Supreme Court Expansion? Filibuster Busted? Not So Fast. Danger Looms.

Leap frog is, for kids, a fun game. It wouldn't work when it comes to the Supreme Court, though.

Much has already been suggested about what the Supreme Court is likely to say in the near future: That Roe v. Wade should be reversed. Well, it might. And it might not. I would think that the vicious, new Texas statute that conjures vigilantes among the public to enforce against performing abortions would not be the one that the Court would base reversal on. Way too harsh and punitive.

The scary center of the Court is not now John Roberts, but Brett Kavanaugh. He has shown some guts to avoid going along with the rest of the more hard-lined conservatives. This may be different, though. We'll have to see.

At any rate, any movement to expand the number of Supreme Court positions, say to two more, to strike a needed balance (or so say progressives) would first of all, take months, during which opinions passed down by the current Court get made, anyhow; and second, get blocked by obvious Republican Senate filibuster. Not going to happen.

If I had a magic wand, would I do so, though? No. Fooling with the machinery can work both ways. If by some miracle, Democrats would get their way and two more positions would be opened up to be filled by the current Democratic president, the next Republican president might see it fit to do so, too, if a Congress tilted in his/her favor (and the vote to put a Republican back into the White House might partly depend upon such circumstances).

Then a new Court of eleven becomes a newer Court of thirteen. Then meetings and hearings of the Court become far more unwieldy, what with each Court member allowed to ask whatever questions occur to them during presentations and discussions. It gets to be leap frog without end.

To end the filibuster, which would pave the way for such expansion, holds within it even more danger. There's no question that, regardless of how absurd it now sounds, Republicans will regain control of Congress; the present numbers, cut incredibly close, all but guarantee that. Democrats felt helpless enough with ex- at the helm and Republicans in control of the House and Senate before; how will it feel with their vindictiveness on display now? Why wouldn't they xerox Texas' awful abortion law to make it a national mandate?

They wouldn't, only because the Democrats held the filibuster rule in their hands this time. Yes, racism played an enormous role in establishing it in the first place; yes, Republican representation in the states in which they hold Senate control constitutes an unfair distribution of the country's population, such that a decided minority of the population seems to hold sway. But that goes back to the foundations of the republic and history and even culture, and there was no accounting for that that could have rearranged some kind of ongoing equity beyond the two-per-state requirement. 

Indeed, the establishment of two houses, one with a check upon the other, slows down legislation, making people think a little longer (never a bad idea) and probably saved the Constitutional Convention from dissolving. Short of going to a unicameral legislature instead of a bicameral one by Constitutional amendment--which would be a disaster beyond measure--we are stuck with the structure we have.

Of course the wish list of many of the people reading this does not include having Joe Manchin being the traffic cop of most, if not all, significant legislative advancements. It's all too tempting to think that this somehow got pre-arranged. It didn't. That's where the chips fell for two years as a combined total of the collective indecisiveness of the public. All he's doing is wielding the power that nothing else than fate arranged for him. Come on now, wouldn't you?

Now, if I got a phone call from him, I'd tell him that his efforts to try to play both ends against the middle in his state, West Virginia, to somehow stay in the graces of the Democratic Party but win re-election in a decidedly Republican one are about as futile as moving Mount Everest three feet to the left. He would be left with two options, both of which would rip the firmament apart: either cave to Biden's wishes and give him exactly what he wants, or flat-out join the other party (which has been done, if you remember Jim Jeffords of Vermont about 2001 or so). His political future would be confirmed as finished if he did the former, and his very soul might be compromised if he did the latter, though I wonder about that.

But I think he's done anyhow, if the cultish, slavish effects of ex- are continued into the foreseeable future, which they appear to be. I think Manchin sees a way through this mess, perhaps quixotically. But what's going on in his head has to be transferrable to the heads of his West Virginia constituents, and that has to cut through the fog of propaganda that various crazies have established, especially after 1/6.

Besides, ex-, the National Menace, would dispose of him with a wave of his hand should be get back into power. It will only take that. Only sycophants will run the country then, and we would be at their mercy. With filibuster power being the only power the Democrats might have left, it could stop some of the most damaging actions of a slavishly, dangerous subservient House. If you doubt this, try reading Robert Kagan's essay written last week in The Washington Post: It will take you a few minutes, but you'll get the grasp of the crisis we're already in--https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/23/robert-kagan

Yes, there are smart people in West Virginia. Yes, some think very clearly. I wonder how big the center is there, though. Manchin's trying to find it. Or maybe he is the center now. Maybe he thinks people will follow him because of it. I have news: No way. Centrism, and 50 cents, get you a phone call in a booth that's been obsolete for two decades.

At any rate, if all this could be solved by expanding the Supreme Court, it could have been already solved far more easily by conventional means. And it can. Because once some people get into the Supreme Court, something very interesting starts to happen to them: They get perspective and start changing their minds. They start doing unexpected things.

That doesn't mean that that will happen to the present set of people, of course, but it has happened in the past. It's why, for instance, some of the most important laws that comprised the New Deal got approved and have remained to this day, more than 80 years later. Nobody expected Earl Warren to lead the way through to Brown v. Board and Miranda v. Arizona, to name just two.

Abortion decisions look automatic to, maybe, five or six justices representing both sides of the present spectrum. Together, that group does not comprise majority decision. The closer this gets, the more nervous three or four of them will be.

And the mind-changes that have happened have rarely been more conservative; they've almost always been more liberal. Blackmun used to be a staunch advocate of the death penalty when he came onto the Court; by the time he retired, he had done a 180.

So you never know. Life terms bring clarity in ways we cannot predict. Yes, ex- still wants to undermine the whole system and bring it to its knees, serving only him and his selfish interests. All the more reason to keep the system as it is for as long as we can so it can work its own magic. Yes, this may be clinging to a pipe dream. But history is still on the side of stabilized structure.

Term limits? That might be a workable compromise. It's already been suggested that term limits begin with the next appointee, and eventually, the entire Court will be subject to them. They could be made at staggered times, too, so as to variate with upcoming presidential terms so that no one president can control so many appointments. That's worth looking into.

Let's wait and see what the Court says and how it says it before we go tinkering with the machinery. There are surprises coming no matter what; Citizens United still stuns. But we have absorbed them before. Playing leap-frog would be a last resort, at best. And it would never work permanently, anyhow.

Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask indoors. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

"It Could Be Worse." There But for the Grace of God....

It's usually said with a flippancy between people who've absorbed a "How are you?" greeting that may or may not be sincere: "Oh, could be worse."

Until two Saturday nights ago, everybody in my family had someone nearby who was the living example of that: My cousin Monica. Her death was merciful. Her life was what was tragic.

Monica Lynn Olen was 67 when she passed, quietly, in hospice care. Sickened by many ailments through her life, its length quite amazed anyone who was at all connected with her.

But that connection was as sad as anything I've seen. Monica Lynn Olen was extremely mentally challenged from birth. She did not have the mental acuity of a one-year-old. She was very marginally functional.

Her parents, Joe and Genevieve, bravely saw her through most of her life until they themselves wore down and let an institution handle it. Their lives were deeply changed by their daughter's condition.

They couldn't take long trips without her. By 'long,' was meant to places like northern Wisconsin from Milwaukee, sometimes accompanied by Genevieve's brother, my dad, and my mom, her godmother. They shared her parents' remarkable patience and an effort to at least play with her and please her to the extent to which it could be demonstrably done.

After retirement, the Olens could have traveled to many places. They had enough money. But there was always Monica, and many of those plans simply never got made or considered. By the time the parents finally let go of personal care and let an institution handle Monica, they were too old to do much traveling. They had fulfilled their responsibility many times over. Remarkably, they did not salve their frustrations through excesses. They must have prayed a lot. They must have been incredibly strong.

But they transferred that strength to giving Monica a life as decent as could be provided. They stubbornly stared down their undeserved fate and made Monica a participant in all family activities, dressing her neatly and appropriately, making sure she was front and center in pictures. Funeral providers make sure such pictures are displayed at casket viewing; there you could see that Monica posed with family naturally and even with a distinct sense of style. She even had a sensibility of photogenesis about her. She was buried with one of her signature hats.

Monica had moods of happiness and sadness. She resisted, at times, meaningful care. Maladies and illnesses were detected, but far later than they could have if she could have communicated them in any decipherable way. She could not have known much of anything, at least in the way any of you reading this knows anything else. The few words she spoke were repeated endlessly and never put together in a way they could be tacitly interpreted. The rest of us have and will have our fears, but words can put frames around it so that they can be handled. That never existed for her. 

She had little sense of social interaction outside of her parents and aunts and uncles and big sister, Ronnie, now the only member of that family to survive. Ronnie lost her husband quite early to severe diabetes, but raised two sons with him. Another sister, Maria, had been stillborn.

Since she grew an appropriate female anatomy, Monica was sterilized, lest she be somehow taken advantage of. Nobody discussed it, but I am quite sure she never knew the meaning of that surgery. Within a mongoloid visage, there was a slight family resemblance.

She wanted to be hugged most of all. She knew one name, "Eugene," probably adapted by her mother's calling my dad that when she wanted his attention. To her, everybody was "Eugene" except her parents: "Momma," and "Daddy." There wasn't much of an indication that she knew much of anything else.

She would go into instantaneous outcries of complete nonsensical phraseology, most of the time ending in laughter. I always wondered whether she was mimicking the laughter of her mother, or somehow within her limited mentality found something to laugh at. It left you with at least the glimmer of a hope that she was a relatively happy child, unable to absorb angst or anticipation of fear.  It was left to us to wonder.

The institution prepared for her did its best. Monica appeared when her parents died, but had no idea who was in the casket--or if she did, had no idea why. She could be trained to use a spoon, but never a knife.

Of course this is incredibly pitiful. You have to wonder why life extends so far in such a direction, where someone is so helpless that they've needed assistance literally from birth to death, not being left alone except for playing with toys within the same house, and then for little more than five minutes because she could be doing anything to anything and not know why. You have to wonder how much of a life ever really existed, and what value it had, so far removed from a decent life as we have come to understand it. 

She was loved deeply, yes, and there were brief, happy moments, but with no growth, no development, no hope, the emotional price her parents had to pay had to be staggering. I've never been a parent, but it seems to me that one of the gradual gifts of that role is to watch a child become independent so worries about functionality ebb with gentle gratitude. You see it all on Facebook and of course, it's displayed with pride--the pride of having raised children decently and normally. There cannot be better pride than that. It is selfish, yes, but a kind of deserved selfishness that no one ever questions. But Uncle Joe and Aunt Gen never had that with Monica, though they could claim a kind of maintenance that others might not have accomplished.

Monica needed the same amount of help every single minute of every single day of every single week. Nobody should be made to be that unselfish. Uncle Joe started in teaching and became a school administrator, and Aunt Gen worked in a bank. They would turn Monica over to a "school," so to speak, during the day. Perhaps work was a release for them. But perhaps their pride was even greater. It was either that, or give way to shame. There was no reason for that.

The mental strain had to be enormous because it was unrelenting. How do you raise an infant for more than five decades? Uncle Joe and Aunt Gen were as close to saints as there ever could be to withstand the endless sadness--good, decent people who were burdened by an inexplicably awful stroke of luck. There had to be many long, sleepless nights. They accepted their fate with grit, though, and got on with it. But did they have to? Did they have to accept all those years under their own roof and give up the kinds of lives many of the rest of us know is out there? Couldn't they have, shouldn't they have, turned Monica over to an institution far sooner than they did, when they had run out of energy?

I leave that evaluation to you. But whenever I said "Could be worse," sooner or later I'd think of her and say to myself, No question. If her life had only that value, then maybe it was worth it to view one of the worst possible outcomes of something that's supposed to be terrific so you could say to yourself: Whatever's wrong, it can't be worse than she's got it. Beyond that, too, there was always relief that you didn't have to deal with it.

Monica was born in 1954, when thoughts of pregnancy termination were reserved only for saving the life of the mother; Roe v. Wade wasn't even on the horizon. I never asked, but we all knew: To my aunt and uncle, termination was unthinkable. Strict Catholics, religion guided their choices throughout her lives. I never heard them complain. We all watched helplessly.

In a state as big as Texas, though, there are some pretty good odds that such births will continue to take place, being no one's fault. Right now, because of a twisted, sprint-to-the-finish-line attempt to turn back Roe v. Wade, women just six weeks pregnant not only cannot end such pregnancies, but if they are caught doing so by citizens like you and me, without any training or understanding of the situation, they can be turned in to the law with a $10,000 bounty. It has already been solicited by people from other states.

That is disgustingly harsh, cruel and repressive. It is coercion that robs women of the basic rights of controlling their bodies. I have seen the prices decent people paid because they believed that their own senses of morality gave them no choice, but they were and are absurdly high for the overriding majority of modern women and parents. They certainly shouldn't be left to anyone but those making the decisions themselves. It betrays the expectations of a free society.

The awful Texas law may yet be turned back by the Supreme Court, but it will be close. As it is, five justices are allowing Texas' law to stand rather than immediately belay it until it actually hears the case--thus allowing several other states with like-minded political backwardness to pass similar laws and create a kind of default, connected bulwark of resistance. Thus, starting Sept. 1, and until that hearing which will take time to organize and litigate and new, restrictive practices will have that time to congeal, a Texas woman just six weeks pregnant, often before she even knows it, is helpless to choose anything within the state's borders but birth, regardless of fetal condition or outlook. For many women, it will be an awful ambush and trap. It will certainly mean an expense that many cannot afford.

If you knew such a child as Monica would be produced by your pregnancy--much easier to detect now because of the technology--wouldn't you even give it a thought, as a rational human being would? Could you be blamed for doing so? Would a belief in the almighty block any sense of propriety, especially now that the technology permits options? 

And what is propriety in such a situation? It cannot be decided from afar, by a one-size-fits-all, door-slamming legislation that makes no exceptions, that refuses to accept that life does not and cannot possibly cover all situations.

Who in their right mind would remove such choices from any woman, force parents to go through decade after decade of intensive, endless care? Who would drive such a perverted sense of 'morality,' if you could call it that, down a woman's throat simply because she became pregnant--married or not?

It would not be humane in any sense. It would be the ultimate in misogyny. If this awful law is allowed to stand, we will fall back to the kind of society we thought we left behind decades ago, one in which even sexuality will be judged and measured and regulated, in which women are mere objects. 

Few know it, but at the time of the signing of our Constitution, the generally accepted rule concerning abortion was much like that of what Harry Blackmun set forth in his famous opinion in Roe: unchallengeable until 'quickening,' when the mother could feel the fetus moving within her. What was socially permitted has now become thoroughly unacceptable in the minds of excessively religious absolutists, the ones who never had Monicas in their lives, those who never considered the adoption for which they advocate.

It will set off a political chaos and firestorm the likes of which we thought we left behind. It will inch us closer to bringing back the master of chaos, the filthy, amoral liar who, in the name of political convenience and cultism, brought in the purveyors of religiosity that he manipulated but neither shared their beliefs or cared one whit about. 

If you thought we had a mess before, just wait. Abortion, legal and illegal, will never be eradicated in this country, but legal access to it may soon be seriously diminished.

I was asked to read from the Bible at Monica's funeral service. I obliged. Whatever I could do to help get this little angel to her final reward was something I was glad to do.

Life is a mystery, to make of it what we will, filled with issues that beg answers that are comprehensive, simple, and never completely right. To Monica, it was just more of a mystery. All the more to cherish whatever we have left of it. 

Maybe now Monica will have the joy she deserves, the joy she could not possibly understand while here, if it is possible to do so. Her fears are now gone, gratefully. 

Did she have a soul? As much as we would like to think of that, the answer has to be no. Soul is conscience, from what we can gather. She did not have to, could not, make the kinds of decisions that drive our lives; they were all made for her. Maybe she was put here for us to consider our own souls and what we are doing with them.

Is there a place in eternity for such people? We'll all see that when we get there. That we can imagine it is a salve to the emotional wasteland to which we would otherwise be condemned. We will not think otherwise. We don't have to. We'd rather not.

Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask indoors. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

Refugee High: The New Melting Pot

I read Refugee High and kept thinking: I could never teach there.

But then I rethought it. If I were there early in my career, if I hadn't become jaded and cynical, if I could see the students coming along, genuinely interested in learning about the history of their newly acquired country, maybe I would dive into it like nothing else. Maybe it would make absolute sense.

Maybe it would be the way I could fight a cruel and uncaring administration's repressive regime, one that turned back hope for thousands of refugees per year. It might be that I would say to myself: I'm going to give them a chance to show them a thing or two. I'm going to give them the chance they want to really be Americans.

Refugee High is Elly Fishman's account of Sullivan High School, in northern Chicago, a place that would, like dozens of other similar places, be called our new melting pot. Her efforts to depict the desperate hope of many teenagers trying to grab onto something, somewhere, to get a foothold in this vast, perpetually challenging new world of America, is a victory of immersion and ultimately enormous trust in her to tell the story straight. She does.

She tells of Sarah Quintenz, my new hero, the director of the school's ELL program. She throws herself at the problems and anxieties of students new to America--confused, scared, looking for direction. She provides them with support and hugs and confidence. Some respond well. Others do not. Still others start, then stop, then start again. 

Sarah knows they will suffer setbacks. She knows sometimes they can't help it. Always, always, she is there for them and never gives up on them. She pulls them aside. When she feels she needs to, she visits their homes. She encourages them endlessly. She embraces diversity and likes the multicultural atmosphere. She provides a safe haven. A place like Sullivan needs a Sarah. To the immigrant kids, she's their Gibraltar.

Fishman tells of Alejandro, who misses his homeland of Guatemala but knows that once he has made it to America, he can't go back. His very life would be in danger. But the new regime is hunting him down, trying to winnow out as many newcomers as it can. Can he graduate from high school before they get him? Will graduation itself make a shred of difference?

She tells of Shahina, a Muslim from Myanmar, who's escaped persecution but is now trying to escape her former culture, into which she could be permanently trapped.  She can't wait for school to provide her with the magic piece of paper, the diploma: things aren't completely in her control. She can work to get money and she does. But she won't get to where she needs to, either.

She tells of Chad Adams, the principal. All studies of schools indicate that the central difference in their success are building principals and what constitutes their direction, however they display it. Adams is handed a disaster--low on money, low on esteem, high on gangs. Nobody thinks he can succeed. Nobody but him, that is. 

Can he make the decisive difference? Can he raise the stature of something that feels like the bottom's above it? The first-day speech he gives to the assembled student body is pathetic indeed but it's like his approach to all things: straight-laced, realistic, but filled with soul. It's all he's got, but he'll give it.

Amidst it all, forces outside the school act upon it in destructive ways: drugs, gangs, violence, alcoholism, forced marriages (a bigger problem than what you'd think)--what the kids have come to school to rise above if they only can. As you read, you can only marvel how anybody graduates from that place at all.

But they do. Some of them do better than that: They get chances to go to college. They get to the next level.

The only thing missing in this book is what it must be like to have whole classes of such kids and try to teach them English, science, math, history. Is there a pull to bring what is usually a decent level of learning down to them? Are corners cut? Does mercy push them along when in other places, like the one in which I taught, they would deserve to fail?

That dynamic is missing. It is an important one. But you can understand how Elly Fishman couldn't cover every base. The information she managed to procure to give us a proper idea of what these intrepid young people have had to overcome must have been a full-time job for months.

Fishman works in the Journalism Department at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, literally a walk away from where I live. She recently appeared for a book talk at the independent bookstore only a block away from me. I missed it. It's a shame I did.

Because now that I've finished this remarkable work, I have lots of questions. Will she follow up? Will she learn what happened to Abdul Karim, Mariah, Shahina, and Aishah? Where has Sullivan gone since she documented its challenges--up, down, or the same? It has the problems big city schools have all over the country--crumbling infrastructure, squeezing budgets, security, reductions in vital staff. I feel like walking down the street and making an appointment to see her.

It's easy to drill down and focus upon one school, but consider other cities with what must be the same kinds of mountains to climb: New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Seattle. Things have been written about them, too. Their challenges are the same. Is this book a mere documentation of a hopeless case, or is it a cry for help?

How this country will meet those challenges remains the key to unlocking our new energy. For their potentials are, in the end, ours. No cruel and heartless administration can, and could, get rid of the overwhelming crush of immigrant students and their wide-eyed promise. The key to making America great again isn't getting rid of them, it's providing what they need to let them grow and flower and bloom.

Of course it would be a much simpler, easier place to educate kids if not for these addendum. But for nearly two hundred years now, since immigration became a very big deal, we have had these challenges facing us, though we forget the same angst and issues of language, fear and parental resistance: Italian, Polish, Irish, Czech, German, Scandinavian, Jewish. They came in waves and faced bullying and petty prejudices as well. 

Some of them are now teaching the Middle Easterners and Latin Americans who make up their classes. They don't have to look that far into their own backgrounds to know and feel the striving, the hunger, the amazement of opportunity. They can see it in the kids' eyes. They want it bad.

America will always be that. May we never forget.

Seeing the results of that might prove to fulfill a career. I taught in a much safer, pristine place, where poverty was but an abstraction and more often than not, the kids went through the motions. Nothing wrong with that, of course. But look what I missed.

Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask indoors. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

I Called It On 9-11-01. Research Confirmed It. Reality Affirms It.

It's nice to know that I called something absolutely accurate inside my own classroom at a moment at which the kids needed perspective, even if there was some speculation behind it. I did it on Sept. 11, 2001.

The first thing I told the first class I met with after the attacks began is that they were, basically, about our endless support for Israel. Nobody had said anything about that to that point and of course, the deeper analysis was yet to come.

But I told the class, and the ones that met for the rest of that day and some of the next, that what was happening was, in the final analysis, about our support for Israel and our failure to provide a decent homeland for the Palestinians. It really wasn't hard to figure out.

After all, the World Trade Center had already been attacked, in 1993, with substantial damage and some deaths. Bin Laden also attacked two of our embassies in Africa, and al-Qaeda had blown a big hole in one of our destroyers in the Persian Gulf. Bill Clinton had tried to kill bin Laden with a missile, but had failed.

Yes, we killed Osama bin Laden, and he had it coming if you believe that justice needed to be delivered by the military in a war footing, as declared by Bush-43, and not legal eagles in court, an argument which somehow got lost. But the real victory was that, once again, we got underestimated, like the Germans did in World War I and the Japanese did in World War II. The 9-11 attack was supposed to set off incredible inner protests, leading to the dissolution of our power. It didn't. At least, not right then and there.

Bin Laden thought it would. He thought our morale would collapse. The last thing he figured is that we would go looking for him.

A recent article in Foreign Affairs magazine points this out. In November 2017. the CIA declassified some 470,000 documents, tapes, videos, and written materials that Navy SEALs had captured during the raid on bin Laden's hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan, on May 1, 2011. Author Nelly Lahoud managed to get hold of some 96,000 of them, which included personal observations bin Laden made to members of his family in the final months until we finally ran him down.

In those remarks, bin Laden believed that (a) al-Qaeda needed to end American support of Israel, vis-a-vis the Palestinians; and (2) the American people would thrash each other to pieces over the attack and devastation. At first, we certainly didn't; instead, we went after him. That he managed to escape for ten years didn't say much for us, but neither did he have many moments of rest.

Ironically, that was the moment of inflection. Having accomplished, finally, what we originally set out to do--revenge against bin Laden and the reduction of al-Qaeda influence in the world of terrorism--we went on a futile effort of nation-building, this time in another country we didn't understand and couldn't have, in order to justify the enormous expense: two trillion bucks. Counted at a dollar a second, one trillion dollars would take thirty-two thousand years to tabulate.

At least bin Laden never saw us actually fall apart, too, which we've done in sections and pretty much since that point. The Tea Party continued its momentum and led, eventually, to ex- and his followers, who have continued their anger at something, somewhere, somehow, as irrational and misplaced as it has been. The war in Afghanistan got put onto the back burner, letting the military obfuscate and generalize and count on the media to eventually refocus itself so that nobody exactly knew how things were going until it was too late. To most of us, it wasn't really a war as much as an occupation without end and without advancement.

So our morale actually has ebbed, such that nobody really feels that the nation is moving in any kind of effective direction anymore. Some actually applaud that and, seizing the moment, are still fighting to move backwards. Some have thrown up their hands in despair. Some are still trying to advance. Of course, the pandemic hasn't hurt. Too bad for him that bin Laden never saw it.

Because the residual effect of the attacks are ever-present:

• Continued distrust and stereotyping of Arab and/or Arab-looking peoples living here, perfectly law-abiding and seeking as much comfort in their lives as anyone else;
• The continuance of our blatantly extra-legal, extra-Constitutional, hypocritical prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, from which very few actual trials of suspected terrorists have emerged;
• A decided reduction in civil rights, especially the right to speak out in support of those peoples;
• A fear that has ripened into paranoia about outside terrorism, when the fundamental and pervasive threat has always been internal--especially obvious with the aftermath of 1/6;
• The effects of all this on our immigration policies, which have withered to match our re-developed xenophobia; and
• The inevitable, tiring momentum all this has given to our politics.

What bin Laden also said he wanted--a kind of pan-Arab league that would obey the same political priorities--failed. Arab Spring replaced it, though efforts to democratize fledgling governments have had mixed results. Remnants of that movement remain. That wouldn't please him, either.

He said that he wanted U.S. troops out of Muslim lands, too. He got some of that, of course, when we just withdrew. But certainly not all of them. Israel still needs us to watch over it. Saudi Arabia needs our money and weapons, too, as a counterpoise to Iran. Those are constants.

So in some ways, the Middle East is a different place than it was before bin Laden applied his brand of unity. It just isn't the kind of 'different' Osama bin Laden would have preferred. The basic problem, that of the eventual determination of Israel and Palestine, endures. Since we backed the establishment of Israel in 1947, it has been and I believe will always be so. I said it on 9-11-01, and many times before and since: we will never abandon Israel. The Holocaust has made its permanent impression. 

What permutations develop from that iron-like stance is still anybody's guess. Osama bin Laden tried to push us off that position, but if the destruction of the Twin Towers and the murder of nearly 3,000 of our people can't force us to re-examine that policy, next to nothing else will. Research now confirms it. Reality affirms it.

Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask indoors. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark