Not After 75. Period.

When last we spoke, I had read the first reviews of Jake Tapper and Alex Rosenberg's book Original Sin, which detailed the sad, and in some ways infuriating, story of how Joe Biden's inside team tried, but failed, to hide Biden's infirmities, both physical and mental, sufficiently for him to run for, and possibly win, a second term as president.

If you read the book, you'll see that it was a disaster slowly building. It finally exploded in front of the whole nation with Biden's abysmal performance at his debate with then 45, now 47--partly because Biden got out of the race far after he should have to give Kamala Harris, his vice-president and de facto successor because there wasn't time to vet another one, enough slack to build a successful campaign (which she might have won anyhow had she been willing to step up and address the shouting nonsense that her opponent's campaign was making over trans- issues). 

Tapper and Rosenberg are right: Trying to describe the damage it was causing in words held no advantage over watching it and seeing a good man dissolve in front of one's very eyes. It simply couldn't be stopped. Everyone around him knew it. Nobody wanted to be the bearer of bad tidings, so the Mad Hatter's Tea Party went on far too long into the night.

Had Biden been even ten years younger when he ran, he might have maintained the energy and quick thinking it takes to win a second term. 71 is not too old in a political career, and several presidents and many members of Congress and the Supreme Court have proven that. But he wasn't. He was 81, and the strains and pressures of the toughest job in the world had taken their predictable toll.

The present president, as awful as he is, will (if he hasn't already) fall prey to the same, wearing, inevitable forces that time grinds in overtaking even the best of us--and he's certainly not that. By the time he's done with his term, whether he tries to skirt the Constitutional safeguards against another term or not, he will be 82 years old, older than Biden. His mental abilities have already been seriously questioned: They won't improve over the next three and a half years.

So it's time to consider an age limit for the presidency, Congress, and the federal courts. The Constitution was written, debated and (don't forget) compromised on in days when, if someone lived past 70, that was quite an accomplishment; vaccines (despite the idiot we have for Secretary of Health and Human Services) had not been derived at that point, and people fell prey to all kinds of diseases for which all we need today are either a prescription or a shot. Despite a temporary drop caused by COVID, we're still over 75 in the average life span. I think that's a good pivot point.

I propose a Constitutional amendment: No one past their 75th birthday can hold federal office unless they are finishing an elected term. That will make members of the House of Representatives no older than 76, ever; no member of the Senate past 80, ever; no president older than 79, ever; and no member of the Supreme Court older than 75, ever.

It's not term limits I seek; it's age limits. If you're elected to the House at the earliest point, age, 25, you can still serve for 25 terms, which are quite a few. In the Senate, if you start at 30, you can still serve eight terms. If you're president, you have to start at an age of 74, at the very most, and then you get one term and one term only. If you're on the Supreme Court or any other federal court, you stop at your 75th birthday, and that's that--but then, you've probably been there a while anyhow.

There are no guarantees about any of this, but it's a surer bet that any federal officeholder won't succumb to senility or a decided lack of energy while in office. We won't have the specter of Strom Thurmond of South Carolina being towed to the Senate floor, whenever he was able to be so mobilized, at age 100. Yes, we lose Nancy Pelosi, who in her early 80s, remained an excellent House Speaker. But that adjustment, once it is seen, can be made to give even a slightly younger person a leadership position, while maintaining the experience it takes to do it effectively.

I say this advisedly, because I'm going on 74 in a few months. But I gave up on higher office when my time at the National Education Association ended--and I was 57 when that happened. I'm not making anyone over 75 in government quit immediately; they can remain in office. I'm not reaching into state government, either, though perhaps some might copy an established federal example. States can function as they wish--but the same inclinations remain. Perhaps states might pass laws that create such barriers ahead of federal amendments, too; it's happened before like it did with women's suffrage, and there's nothing preventing them from doing it here.

It's time we consider this seriously. We are going through a time when people are supposed to be living longer but lose the substance of what they need to govern before they pass away. Safeguards, though imperfect, need to be constructed. I think this is one of them.

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

Mister Mark

It's Not Nice, But--

I know. It isn't nice to get on the case of someone you've just discovered has cancer. But.

Having read the introductory galleys of the book "Original Sin", by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, I'm inclined to make generalized conclusions that really aren't anything new, as stricken as we are by 47's undermining of our system and revanche against his purported enemies.

Take a step back for a minute and I'll reintroduce you to a little history, history that has in fact been mentioned in this space but it doesn't hurt to repeat. It's something that nobody has brought up in the hubbub over Biden's obvious, sad and tragically devastating decline while in office.

I bring this back up because there's a good chance this has happened before, and not that long ago. The argument was never fully vetted, because an untrusted source got it right, but a trusted source responded with indignant shock and got it wrong.

I hosted a gathering in Washington, DC, when I lived there some 12 years ago. I was introduced to a gentleman, now deceased, who had been in the Reagan administration--in fact, had been in the Situation Room, as its called, the place where foreign and military policy is carried out and redefined during crises. His connection with the president wasn't close, but he got to know those that were.

And he told me, without prompting: He had it in good confidence that Reagan didn't have all his mental faculties for at least the last year and a half of his second term.

That comment didn't surprise me. The signs were obvious: Keeping him away from the press; minimizing his public appearances; quickly glossing over and getting him to back away from comments that indicated he couldn't remember one country from another (as in Beirut as opposed to Israel). There was no doubt that, at 77, he was slowing up. What nobody knew--in fact we still don't know and we may never know-- how much his decision-making was taken over by others as he became little more than a figurehead.

Or not. Bill O'Reilly's research led him to hidden places. He wrote the book "Killing Reagan" as part of his "Killing" series, and discovered that James Cannon, a White House aide, wrote a memo to Chief of Staff Howard Baker in 1987--just about when my acquaintance worked in the Situation Room--that suggested "the possibility that relieving the president of his duties (i.e. invoking the 25th Amendment) might be in order." But Cannon also recanted that memo, or so said Reagan's Attorney General, Edward Meese. Both are deceased now.

But what caused Cannon to recant? Was he honestly mistaken, incorrectly analyzing some obvious mistake Reagan made for senility? Or was he leaned on by less objective sources who wanted to protect Reagan's legacy? If so, who leaned on him? Could that source have been Reagan's wife, Nancy, who brooked no criticism of her husband, ever, and was one person who people never crossed if they could help it?

George Will, conservative columnist and one with far more credibility with the mainstream press, because he belonged to it and still does, writing occasionally for The Washington Post, spoke out against O'Reilly almost immediately after the latter's research became public. Will's wife, after all, was a member of the Reagan administration's communications team, so he took her support to heart, as husbands tend to do. If you add Will's stature, O'Reilly's findings were quickly quashed and we all went on with this nagging question being left in our minds. 

Of course O'Reilly objected to people who never wished to conduct further scrutiny: "It is preposterous that there wasn't an intense concern about the president's mental state shortly after the Iran-Contra scandal broke," he later said, about ten years ago. "That is a fact, and it is disturbing that Reagan loyalists have attacked us for pointing it out."

It's possible that it's both. Reagan died of Alzheimer's disease, that awful diminishment of the mind. Could it have begun while he was in the White House? Yes, indeed it could have. His moments of lucidity, though, might have outnumbered his moments of vacating memory, at least for that time; Alzheimer's doesn't attack all at once.

But it's clear, from O'Reilly's standpoint, that Iran-Contra brought Reagan's infirmity into clarity, or should have. I have little doubt that Cannon's memo was nothing less than a vetting of conversations that he either had been privy to or had had himself; White House memos are rarely justified by mere brainstorms. And O'Reilly found it, or discovered its existence. Such is what happens when someone wants someone else to remember something.

That, too, is a cover-up, one that continues. History is robbed by it. Someone should unearth it for the sake of clarity and future considerations.

We are left with the malady that afflicts White House insiders under these circumstances: that if you try hard enough, you can fool yourself into thinking that your boss still has all his marbles, or at least enough to continue in the job without attacks on that basis. There's an enormous difference, though, between Reagan's situation and that of Joe Biden: Reagan was well into his second term. I'm sure those that knew about his mental faculties had an unspoken--maybe spoken but maybe not recorded anywhere; an assumption with a wink and a nod--agreement to take him in for what's called a 'soft landing', where no great national crisis takes place and other people take over decisions for him.

Joe Biden, on the other hand, wanted desperately to defeat 47 and continue his policies--who wouldn't--so his aides were in a far more impossible position: try to fake his lucidity through the grinding of another nationwide campaign and on through another four years. But the debate tore the curtain back from that Wizard of Oz; there was nowhere else to hide, no spinning that would suffice.

Who was his most ferocious defender? Once again--Jill, his wife, who people didn't want to cross. As you might figure. Biden did, finally, accede to logic and polling, and stepped aside. But it's now clear that the smoothing over and covering up of his infirmities began far before last July. It's just that, as the public and its media keep doing, as wishful thinking drives us to accept, we refused to confirm what our eyes clearly saw--the halting stride, the garbled speaking, the forgetting of details.

Could we have been saved from this present effort to erode democracy? Maybe. We'll never know because Democrats, in their shared desire to smooth over challenges, because no one wanted to be the first to cry wolf. They took Biden's endorsement, didn't outwardly question the mentality behind it, and nominated Kamala Harris, who became one of the great disappointments in presidential campaign history, right up there with Michael Dukakis, who also somehow snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. And now we (again) have a corrupt, terrible president who is not only amoral, but may in fact be also losing his marbles, little by little, and who will certainly resist any future soothsayer who suggests that he should step down.

Granted, the 25th Amendment is there for such a situation. But as has been noted in this space, a president's Cabinet isn't likely to be the first to acknowledge such a potentially damaging dilemma; it's likely to be the last. So we need another Constitutional amendment putting a ceiling on, perhaps, the age at which someone can be elected president--allowing for someone to cross that line if already in office. We have a basement age, 35, already in the Constitution; why not a ceiling? Let's call it 70, so if someone happens to begin his first term at 69, he won't be older than 77 when he leaves office.

It would have take Joe Biden out of the running in 2020, true. But look what happened. Look where we are. Look where we could be. He could have also won, for one thing, and now he's been diagnosed with metastasizing, prostate cancer. But someone else could have won, too, someone who would have inspired more confidence than a decent but failing leader.  It's worth more than a passing thought.

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

Mister Mark

A Third Term? The Loopholes Are All There

Everybody is scared to death of a lot of things now, but especially of 47 being president for the rest of his life.

I wish I could tell you not to worry. But worry. Worry a lot, talk a lot about it, and stay in touch with political things, even though heaven knows that's the last thing many of us want to do.

Because I see no reason why it couldn't happen, at least as far as the Constitution is concerned. The loopholes are all there, because of course nobody expected someone like this to ever be president--someone who destroys all the guardrails in a relentless, ugly pursuit of absolute power which he abuses every day. Not to mention getting elected twice. Not to mention getting re-elected with a plurality of votes once.

Steve Bannon, culture wrecker extraordinaire, hinted strongly at this possibility on Bill Maher's show a couple of weeks ago: He said, "(47) will be president of the United States on the afternoon of January 20, 2029. We're studying it now."

It really doesn't take a lot of study. I looked and yes, it is possible. Yes, if everyone has their price and can be bought off. Yes, especially if a Republican is elected president in 2028, and yes, within constitutional means. Then, it's highly probable. I'm not sure that it can happen as quickly as Bannon suggests, but within a month or two of that presidential term, the ducks can all be in line. A true coup d'etat can take place, with the pretense of legitimacy cloaking devastating shenanigans.

It comes down to this: First, figure out who would make absurdly loyal stooges to serve as stand-ins for the next Republican ticket.

Second, make an attractive deal that promises them positions they would crave.

Third, persuade Congress (it doesn't matter who's running it; see below) to go along with the deal.

Fourth, get 47 appointed president by proscribed constitutional means.

The 22nd Amendment was put there because the Republicans didn't want a president like Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat who had been elected four times, to keep being president more than two terms. That much power has to have limits, the thinking went. They obviously no longer think so. But within what looks like an ironclad firewall there is a loophole provided by another amendment, the 25th--one that nobody thought about, I'm quite sure.

It's time to start thinking about it, instead of avoiding difficult, uncomfortable conversations about what's "unthinkable." Because this clown has made nothing "unthinkable" anymore. People are still trying to get used to that. They'd better hurry up. 

Because the longer it's not faced, the stronger the possibility is that 47 can become, well, technically 48, but probably 50: The more possible momentum can be established and the public caught unaware.

The 22nd Amendment says that no one can be elected president more than twice. 47 can still be president, though, because the way a person can be vice-president was updated by the 25th Amendment. That provides more than one way for 47 to sneak in the back door, so to speak and to make it as legal as crossing the street on a crosswalk.

The 25th Amendment was passed in 1967 because upon Kennedy's assassination, the normal, legal succession to the presidency revealed potentially, at least, a real problem: the next man after vice-president Lyndon Johnson was the Speaker of the House, John McCormick, who was already 73 (my age, by the way). The next person up, the president pro-tem of the Senate, a mainly ceremonial position, was Carl Hayden, who was already 86. That fragile succession chain set off shivers on Capitol Hill. The solution is contained in that amendment, but because of the unwieldy methodology the Constitution proscribes, it still took four years to get it accomplished.

So we now have a process that says that the moment a sitting president fails to still be president, be it by death, removal, or resignation, the vice-president becomes president, even without the swearing-in ceremony. In today's far more dangerous world, that provides the security of instantaneous succession and no arguments made.

All well and good. But within that new process is room for plenty of mischief.

Let's say for a minute that 47, with disingenuous pompousness, says that he won't run for a third term. That can, first of all, hide his true intention, because he doesn't have to remain president to regain power as president. No, he doesn't.

And let's say that a Republican, say J.D. Vance, gets elected in his stead. Vance gets a running mate, say Majorie Taylor Greene, the ridiculous, blaring, incredibly stupid congresswoman from Georgia, as slavishly devoted to 47 as anyone has ever been. That's part of the plan.

And they are secretly persuaded--each one--to become president for a number of days, even to plan appointing (or keeping) a new or old Cabinet, to make sure of a rubber stamp. Then the process begins.

47 keeps denying that he'll have anything to do with the White House anymore, just like he denied having anything to do with the Project 2025 Heritage Foundation plan, which has clearly been his blueprint all along. But continuously lying is his watchword, not that anybody would ever call him on it.

The election takes place. The restrictions on voting are tightened signficantly, and once again, bushels upon bushels of money are brought for ads in swing states like Wisconsin to intimidate and brainwash average voters into believing that Republicans have any thought of prioritizing their needs (which, clearly, they have already proven not to). It works just like it did last time, since the Democrats are afraid of alienating any of the minority groups which make up their coalition; last time it was those who supported trans- rights, this time events will bring some other fringe group forward for attention. So the Electoral College, backwards and obsolete, left there because our method of changing the Constitution is clumsy and obsolete as well, elects Vance and Greene president and vice-president through a now-often used irregularity. Or not, if things go as they did in 2024. 

Now the deal is struck: In the so-called lame duck time, Vance elicits a promise from 47 to become, say, Secretary of State, replacing whomever is there in what will be a token position for four years; take the recent displacement of Marco Rubio. And Greene will be promised something else just as juicy, say Attorney General, Treasury Secretary, or Homeland Security Secretary, since she's been mouthing off about those pesky foreigners endlessly. Their loyalties have already been tested and secured, so that shouldn't be a problem for 47, since he's appointed endlessly incompetent stand-ins so far anyhow.

So Vance is inaugurated, enters the Oval Office on the afternoon of January 20, 2029 as the 48th president, and writes a letter of resignation, making the redoubtable Marjorie Taylor Greene the first woman president of the United States, number 49, for exactly as long as it takes for her to appoint 47 the vice-president and sit out the process proscribed by the 25th Amendment. Now comes the hard part: both houses of Congress must approve that appointment by majority vote. That's controlled by us, but so what? Would a new Democratic Congress actually let Greene sit in the White House instead of 47? Talk about the lesser of two evils....Then, upon approval, she resigns herself and yields the bully pulpit right back to him.

What happens if she reneges on her promise to step aside? 47 could nudge the Cabinet, filled with his appointees, remember, to bring to a vote her ability to run the country, as the 25th Amendment allows. With threats galore and their positions on the line, they would naturally comply. Congress would have to decide within 21 days, and it would have the same choice--the devil or the deep blue sea. A bit more challenging, but possible.

Can that happen? You bet it can. 47 will not have been elected president again. He can't, and he won't. But he doesn't need to. He will have been appointed president. There's nothing in the Constitution that says that a former president, even Barack Obama or George W. Bush, both of whom won two terms as well, cannot be vice-president: Nothing. And thus be appointed through the president's resignation. So he can, and you can bet your last dollar that he would.

It's a transaction, assuming that Vance and Greene, or any other combination of two Republicans, would accept deals. And as intimidated and awed as they apparently are, based on their public comments, that seems a simple enough exchange. There would be no bribery, no money exchanging hands. For Republicans, the trick would be to get two people who would be inclined to go along with it. Maybe it wouldn't be Vance and Greene. That would take some risky vetting, but what's that compared to a grab for ultimate power?

Has such a corrupt bargain taken place before? Well, if you believe what the Democrats accused John Quincy Adams of in 1828, there has. Adams, Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, and one other candidate ran for president that year: Adams, the incumbent president; Jackson, the hero of the Battle of New Orleans, who had the most electoral votes of the four; and Clay, the Speaker of the House, who was a distant third. The three stood for election in the House of Representatives, still the method the Constitution requires upon such a circumstance, where each state delegation gets one vote. Some House Speakers are more or less placeholders, the way Mike Johnson is now, something of a 47 sycophant; others are highly influential. Clay fit the latter description, so although Jackson had won the most electoral votes, Adams came from behind to beat him in the House. Then, in what caused Jackson supporters endless howling, Adams made Clay his Secretary of State. In fact, they called it the "corrupt bargain," even though Adams denied that such a deal had been struck.

If everyone does as promised, though, this deal would be done, and nobody could sue successfully (You really think this Supreme Court would get in the way?) to stop it. If necessary, the same thing could happen in 2033, even if 47, now president number 50, would be 86 by then. Yes, he will eventually die, but what's to keep him from doing the same thing with his sons, or maybe one son, then the next? We would have a constitutional monarchy, sure as the air you breathe; truly a banana republic. America, as we know it, would be destroyed within a fetid fog of legitimacy.

There are no roadblocks available. No changes in the Constitution could take place because the methodology asks for us to leap too high a bar; don't even think about it. The only thing we could do is elect a Democratic president. That has proven, amazingly, to be too much of a challenge to overcome so far. But the Democratic Party has to do some honest-to-goodness soul searching to keep its shaky coalition together and yet elect a good person to the position.

It's the only way out now, even if 47 would make what would be his usual stink about an election being "stolen." We would have to endure that, but that's been done before. It's the only way our democracy, as tattered as it is, can last. It's breathtaking that it has come to this, but it has, where one political party can, and would, strangle our way of life in a mindless grab for absolute power. The planning for it is happening now, I'm sorry to say. It must be stopped.

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

Mister Mark

Bringing A Dying Democracy Back to Life

        

        Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt know what they're talking about. Their first book, How Democracies Die, created a template for following the demise of our system. It recommended something that we tried, but didn't complete--the fusion of the political parties sufficient to ward off the anti-democratic machine of 47 and his ilk.

        They have come back with another work, one that utilizes history to a greater, broader extent to tell us what is going on now and what energies we have to apply to deny it. It's called Tyranny of the Minority, and it's worth studying to come to grips with the (now) monumental task before us.

        The first thing to remember--and it's something many of us fall prey to--is that the Constitution, which many in the media (and therefore us) note in nearly reverent terms, consisted of a series of compromises without which the nation, as we now understand it, could not have existed. The document is not "sacred." It is filled with flaws. But at the time--which is what soooooo many people forget--it was the best we could do to keep the country from falling apart.

        The second thing to remember--kind of like the overused phrase, "that being said"--the really fatal flaw of the Constitution is that it's too hard to change, with its insistence on two-thirds of both houses of Congress and three-fourths of the state legislatures needing to get on board.  Oldsters like to say that that gives us legal stability. These authors disagree, and they use democracies developed later in world history to show us why. Countries like Sweden, Norway, and Finland, say the authors, were faced with challenges that they met head-on, and thwarted the backwardness that we've developed because we've been stuck with a constitution that won't let us out of the traps we've made for ourselves. (Example: France tried an electoral college like the worn-out one we have. They tried it exactly once. It didn't work, so they scrapped it. But then, they had the mechanism to do that.)

        Instead of a bulwark of stability, time has presented us with a stodginess, staleness, and a near-complete lack of flexibility to adjust to changing circumstances. In the legal community, the conservatives have endorsed this thinking with references to "originalism," to set the basis of their logic and rulings on what the founding fathers (I won't capitalize the phrase because, unlike others, I don't feel that they knew everything they needed to know before setting out on their constitutional convention journey--they instead made things up as they went along) meant when deciding on actions to be taken in cases before them. Besides, "originalism" has been utilized as an excuse judicial conservatives tend to make when doing things that are unpopular and non-sensical. 

        The result has been that the Republican Party has seized the machinery of a functional democracy and ground it to a near halt, the authors say, and few would object to that analysis. The aforementioned Electoral College and the make-up of the Senate demonstrate this.

        The important thing to remember about the Electoral College is that the founding fathers didn't like it, either. They were a bit befuddled about how to choose the president to reflect the attitudes of the entire country--and yes, a direct popular vote option was presented, and then rejected, by the group. Though the foundations of it were becoming clear even by that time, the concept of political parties wasn't anticipated nor discussed at the convention. That would later confound, and has confounded for some time now, the way to successfully maneuver presidential elections to fit the round peg of political parties into the square hole of the Electoral College.

        The make-up of the Senate, with equal representation among the states, was utilized to break a deadlock which threatened to shatter the entire meaning of the convention itself. It was Madison's idea, presented by a small state delegate from Connecticut, Roger Sherman, who had been on the committee to draw up the Declaration of Independence (the symbolic gesture of which could not be overlooked) in order to soothe jangled nerves, that sought to combine the attitudes of the people at-large with those of the states in getting legislation passed. But again, no one could have seen the position the Senate now has through making up its own rules of ending debate morphing into the now overwhelming dominance of the filibuster. 

        Cory Booker's recent 25-hour display of what the filibuster should be, rather than what it now almost always is--a heads-up that someone who doesn't like a proposal would like to hold an elongated speech instead of actually doing so--sets off a 60-vote supermajority threshold instead of that of a mere simple majority, 51. That brings the lesser-populated states (a decided minority) into the mix in what the authors call (and are right about) a disproportionate way, and leaves the rest of us hostage. It leaves good, solid, helpful legislation hanging out there without a place to go, and dies in places no one else can see.

        In all, it comes down to the right, and inability, for the average citizen to navigate a fair playing field when it comes time to vote. Nothing is completely fair and evenhanded, but these improvements that the authors suggest become vital when confronted with the effrontery and lies and vicious power grabs to which we are now exposed because a minority has grabbed and maintains control:

    1. Pass a constitutional amendment establishing the right to vote for all citizens over 18, period.

    2. Establish automatic registration to vote as soon as people turn 18.

    3. Expand early voting for all citizens. It should be easy to vote, not difficult.

    4. Make Election Day a national holiday.

    5. Restore voting rights for all ex-felons.

    6. Restore national-level voting rights protections--in effect, restore the true intent of the Voting Rights             Act of 1965.

    7. Replace the partisan electoral administrations with those of professional officials, detached from local        and/or national politics.

    8. Abolish the Electoral College and give us a simple national popular vote.

    9. Give the Senate a proportional representation--which would take another Constitutional amendment.

   10. Replace the single-member districts of the House of Representatives with a system of proportional              representation in which voters elect multiple representatives for larger electoral districts and parties             win seats in proportion to the share of the vote they win.

   11. Eliminate partisan gerrymandering and create independent redistricting commissions such as those             used in California, Colorado, and Michigan (notice they're blue states).

   12. Make the House of Representatives larger by updating the act of 1929--yup, it happened that long              ago--which fixed the number of House members at 435.

   13. Abolish the filibuster in the Senate. It just needs a vote in the Senate itself.

   14. Establish term limits in the Supreme Court, perhaps 12 or 18 years.

   15. Leave amending the Constitution to Congress itself, and take out the state requirements.

        Not without these improvements can we have the kind of government we are capable of: one that responds properly; one that gets to the table with the genuine purpose of finding solutions for all; and one that can move the country where it should be going--forward. Tyranny of the Minority is worth your while for its thoughtful, history-based analysis of how we have gotten to the forlorn place we presently are in, and the challenging but necessary ways in which we can catch up to other countries in our efforts to make it good again. We need to, or we will become the tragic disappointment of the world. 

        After all, we began democracy as an experiment that seemed to work. We are now in terrible danger of losing it because we have put ourselves into this rut that seems bottomless and irrevocable. We can't let that happen.

        Americans came up with quite a document back in 1787. But now we're stuck there, floundering. We must find ways to unhitch ourselves so that we can meet the challenges of the world we are in right now.

        We can bring our dying democracy back to life. We just have to understand that it's on its last legs, and time is running out.

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

Mister Mark

A Very Big, Ongoing Mistake

One of the problems with being a retired history teacher is that you never get tired of thinking about it. Beyond that, the way you taught it. Did you get it right?

I doubt that any history teacher, past or present, will tell you that they got it right or even thoroughly covered in their instruction about the Native Americans; certainly, not in their textbooks. They will probably say or imply strongly that coverage of our history simply included too much to be sufficiently thorough about it. With everything else we needed to deal with, they'll say, we just plain ran out of time.

But that, by itself, is also insufficient. When people say they ran out of time to do anything--read a book, write the novel they were meaning to, cleaning the garage, taking that magical vacation they dreamed about--they mean, too, that it never did quite come to the top of their priority list. It's hard to face it: Not having time to do something means you didn't care enough about it.

We didn't care enough, don't care enough, about teaching our kids what whites did to the Natives. It would make the 1619 Project look like Dr. Seuss. Our genocide of these peoples was thorough, focused, and everlasting. It began before Black slavery came to these shores. It had to if white Europeans were to establish enough of a civilization in order for a solid caste system to emerge. It might add meaning and depth to the word "tragedy" if we would ever come to understand just what we did to human beings from whom we could have learned much, but didn't. Instead, we killed them in battle, intentionally made them perish from diseases, and/or dispersed them to places where we could easily cease caring about them other than trying to turn them "white".

Name the Native nation: It was done to them. Our geography of destruction is fixed in our minds as, mostly, being in the Great Plains; our minds automatically go there because there is the place where the teaching of it, sincere but poorly inclusive, took place. Most of the time, with white European ancestors teaching it (including me), we waited until after the Civil War to encapsulate and emphasize what was to be the final domination and corralling of Natives: the broken promises, the devastation of neglect, the presumptions of inadequacy to conceal overt racism. But it began as part of our beginnings, along the East Coast, and continued to California and the Pacific.

The number of these nations is overwhelming, too. Each has its own story of flourishing interrupted by white seeking land and fortune. That's part of the issue: we were too good at our efforts to wipe out whole civilizations. To cover the contributions of these peoples would take courses devoted to them alone, documentation that supports them, writers who have come and gone and those wishing to buttress what they have found. 

The Natives did not build libraries, at least not equal to the ones we rely on to house and grow knowledge. They did not leave enough evidence behind. But then, they didn't think they had to. Their lives were too simple for whites, bent on technological and industrial improvement and expansion, to fathom.

It was one of those places in our inquiry in which we were all too eager to dismiss Natives as lacking in evidence of intellectual development. We concluded that they could live anywhere, so anywhere is where we dumped them. We missed out on, and cannot embrace now, their wisdom about nature and why it is so important to keep track of our use of it.

Catching up with that vacuum will take more lifetimes than you and I have. Yet, there are those attempting it. In the New York Review of Books the other day, an article reviewed three more tries at encompassing the utter destruction of what Natives might have meant to us besides being peoples in the way. One of these was a book by Ned Blackhawk, a Shoshone, called The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History. In it, he says simply and decisively: "focus upon Native American history must be an essential practice of American historical inquiry." 

What he asks for is as much a revolution as the discovery of electricity: a sea-change in emphasis and development. He wants historians to go back to the beginnings of white dominance in North America and call it for what it is: Imperialism. Nobody ever thinks of what we did to the Natives as imperial, but it doesn't take long at all to find that at the bottom of our efforts. We give them deserved credit for continuing to exist amidst all that we have wrecked around us, but the thread of that depraved positioning was lost early. The efforts to recover it were never seriously lasting. We've hopscotched our way toward Native historical development, just another way of short-sheeting them.

When I taught and came to the end of the frontier and its final slaughters, I confronted my students with this question: Which is the greater tragedy, the treatment of the Blacks or that of the Natives? It made them stop and think a minute. We've put serious study and caring into the effects of Black slavery, and with obvious good reason, but our abuse of the Natives is still an afterthought. Not until we have come to grips with that can we advance our culture to a place where we can be proud of it. Not until we think of the word "inclusivity" to subsume Natives, too, will we find peace among ourselves. 

Our present government has no thought of that. Instead, it has apparently taken away any notice about Ira Hayes, the Native soldier who was one of those raising the flag over Iwo Jima. That our present government wishes to take away any thought of him and his contributions to our history indicates that we can easily lose track of that essence of humanity--and sustain racism as a twisted reality. That, too, would be a very big, ongoing mistake.

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

Mister Mark

A Hyde Park in Every Town?

He got up and read some poetry he had written with some fierce and suggestive lines. But before that, he had something to say that made us sit up and pause.

At Writers' Night in Sturgeon Bay, you get about ten minutes to read either essays or poems. The crowd is supportive and largely empathetic; many of them know the kind of chutzpah it takes to display your wares in front of a live audience.

This fellow's approach, though, was a little different. Keeping in tone with recent developments, he opened his remarks by saying that he wondered whether or not it was still all right to say what was on his mind any longer, in a country that had begun to abandon that watchword. A fear had crept up inside of him.

Oh, nothing's been said about limiting people's speech, at least not yet by the overbearing, excessively stupid regime that we have somehow elected. But we all know it's capable of trying it; 47's attacks on undesirable press indicate that all too well. And it's not too excessive to believe that the pressing thumb of authoritarianism and creeping tyranny is within the scope of possibility. If that's what the gentleman meant, he might have been expressing what the rest of us now wonder about.

I had never heard anyone discuss that before in this country, though, and I've been around this country a few times not that long ago, saying pretty much whatever in the hell I wanted. Nowhere, at no time, have I or anyone else ever wondered whether they'd be muzzled from what was supposed to be free expression. But the fact that, upon mere observation, this fellow could come to that conclusion is a danger of which we should take note.

Free expression is America, simple as that. If ideas, however distasteful, cannot be aired publicly, the moment will come when airing them privately might expose someone to penalties as well. At that moment, America will be dead. Laws will not be passed due to open conversation about their possibilities; they will be forced upon us by someone who thinks they know better.

When that happens, self-government disappears. The contentment that comes from understanding that, regardless of what side you're on, you had an equal chance to affect public affairs will be robbed from us as surely as a pickpocket would come and take our money without our knowing of it. We will lose an important part of our individual originality, the sign of what it is to be unique human beings.

So there must be a place in which to engage in opinions and information which cannot be altered or cancelled. The British have one: the Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park in London, a place I attended some forty years ago. According to a website devoted to The Royal Parks, it was established as a send-down from the tradition of the condemned who wished to make some final statement before being hanged. It became a social event and went on for nearly 600 years before hangings became non-public.

The real creation of public speaking in London, though, came from women, namely those belonging to the Reform League in demand of the franchise. They would hold marches and protests normally terminating in Hyde Park with applicable speeches. In 1866, one of these marches resulted in the entrance to Hyde Park being chained shut. Three days of rioting followed. The next year, a crowd of 150,000 formed and the police didn't intervene this time. The Home Secretary resigned the next day, and in 1872, Parliament passed the Parks Regulation Act, officially establishing the right to utilize Hyde Park's Speakers Corner as a place for free discussion, legalizing what had already become true.

Was it supposed to be completely anarchical? Well, no. The police were there the same day I attended to keep order and prevent the speaker's words from being "illegal," whatever that means. Actually, the speaking area of Hyde Park officially extends far beyond the Speakers' Corner, but it's the place people normally congregate. It's also still used for public demonstrations and rallies. On Women's Day, June 21, 1908, 250,000 women marched to the park to hear speeches from 20 different places within it. The police banned the Women's Social and Political Union from meeting in the park in 1913, but the suffragettes ignored it.

Among those who have stood there to express themselves have been Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and George Orwell. Orwell marveled at the opportunity for people like "Indian nationalists, temperance reformers, Communists, Trotskyists, freethinkers, vegetarians, the Salvation Army, and a large variety of plain lunatics" to exercise their free speech rights. About a hundred speaking places were found weekly on London street corners between 1855 and 1939. Speakers' Corner is the last to survive.

Speakers and crowds tend to gather there on Sundays now. The listeners don't stand idly, either; if they have something to shout back at the speaker, they help themselves. Such happened when I was there. The speaker, who had brought his own stepstool, had some nasty things to say about homosexuals, and some in the crowd fought back in defending them. 

It had the effect of reducing the impact of what the speaker had to say. It's another place where free speech can be claimed but the responsibility and consequences of which can neither be predicted nor necessarily approved. Such is its benefit; you learn that as deeply as you believe in what you might say, as logical as it may occur to you, it isn't the only opinion on God's green earth. And you must respect what comes your way on account of it without committing violence, or orderly society as we know it will be dashed.

I wonder whether we can establish such freedom in this society, so the above mentioned fellow need not worry about whether he will have the opportunity to expound his ideas. Most towns, large and small, that I know have at least one public park in it. Would it be too much to ask for a small part of it to be carved out for the purposes of unfettered, guaranteed public discussion? Would that mean that public discussion elsewhere within its boundaries would be, by implication, curtailed if the police think it necessary? Would that work at cross purposes? Or would it calm people down and keep them from the tension that removing civil and human rights causes? Would such an arrangement also need a "no solicitation" warning nailed to a nearby tree, limiting the free market in favor of free speech?

The police here in America would have to be just as wary about protecting the speakers themselves than they would about "illegal" speech. Wherever you find free expression now, there is always fierce pushback that sounds increasingly ugly and threatening. The common phraseology about that is that it provides a "safety valve" and allows people with edgy, controversial philosophies to get what's bothering them off their minds to no or little real effect. 

But I wonder: Would that be where it ends now, with an actual attack on our U.S. Capital lurking in the background, many of its perpetrators now pardoned by a political monster? Will they then get away with masquerading as purveyors of "free speech," when it actually was an assault on democracy? In the name of democracy, would a Speakers' Corner in every town serve to ruin what democracy actually means?

Hard to say. The need for maintaining political speech could beget efforts to contain, and thus reduce and/or control it. In 1791, the states chose to codify what the republic was supposed to stand for by passing the First Amendment. They understood that, in order for liberty under law to properly function, a wide berth must be given for allowing ideas to flow and be exchanged, popular or otherwise. 

I find it stunning that someone might need to suggest that the places for that expression previously provided--practically everywhere--might be closed here and there. Would we instead have to guarantee such discussion in carefully outlined territories? The edge of that cliff is still in the distance. But we can see it from here.

Mister Mark

How Come One Is Famous While the Other One Isn't?

I couldn't just absorb the moment, though I wanted to sit there and do just that. I had to think quickly, and gratefully, I did. But the reason I had to do so is still pretty astonishing.

Luckily for someone who loves books, I live one block from probably the best and most attended independent bookstore in all of Milwaukee--Boswell Books. Like so many other businesses, it had to crawl through Covid, another ship tottering without help on the horizon. But it stayed afloat.

One of the surest signs of this is that, after months of online presentations, it has gotten back to the habit of inviting authors for live conversations about their work. Another one of those arrived the other night, when a Japanese-born professor, Shigehiro Oishi, came to hawk his work Life in Three Dimensions: How Curiosity, Exploration, and Experience Make a Fuller, Better Life. As far along in life as I now am, I've been through enough experiences to deep questions to myself: What makes a 'good' life? What constitutes 'happiness'? Is that even worth pursuing? Or is it something else that should spur us on?

Oishi is a professor of social psychology at the University of Chicago, one of those credentials that leaves you with one thought: Hooooo. Pretty sharp cookie. What he explored in his work, apparently, was what he called a "psychologically rich life"--one in which curiosity, a variety of experiences, and a sense of doing good for others keep one actively involved in the business of enjoyable living.

He has found, for instance, that the 19th Century Webster's Dictionary did not define "happiness" in terms of material success or the need to achieve something. That shading of definition has morphed into that direction in the next century, the one from which we've emerged. If you keep that in the front of your mind, he says, you find yourself in a trap from which you may not escape: the need to make more money and be more famous, regardless of how you may have already 'succeeded.'

What I thought, and still think he was trying to do, is to tell folks to keep it all in perspective--that other things, like helping people and maintaining a positive influence on them, are far better things to try to live for (which is a large part of what teaching as a calling and profession has always been about, whether paid for it or not). Such thinking isn't all that new, but perhaps his research is; I have to read the work now and discover what "evidence" he's developed.

All of this was kind of fun to listen to him extrapolate. His Japanese accent was evident, but not overwhelming; I kept thinking that a lecture from him might be fascinating to listen to. No doubt, either, that he must still be giving lectures; he didn't look much over 40. I got immersed into the discussion when a question occurred to me. I was the last one to be recognized before we broke up and allowed him to sell and autograph his book.

I wanted to know, in a way that might probably expose an obvious (slightly politically charged, too) answer, so I raised my hand and asked: Who had (has) the more fulfilling life--Elon Musk, or Albert Schweitzer? An admired humanitarian and religious philosopher, Schweitzer never seemed to focus on personal fame or profit, and helped thousands of west Africans through various diseases in the period between the world wars. Everyone knew who he was, I thought. That's why I used his name.

But Oishi thought he heard Schweitzer's name wrong, that I was referring to someone else. I repeated it. He gazed at the crowd and his wife in confusion. I thought it was an amazing moment: A professor at the University of Chicago, a social scientist to boot, didn't know who Albert Schweitzer was.

I gave him a path out of embarrassment. I quickly changed the comparison to Mohandas Gandhi, and he recovered. But you can't unring a bell. I wasn't trying to ambush him; I thought it was a softball question, something he was driving at all along. And, in fact, he riffed on how Musk is probably already caught in the success 'trap,' and someday that will occur to him.

That was fine, but--Wait a minute...I had indirectly brought up a new but tangentially applicable question: What makes people 'famous'? This very learned person had no clue about Albert Schweitzer and immediately knew Mohandas Gandhi, who lived roughly at the same time and had hopes for humanity, much like the (apparently) lesser-known but well-regarded Schweitzer. In fact, Schweitzer won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952 (You can look that up). Given that award, Schweitzer should be more highly regarded, right? Gandhi was nominated for the Peace Prize five times (which I bet is a record), but never won it (amazingly).

Was it because Schweitzer lived 90 years and died a natural death, while Gandhi was assassinated and lionized in literature and film? Was it because that, while Schweitzer was a controversial religious philosopher at one point, much like Gandhi, he didn't try to merge two intense religious sects together? Is that what makes the best example of active living? Is that what makes people more memorable?

Or, in a sendup of the future, is Schweitzer doomed to the shoebox of lesser-knowns, even though he doesn't deserve such a fate? Is that because he did his work on the perpetually forgotten continent, Africa, the wealth and vibrance of which has never been sufficiently recognized here because it prompts the follow-up question: Then how come we enslaved so many of its inhabitants and had to fight a bloody war to free them?

Should we give Oishi a break, though, seeing as how he understandably has a greater residence of memory in Japan? If you became a professor in Tokyo, wouldn't you forget about, or never be informed about, others who gained significant fame because Schweitzer had little to do with the U.S.? But Mohandas Gandhi had little to do with the U.S., either.

As we move through time, certain names resonate while others just as deserving somehow fade. Some are occasionally resurrected, and the rush to remember surges for a while. We build statues to them. We also leave statues up when they should be torn down. What is recognized as shining history is often the function of who is in a power position to voice that shining, or how well it is done. That is why, for instance, the 1619 Project has never really gotten off the ground, because some racial chauvinists insist on making a 1776 Project to obscure it. The overly dramatized "lost cause" of the Confederacy flicks at emotional attachment that is attractive to encourage perpetual victimization, yet not deserved. Some statues of Robert E. Lee remain up, while others come down.

We are somehow still confused by treason, attended to by those determined to shape memory. Perhaps a statue devoted to the rioters of January 6 (a date which no longer needs a specific year to underline its importance, like September 11) will also go up at Mar-A-Lago. Many of us cringe at that possibility, but its leader was elected president twice. He has already made it a point to direct schools not to include the teaching of diversity, equality, and inclusivity in their history courses. 

Is it ridiculous to imagine a world that forgot that? It's possible in a world that has forgotten Albert Schweitzer.

Be well. Be careful. Resist, regardless of how futile it seems. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark