Month: February 2021

Old Left-Hander

For decades, it was the sign-off for every Cincinnati Reds radio broadcast.  Joe Nauxhall was the youngest to every play major league baseball when he joined the player-short World War II Reds roster in 1944.  He was fifteen.  When the War was over it was back to Hamilton High School and then the minors, but in 1952 he returned to the big leagues, and played, mostly for the Reds, until 1966.  The next year he began his second career as a radio commentator on Red’s radio, a stretch that lasted until 2004. 

On long trips, my Dad would listen to Red’s games.  As we drove through the pines of Michigan, or across the New York Thruway, or down through Kentucky, it was always a taste of our hometown, Cincinnati.  And since the Reds were broadcast on WLW Radio, a clear channel AM station using the maximum wattage allowed, you could hear the games almost everywhere.  We could sit on a beach in Canada and catch the scratchy end to August games.

And when it was over, we’d know.  Joe would signoff, always with his signature phrase:  

“This is the old left-hander, rounding third and headed for home”.

Butcher’s Bill

We have reached a terrible milestone in our national experience:  twelve months of a world pandemic.  There are few alive who have experienced a world like this, the very few who are as old as my Dad would have been this July, 103.  And they were babies, born in 1918 during the “Spanish” flu epidemic, that took 675,000 American lives in twenty-six months.   We are sadly ahead of their pace: today’s butcher’s bill over 520,000 gone to COVID. 

But unlike the post-World War I world, our science is serving us well.  All my grandparents’ generation could do was wear masks, avoid crowds, socially distance and increase ventilation.  And, just like today, they had their “anti-maskers” (there were entire anti-mask societies) and scoff-laws.  Some wore their masks with holes cut in the front to accommodate their cigars.

Recently in the United States those same common-sense preventions again became political pawns.  Wearing a mask and obeying state regulations somehow got wrapped up in the polarization of our politics, a mark of our affiliation rather than a social duty to protect each other.  How many additional lives that cost is unknowable, but the scale is likely in the hundreds of thousands.  By allowing politics to overrule science, our nation has paid an extraordinary price.  With four percent of the world population, we have twenty percent of the world’s deaths.

Science

But the great difference between now and the year of Dad (and Mom’s) birth, is science.  From the beginning we knew what caused our disease.  And we put the great engines of our scientific industries to task:  find treatments and find vaccines.  Today, the third vaccine, this one produced by Johnson and Johnson, will receive clearance for public use in the United States.  It, along with the Pfizer and Moderna products, will be rushed into arms.  

Four million doses of the one-shot J&J vaccine will immediately be apportioned as soon as the final approvals are made.  Sixty-six million doses have already been administered to Americans, with more than thirteen percent of the population vaccinated.  The goal: 100 million doses by April.  President Biden predicts that the shot(s) will be available to everyone in the nation by August.  Other vaccines are waiting in the wings, just concluding their scientific trials.

We already are seeing the benefit of immunization. Nursing home residents, the most likely to die from COVID, were among the very first targets of vaccination in the US.  Death rates there have fallen seventy percent since the shots began.   The concept of “herd immunity”, that so many folks are immunized that viral transmission is slowed to a near halt, is foreseeable.  

We are rounding third, and headed for home.

Dancing in the Base Path

Ohio has hit what we call “false spring”.  After weeks of snow coverage, sub-freezing temperatures and clouds, the ice is melting.  When I was coaching high school track this was the time of year where I’d have to yell “KEEP YOUR CLOTHES ON” to my high school boys.  After months of twenty-degree weather, the forty-five-degree sunshine would feel like summer, and they’d rip off their sweats and even shirts in the workout.  What would feel like Arctic blasts come May felt like Florida beaches in February.

With vaccines and possible “herd immunity” in sight, it’s easy to feel like those bare-chested runners.  It feels like spring, almost summer.  It’s time to drop all the protections of coats and sweats, of social distancing, masks and restrictions.  Let’s go play!!  We should get together!! Let’s celebrate the end of our long pandemic winter!!

But we aren’t there – yet.  America is so close to solving our national scientific equation, but we have not crossed the plate.  We have rounded third, and we are headed for home, but the score doesn’t count – yet.  We are dancing in the base path.

Home

And as we dance, it’s still possible we might get thrown out.  

The virus doesn’t think, it just acts.  It doesn’t know that herd immunity, eighty percent or more vaccinated is on the horizon.  The virus does what it does, replicate, infect, replicate some more.  It doesn’t know that defeat is imminent.  And it will continue to do what it does, until we actually have all those shots in arms.  We can still have another spike, another jump in the death rate, another lengthy butcher’s bill.  It isn’t necessary, but it’s possible.  It’s up to us.

We have rounded third, and we are headed for home.  We need to keep our heads down, and get across the plate.

Here’s the next in the “Sunday Story” series.  There’s no political point here, it’s just a story about folks who find lost dogs.

Lost Dogs

If you’ve read many of these “Our America” essays, you know dogs emerge as a reoccurring theme. We’ve currently got four rescues here at the house, and Jennifer (my wife) is deeply involved in an all-volunteer group called Lost Pet Recovery (LPR). They’re folks who spend most of their time trying to get lost dogs back to their families, and wandering dogs to safety. It sounds simple – just catch the dog. But there’s so much more that goes into it.

So the first thing you need to know about finding lost dogs, is it is NOT the same as finding lost children.  Even though we think of our dogs as our children, they will not respond the same way as our kids lost in the woods might.  When a child is lost in the woods, we gather all of our friends, we find someone to look from “the sky” with a drone, we scour the countryside calling out for them.  We assume (rightly so) that the child wants to be found.  It’s kind of a “village goes after Frankenstein thing”, think torches and crowds, but only in a good way.

Flight Mode

But after a dog has been “out” for a couple of days, they are in flight mode.  They are running, running from anything that generates fear.  And everything, and particularly everybody generates fear – often times even “Mom and Dad” and brothers and sisters.  One of the coolest parts of rescuing dogs is the moment when the dog “remembers” who “Mom or Dad”  is.  We’ve all seen the reunion videos of dogs welcoming their returning soldier home from a long tour.  And that part is really cool, and it does happen even for the “rescued” dog.  But it doesn’t usually happen when they are “out” running.

Once a dog is out, there might be a short time when calling for them will help.  But a dog also knows they might be “in trouble” for running – so even then it can’t be “Fido get back here!”  It’s got to be calm, quiet, “…hey Fido buddy, I’ve got a cheeseburger for you – smell it?”  But when you gather all your human friends and send them out into the field to find your lost canine, it’s more than likely that you are driving him or her even farther away, especially if they’ve been “out” more than a day or so.  They are scared, and all of those strange people yelling their name is going to make then even more scared.  So they’ll run, and they can outrun you.

That’s when you need my friends:  the folks at Lost Pet Recovery.

Berne 

The area around Alum Creek Drive and Livingston Avenue is not considered the “best” part of Columbus, Ohio.  It’s mostly industrial, and from time to time in the night you might hear “shots fired”.  The area makes the evening news for shootings and robberies more than for the real efforts of the Southside Civic Association.  But the owner of one of the companies in the area noticed that a Bernese Mountain Dog had taken up “residence” in the small industrial park sandwiched between Alum Creek Drive and I-70 headed downtown. 

He, through a friend of a friend, let LPR know.  And Jenn was on the job.

Jenn went down and “learned the Berne”.  She talked to the folks in the industrial park, and followed the dog tracks in the snow.  And she found out the Berne was bedding down in a storage shed on one of the properties.  In fact, Berne had a friend, Bob, the owner of one of the businesses.  He was not just feeding Berne, he was grilling beef and chicken for her.  She had a “bed”, straw blankets and such, in the back of the shed.  She came and went as she pleased, and though she wouldn’t allow contact, she definitely had “ her place” down on Alum Creek Drive.

This was in January, middle of winter here in Ohio.  But Bernese Mountain Dogs originated in Berne, Switzerland (my first mistake – I always thought they were Burmese from Burma, kind of a Himalayan thing – wrong) and the cold is what they were bred for.  And while Berne had a “place” it still was a cold, tough world out there, and everyone wanted Berne to be safe.  In fact, Bob wanted to make Berne his own.  The two even got to the point the Berne would take food from his hand.  But when he’d reach out, she’d bolt.

But she kept coming back.

Trappers

The first move was to put a camera and a “trap” in the shed.  The camera is a deer-cam, triggered by motion and transmits to Jenn’s phone.  It’s got night vision as well, so whenever anything moved in the shed, Jenn was notified.  And the trap – well it’s six feet long by two and a half feet tall by two feet wide, with a spring door that closes if Berne steps on the trip plate.  Jenn and Bob placed food leading into the trap, and of course, the “mother-load” of food at the back past the trip plate.  Any self-respecting and hungry dog would walk right in and get the food – and get trapped.

But Berne was trap-wise.  She knew to get all the food leading in, and to reach just far enough into the trap to take the scraps in the front.  But no matter what was in the back, she wouldn’t go.

This went on for a week or more, with Berne almost literally waving at the camera as she went by.  Jenn hung out down in the parking lots of the buildings off of Alum Creek Drive, and began to get a sense of the dog’s pattern.  She didn’t go far, and she didn’t cross the busy roads.  There was a small wood, a little cemetery, and the big storage lots.  She circled through her territory checking everything a few times a day.  At nighttime usually she headed for the storage shed, ignored the trap, and bedded down in the back.

Bob had to leave town for a week – so Jenn set up an alternate site to feed Berne.  And it was another week of trying different foods (from McDoubles to KFC Bowls and Chicken Strips) but Berne still waved at the camera, sniffed around the trap, and ate the teaser pieces along the edge.  She even barked at the peanut-butter covered bone lashed to the back.  She’d eat everything around, but she wasn’t going in.

Sleeping in a Truck

Meanwhile, my wife was sleeping in a truck in an empty parking lot off Alum Creek Drive, night after night.  LPR volunteers support each other. As one “trapper” gets sleep in the truck, others, spread all over the state, are watching the cameras for her.  When Berne approached, they’d text or call.  Jenn was far enough away from the trap that the sound of the phone wouldn’t disturb the dog, but would wake her up.  But instead of catching Berne, it was mostly to release the feral cats that lived in the area.  And those cats weren’t happy about the catch part – nor particularly grateful for release either.

There are several trappers in LPR, and they often collaborate on how best to catch their dog.  Maybe grilled (instead of KFC fried) food would work.  Jenn and I took our portable gas grill out to the parking lot, set up a little table, and made Sunday evening dinner.  We had our usual ribeye steak and green beans.  But we cooked another steak (not the ribeye) and some sausage for Berne.  We filled the small woods with the odor of steak and sausage, then placed her portion in the back of the trap.

We packed up and pulled off to eat our dinner in the truck, waiting for Berne to show.  It didn’t take long, we just finished our dinner when she came out of the woods and around the trap to the back.  You could sense her frustration – steak and sausage, right there in front of her.  And she voiced it, barking at the trap, sniffing around, but still refused to go in.

Panel Trap

So after a second week, Jenn, Don “the boss” of LPR, and Kim from Cincinnati got together to change the equation.  The trap wasn’t going to work.  But there is a different kind of trap, a “panel” trap.  It’s actually several sections of 6×6 pieces of fencing, lashed together to make a room.  In the front there’s a door, with a really long rope on it.  It’s a simple concept:  put the bait in the back, wait for the dog to go in, then pull the rope so the door slams shut.

But there’s no automatic part of this panel trap.  It’s up to Jenn, parked about three hundred feet away, in the dark and cold of the now-February winter snow, to pull the rope and slam the door.  And the only way she knows to pull the rope, is a grainy night-shot picture on an IPhone screen.  And there’s always a delay, of a few seconds – so while the picture might show the dog in the back, that’s very recent history, not necessarily the present.

They left the door open for a couple of days, to see if Berne would get in the habit of going in. And she did. It was President’s Day weekend, the weather forecast was looking bad – but it was time to “save” Berne. Jenn was hiding in the truck on Monday evening. She knew Berne usually came around 7 pm, so she turned the truck off at 6:30. It was a damn cold night, but she didn’t want anything to spook Berne away. Kim came up from Cincinnati to surprise Jenn, and was in a different part of the complex, watching Berne heading towards the trap.

Berne appeared and wandered into the trap.  Kim could see it, but Jenn was waiting for the camera picture.  Then Jenn got the text message from Kim:  “GO-GO-GO”.  She pulled the rope, the door slammed shut.  Berne was safe.

Polly

Jenn and Kim went to the trap, calling softly to Berne.  She huddled in the corner, scared, but Kim went in and almost immediately Berne was leaning on her.  Jenn joined them, and began to calm Berne down.   Bob was going to take care of Berne, and quickly drove up to the trap.   Don came too, and they put a “slip-lead” on Berne, and got her in Bob’s truck.  They then scanned Berne for a chip, and found that she had one.  Berne went home with Bob – pictures from that evening showed a relaxed Berne sleeping at the foot of Bob’s bed.

The chip reads out a number, which links to the “chip” company. Although the chip wasn’t registered, the company was still able to trace it back to the owner. (Hint: register your dog’s chip and keep it current. It saves a lot of time locating the owner and getting your dog home). They had an owner for Berne, and Jenn called.

Berne was lost from her home near Mansfield, almost sixty miles away, back in April.  She’d been “out” ten months, and her real name was Polly.  She was a “pure-bred” Bernese Mountain Dog; originally purchased for breeding.  But the owners had left the breeding business.  They felt that the internet had made it too dangerous for the dogs, they couldn’t “vet” the owners personally the way they wanted to.  So they had Polly and her sister, and they were living on several acres when Polly slipped away.

Bob and Berne, now Polly, were bonding, so it was hard to give her back. But it turned out that the folks near Mansfield loved her too, and Jenn now talks with them on a regular basis. Polly is back at home, happy and healthy with her sister, recovering from her adventure in the “big city”. And Jenn and LPR are on the lookout for a “rescue” for Bob.

There’s always another dog.  In the five days around when Jenn trapped Berne, LPR recovered seven other dogs across Ohio. Almost every night, there’s a LPR volunteer sleeping in a pickup truck, or staring at a computer screen, waiting on a dog to get safe. The work goes on.

Want to know more about LPR?  Click here for the Facebook Page.

Testimony

The United States Senate took testimony yesterday on how January 6^th, the day of the Insurrection, could have happened.   How was the Capitol so unprepared for what many who view social media saw as foreseeable and predictable?  Testifying were the three on the front line who take direct blame for the “fall” of the Capitol:  the former Chief of the Capitol police, the former Sergeant of Arms of the Senate, and the former Sergeant of Arms of the House.  All three resigned from their posts soon after the insurrection.

Also testifying was the Acting Chief of the Washington Metro police.  He was the “outside” man who tried to pick up the pieces when the Capitol called for help.

They thought they were ready.  They had all the intelligence, all the information.  The Capitol weathered the Million MAGA march, and they were “prepared”.  Prepared for a “First Amendment” event, as they call it, with the possibility of violence.  What they now admit they weren’t prepared for, weren’t able to even contemplate, was a full assault on the Capitol building.  They were ready for people chanting on the Mall, and screaming at the doors.  But they never even drilled their forces for incursion into the building.  It was beyond their wildest dreams.

Good Men

The witnesses are good men:  decades on the Capitol Police force or in the Secret Service.  They had all of the connections, friends in command at the National Guard, and intelligence sources they depended on.  They have spent literal lifetimes building their careers and reputations.  The former Sergeant of Arms have been on the Presidential Protection detail.  It wasn’t knowledge that failed them, and it wasn’t some vague orders from either Nancy Pelosi (the National Guard would look bad) or even Donald Trump (let them in).  It was a failure of imagination.

It’s hard to blame them.  America is a nation of protests.  The Capitol building has been the target so many times:  of demonstrations and complaints, of crowds chanting and sometimes getting out of control.  In 1932 the “Bonus Army”, more than 40,000 World War I veterans demanding a promised bonus from Congress, camped on the Mall in front of the Capitol for three months.  It took the US Army, led by General Douglas MacArthur, to drive their former comrades off and raze their camp. Two were killed and fifty-five injured, in what MacArthur called a rebellion. But they were simply trying to get Congress to pay their veterans bonus in 1932, at the depth of the Great Depression,  instead of the original 1945.  

But though they were an “army” that wanted something from Congress, they didn’t attack the Capitol.  They wanted action, not destruction.

Tradition of Protest

There have literally been thousands of marches on the Capitol.  And there has been “civil disobedience” actions, where folks refuse to leave, or sit in the halls of the Congressional offices and chant.  We’ve seen them led out of the buildings with “plastic handcuffs”, even some in wheelchairs.  More recently Reverend Raphael Warnock, now Senator Warnock of Georgia, was arrested in protest.

And that’s what the Capitol Police were prepared for:  angry and vocal Trump supporters, demanding that the Congress rescind the results of the 2020 election.  That’s also why the House and the Senate continued in session for so long on that fateful day, seeming oblivious  to the violence at their doors. But from the outside view, it seemed obvious that things were wholly different than any protest before.  The Members were used to hearing the chanting, the yelling, and the “pressure” of the crowds outside.  Congress prides itself on completing their business, regardless of the what else is going on.

But this time the protestors were coming in  — for them.

For anyone on social media, the possibility of more than just a “first amendment” or “civil disobedience” event was more than clear.  Violence was always part of their movement, at the Trump Rallies, at the demonstrations, and in the “lore” of QAnon and the other right-wing conspiracies.  And, as many said at the time, they believed that they were acting “for America”.  They were convinced that the election was corrupt, that “their” candidate was the true winner, and that they were trying to “save” the Nation.  Once they took the first step – accepting the “Big Lie” about the election – everything else was foreseeable, perhaps even inevitable.

But not for the leaders of the Capitol protection services.  

Questions

There are still many questions to answer.  Why did the National Guard take so long to deploy?  How did our Intelligence services “miss” what was obvious to so many “regular” citizens?  And the biggest question of all, how did our Nation come to the point where one political leader was willing to defy two-hundred and thirty-four years of Constitutional precedent, and try to remain in office after losing an election?

After 9-11 we found that the intelligence of the plot to fly planes into buildings was right in front of us.  The failure was in the communication among the intelligence agencies to put it together.  And more importantly, there wasn’t the imagination to see flying fully loaded passenger planes into buildings as a real threat, even though it was the central plot of a popular Tom Clancy book (Executive Orders) just five years before.  

The three should have resigned, they failed in their duty to protect on January 6^th.  But their failure wasn’t so much in action.  It was a failure of imagination.  A militant attack on the Capitol wasn’t in their wildest dreams.

Paul and Leah, my grandchildren, are always asking me to tell them stories about the old days, or about the war.  So back to the old days and the war.  Not me, this time though.  

In the first years of World War II, a young writer and myself were asked to write a series of pamphlets for the US Air Forces to help them understand the British civilians they were forced to live with.  I did this, and the last paper we wrote was a sort of culmination of all that had gone before and a kind of thank you to the US Air Force – mainly the Eighth.  I don’t have the pamphlet, but I am going to reconstruct and perhaps, revamp it.  It’s about two countries trying to understand each other under great difficulties, learning to live together, be happy, grieve together, and celebrate sometimes.  I will be addressing this epistle to the American Air Force.

This is the quiet ploughland of old England, one of the most peaceful areas on earth, which was used to win the greatest war in human history.  From the midst of these wheatlands and meadows, from the centuries old cottages with straw thatch and oak beams, the huge bomber fleets were airborne which pulped the heart of Hitler’s Reich.  In these Eastern counties, the Pilgrim Fathers gathered and sailed away to build a new world.  To these Eastern counties, their 20^thcentury Pilgrim Sons returned to free the old world from tyranny.

Few people in East Anglia have been to the United States, but the United States have been to us.  We saw them come in our hour of desperate need – young men in the tens of thousands, nonchalant, gay, confident and courageous.  As an Englishwoman, one of a race which is said to be cold and proud, I would like to tell you very humbly something of which all of us who have been privileged to meet the men of the Eighth Air Force feel and shall ever feel in our hearts about Americans.

The American story began for us long before the first Flying Fortress or Liberators, the Lightnings or the Thunderbolts swept through the English skies.  It began one spring afternoon in 1940, when clearly and steadily throughout two days and two nights, we heard in East Anglia the sound of distant explosions.  There were dumps being blown up by remnants of the British Army before it was driven into the sea at Dunkirk.

We expected the Nazis to attempt an invasion within a few weeks.  Men, women and children, all of us, meant to fight.  Yet we had nothing to fight with.  In our area of eleven miles long and four miles deep, we had seven rifles and one hundred twenty rounds of ammunition.

Every evening after work, men and women met together and concocted homemade bombs out of tar, gas and cotton wool.  The idea was to light it with a match and then throw the contrivance underneath an advancing tank in the hope it would catch fire.  We sweated away digging trenches and hiding places in the undergrowth beside all the roads leading from the coast, so the Nazis would not see us before we hurled our homemade bombs at them.  Rather simple thinking, wasn’t it?

We arranged secret meeting places.  We hid food.  We planned to set fire to haystacks and burn everything of use to the enemy in the line of his advance.  All night long, we kept watch on church towers, at crossroads, etc. in case the Nazis began to drop on us from the skies by parachute.

One evening, all the able-bodied men were called to the village hall.  On the floor were large wooden boxes.  From these, each one of them was handed a rifle and twenty rounds of ammunition.  For the first time since Dunkirk, we felt we had something to hit back with if they came.  Our hearts sang a new song.

These rifles were the first weapons to reach the Eastern Counties from the USA.  Lend Lease may have been a subject of political controversy in the USA, but in England it was as if a friend had suddenly put a weapon in our hands at a time when our backs were to the wall and we had nothing but faith left to us.

All night long the Nazi planes droned overhead on their way to London.  For many months, they were almost unopposed.  We slept on the ground floor and in the cupboard under the stairs.

The German aircraft gave forth an eerie two-noted sound.  If a glimmer of light showed, they dropped their bombs.  The huge fires they started in London threw a rosy light on the Eastern Horizon. 

We, in Bochain, built and equipped the bases for the Eighth Air Force as part of our share of Lend Lease in reverse.  Many of them were placed on the finest farming land in Bochain.  Parts of the East of England grow heavier crops per acre than any other land in the world.  The Air Ministry had to pick the most level land for the air field, but the level land is the best farming land, the easiest to cultivate.  Farmers who families had owned and farmed the same land for many generations found themselves dispossessed.  Bulldozers came, smashing down the hedges and ditches.  Trees were hauled out by the roots.  Mountains of sand were carried and dumped in the middle of growing crops.  Train loads of rubble from the blitzed areas of London were used to lay the foundation.

Tens of thousands of British workers toiled through the wet and cold winter weather, working long hours of overtime, seven days a week, mixing the concrete, laying the runways and building huts and hangers.  Soon acres of concrete lay where the acres of corn had stretched before.

At dusk, the Englishmen drove around the deserted perimeter tracks in a car with sporting guns pointing out of the windows and shot at the partridges as they came home to rest.  The first American arrivals stared in amazement as looking like a load of gangsters, the sportsmen rolled by in the gloaming.  Come what may, the Englishman has to have his sport!

Soon the first big bombers from the States, the Liberators and Fortresses, began to arrive.  Then came the fighters.  Village communities, numbering only a few hundred people, found themselves with several thousand Americans on their doorsteps, in their shops and parks, and very soon in their homes.  In many parts of the Eastern Counties, the American population outnumbered the British.

It was not easy at first.  The Americans found us cold, glum and angular, with our severe ways and quiet superior glances.  And the children – what pests they were with their eternal requests for “gum, chum”.  But you, the Americans, were so good to them, they loved you and called you their American uncles.  You were their heroes too.  There were many problems of adjustment, but most were met with a grain of humor and an ounce of tact.

Soon after the Americans arrived, a Piper Cub, which always seemed to be having engine trouble and landing every day for temporary repairs, became a well-known feature in the lives of the villagers.  The mystery was solved when it was discovered that the pilot always took the occasion of his breakdown to buy as many shell-eggs as the farmer on whose land he descended would sell him.  It was an enterprising scheme to replenish the commissars of one the Eighth Air Force.

How to do the laundry for these thousands of men from across the seas suddenly planted in the middle of us?  From the American angle, I guess it must have seemed that all the villagers charged high prices and did not do the job too well at all. But, from the British point of view, the problem was two-fold – soapy and socially.  Our soap ration was barely adequate to keep our own hands clean.  And, socially, it was not considered “quite the thing” by the ladies to do wash.  However, in village after village, the word was passed, “I’ll do it if Mrs. King will.  What’s good enough for Mrs. Crane is good enough for me”.  Soon, every home had a share in keeping shirts, socks and hankies of the Eighth Air Force clean, mended and ironed.

Every community plotted and planned to make the American guests feel at home.  In one village, there is an old building dating back from the 15^th century.  The ground floor has bars on its windows.  It was used by the old feudal lords as a prison.  The village ladies fixed this place, painted it themselves, furnished it, decorated it and turned it into a Welcome Club for the Eighth Air Force.  Every night volunteers served refreshments and held dances, debates and card parties. Few Americans airmen who spent their evenings at this Welcome Club making friends with the village people could guess they were being entertained in an old jail which, no doubt, had been used to imprison many of those who were unlucky not to book a passage on the Mayflower and got left behind. 

What did the Eighth Air Force think of the Eastern Counties?  Not too badly, we hope.  At any rate, thousands of them married English girls in these years of endurance and victory.  

Bochain’s Home Guard, over two million strong, was at first armed with pikes and cudgels, but finally with some of the best weapons of warfare.  They drilled in the evenings and weekends, and stood ready for four years to fight the enemy if he landed on these shores.  The British Home Guard was originally enlisted to defend their own towns and villages, each man to stand, fight, and die if need be, amid the streets and houses that he knew and loved.  When the American bases began to spring up like monster mushrooms all over the Eastern Counties, the question arose of who should defend them against possible enemy airborne attack.  In most places, the Military High Command delegated this duty to the Home Guard, by then a highly skilled and heavily armed body of trained men.

The Eastern Counties have a sense of eternal values about them.  They are the great invasion belt of British history.  Across the counties have swept the Danes, Dutch, Normans, Romans, and many more, and have left their traces of habit and language behind them.  As the plough broke the soil between the vast air bases, alive and throbbing with the amazing machinery of the modern age, it turned up ancient pottery, Roman coins, weapons of flint and iron, fossils, skulls and bones.

When the Germans dropped their bombs around East Anglia, it was often found that the old buildings stood the shock better than modern constructions of brick and stone.  Maybe the old buildings of the Eastern Counties have a bit of give to them.  They swayed in the bomb blast and stuck together, while more modern buildings stayed rigid and disintegrated.  These old buildings have endured for centuries.  

Their bones are of oak, mostly old ships-tankers which sailed the seas in the days of John Cabot and Henry VII.  The seamen used to exchange them with the farmers near the coast in return for supplies.  The flesh of the buildings between the oak bones is wattle and daub.  Wattle is just bunches of hedge sticks bound together with withies.  Daub was fashioned from clay, water and cow’s dung to make it stick firm.  It was mixed in holes in the ground and those forefathers of ours used their bare feet for the mixing.  It was from homes like these, which still stand around the air bases, that the men and women set forth to board the Mayflower all those years ago, over two hundred.

In those far off days, almost all the farmers in the Eastern Counties used to hold a HORKEY.  This was a celebration in the barn each year when the farmers and villagers sat down together to break bread, sing hymns and songs, dance, and thank God for the harvest.  So, after the Pilgrim Fathers made their landfall in the West, and in 1621 had gathered their first harvest in safely, with memories of the barns and villages in England, they held a HORKEY.

That was the start of Thanksgiving, and while in America the festival of family and earth has been maintained and enriched, in England it has died out.  This good old custom was revived in honor of the Eighth Air Force.  At harvest time, in a four-hundred-year-old barn, over one hundred and fifty guests sat down together.  American airmen and the people from the village sat beneath the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes and celebrated.  Outside, the bombers rolled on like thunder in formation.  Inside, beneath the oak beams and rafters, decorated with sheaves of wheat, golden-globed marigolds and hedge blossoms; sat free men, united in a common crusade against evil, able to enjoy the simple faith which turns to God when the harvest is home.

At Christmas time many of the Americans put on shows for the children – parties and shows which the children will never forget.  The young guests were transported to the bases in the hundreds.  There was a huge tree, decorations, games, a present for each child, any amount of candy, and above all, huge quantities of ice cream. 

When the jeeps and trucks came back to the villages in the darkness, the children stumbled out of them with their eyes shining like stars and their cheeks red as holly berries with excitement.  “Look what our American Uncles gave us,” they said.  Remember that many of these children, growing up in the war years, had never known a Christmas like that before.  They will think of American Uncles for the rest of their lives whenever the  candlelight falls softly on the dark green branches of the Christmas tree and parties and presents in the air.

The American airmen joined in the Christmas caroling with the with the villagers.  It was heartwarming.

Well, the time came to say goodbye.  The men of the Eighth Air Force shared so many things with us in those last tremendous years which ended on V. E. Day.

When a man has passed through the valley of the shadow of death with a friend at his side, he never feels quite the same towards that friend as he did before and he cleaves to him forever.  Our nation passed through the valley of death, and you came in your youth, strength and daring.  In the majesty of your industrial might and power, your crossed 2,000 miles of ocean of you own free will to take that journey with us.  How can we, the English, ever forget you?

Every man in the US Eighth Air Force has been an ambassador for his nation, and the job they have done in the building of new affection and understanding between our two democracies will live forever.

One Year

It was only last September that we suffered the 200,000 deaths mark from COVID.  It only took seven months to reach 200,000.  We are now a full twelve months into the pandemic, and this week, 500,000, half-a-million Americans, have died from the disease.  

Last September the loss was seemingly ignored.  As we honored the 19^th Anniversary of 9-11, the loss of 2,977 Americans, we slipped by the milestone of 200,000.  This week, we are doing much the same, letting the horror of one year’s loss to COVID slip by.

Last night President Biden held a brief ceremony at the White House honoring our loss.  Five hundred candles, each candle representing a thousand lost, were arranged on the steps to the White House portico.  That location is best remembered for Donald Trump’s triumphant return from the Bethesda Hospital and his own struggle with COVID.  The candle light ceremony was at least some acknowledgement of the personal loss that most Americans feel.

In September, I proposed we honor the 200,000 with a moment of silence along with the 9-11 ceremonies.  We didn’t. Here’s what I said then.

Historic Loss

Deaths matter.  Over 100,000 American soldiers have died in battle since the end of World War II.  Over 100,000 American soldiers died in World War I.  In only two wars in United States history have more than 100,000 been killed:  the Civil War and World War II.  

We honor all of those deaths every year on Memorial Day.  We respect those that we have lost, and we expect that our leaders will be more than careful about putting our current soldiers in harms way.  They are our children, our parents, our brothers and sisters and our friends.  Their lives are important.

Sometime in the next couple of weeks, the death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic will reach 200,000 American lives.  More Americans have died from COVID than died in every battle and war in the past seventy-five years since World War II.  More than Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, Afghanistan, Iraq and all the rest combined.  They died in only eight months.  And, if it were a world contest, then the United States is “the big loser” in deaths.  We’re approaching 190,000 this week.  Brazil is in second with 121,000, and India in third with 65,000.  Even though no one believes that China and Russia’s numbers are accurate, this is NOT a statistics where having “the most” is a good thing.  

Politics and Life

Unfortunately for America, COVID-19, like much else in American life, is cloaked in politics.  The US response to COVID is the crucial issue of the 2020 Presidential election.  If you’re for Donald Trump, then China “gave” us the virus, and we responded as well as we could.  Now we should just get back to living our “regular” lives, be sad for the losses, and learn to deal with the virus and wait for “herd immunity” or a vaccine.

If you’re for Joe Biden, then the virus might well have been controlled from the outset.  The US might have responded in a way to restrict the infection rate.  Perhaps many of those two hundred thousand would be alive, and the US would be on the way to recovery like many of the European countries are today.  Biden would have us re-group, gain control of the disease, and then move forward.

The Calculus

Frankly both sides are vested in what happens to COVID.  The President is doing everything he can to convince America it’s all “OK”.  He’s reducing testing (so we don’t see increases)  and claiming a miracle cure (that the FDA had to walk back in the next couple of days). And this week the CDC released a report saying that people who are already weakened die from COVID (duh). 

 (On that report, it’s important to remember that people who get COVID often die from something else – pneumonia primarily – and that is listed as a “cause of death” along with COVID.  But without COVID there wouldn’t have been pneumonia, and the patient would be alive).

I don’t believe that the Biden side wants more deaths to continue to prove Trump’s incompetence.  They are calling for a more logical approach, a proven scientific method of controlling an epidemic virus.   Yes, it works into their political calculus as well. Aren’t they lucky?

Mourning the Dead

And while COVID is a critical issue, it isn’t the only one.  We as a nation are focused on whether Black lives are valued, and how to keep order in our streets.  Our divisions are so real that there are literal fights occurring between protestors and pickup truck drivers in Portland (full disclosure, I own a pickup truck too).  So, I hope both sides are worried about the state of our nation, so rancorous and divided. 

On September 11^th, there’s going to be the usual moments.  We will all be preparing for 9-11 remembrances, minutes of silence at times that planes struck, solemn bells rung at Ground Zero, flowers laid at the Monument in Shanksville, Pennsylvania and the Memorial at the Pentagon.  We will mourn the loss of the firemen, and the policemen, and the regular people working in the Towers and the Pentagon, or flying on the planes.  2,997 died that day, and we will rightfully observe the loss.

As Abraham Lincoln said about such ceremonies, “it is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this”.   But while we are preparing for the nineteenth anniversary of 9-11, we should be mindful of the current milestone we will be reaching.  Somewhere around that date, the two hundred thousandth person will die from COVID-19 in the United States.

#Honor200000

Whether you are a Republican or Democrat, a Trumper, Never-Trumper, Biden fan or something else, we should all pause to recognize the loss WE as a nation, have had in our own lives in the past eight months.  We will pause at 8:46 and 9:03.  And we should pause again at 9:37 and 10:03.  Those deserved moments are the times when planes crashed into the buildings or courageous passengers flew one into the ground.  

But perhaps at noon on September 11^th, we should pause one more time, for those we’ve lost in this ongoing American tragedy.  It’s not about politics.  It’s to recognize our ongoing sacrifice, and our continuing grief.

Counting

Last week there were two big scandals in politics.  The first was about New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and the early COVID crisis.  As the pandemic raged through senior citizen homes, it seems that the state manipulated the death statistics to “look better”.  The original statistic was 8,000 deaths in the nursing homes. But we now know that 7,000 more who died were transported to hospitals and were considered hospital deaths rather than the “nursing home” deaths.  

It seems like a “counting game”, manipulating statistics to control the narrative. But it’s the State of New York, where the Democratic Party is willing to eat its own.  Democratic politics in New York are bad. For a time the Republicans controlled the legislature, because one group of Democrats hated another group so much, they aligned with the Republicans.  It’s other Democrats that are using the numbers to attack Cuomo.

Frozen

And the other scandal?  As the state of Texas froze, people were trapped in their unheated homes. Some even died of hypothermia or loss of power to drive lifesaving equipment.  Others were forced to find water by breaking the ice on swimming pools to boil, as the water infrastructure froze.  As the pipes burst, the system-wide water pressure dropped and failed. 

That scandal has two parts.  The state of Texas is an “ independent” operator when it comes to utilities.  They cut themselves out of the national power grid, so that their market was “free” from Federal government regulation.  Since the big power needs for Texas is in August air-conditioning season, some power generators actually go off-line for the winter.  Others failed to “winterize” their generating facilities, so that when this year’s Arctic weather reached to the Gulf of Mexico coast, they were forced to shut down. 

So Texas can’t “borrow” energy from other states.

Texas energy was cheap, and they got what they paid for in the past two weeks.  And to add insult to energy, many Texans took advantage of the cheap energy with variable rate energy plans.  As energy was generally plentiful, the prices were low.  But since the energy is scarce right now, their variable rates are skyrocketing.  Some are getting monthly electric bills in the tens of thousands – really.  That for the electricity that left them frozen.

Out of Dodge

And of course, there was the humorous side of the Texas disaster. Senator Ted Cruz hopped a plane to Cancun to dodge the weather.   Watching him fly down there, trying to ignore IPhone cameras along the way, then head back home the next day was almost as much fun as listening to his tortured explanations of what he was doing.

But before we go on with discussion of the issues, isn’t this normal?  We’re not talking about “the other guy” who used to be in the White House, about what craziness he said, or did, or failed to do.  We are talking about “normal” crises, and “normal” politics, and the normal antics of America’s politicians.  What a relief.

What’s Important

Both of these issues have real consequences for real people.  If the people of New York were more fully aware of the early nursing home statistics, perhaps they would have demanded different choices from their government.  Though, to be honest, as I remember at the time as the first major outbreak of COVID rocked the nation, we were all very aware of the toll taking place in nursing homes.  Would 15,000 instead of 8,000 made a difference?  I don’t know.

Cuomo does have an awkward political moment.  One excuse his Administration used was that in the rush to deal with the COVID crisis, they didn’t realize the statistical “error”.  But later, when the pace slowed, it wasn’t corrected.  And in the meantime, the Governor had time to write a book,  American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic. It ended up on the New York Times bestseller list.  That certainly raises questions about his priorities.

And both of these crises have political consequences.  The Governor and the Senator’s missteps are some of the first moves of the Presidential campaign of 2024 . Are you ready?   The New York Governor built an image of competency as he gave his “chats” during the spring of COVID, but the negative ad will show him busy writing his book as seniors died.

And of course, the image of Ted Cruz dodging cameras at the airport to head for the beach as Texans froze in their beds, will make a great ad for some opponent.  We may forget all that in the meantime, but the grainy black and white videos will remind us of their priorities when their states were in crisis.

Normal politics:  welcome home!

This is another in the “Sunday Story” Series. There’s nothing “political” here – no great moral outcome or outrage. Just a story of watching the Nightly News and vacation memories.

Fran

I watched the Nightly News this week.  There were lots of stories:  ice storms in Texas, snowstorms in Washington State, COVID numbers, and the Biden plan.  And, like most evening newscasts, NBC’s Lester Holt tried to end on a “high note”.  His story was of the snowstorm in Seattle, and the ninety-year-old woman who refused to miss her COVID vaccination appointment.  

We were sitting at the kitchen table, discussing the news as it came across.  So it was only with “half an ear” that I heard the beginnings of the story:  all transportation was down, the ninety-year-old couldn’t find a ride to the vaccination site – so she bundled up and walked, six miles (uphill, both ways) to get her COVID shot.

Then they put her picture on the screen.  I turned to Jenn (my wife) and said – “I know her!!!”  It’s Fran Goldman, a face from my distant youth.  Seeing her led my down all sorts of “rabbit holes” of memories.  So join me – down this “rabbit hole” of family vacations.

Oh Canada!

There is an island on the Canadian side of the US border called St. Joseph’s Island.  It’s just above the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, the island farthest east in the St. Mary’s Channel that goes from Lake Superior to Lake Huron, right across from Drummond Island in the United States.

Somehow in the 1920’s, that Island became popular among the Cincinnati Jewish set for  summer vacation homes.  One of the original owners were the Fries (pronounced Freeze) who owned Fries and Fries Fragrances and Flavors company in Cincinnati.  If you lived or travelled in Cincinnati in the 1960’s and 70’s you might remember their plant, on I-75 Southbound just as you passed the Paddock Road exit and the Jim Beam Distillery.  Your car would fill with exotic smells of vanilla or other pleasant odors.  That was Fries and Fries.

Hilton Beach

Another was the Ransohoff family, who built a vacation cabin farther down the shore.  And in between was the Steiner cabin, owned by the founders of the Kenner Toy Company.  At the time, there was a train that went from Cincinnati to Sault Ste Marie, Michigan, where they could take a ferry across the channel over to Sault Ste Marie, Canada (better known as “The Soo”).  Another train took them to the small community of Bruce Mines, where they could catch a ferry across to the island, and finally to the town of Hilton Beach, just down the road from their vacation homes.

Other cabins grew along the shoreline, until by the 1950’s there was a whole little community.  From east to west – Fries, Feder, Steiner, Edelestein, Goldman, Ransohoff.  Their families spent most of the summer up there, with the husbands coming up on vacation for a few days at the beginning, and a few weeks at the end.

My father, Don Dahlman, grew up in the apartment below the Ransohoff clan.  By the 1950’s the “Ransohoff Compound” included several cabins built around the original, with each of the three sons, Dad’s contemporaries, building their own. So the Dahlman’s visited  Hilton Beach throughout the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s , and though we never had our own place there, we spent a couple of weeks each summer renting one of the cabins on the beach from before I was born until I was in my twenties.  For my entire first two decades of life – going on vacation was going to Hilton.

Growing Up On the Lake

It was a boy’s paradise.  There was the “lake,” (not the “big lake”, Huron, around the bend at Big Point, but a wide gap in the St. Mary’s River) where we boated, skied, and picnicked on various small rock islands.  Those islands had mysterious names like Whiskey Rock and Blueberry Island, and the one with the “slippery sluice”, a moss-covered crevice in the rocks we could slide all the way to the lake.  There were lots of woods to explore between the cabins, with the creeks running down to the lake all smelling of mint.  

And there were all the people you grew up with, two weeks a year, year after year after year.  Some you were even related to in a distant, third or fifth cousin kind of way. 

Morning Bath

My father’s ritual was that we would all get up in the morning, and “bathe” in the lake.  It wasn’t too early – 9 am or so – but this was water fresh from Lake Superior.  We never saw ice on it, but it sure felt that way in those mornings when we huddled on the beach, and had “the great debate”.  Mom would “wash herself in”, using the Ivory Soap that wouldn’t sink to the bottom.  It was a slow painstaking (and painful) process, and only when she was fully lathered and had no other choice would she take the breathtaking dip all the way in.  

Dad, on the other hand, was a “now or never” kind of bather.  He would immediately take “the plunge”, come back up with “seal” whoops then call for someone to toss him the soap.  We kids (my two sisters and I, and whatever friends we might have brought with us) would have to decide.  I was like Dad, dive in and get it over with.  If you’ve ever participated in the “ice bucket challenge” you’ve got the idea.  We wore swim suits, though there were others on their isolated beaches who didn’t bother.

So every morning the “Dahlman clan” would head down to the beach, and add a little Ivory Soap (a Cincinnati product made just down the road from the Fries and Fries Plant) to the Great Lakes.  Some mornings it would take just a few minutes (too cold) and some days we might stay a bit longer.  But afterwards it was always get dressed and head for the “cabin”.  

Almost England

Blue jeans and sweat shirts or Canadian flannels were always the morning dress code.  And Canadian bacon, eggs, toast, pancakes, and seemingly everything else was always on the menu.  Mom was British, and Canada seemed a lot closer to “Mother England” than the United States in those days.  She could always find her English marmalade, and special salad creams.  And of course for us kids, there were the “exotic” English candies and cookies.  My teeth were toughened by the strongest of caramels, Mackintosh’s toffee bars, where the first bite found any weakness in enamel. 

But the family tradition was to find Peek Frean’s Bourbon Biscuits.  You couldn’t get them in the States (and you can’t get them anywhere now – I’ve tried). But they were a double chocolate cookie, two chocolate wafers with a chocolate filling.  And they tasted even better because you could only find them in Canada, and for us, at the Hilton Beach General Store.

There were a couple of other “delectables” only available in Canada.  When I was young, it was crinkle French fries at “Lornie’s Restaurant” – the only thing I would put vinegar on.  And the only thing to wash those fries down was Grape Crush, a drink that hadn’t made its way across the border back then.  Today, if I can find just the right fries – and cook them to just the right consistency (crisp and crunch) and sip a Grape Crush, I can travel back fifty-five years in a flash.

Preservers and Beer

Dad would rent a boat for the weeks we were there, and as a young child, I remember bedding down underneath the bow, snuggled into the slightly moldy life preservers.  I can still go to sleep to that memory:  the burr of the motor, the bump of the waves, the smell of the preservers and gasoline and maybe a Canadian beer that Dad was sipping along the way.  

Speaking of beer, when I got older that became part of our routine.  By then were driving to Canada from Cincinnati, crossing the pine forests of Michigan as we felt the air change from Detroit industrial to the cool dryness of the Great Lakes.  We crossed the Mackinac Bridge. That was one of my first driving experiences.  Dad had acrophobia, fear of heights, that really kicked in on the seven mile stretch high over the water.  Mom didn’t drive, and when we were kids Dad would stop at the bridge entrance and get a “driver” to take us across.  But when I hit fifteen, I’m not sure I even had a license yet, I could drive a straight line from the Lower to the Upper Peninsula.  I got to drive the international bridge into Canada as well.

And as soon as we cleared customs, our next stop was the beer store.  We usually bought Doran’s, but there were the more traditional Canadian beers, Molson’s and LaBatt’s as well, and of course Canadian Whiskey.  At the time, the drinking age in Canada was eighteen, so when I was of age, we got several cases of beer to get us through two weeks. It wasn’t just for us, but for all the guests that would wander in from the path between the cabins, especially to sit by the fireplace in the evenings.

Rainy Day

And what to do on a rainy day on vacation?  It was time to “explore” the island (even though we had explored it plenty of times before).  The first stop was to go to Richard’s Landing, the other “major town” (population – 400).  There you would find the tourist shop called “Courtney’s”.  Harry Courtney was the owner, an American ex-pat, with all sorts of lurid rumors as to why he was in Canada.  At Courtney’s you could buy First American products, moccasins and clothes, as well as “famous” Hudson Bay Company blankets, and Viyella shirts. Those special-blend cotton-wool shirts came in varying Scottish plaids.

Mom, of course, knew the Scottish Clan history of each plaid, from Stewart to Black Watch.  But the plaids were adopted by families on the beach, so that the Black Watch plaid was always “Ransohoff” plaid in my mind.  And Viyella shirts always have a special place in my heart – I’m wearing my Stewart plaid (can’t remember which beach family adopted that) as I write today.  They’re good for Canadian summers, and twenty-degree winters here in Ohio as well.  But Mom went to Courtney’s for another reason.  Mrs. Courtney was British, and the two would always go down their shared memory lane of London and the English countryside.

Around the Island

Harry was one of Dad’s boat rental sources, so some years we had to pick up a boat and take if back half-way ‘round the island to Hilton Beach.  But Harry’s boats were notorious for breaking down, and when I was older, I found myself alone in the middle of the channel adrift, hoping I could catch a tow somewhere.  This was all an age well before cell phones, in fact, they didn’t have phones in the cabins either.  If you needed to make a call, there was a payphone outside the General Store.  Eventually a fellow boater towed me to the dock at Hilton Beach – and I walked back to our rented cabin.

After the journey to Richard’s Landing, there were two more destinations on the Island.  The first was to visit another Cincinnati family, the Pritz’s over on Mosquito Bay.  They were friends from Cincinnati too, but had a more “rustic” place away from everyone else.  And after seeing them, it was off to the end of the island, and a visit to old Fort St. Joseph.

There you found the artifacts left over from the battle for the Great Lakes during the War of 1812, and learned the history of the Voyageurs, the traders who took great canoes throughout the Canadian wilderness.  They had blankets and metal goods – pots and pans and axes – and I’m sure whiskey as well to trade with the First Americans.  And in return, they got beaver pelts, to satisfy Europe’s massive need for fashionable beaver hats.  We watched the same movie every year – about their trials and their songs, and their recipe to deter the attacking mosquitos – skunk oil and bear grease.  After our visit, we drove home lustily singing “the Voyageur Song” – in French. Who knows what we were really saying.   (What you could only see at old Ft. St Joe then is now on YouTube – The Voyageurs – warning – the song will get stuck in your head!!).

Fran 

The Goldman’s’ lived in the middle – alongside the softball field, across from first base.  They were friends of Mom and Dad in Cincinnati as well, and I’m told distant cousins.

So no wonder she wasn’t concerned with the cold and snow in Seattle. She swam in the cold, cold Huron waters for all of her life.  And I’m sure as she marched to her vaccination date, trudging through the snow and ice, she was humming a song, of skunk oil and bear grease, whiskey and whitewater.  She saw the movie even more than we did – there were always a few rainy days, and she was there for most of the summer.  

She was a Hilton Beach Voyageur!!

Boy Scouts

The summer I was thirteen, I was a Boy Scout “machine”.  I was in a hurry; a hurry to get my Eagle Scout Award.  There were five us all working in Troop 229 in Kettering, Ohio. We all had the goal of getting Eagle by Christmas – and getting the Award all at the same time.  

Looking back, we were all in a rush, perhaps too much so.  When you’re moving that fast through the Scouting program, you’re definitely going to miss some things along the way.  At my “Board of Review”, when adults I didn’t know examined my qualifications for Scouting’s highest youth Award, the first words out of one of the evaluators, was, “You’re too young for Eagle”.  I must have been a budding politician then, as I still managed to convince him, and the others, into voting for my application.   

Moving through the ranks of Scouting – Tenderfoot, Second Class, First Class, Star, Life and Eagle, is mostly a matter of passing qualifications.  For the last three those qualifications come in the form of Merit Badges. At the time it took twenty-one to earn the Eagle Award.  They tested everything from Camping, Canoeing and Swimming, to First Aid and Emergency Preparedness, to Citizenship in the Community, Nation and World .

Service Project

But Eagle was special – and it required a special service project, something of value to the community.  And the service project wasn’t just about doing work.  The real test of the project was in the organization.  Finding a good cause, getting help, materials, and planning out the project were just as important as the completion itself.  My project wasn’t some of the incredible constructions I hear about today. Nor was it some highly developed social media effort (social media consisted of phone calls back in 1970).  It was fairly simple:  there was a group home for adults with mental handicaps, and it needed to be cleaned up and painted.  

So I got my four friends on the “Eagle Trail”, organized all of the equipment and paint, and we spent a weekend making the home look a lot more “homey”.  It was an experience:  ladders and wasp nests, chipping and second coats – but we got it done.  And at the end of the first day I took my buddies out to dinner at the “new” hamburger place, McDonalds.  

Big Mac Meals

All five of us were starving.  It was Big Mac’s and Fries, chocolate shakes and probably some extras as well.  I was a little surprised at the price, more than I expected, and I think I had to hit up my Dad for a couple of extra bucks.  The total bill was FIVE dollars.

Five dollars – seemed like a lot of money in those days.  Five dollars could fill five teenagers’ stomachs after a hard, hot day of working on the Home.  Just five dollars – in 1970 that would buy twenty gallons of gasoline, more than four gallons of milk, and twenty POUNDS of bread.  

What will FIVE dollars get you at McDonalds today?  A “number one” value meal:  Big Mac, Fries, and a drink, costs $7.60.  That’s for one.  So to feed those five “starving” teens today, it’s closer to $40.00 (Menu and Price).

Value of a Dollar

What’s changed?  So probably not the Big Mac, or the Fries, or the Cokes from the fountain (though the fountain may be “electronic” and require advanced computer training to pour).  What changed is the value of the money used to pay for those items, the “value” of the dollar.

And the value of a dollar is based on the “supply” of dollars versus the “demand”.  Not to be too simplistic, but the “demand” for money is pretty consistent – everybody wants it, everybody needs it, and everybody will spend it (in one form or another). 

 So the “demand” side isn’t such a big deal – even in the pandemic Americans have managed to spend money.  Look at the success of Amazon, or try to buy furniture, or find someone to do home remodeling.  We have been stuck at home, and if we have money, then our homes are often looking a lot better.

National Debt and Inflation

The United States government often spends more money than it raises in taxes, fees, and other income.  That “deficit” spending is “funded” by the government borrowing the money.  That “borrowing” includes selling bonds, simple promises to “pay Tuesday for the money today”.  Back in 1970, the US Government owed $370 billion, mostly driven by Cold and Vietnam War spending.  

At the end of the Trump Administration, the US Government owes about $27 trillion.  That’s seventy-three times higher than when I was thirteen.  But the relative value of the “dollar” in terms of Big Macs, is only one-seventh (it takes seven times more dollars to buy it).  And while the debt has almost doubled in the past decade, the Big Mac Value meal increased by less than a dollar.  So we can conclude – at least on the “Big Mac” scale – that while rising costs are linked to the National debt – there isn’t a dollar-to-dollar relationship.

Biden’s Proposals

It the US Government decided to “pay-off” ALL student debt, it would cost $1.7 trillion.  Assuming that it’s not paid for by additional taxes, it would increase the National Debt but six percent.  By the way, that’s almost exactly how much the Trump Administration “gave back” in their big tax cut in 2017.  Joe Biden’s COVID relief package costs $1.9 trillion, just a bit over a seven percent debt increase.  

So when we hear Republicans and some moderate Democrats all of a sudden worried about the impact of spending on the National Debt and inflation, remember that they didn’t seem too worried about that in the Trump Administration, when the National Debt went up 26%, from $20 trillion to $26 trillion (The Balance).  Hard to imagine that it’s NOW, that a couple of more trillion will make “all the difference” and drive us to dramatic inflation.

But their anguished worries make good sounds bites – especially when the programs are benefitting the lower income Americans instead of the top one percent windfall of the Trump tax cut.

Eagle Ceremony

In November of 1970, five Boy Scouts were awarded the Eagle Rank at Southdale Elementary School in Kettering.  Dad managed WLW-D in Dayton, so we got television news coverage and everything (there’s even an old reel of 16mm film around).  And just because five Scouts earned the rank at once, it didn’t “inflate” the Eagle Ranks, nor did it “devalue” the influence of the award.  It’s been on my resume every since.  And the tarnished Eagle medal still is in the top drawer of my dresser.

Memes

You can read it on any Facebook meme – or you can see it on right wing media.  Gas prices are up, power has failed in Texas.  And it’s all Joe Biden’s fault.  The “terror” of the “Green New Deal” is already being blamed.  We won’t be able to afford to drive our cars, and people are freezing in their houses in the Arctic vortex winter.  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez must be laughing hysterically.  After all, doesn’t she control what the Biden Administration does?

I call BS.  Let’s talk about what’s really happening.

“Gas Buddy” is a great website.  It can show you where the cheapest gas prices are in your area.  And it also tracks historic gas prices nationally, and locally.  So you can make “apples to apples” comparisons of what’s really going on.  Today, if you drive down to Kroger’s, regular gas costs $2.45/gallon (without the loyalty discounts).  That’s up $.46 since election day.  One argument goes that just the “thought” of a Biden Administration has driven the price up.

But let’s look at the history.  Now, February 2021, the price is $2.45.  A year ago, before anyone knew that Joe Biden was going to be President, the price was– $2.44.  Two years ago, in February 2019, the price was – $2.38.  Three years ago it was a little better – $2.25.  

What’s the point?  That gas prices in February have trended higher for the past few years.  There’s lots of reasons for that:  gas production switches over to “summer” blend gas, more oil is refined as fuel oil for heating rather than gasoline, the Saudi’s have raised prices.  None of that has anything to do with the “Green New Deal”, Ocasio-Cortez, or Joe Biden.

Frozen Wind-Turbines

So for those right-wing doomsayers who cry that Biden will make gas prices $4.00 a gallon:  that might happen someday, but it ain’t happening yet.  We all know the story of the “Boy who cried wolf”, and they’re doing a lot of crying now.  The Biden Administration will try to make the United States more energy efficient, and climate friendly.  But it hasn’t happened yet.

But what about Texas the home to gas, oil, “Texas Tea”, and wildcat drilling?  The arctic vortex has drifted all the way down to Dallas, with several inches of snow and ice, sub-twenty-degree temperatures, and three million people without power.  And, according to the Facebook memes and the Governor, it’s all because Texans have switched to “wind power” and the wind turbines have frozen.

No one has ever claimed that Texas was in the fore-front of the environmental movement.  But the “Great Plains” do lend themselves to frequent winds, and the wind power industry is taking advantage.  A full SEVEN percent of Texas power is provided by wind turbines.  So how did those FROZEN wind turbines shut down the Texas power grid?

Ninety-Three Percent

They didn’t.  Texas has a separate energy grid, with the vast majority of power generation based on natural gas, oil, coal and nuclear.  But the problem is this:  the power generators in Texas “bet” that the once a decade cold snap wouldn’t be too bad.  So they didn’t protect the energy generating sources, particularly natural gas.  When this cold snap hit, the natural gas pumps literally froze up, and couldn’t pump the natural gas out of the ground to be burned for electricity.  Even some of the nuclear plants have shut down, their cooling pumps frozen by the sub-freezing temperatures.  And yes, the wind-turbines are frozen too.

But those same turbines aren’t frozen here in Ohio where the current temperature is three degrees, Fahrenheit.  They have been winterized, as well as the natural gas electric plants and even the two nuclear plants.  

What You Pay For

Think of Texas like that “special” car you only drive in the summer.  No reason for snow tires, and no reason to check the anti-freeze.  No need to protect it, because you don’t ever bring it out, stored in the warm garage for the cold, cold winter.  So when all of a sudden you decide to take it out in February, would you be surprised that the tires don’t grip and the radiator freezes up?  

The Texas power industry “bet” on the weather, and they lost.  And now the regulators in Texas, like the Governor, are taking the “heat” (or getting the “cold shoulder”) from the millions of Texans left out in the cold without power.  So it’s easier to blame Biden, or Ocasio-Cortez, than to take responsibility for their own failures.

Texas wanted cheap energy.  And it was cheap for a reason, and not just because it was sitting in the ground for the drilling. They got what they paid for.  Bet they wished they’d put a few more dollars in now.

Resistance

This “blog”, originally called “Trump World”, began just over four years ago.  It started at the  suggestion of my niece Leslie. We were talking about what to do about the new Trump Administration and how we could make our voices heard against the outrages we saw.  Leslie suggested I “write a blog”, something that seemed both interesting and alien to me.  Our family always discussed politics and world events, with even the youngest (that was me for a long time) not only expected to have a say, but listened to and respected.  Our discussions around the dinner table were legendary among my parents’ friends, but it all started with just us, just the family.

But conversations are two-way streets.  Essays are putting thoughts on paper. It’s difficult to know if what you’re thinking and writing and what people are reading is “the same”.  So I wasn’t sure if essays were the answer.  (By the way, I’ve discovered the same kind of problem with public “presentations” in our new COVID world.  “Zoom” lectures aren’t anywhere close to classroom presentations.  There’s no “feedback”, even rolled or closed eyes, to let you know how you’re doing.  Nothing like lecturing a blank computer screen to test your concentration.  Human contact, verbal or non-verbal, is vital).

A Blog

So Leslie thought I could replicate some of those “dinner discussions” in a “blog”. And as a retired guy, I had the time and the inclination to try it.  By the way, I’m not that fond of the word “blog”, I always feel like “blogging” is a stream of consciousness kind of thing:  “Dahlman’s Blog – MacBook Pro,  Star Date 74594.4 …”   I see myself as more of an essayist.  I need a structure, a beginning, middle and end that relate to each other.  As my college writing Professor, Tony Stoneburner, taught:  an essay either needs a skeleton or it needs a shell, but it needs something that pulls it all together.  I’ve always been a “shell” guy.  The essay may go a long way away in the middle, but returns to the beginning at the end – at least that’s the goal.

I bought a website (dahlman.online) and paid the fees (WordPress) and set out to try to explain the years of Donald Trump.  

It was going to be a once-a-week thing, for a few folks that we knew.  And if it had stayed that way, here four years later, there would be about two hundred fifty essays spanning the era.  But, just like our family dinner table discussions that would last for hours, the essays got “out of hand”. 

The more I wrote, the more I seemed to want to say.  The essays became a near-daily exercise, staring at the blank white page (screen) of my MacBook.  It even got to the point where several essays were written on my IPhone.  Essays were written in cars, classrooms, hospital rooms, and when I took a full-time online teaching job, in the very dark early hours before school started.  

So Many

So why all of this “process” talk about the essays?  Because this essay is the one thousandth on “Trump World”, now “Our America”.  And more than just the “few folks” are reading them.  There are still those “few folks” who get essays by e-mail.  Then there are the “Facebook” “participants” – where all the discussion and sometimes acrimonious debate, goes on.  That’s around a thousand people a month.  Then there are the over two thousand people who “subscribe” to the website itself –  “Our America”.  So the “project” has progressed.

The thousand essays contain around a million words, or in book form, two thousand pages.  That’s seven-hundred, twenty-five pages longer than War and Peace.  It’s a body of work, about the events of our time.  Sure the word “Trump” is probably the most used, but topics went from the horror of mass shootings and child separation, to the joy of watching a solar eclipse, to travelling around the country.  Some of the best essays were written on picnic tables as the sun rose over our camper.   

History and Dogs

Other recurring themes:  track teams, Boy Scouts, teaching kids, lots of history, and dogs, all the dogs.  We lost one of the best, Dash, our Yellow Lab early on.   But Buddy, our shepherd-mix miracle cancer survivor is still going strong.  And we’ve added a new Yellow Lab, Atticus, and an Australian Shepherd mix, Keelie, both, like Dash and Buddy, rescues. And just recently we’ve acquired Louisiana, the long-legged gentle rescue from Baton Rouge.  He was supposed to be a “foster” as he recovered from two broken legs and a broken hip – but he and Keelie are fast friends.  So we might end up having “four dog nights” instead of “three”.

And I’ve taken the opportunity to share some “stories”:  about my parents, my life, and our world.  That’s a lot like my classroom (or long rides in the back of the bus), where there would always be some “story” to highlight the lesson or the meet.  Sometimes it was history, and sometimes personal.  But there is a reason “story” is part of the word “history”, and I took full advantage of my opportunity to tell them.

Top Ten

There’s a list of the essays, and how many read them – here’s the top ten.

Small Town Problems – 918

Mom’s War – 560

Out My Window – Part 4 – 507

Don Dahlman – 168

Memories of Notre Dame – 147

Shanksville – 145

Lester Kahrig – 144

Flags and Shoes – 130

OK, Boomer – 124

Going to War – The Draft – 114.

What’s interesting about the list?  Direct essays about the Trump Administration aren’t in the top ten.  Instead they’re stories about people (Mom’s War, Don Dahlman, Lester Kahrig), history (Memories of Notre Dame, Shanksville, Going to War) and my small town, Pataskala (Small Town Problems, Out My Window – Part 4).  That leaves two more political essays – Flags and Shoes and OK, Boomer.

A Liberal in Trump Country

While any adult close to me knew my political values, as a school teacher in the same community for forty years I kept my “politics” out of the classroom.  So it came as a shock to some that “Mr. Dahlman” teacher, was a “fire-breathing liberal”.  For some of my former students that came as a welcome affirmation, but many felt I betrayed their values.  They seemed to be in search for some prior “sins” of indoctrination – but if that was so, I did a lousy job.  Forty years teaching in the school, and our community is still overwhelmingly “Trump Country”.  

So I’ve lost some “friends” along the way, some that don’t matter, and some that I really respected, outside of the realm of politics.  The one thing that Donald Trump symbolized to our country, is the loss of political civility.  He wasn’t the cause; we were already well down the road of “disagree with me and I hate you”, but he took us to a whole new level of vitriol.  I’ve learned things about folks I know – well – that I’d rather not known.  But that’s been our world, stoked on by Trumpism, and now magnified by the isolation of COVID.

Still Friends

And on the other hand I’ve found some “friends” as well.  Some have shared the verbal “combat” of our discussions online, and some have more gently commented in the “blog” itself.  And for some – it’s been even more subtle.  We live in “Trump Country”, but we put our politics on the front lawn.  It not only was an exercise in politics, it was a statement of our freedom of speech.  When our Biden signs were stolen, they just were replaced by bigger ones.  Happily, there were many in our community who spoke out against the theft, most of them with “Trump” signs in their front yards.

But the real mark of fellowship was the person who lived on a nearby street who stopped by after Biden was declared the winner.  Her neighbors were so volatile that she dared not put a Biden sign in her yard.  But she wanted to thank us, and handed us a bottle of champagne – bought to celebrate Hillary’s coming victory four years ago.  COVID world wouldn’t allow her to come in and share a drink (we asked), but she wanted to toast Biden’s win, at least vicariously.

Our America

Four years ago we were struggling to describe “Trump World”.  Now we aren’t sure we can get rid of it, even if we get rid of the “man” himself.  There will be a plenty more to discuss, and plenty of opportunity to argue.  Hopefully we can all recognize that, in our changing America, most of us want things to get better.  After all, it’s “Our America” now.

The Trial

The Senate Trial of former President Donald Trump is over.  Some Democrats take solace in the seven Republicans who voted to convict.  Many of the other Republicans who voted to acquit immediately condemned Trump’s actions. They claimed a technical Constitutional interpretation prevented them from assigning guilt.  And several Republicans Senators, sworn jurors in the trial, took great pleasure in flaunting their assistance to the Defense team.

The Trump attorneys, as poorly as their “My Cousin Vinnie” defense performed, hit the nail on the head. They said  “a win is a win”.  Donald Trump, the first President to be impeached twice, remains acquitted twice as well.  

Kick the Can

There may be other venues to apportion Trump’s blame for the Insurrection of January 6^th.  The Justice Department may look at his actions. But that’s a “no-win” situation, playing straight into the Trump narrative of “witch-hunt” and persecution. Georgia authorities are examining Trump’s recorded call to the Georgia Secretary of State.  And there’s plenty of other Courts who are likely to have Trump as a defendant. The District Attorney of Manhattan’s jurisdiction has been preparing for years.

Trump’s impact on our politics is not over.  By acquitting him, the Senate has “kicked that can” down the road, regardless of the damning speeches delivered after.  His influence over “his voters” will continue. He many no longer have the “weight” of seventy-four million votes behind him.  After the Insurrection, and as he’s out of office, it’s likely that he still influences millions, but not those millions. 

Trumpism Lives

The battle symbolized by Trump will continue:  the growing authoritarianism, the racial divisions inspiring hate, and the silos of “facts” that cannot be reconciled.  And America is faced with an ultimate fact that cannot be ignored.  In a score of years White people will no longer be in the majority.  The growing pressure of that undeniable event influences all of our political interactions.

And all of those factors will still be here, Trump or no.  Trump may want to pick up the mantle of leadership again. Or he may pass it on to his children, or allows others (Hawley, Cruz, Graham) to grasp it.  But the struggle the Senate trial symbolized is not resolved.  America still needs to confront the forces that drove the Insurrection, and until we do, they will hang like a Damocletian sword over everything else.

Moving On

America is confronted with more important crises:  COVID, racial inequity, economic disparity, and climate change.  Joe Biden is relentlessly moving ahead.  The “progressive” worry, that Biden will be too driven to compromise, is proving to be unfounded – at least so far.  Sure Biden is talking to Republicans, but meanwhile, the COVID package is moving through the House of Representatives as a “budget reconciliation” item.  Should the Senate need to pass COVID without Republican support, they have the fifty votes plus the tie-breaker to do it.

But it is time to move on.  Trumpism will be in the background, rearing its head especially in the Republican primaries of 2022 and 2024.  But Donald Trump’s record is that unless his name is on the ticket, he doesn’t help so much in the general election.  In 2018, and even in 2020, his name brought out voters. It helped the “down-ticket” ballot, but even in 2020 it wasn’t enough to help him.  

Return to Normalcy

Joe Biden made promises to America.  One of those was to “return to normalcy”, to a time when we weren’t worried about the next “Presidential Tweet” establishing US Government policy.  A time when “normal people” didn’t check their phone – first thing – to see what the next crisis would be. 

 To return to when we could have reasonable expectations for the conduct of our leaders.  Biden has already passed one such test.  When one of his staff ended up in a scandal, and tried to abuse his authority, the White House immediately suspended him and ultimately the staff member resigned.  A far cry from the way scandals were handled in the Trump White House.

It’s time to leave Donald Trump behind.  That doesn’t mean forget the Insurrection (and his role in it), but it’s time that the future take precedence over the past.  Have a “9-11” style commission, let the Justice Department and the Courts do their thing, but the Nation needs to focus on our future.   And the future is a man of our past – Joe Biden.

This is another in the “Sunday Story” Series. There’s nothing “political” here – no great moral outcome or outrage. Just a story about ritual – and me.

Schedules

Many of my classes at Denison University in the 1970’s had “high stakes” testing.  Two written exams; one in the middle (mid-terms) and one in the end (finals) made up the entire grade for four months work.  There was no room for error, for having a “bad day” or failing to prepare.  Blow the mid-term, and there really was no coming back.  Blow the final, and you wouldn’t even know until you left campus and arrived home.

So studying for exams was serious business.  The week before exams there was always a “pattern”:  starting with re-reading underlined texts ( there were highlighters back then, but I didn’t use them).  Then it was onto the pads of notes.  I’m left-handed, so Spiral Notebooks were never my friend.  The spiral always got in the way.  And since for most of my college career I anticipated going to Law School,  “legal pads” were absolutely necessary for note taking. 

Before exams ever began, I wrote a “schedule”.  How many days until the first exam (we had a “study week”), how much time between each test, how much effort I needed to make for each class.  There was an organized process, that paced me through to the last exam on the last day, before I loaded the Volkswagen and headed out.  For those who coached with me over the years, they know – there’s always a schedule.  That started early.

Pancakes and Pennies

I’d study until the night before an exam, going so far as to write “sample essays” of the possible exam questions.  But at some point, usually past midnight of the day of the exam, we headed to I-Hop (International House of Pancakes) in Newark for a late-night breakfast. I put all the study materials away.  When I was done studying, I was done – there was no “cramming” at the last second to confuse and distract me.

But there was one last ritual to perform, to symbolize the completed preparation.  I  lived in Crawford Hall at Denison, farthest to the East from the Academic Quad.  The walk to the main quad passed in front of Swasey Chapel, and in front of the Chapel was a sundial.  That exam-eve night, after returning from I-Hop, my friend Tony and I would stand at the sundial, and throw pennies off the hill and into the darkness, chanting Julius Caesar’s ancient invocation as he crossed the Rubicon:  “Alea Iacta Est”.  We studied, we prepared, there is nothing more to do:  the die was cast.

The Die is Cast

That ritual always served me well on those exams.  I went into the tests confident, and prepared, and other than trying to keep my handwriting legible in the “Blue Books” full of answers, I  did well. (As a career teacher, I am glad that my recent students could take exams by typing rather than writing – I feel badly for the professors who had to decipher my scrawl).

Later as a Coach, “Alea Iacta Est” became important in my strategy.  When training track and field athletes, there is a tendency to try to do “one more thing”, one more workout, one more vault, one more throw.  It was important to know when to stop, when that next interval or attempt wasn’t worth it.  “Ending on a good one” was important mentally, but ending before an athlete was exhausted was critical.  That was even truer at the end of the season.  Rest became more important than effort – but the pressure to do “one more thing” was intense.  “Alea Iacta Est”– or as I learned in rural Pataskala when I first arrived – “the hay is in the barn”. 

Sprinter’s Mind

As an athlete I had personal “rituals”.  My first really competitive sport was swimming – with all it built in customs.  “Shaving down” for the big meet seemed like such a good idea, slipping through the water like a shark:  until it became a “blood-letting” like the shower scene from Psycho.  I determined I needed the red blood cells more than the “mental edge”.  But being clean and shaven (at least my face) before the meet, any meet, became a ritual for me, in swimming, wrestling and onto my track career as an athlete and coach.  

As a track athlete I had the “sprinter’s mind” of always being warm.  I was a two sweat-suit guy, even on the hot days.  I was usually soaked through before I ever got in the blocks.  But as a coach I envied my peers who wore track warmups to their meets.  I did that a couple of times and we had horrible team performances, so sweats were out for me.  Shoes weren’t that important, on bad weather days boots were just fine, and getting a “Teva Tan” from sandals at the summer meets was great.  But there was the base:  either blue jeans or khaki shorts and the coaching shirt.  For really, really hot meets I might switch to a team t-shirt, but that damn black coaching shirt was always in my bag.  When the pressure was on and the big races up, it went back on.

Damn Shirts

I finally retired that shirt after the 2016 track season, replaced with a different one – but it looked just like the old one.  That one became “that damn shirt” for 2017.  It’s still hanging in the closet, a lingering reminder of coaching the “black and gold”.

And speaking of shirts – never, ever, no matter how “sure a thing” it might be – order championship T-Shirts in advance of winning the championship.  It took a rival team in the Ohio Capital Conference to prove that was a bad idea.  They were so sure of themselves:  they wore their new 2009 Team Championship camouflage shirts to the prelims of the 2009 Championship meet.  My kids noticed, and some words were spoken between the teams and even my team and their coaches.  I put a stop to that – but don’t think I didn’t use that shirt as a motivator for the finals.  We won the Conference by almost fifty points.  I don’t know what our competitors did with those red, white and yellow camo shirts.

Location-Location-Location

I’m not obsessive compulsive – at least not too much.  But as any team I’ve coached will tell you – I have a spot.  There’s a spot for the team camp, a place for our team warmup, even a spot where  I want to stand to watch the pole vault or yell “ARRRRRMMMS” for the 4×400.  At Heath we camp on the high jump end just beside the visitor bleachers.  At Wheeling it’s on the fence at the back-stretch, and at home, it’s across from the south long jump pit.  

And me – I want to be at the events I directly coach – or on the backstretch.  Always on the backstretch – I can yell, I can talk, and occasionally even swear, without being in the middle of a crowd.   

But the ritual that prepares me best for coaching (or officiating these days) is “the walk around”.  Sometime after we arrived at the track, I’d “take ownership”.  I would walk around the track, looking at field event areas and exchange zone colors; checking how the timing system was set up and where the clerking area was.  I’d learn the place, and organize in my mind how the meet was going to go.

Saying Goodbye

It didn’t always work, but the ritual got me ready.  And that last year in cross country at State, and a few years later at the Regional in track, I also took a moment to take it in.  I did a mental check, making sure that it was “OK” for me to go.  I remember standing at Scioto Downs by the south gate, looking across the infield, knowing I was going to retire.   I waited for the onset of “panic” that would let me know: I couldn’t go through with it and resign. But there was no panic.  I was so confident in what Coach Jarvis would do, the program would only get better.  That’s how I knew I was ready.  And John has proven me right.

One Job

So Friday was for the defense in the Senate Trial of Donald Trump.   

I hate those guys.  I know they are lawyers, hired to do one thing:  get their client acquitted.  And I know that as defense lawyers, even in this Senate “impeachment” environment, the burden of proof is on the prosecution, the House Managers.  But there are three terms that characterize their Defense:  specious legal arguments, continuing Trump’s lies, and my least favorite term of all, “what-about-ism”.  

Dead Horse

In any “regular” court, the defense would normally call for a summary dismissal of a case.  They’d do it at the beginning of the trial, trying to find jurisdictional or legal grounds that disqualify the prosecution.  And they’d do it again after the prosecution rested their case, claiming that the necessary burdens of proof were not reached.  But once the judge ruled on those motions for dismissal, then the defense would drop it, and move on.  In fact, if the defense continued to try to press their dismissal claim, the judge might well hold them in contempt.

But the first leading argument of the Trump defense team is that the entire hearing is unconstitutional.  Their claim is that the Senate has no standing to try a “former” President.  But the Constitution expressly makes one thing clear:  The Senate is the sole decider on trials for impeachment.  And the Senate voted, twice, that the trial of Donald Trump was in fact Constitutional.  Just as if a judge ruled in a trial, the decision was made, the question “asked and answered”.  There is no appeal.

So why do the Trump lawyers continue to “beat this dead horse”?  It’s simple math, adding up to the number thirty-four.  They need to give at least thirty-four Republican Senators “cover” to vote for acquittal.  The evidence, in spite of the defense attorneys’ attacks, is absolutely condemning of the President’s actions.  The Republican Senators don’t won’t to be pressed into deciding on that basis – so the faux Constitutional argument gives them a “fig leaf” to hide behind.

But in full fairness, the lawyers have one job to do – defend the President. 

Alternative Facts

What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul?  There’s one thing we have learned from the Era of Donald Trump:  repetition of a lie over and over again does not make it true.  There really is no such thing as “alternative facts”.  But the Trump attorneys felt duty-bound to continue the lies:  that Trump was for “law and order”, that Democrats want to “defund the police” and “burn down the cities”.  That the President of the United States has a “free speech right” such that he can incite a mob.  

But we also know that while the whole nation, and much of the world is watching, the Trump attorneys are speaking to thirty-five people:  thirty-four Republican Senators and one former President living in Florida, who may or may not pay their bills.

What-About-Ism

The new-speak term of art is “what-about-ism”.  It is a debate tactic:  rather than discuss the actual focus of the debate, the actions of the President of the United States leading up to and on January 6^th:  talk about something else.  “What about” something that Nancy Pelosi, or Joe Biden, or that demon of all demons, Maxine Waters said.  From that comes the false equivalency.  If they can say what they said, then Donald Trump was legal and justified to say and do what he said up to and on January 6^th.  That’s a “false equivalency” (another new-speak term).  None of the named sources, or Johnny Depp or Madonna (or even Robert DeNiro) were in front of a mob ready to follow their leader to save his “stolen election”.  If Joe Biden did take Donald Trump behind the gym and punch him, it wouldn’t rise to the level of insurrection, or impeachment.  It would be at best an assault, and looking at the two, Trump would get his ass beat.

And even if all of those things were “equivalent”, it doesn’t matter.  If we are all driving at eighty miles an hour, we are all breaking the law.  The fact that only one of us gets pulled over doesn’t make the ticket any less.  “What-About” means everyone is guilty, not that one is “made” innocent.

Have a Question

Then onto the “lightening round”.  Senators ask questions of the House Managers or the Defense Lawyers or both, and they answer the questions.  Some of the questions are “setups”, patsy questions for one side or the other to “hit out of the park”.  And some are serious, the Senators who seem to have real concerns.  And out of those questions we have come down to the one critical issue that might actually change some minds in the thirty-four decisive Senators.

No one is seriously questioning the base House premise:  that Donald Trump incited the mob.  But what seems to be a more significant issue for the Senators is what did the President do while the mob was in the Capitol.  Utah’s Mike Lee foreshadowed this debate when he threw a fit about a House Manager quoting him in a phone call from Trump as the mob reached the Senate chamber.  “I am the only witness to that call,” Lee shouted, “and they have it wrong.”  The call was on Lee’s phone, but it was Trump for Alabama’s Tommy Tuberville.  And the rookie Senator stands by his own statement: The President called to have him delay the vote on certification. Tuberville told the President that the Vice President was being hustled away by the Secret Service.

What does that matter?  It is the definitive proof that Donald Trump knew, in real time, that his Vice President was in danger – and did nothing.  And Friday night it was revealed that around the same time, Trump and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy had a profanity laced screaming match on the phone, as McCarthy demanded Trump do something.  But nothing was done.

Outbreak

Trump sent the mob, then did nothing as they ransacked the Capitol, threatened the proceedings, and searched for our national leaders, threatening death.  Shouldn’t he be punished for that?

The Defense Team is terrible.  They have walked into a sure thing, a guaranteed thirty-four Republican votes to acquit, and managed to allow doubts to creep in.  I still believe the Senate will acquit the former President, so his team will “get one job done”, but they didn’t help much.  

And I still wish there might be an “outbreak” of honor and courage in the Republican Party.  If not enough to acquit, enough at least to give America hope.

Addendum (2/13/21 – 11:30 am)

The Trial of Donald Trump has finally taken an unexpected turn.  Saturday morning the House Managers called for the deposition and testimony of  Congresswoman Herrera Beutler (Republican-Washington) who overheard the Kevin McCarthy phone call with President Trump.  The Defense lawyers threatened to depose “hundreds” in his office in “Philly-delphia” if that request was agreed.  But – by a 55-45 vote – witnesses will be called – and this Trial will last quite a bit longer.

Who will really be called – and how many – will be debated and voted on.  What is not clear: To what end?  The House Managers have made their case – but have determined that it is to their advantage to push this on further.  Is there more pressure on Republican Senators than we realize?  Chuck Schumer does not operate “on the fly”, he must have known this was coming.  

So what is the greater strategy?  Only time will reveal it.

Addendum II – The Greater Strategy – 2/13/21 – 4:15 pm

There was no greater strategy – other than the strategic move by the McConnell to hold the rest of the Senate business hostage to the Impeachment Trial. Donald Trump was found not guilty – 57 to 43, 10 votes short of conviction. Now the “re-write” will begin. As I type, Senator McConnell attempts to justify his decision to find Trump “not guilty”. He is condemning Trump, but failed to find him guilty. And he led a coalition of Republican Senators to take that position. Seven Republicans – Sasse of Nebraska, Cassidy of Louisiana, Burr of North Carolina, Collins of Maine, Murkowski of Alaska, Romney of Utah and Toomey of Pennsylvania choose “the right” over political expediency. They found Trump guilty. We should say their names. Others. like Rob Portman of Ohio, couldn’t muster the courage to do so.

It’s time to move on. We will ultimately pay some price for not ending Trumpism here, but so be it. There is work to do in our country – we have kicked the “Trumpist” question down the road. That’s a huge mistake, but it, is what it is.

Now let’s get going.

Buffalo Springfield – Stephen Stills-  For What It’s Worth

Both Sides

I had a discussion with a friend the other day, about the trial of Donald Trump.  We were lamenting what seems to be fact.  No matter what, enough Senate Republicans have made the political calculation: protecting Donald Trump is protecting their own interests.  They will vote to acquit, and Trump will claim “victory”. 

I pride myself on being able to see “both sides” of most arguments.  I’ve searched for “principled” reasons why one would vote against punishing Donald Trump for sending the mob against the Congress on January 6^th.  Unfortunately, I’ve failed.  Other than the highly questionable Constitutional jurisdiction argument that the vast majority of scholars say is wrong, there seems to be nothing “principled” in their position.  They are only protecting their own asses from the wrath of the Trump-controlled primary voters.  It only takes thirty-four Senators to acquit Donald Trump, and while I am normally a “half-full” kind of guy, I am struggling to see any other outcome.

Watching History

Being retired, I have the luxury of watching the impeachment trial closely.  I’ve set up the day: write, workout, shovel snow, make breakfast. Then it’s sit-down and watch history in the making.  It’s like sitting in the gallery at the Andrew Johnson impeachment, or with a group of high school seniors watching the Bill Clinton trial (I did that). I followed this same schedule just last year.  

Someday, years from now, in some classroom (digital or real) a teacher will try to explain this.  The teacher will “teach” how a President refused to accept defeat, convinced almost half of Americans that the election was a fraud, then ginned up a mob to stop the certification of votes.  How literal battles were fought on the steps of the Capitol of the United States, hand to hand combat, flags flying, lives lost, to protect the representatives of our Nation.   There will be the heroes in the story, the Policemen who struggled to hold back the insurrectionists. 

Lessons Learned

And there will be lessons to learn.  The teacher will cite this as another example of how a demagogue can temporarily derange part of a nation, Trump on the list with Hitler and the rest.  And that educator will have to explain how the American “exceptionalism” belief that our leaders will always “rise to the occasion”, how the Presidency “makes the person”, failed.    The words “profiles in courage” will be used, and the teacher will be left to explain why that wasn’t enough.

And because that future is a “multi-media” world, students will actually see what we are seeing now.  There will be the videos of the insurrectionists searching the building for Vice President Pence and Speaker Pelosi.  They will see Senators running from the mob, and police officers crushed in the doors.  And likely, they will hear some of the words of Congressman Jamie Raskin emotionally telling his experience:  the death of his child, the call of duty in the Congress, and the fear of losing more of his family in the uproar.

It will be as if we could watch the trial and execution of John Brown, or be there as the Ku Klux Klan rode to keep the freedmen from voting.  It will be in color on their monitors.

What Was Learned?

And at the end of the lesson, a good teacher will ask the open-ended question – what was learned?  Those future students will hopefully have a better answer than we have today.

We hear it from Lindsey Graham and Jim Jordan.  They are sure there are not enough votes to convict, so why are “those Democrats” forcing the Nation through this.  And the answer lies in that future classroom.  There may be criminal trials of insurrectionists, and maybe even of citizen Trump himself.  Those trials will never put the national spotlight on this tragedy better than this impeachment trial does.  The Senate is writing history.  And while it would make a better historic point if that trial resulted in conviction, a more fitting outcome; just putting the truth “on the books” for future reference is important.  

Those students will learn that our Republic depends on the “honor” of our leaders.  And they will also learn that sometimes, that “honor” just isn’t enough.

And, for what it’s worth, maybe they will do better. 

Summer of ‘74

It was August 8^th, 1974.  I graduated from high school two months before, and I was in the final stages of preparing to leave home.  Denison University, up “on the hill” in Granville, Ohio, awaited me.   I spent that last summer before college painting houses, and watching the House Judiciary Committee investigate and debate the actions of the President of the United States, Richard Nixon.

It was my second summer of Nixon.  My last summer of high school, 1973, I watched the Senate Committee hearings on Nixon, with the famous Senator Sam Ervin, a Democrat who could have been Hollywood cast for the part, as Chairman. (Speaking of Hollywood, the Minority Counsel on that Committee was a young Fred Thompson, who spent the latter part of his life as an actor, including “serving” as the second District Attorney on the Law and Order series). 

The Tapes

So I knew the case against Richard Nixon, inside and out.  On July 24^th, 1974, the United States Supreme Court ordered Nixon to turn over the “tapes”. Those were recordings from the White House of Nixon’s own conversations with his staff about the Watergate break-in and coverup.  I fully expected Nixon to burn the tapes on the White House lawn rather than turn them over (the suggestion of one of his speech writers, Pat Buchanan).  Had Nixon done so, perhaps he would have survived in office to the end of his Presidency.

But Nixon did turn them over to the Special Prosecutor, who then passed them to the House Judiciary Committee.  And the Committee moved inexorably towards impeachment of the President, the second time in American history.  

I don’t think I knew at the time, what happened in those early days of August.  The leaders of the Republican Party in the Congress:  The House Minority Leader, the Senate Minority Leader and Senator and former Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater; all went to see President Nixon.  They told him that he was going to be impeached, and the Senate would convict him.  They asked him to resign.

Champagne

What I did know on the evening on August 8^th, sitting in our downstairs recreation room with a few friends, was that Richard Nixon was speaking to the nation.  And there must have been some fore-knowledge of what he was going to say – champagne and glasses were available.  Nixon announced, that as of noon on August 9^th, Vice President Gerald Ford would be the next President.  We toasted to the end of Nixon, and of three years of America’s fixation on Watergate.

The House Judiciary Committee recommended impeachment, but the full House never debated or voted it.  So Richard Nixon became the first President to resign, but not the second to be impeached.  And since there was no impeachment, there was no Senate trial.  Exactly a month later, President Ford granted a full and blanket pardon to Richard Nixon for anything he might have done, declaring that “…our long national nightmare has ended”.  As a freshman at Denison, all the folks watching in the student lounge in Crawford Hall instantly knew what I thought about that.  Nixon got off – far too easily.

Over the ensuing years, I mellowed on President Ford’s decision.  I gained some understanding about how much our attention was diverted to Watergate, beyond what was happening in the world, and in our nation.  And now I hear some of those same arguments, directed towards President Biden, suggesting that he should end this current Trumpian nightmare. “Move on” they say, there’s too much to do:  COVID, the economy, the environment, infrastructure, and so much more.

Nixon Redux

But I have come to think of all of this differently.  Donald Trump was politically advised by the younger generation of Nixon’s followers.  Roger Stone was critical in his political aspirations.  Stone, a young Nixon staffer, believed so strongly in the disgraced President that he had Nixon’s face tattooed onto his back.  At sixty-eight, he maintains his physique, perhaps to maintain the structure of Nixon’s visage.  

Almost three years ago, I wrote an essay about Stone called Stone’s Dream.  The premise of that essay was that Stone believed if only Nixon had “toughed it out”, burned the tapes, stonewalled longer, then he would have survived.  Stone taught Trump well. He stonewalled the Mueller investigation that found hundreds of contacts with Russian intelligence. The day after Mueller testified, Trump  leveraged Ukraine for “dirt” on future opponent Joe Biden resulting in his first impeachment and trial. But Trump got a “pass” on that as well.  So why shouldn’t Trump absolutely insist that he won the 2020 election, so much so that he encouraged his supporters to come to Washington, march on the Capitol, and stop the certification of the Electoral votes.  He always “beat the rap” before. He was tough like Stone.

Accountability

Today’s impeachment trial of Donald Trump is not just about Trump himself.  It is about responsibility and accountability.  Nixon was never held accountable for his actions in Watergate, despite his key aides all serving jail sentences.  The Congress didn’t hold him to blame, accepting his resignation as enough.  The Courts were denied the opportunity to air the evidence, Nixon protected by his blanket of Federal pardon. 

Maybe our “long national nightmare” was only temporarily ended by Ford’s pardon of Nixon.  Perhaps that action created a recurring nightmare, each time a little stronger and more frightening.  Nixon was a crook, a thief, a man who abused the powers of his office for personal political gain.  Yes, he resigned the Presidency, but lost little else.  Trump was more, a man all-to-willing to launch an insurrection to maintain the office for which he no longer was entitled.  If we, the United States, do not hold him accountable for those actions, either in the Senate or the Courts, what nightmare will shock us from “sleep” next?

Divided Politics

We are a divided nation.  Perhaps that’s not the right characterization:  we are actually a fragmented nation.  Politically there are Republicans and Democrats.  But the Republican Party is splintering over whether to continue the path of Trumpism.  There are the “Lincoln Project” types, no longer officially Republican at all, who are trying to become the core of a “New Republican” Party.  There are the “old school” Republicans, like Ohio Governor Mike DeWine or Senator Rob Portman, who seem adrift in a sea of Trumpist action.  And then there are the Trump followers, not just his family, but those opportunistic politicians who have found a band wagon to ride.  And, of course, there are the “crazies”, from Proud Boys to QAnon remnants, who really aren’t Republican at all.

Then there are the Democrats.  Being a Democrat means being divided almost by definition.  Need an example:  The Mayor of Chicago, a Democrat, elected with the support of the Chicago Teacher’s Union, was at war with that same Union about opening the schools.  The “progressive” Democrats are scared to death that President Biden will somehow be too “moderate”, even though he was elected specifically because he was a moderate.  And then the “blue dog” Democrats, the more “conservative” Democrats are searching for a place in their own Party.  Well, they are fewer and far between.

Divided Origins

We are also a nation divided by race and origin.  But even that question is changing.  Within only a decade or so, there will be no majority race in America.  We will be a nation of minorities, including the “White” minority.  And while we’re at that, even the minorities are splitting.  What was once considered the “Hispanic” minority, is now seen in more appropriate terms.  Some are of Cuban origin, some Puerto Rican,  some Mexican, some Central American, some are more American than most other Americans.  

We grew up with a “School House Rock” view of America – The Great American Melting Pot (bring back some memories – and watch it again).  We came from “wherever” (old World) and jumped into the pot – and all became American.  But we know that’s not really what happens – at least not now.  And it’s hard to pick out a dark face in the “School House Rock” version though the Indian kid on a bed of nails does make an impression.  Maybe we should view America as a “tossed salad”.  Instead of a “melting pot” or “stew”, where everything becomes alike, we are a salad where each carrot or onion or tomato remains individual, but contributes to the “salad whole”. 

Multi-Culturalism

That, by the way, is the essential difference described as “multi-culturalism”.  Instead of cultures being subsumed by “American”,  American is enhanced by different cultures.  They all maintain their relevance in an America that is greater than its parts.  But multi-culturalism is a direct challenge to the “melting pot” where all were one.  In a more racially focused view:  the melting pot made everyone either “White” or “subservient” to White.  And of course, that’s why the “melting pot” didn’t work.  If you were a person of color, you could never “melt” into a White society.   The “tossed salad” allows everyone to keep their culture.  And while “lettuce” may make up more of the salad than any other part, it’s all the other constituent parts that make a salad actually “taste” good.

The German could lose her accent.  The Irishman could drop his brogue and Catholicism.  The Italian could do the same.  All found ways to “melt” and immerse themselves into the American “melting pot” of the 1800’s.  But when the great migration of Black people from the old South to the North and Midwest occurred around World War I, there was no way for them to “melt in”.  No matter what else they did – they remained Black.

Education 

So when you look back with nostalgia at the “School House Rock” version of history (so much more exciting than good old Mrs. Ralston) remember it not only simplified, but ignored many Americans.  It was 1977.  While there were a few faces of color, there was no mention of slavery, or Hispanic immigration, and their impact on the “American Melting Pot”.  It wasn’t taught in school then either (full disclosure:  I was soon to be one of those teachers, and it took years to get over just “teaching what I learned”). 

Part of the “dissonance,” the discomfort many Americans feel today is because of this.  We were taught one thing, now we are being told we weren’t told the truth.  No, Mrs. Ralston or even Mr. Dahlman weren’t LIARS, but they were “victims” of their own education.  They taught what they knew, and they taught their own experiences.  But that knowledge and experience didn’t include much about those who couldn’t climb into the “melting pot”.  

This week (in this year, 2021) a group of parents of North Ogden Charter School in Utah, decided they didn’t want their kids to “participate” in Black History Month.  That’s not the “bad” news.  The bad news:  the school went ahead and allowed them to “opt out”, like it was religious or sex education.  The public uproar changed the school’s and even the parents’ minds, but that’s the discomfort America feels with our unlearned, unspoken past and present (KUTV).

Acceptance

All of that dissonance flows right back into America’s political fragmentation.  It’s why working-class White men with high school educations think that the Republican Party represents their interests.  It’s why there is so much political “reward” in packaging campaigns in “us versus them” terms, and in playing to victimhood.  And it’s why there is hope for the Republic.

Hope?  

In the next decades, as we become a minority-majority nation, we also will see the passing of what my son calls “the old White dudes”.  And with them, goes generations of entitlement and false historical memories.   It’s not that the younger generation has it “all right”.  They are too addicted to their screens and podcasts, too susceptible to the “voice” in their EarPods that seems to know the answer to every riddle.  But they are different, they have experiences that cross the boundary lines that restricted their parents and grandparents.  So I believe that at least when it comes to this form of single-culturalism – they may well save us. 

 No pressure – of course.  

Senate Trial

For the second time in as many years, the Senate trial of Donald John Trump begins today.  It is a trial caused by the House of Representatives “impeachment” of the then-President in January.  The House charged the President with committing the Constitutionally mandated “high crimes and misdemeanors”.  In this case, they are charging him with inciting insurrection by literally sending a mob to attack the Congress.  The purpose of the attack was to stop the certification of the election results of 2020. Then-President Trump claimed that the results were fraudulent, despite over ninety Court decisions to the contrary.

As a result of the attack, five people died and the Capitol was “invaded” for the first time since the War of 1812. The process of certifying the vote was disrupted, and one police officer was killed. One hundred and forty other officers were injured, and two have committed suicide.  While Congress resumed session hours after the “insurrection” and certified President Biden’s victory, it is safe to say that the Congress has not been the same.  Neither has the United States of America.

Legal Technicality

The former President is defending himself with four legal arguments.  The first, to be examined and decided today in the Senate, is whether a President who no longer holds office can still be held for trial.  The vast majority of Constitutional scholars agree that he can be, even though the “main” penalty of an “impeachment trial” is removal from office, a moot point in this case.  The reason:  The Constitution also contains the clause that the Senate can further “punish” by barring the convicted from every holding Federal “positions of trust”.  It is this second punishment that the Senate seeks.

Peacefully

The second argument is that the President spoke to the crowds on January 6^th in a “peaceful manner”, in fact, using the word “peacefully” to encourage their actions.  That was one word in an over seventy-minute harangue, in which he called for the crowd to “march on the Capitol” and to “fight, fight, fight”.  He told them “we will not take this anymore”, and that “we have to show strength”.   And he reiterated his false claim that the election was stolen, and that it was their duty to “stop the steal”.  

Everyone Else Does It

The third argument is one that Senator Lindsey Graham, a current “impeachment juror” and Trump apologist argues:  Democrats do it too.  Graham is “threatening” to demand witness testimony from Democrats who, he says, advocated violence during the Trump administration.  His particular focus is on Congresswoman Maxine Waters, who at the beginning of the “child separation” crisis told a crowd to confront Trump Administration members in restaurants, gas stations and on the street.  Graham equates her actions, and other Democrats during the George Floyd protests last summer, as “equal” to the actions of Donald Trump regardless that the outcomes were wholly different.  

This is similar to the argument made by some Republicans in the House of Representatives last week, as the Democrats stripped the Committee assignments of Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene.  The Congresswoman from Georgia advocates the QAnon theory, and has called for the murder of Speaker Pelosi.  When the Republican Party failed to punish her for those statements and others, the House as a whole did.  In the debate, Republicans, including Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, equated Greene’s statements with those made by Waters and Ilhan Omar, who was been outspoken about the power of the Israeli lobby on Congressional action.  

The statements don’t compare.  Neither Waters or Omar threatened death to anyone. Neither has taken stands like Greene that the school shootings at Sandy Hook or Marjorie Stoneman Douglas were “faked”.  And neither sent a mob to attack the United States Congress.

Free Speech

But it is the fourth argument for the former President that will be the most interesting to hear articulated.  The lawyers for Mr. Trump are preparing to argue that, no matter what he said on January 6^th, he was simply exercising his First Amendment right to “free speech”, and that Senate has no authority to sanction that right.  They will claim that the United States Supreme Court makes the speech of January 6^th permissible under the 1969 Case Brandenburg v Ohio.

Clarence Brandenburg owned a television repair shop in Arlington Heights, Cincinnati, just down the road from where I grew up in the suburb of Wyoming.  Brandenburg also owned a farm on the east side of Cincinnati, near Coney Island, and he invited a news crew from WLW-T to come and film a Ku Klux Klan rally there.  

The rally was small, twelve hooded men who burned a cross and gave speeches.  Brandenburg spoke about a “400,000-man march on Washington” and said:

“If our president, our Congress, our Supreme Court, continues to suppress the white Caucasian race, it’s possible that there might have to be some revengeance (sic) taken.” (Cincinnati Enquirer).

Brandenburg Standard

Brandenburg was charged with an Ohio Law against “advocating violence as a means of political reform” and sentenced to one to ten years in prison.  On appeal, the United States Supreme Court overturned the conviction, and set the standard for when “political speech” crossed the line into criminal action.  The “line” is created in this phrase of the Court’s statement:

“…except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.” (Cornell – section 7).

The lawyers for Mr. Trump will argue that whatever he said or did on January 6^th, it doesn’t meet the “Brandenburg Standard”.  And the House Managers prosecuting the case, will do everything they can to show that through both direct action and reckless disregard, the former President’s actions leading up to January 6^th, and his speech of that day, did exactly that:  incite lawless action and produce the Insurrection.

But we can’t ignore the irony.  Donald Trump will base a large part of his defense on the actions of a sad little KKK rally of twelve men in costumes on a farm near Coney Island.  The essence was that whatever Brandenburg said, he was ultimately ignored.  It’s too bad the nation wasn’t so lucky on January 6^th.

Men in the Middle

Bill Cassidy, a Republican Senator from Louisiana,  is a “man in the middle” in our current political world.  The crucible of politics in America is the United States Senate.  The Democrats hold fifty seats, and so do the Republicans.  The Senate is “Democratic” by virtue of the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Kamala Harris.  If America is divided – the Senate is the image of division in the mirror.

America has been a nation of growing division since 2010.  There are lots of reasons.   A Black man elected as President of the United States. The Affordable Care Act passed without a single Republican vote. Majority Leader McConnell refused to allow Democratic legislation to reach the floor of the Senate for “up and down” votes.  The economic divide between the “haves and haves not” increasing.  And it is the view of many Americans that the nation they “knew” in the past has irrevocably changed.

The Tea Party and the rise of Donald Trump were results of this division.  So was the Women’s March on Washington, the Black Lives Matter movement and the outlandish QAnon conspiracy.  The most recent outcomes were the repudiation of “Trumpism” at the polls in 2020, and the “Insurrection” against the US Capitol on January 6^th.

Where Stands the GOP

So here we are.  For those who think this is settled – concluded with the prolonged results of the Presidential election of November – it only takes a look at the Republicans in the House last week. They tried to remove their Caucus Chairman Liz Cheney for voting in favor of impeachment. And they gave a full “pass” to Marjorie Taylor Greene for sanctioning QAnon nonsense. It’s not over.

The next expression of our division will take place this coming week, in the United States Senate.  The House of Representatives voted to impeach Donald J. Trump, then President of the United States, for inciting the Insurrection on the Capitol.  They did this while he was in office, as a statement of his collaboration in the “crime”, and as a warning to keep him controlled until the Biden inauguration.  They achieved the latter, but Joe Biden was sworn in on the Capitol steps surrounded by more military forces than any President since Lincoln in 1861.

The House also wanted to establish the precedent that no President can “send the mob” against the legislature to enforce his will.  Regardless of whether Trump is in office, that precedent is more than just incidental.   A significant minority of our Nation still believe that Trump was right.  That leaves us without accountability for what occurred, and many months from judicial determinations.  

So once again the focus will be on Donald Trump, the nexus of American division, held in the symbolic home of that division, the Senate.  McConnell is still there, but muted by his minority role.  So how does the Senate “breakdown” for this most significant Constitutional process?

Your Radio Dial

Going from right to left (on your radio dial as the Cleveland Brown’s radio announcer would say) we start with those Senators who are full throated Trump supporters:  Hawley, Cruz, Kennedy of Louisiana, Paul and Graham.  Ol’ Lindsey is an interesting case.  He’s a man who the night of January 6^th detached himself from Trump (“I’m done” he said on the floor of the Senate). But he then quickly moved back into his chosen position of “Trump Whisperer”.  

That group and others are more interested in inheriting the Trump mantle, and more importantly his voter base, than the right or wrong of the case before them.  There is no changing their stand. 

Then there are the Republicans who voted with Rand Paul to avoid the trial. They agreed with him that the Constitution does not allow for a “private citizen” to be tried in the Senate.  Regardless that all the legal precedent, and the Founding Fathers themselves, disagree with that interpretation, it gives those Senators a “fig leaf” to hide behind.  No reason to go into the facts of incitement or insurrection (for a much longer discourse on “fig leaves” – click here).

The Middle

Senator Bill Cassidy was one of these.  And Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press Cassidy said: “…that vote was in a moment in time…”. He went on to suggest that it wouldn’t prevent him from judging the entire case, not just the Constitutionality based on Rand Paul and the defense lawyers’ assertions.  Of those Senators there are a few, including perhaps Portman of Ohio, Shelby of Alabama, Grassley of Iowa, Burr of North Carolina and McConnell himself.  Portman, Shelby and Burr have already announced that they will not be running for re-election, freeing them from the Trump voting majority in the Republican Party.  There may be more in this “middle ground”. 

Next there are the “five”:  the five Republicans Senators who voted against the Paul motion, and for the trial.  Toomey of Pennsylvania (retiring), Murkowski of Alaska, Romney of Utah, Collins of Maine, and Sasse of Nebraska all bucked their former President and earned the political enmity of their local and state Republican Parties.  While a vote to have a trial is not the same as a vote for conviction, it does suggest that they don’t need a “fig leaf” and want to hear the evidence.

A Group of One

And then there is the “lonely” but ultimately powerful one Democrat near the middle, Joe Manchin.  Almost 69% of his state, West Virginia, voted for Donald Trump.  69%, that’s more than two out of three voters. Even the elected Democratic Governor, Jim Justice, switched to Republican while in office AND was re-elected. From a wholly Democratic state of the 1990’s, the state of Robert Byrd and Jay Rockefeller; Joe Manchin is literally the last Democrat standing.  Manchin is well aware of his dual roles. He is the decisive vote for the Democratic Party in the Senate. And he is always in a perilous position as a Democrat representing the most Republican state in the Union.  

Manchin stood with the Democratic Party when necessary.  He voted to remove Trump from office in the first impeachment trial, and voted against some of Trump’s Supreme Court appointees.  But while he voted to continue this trial, he has been outspoken about how “ill advised” this impeachment process is.

The Choice

And finally there are the other forty-nine Democrats in the Senate, lined in lock-step for conviction of Donald Trump, and hopeful to ban him from running for office in the future.

It takes sixty-seven Senators to convict Donald Trump, and after that, only a majority to ban him from running for further office.  It’s unlikely that seventeen Republican Senators will determine that Donald Trump should be convicted and removed, despite the ample evidence to show his involvement in incitement. His actions during the Insurrection were the definitions of nonfeasance, misfeasance and malfeasance.

The Republicans in the House of Representatives have clearly made themselves the “Party of Trump”.  As disgraced Congresswoman Majorie Taylor Greene stated, “The Party belongs to Donald Trump, and no one else”. It is only fitting that the Republicans in the Senate get the opportunity to make that choice as well.  And in the next few weeks, they will.

This is another “Sunday Story” from “the good old days”.  But this is not about backpacking, or even dogs!  This is a coaching story.

Rookie Lessons

In high school, I wrestled, and I swam.  But where I really found my place was on the track.  I was a sprinter, pretty fast actually, and I found success and satisfaction on the Track Team.  It started at Van Buren Junior High School in Kettering just south of Dayton, Ohio, and I learned a lot of lessons that first year.  I learned that eating cornflakes before Spring Break practice was a horrible idea.  And the next lesson came immediately. I learned that no one dies from throwing up, at least not on the track.  All you do is pick yourself up and finish practice.  Don’t step in the cornflakes.

Another lesson: no matter how good a strategy it might appear to be, diving to complete a sprint relay exchange is just a bad concept.  I was second man in the 4×220 relay (back then, we ran yard not meters).  I was coming fast, and my teammate receiving the baton was worried that I’d overrun him.  So he took off way, way, too soon.  I found one more gear to try to reach him, and the baton was only inches from his hand.  But I couldn’t get there – so I dived.

Eating Cinders

The baton struck his hand, but he didn’t close in time.  I went down on the track at full speed.  Today, that action would result in “road rash”; layers of skin scraped off by the rubberized surface.  But back then we weren’t running on “all-weather” tracks.  We were running on packed cinders, charcoal ash pressed into a track surface.  So when I hit, shoulder first, then rolled on my back, not only a couple of layers of skin were gone, but were replaced with layers of those cinders.  The fall hurt, but I did get to hear for the first time, the crowd go “ahhhhh” as they watched me go down.

My next experience was with a spray-on medication called “cinder suds”.  It hit the raw wound, stung like crazy and then bubbled.  That was so the Coach (we didn’t have trainers for track) could start scrubbing the cinders out of the wound with gauze pads. Coach and I “bonded” in my pain.  Later the teams I coached missed out on that particular “bonding” experience, though they did learn a therapeutic technique called “contrasting” involving buckets of ice and warm water.  That “bonded” us together too.

It actually took several years for all the cinders to migrate out of my shoulder. And I got a lot more serious about exchanges!!

Old Man Races

I got hurt a couple of other times as an athlete.  The last was when I was far past my prime, running a sprint race in the “over fifty” age group at a summer meet in Yellow Springs.  I was trying to find my “sprint” shape of old, and was racing those other “old” guys.  One of them, sporting a USA Track Team speed-suit, made sure I knew he was going to win.  You’ve either got to be really good to pull off a speed-suit in the “over fifty” group, or you’re just too cocky.

So when we came off of the turn in the 200 (meters now) and he was right beside me, I knew what to do.  I lifted, relaxed, and for a few steps, found a rhythm I hadn’t felt for two decades.  The technique still worked, and I moved past “speed-suit guy” —  and then my calf muscle dissolved.  I took the next step, and when my now non-functioning foot hit the track again, I followed it straight into the surface.  Damn – I had that dude beat!!  But I did get a final chance to hear the “ahhhhh’s” one more time.  The next problem:  how was I going to get home with might right calf completely locked?  I crossed over and used my left foot for the gas and brake. Good thing I didn’t drive the Jeep with the clutch.

It took a few weeks on crutches, and a lot of time riding a stationary bike to get back to normal life.  Fitting, that my “athletic” career ended about the same way it began: in a 200, going down on the front stretch to the chorus of “ahhhhh’s”.

Learning Pole Vault

But my best (or worst) track injury was as a coach.  And it happened far away, on the campus of Slippery Rock University in Northwestern Pennsylvania.

I was a sprinter, but I coached every event in track and field during my career.  I had state qualifiers as distance runners, long and high jumpers, throwers and hurdlers, as well as sprinters.  But my “reputation” came as a pole vault coach.  That was only because I couldn’t find an expert, and had to learn the event myself so I could help my kids.

The way I learned was to go to the places the kids went to learn.  So I started at the Indiana Track and Field Camp, working with a national level coach named Marshall Goss.  That week, I had the honor of watching Fourth of July fireworks between Bronze and Gold Olympic Medalists, a pole vaulter and a 400-meter runner.  

I then took some of my athletes and went to the then-premier vaulting camp in the country – the MF Pole Vault Camp at the University of Rhode Island.  The coach there was Bill Falk, a man who looked a lot like Mr. McGoo (that’s definitely a dated reference) and had an enormous wealth of vault knowledge.  Bill was always willing to share – something I found in most great vault coaches.  I learned a lot, and my kids got to eat lobster for the first time! (The deal was, I paid for the lobster, and if they didn’t like it, they could get a burger and I’d eat their dinner.  I had two).

Advanced Studies

But where I really earned my pole vault “advanced degree” was at the Slippery Rock Pole Vault Camps.  There I met another “guru”, Mark Hannay.  Like me, Mark was a high school teacher and was the part-time vault coach for the university.   Mark developed an entire theory of vault, with each piece fitting in a whole process. He called it the “summation of forces”, and  it was understandable physics that made a lot of sense.  

I went with the kids to “the Rock” for a couple years, and then Mark asked me to come work the camp as a coach.  For the next few years I spent a couple of weeks each summer in that environment.  There were hundreds of vaults a day, and breakfast, lunch, dinner and far into the night talking with other amazing coaches about pole vaulting, and everything else. It was in those weeks that I really gained my understanding of the event.  

Pit Coach

I was a “pit coach”.  That meant that I had my group of kids to work with for the entire week, following Mark’s progression.  They always got better, even though their improvement was tempered by the wear on their legs as the week went on.  It was part of my “pit coach” job to make sure my group was “safe”.

So I was standing next to the runway, near the pit, when a kid named John had a disaster (I do remember his last name, but I won’t share it here).  Everything he did was bad:  he slowed down instead of speeding up, he was too far away from the pit when he jumped, and he committed to a vault that wasn’t going to get him to the mats.  I stepped up.  There’s no “catching him” – that’s really not a thing in pole vault.  I was going to push him into the pit.  But as I stepped in, he (rightfully) swung his takeoff leg back, trying to create more energy.   Unfortunately he was wearing track spikes, and instead of pushing off of the runway, his takeoff foot pushed directly into my face.

John went up, then landed hard on the ground on the edge of the pit.  I stood on the runway, my face in my hands.  The SRU trainer ran to John, as he sat in a heap. “Are you OK?” she asked.  “Yeah, I’m OK, but you better check on him”, pointing to me.  

So, you know things aren’t  very good when the trainer looks at you, and goes pale.  I stepped forward to catch her, she looked like she was going to pass out.  To her credit, she quickly pulled herself together, and moved to me.  My face was covered in blood, and I had a jagged tear stretching from my forehead above my nose across and onto my eyelid.  It  didn’t really hurt, but it was clear that this was more than a couple of “steri-strips” fix.

Asics Symbol  

The trainers got me bandaged up, and Mark and the other coaches had a discussion about which local hospital was the best for getting sewed back up.  The debate was between hospitals in Grove City or Butler, and the final consensus was go to Butler.  So we drove twenty miles, and I checked into the Emergency department.

I think I was the only patient in the Butler ER that night.  I remember being in a big group exam room, just me and the doc, who gave me “the good news” and “the bad news”.  The good news: my eye was fine, and he thought he could sew things up without a whole lot of scarring.  He said “The cut isn’t a straight line – it’s curved.  That’s good – a straight line scar is really obvious, this will eventually blend into the lines in your face.”  I guess that made me feel better – at the moment I felt like I had a Klingon forehead-thing going.

He also said he had a “special German” suture kit, with finer needles to make smaller punctures.  That way, there would be less damage as well.  And that was all the good news.  

The “bad news”:  if he numbed the cut up, then the wound edges would go soft.  They wouldn’t  be “clean” and that would increase the scar.  So he asked me to “hang on”:  he would work as quickly as possible, but no painkiller.

It wasn’t as bad as I anticipated.  If you’ve ever had stitches, the worst part is the needle of Novocain finding the nerves to numb things up.  So instead of that one shot, there was the piercing of the curved “German” suture needle, in and out.  It hurt, and he put a lot of sutures in, again to reduce the scarring.  But the Doc was a man of his word, and it went pretty quick. 

Earn the Lines

I arrived back to the SRU dorms, and my “pit-group kids” all came to see how bad it was.  The last they saw me was just blood, so they were pleased that I “made it” and was back on dorm duty.  I didn’t miss a shift on the pit, spotting kids in the next morning’s session.  John was incredibly apologetic:  I was just pleased he was OK too.

The Doc was right:  the scarring isn’t too obvious.  If you look carefully there’s kind of an “Asics symbol” in the middle of my forehead.  But as I got older, it has been mostly subsumed by the natural lines created by forty years of Watkins Track and Cross Country. 

Out of all that, we developed the “Watkins Rules” of pole vaulting.  The number one rule was and always will be: 

LAND IN THE BIG BLACK AND GOLD THING (the mat).  

But the number two rule:  DON’T HURT THE COACH!!!

Mixed Signals

I’m not a Republican, and it’s not for me to say what the Republican Party, the Party founded on anti-slavery and Lincoln, should do right now. But I can describe what I’m observing, and what road the Grand Old Party is traveling.  

The election of 2020 gave the Republican Party mixed signals.  Sure, Donald Trump lost.  But he got the second most votes EVER by a Presidential candidate.  And he did it in the biggest US election of the modern era, with 66.3% of the voters showing up.  So while it’s easy (especially for me, A Democrat) to say that Trump was repudiated, that’s not quite fair.  Trump was defeated, in an election which has been scrutinized by both sides for fairness.  But there are 74 million Americans who voted for Trump, and he still remains a force to be reckoned with.

And the rest of the GOP ticket did pretty well, Georgia being the massive exception.  The House of Representatives grew tighter, as many of the marginal Democrats who won close elections in 2018 were ousted.  And while Democrats did “pull the upset” and capture the Senate, many prognosticators, including me, thought it would be a seven or eight seat margin.  Instead it is a fifty-fifty tie, with Vice President Harris determining the Democrats have control.

Aging Mitch McConnell is willing to hang on for a couple of more years, to see if he can regain control of the Senate. And California Republican Representative Kevin McCarthy sees himself as the next Speaker of the House of Representatives, if he can only find a way to turn six more seats from Blue to Red. 

So while the Democrats are “in the saddle” in the White House, the Senate, and the House, it’s really all a very near thing.

Signal Flare  

Yesterday the Republicans in the House of Representatives met to decide the fate of two of their colleagues.  Their decision is a signal flare in the sky, telling us what forces are “in charge” of the Party today.

Liz Cheney is the Congresswoman from Wyoming.  She is third in the leadership structure of the House Republicans, Chairman of the Caucus.  And, of course, she is the daughter of one of the stalwarts of the old Republican guard, former Vice President Dick Cheney.  How important is she to her father?  When her gay younger sister Mary, legally married her partner, Liz took a stand against gay marriage.  The Vice President supported Liz against his younger daughter.

But Liz Cheney has also committed her own “unforgiveable” sin.  After the insurrection of January 6^th, when the House of Representatives voted to impeach Donald Trump for his role in instigating the action, Liz Cheney, third in power in the GOP, was one of ten Republican members who voted to impeach the President.    She made it clear that she held Trump responsible for the insurrection, and indirectly, the deaths that occurred.  For this act she has been censured by several County Republican Party organizations in Wyoming.  

Turning Right

There is a movement to remove Cheney from her leadership position in the Republican Caucus.   She held onto her position yesterday, but twenty-five percent of the Republicans wanted her thrown out.

And then there’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, the newly elected Congressman from Georgia.  She is an avowed QAnon supporter.  During her rising political career she has supported multiple “conspiracies”. She believes  the Trump “voter fraud stolen election” story. But more than that, she believes the 9-11 conspiracy that a plane did not fly into the Pentagon building, that a space-based Jewish laser gun set fire to California forests to clear the way for the high-speed rail line, and that the Sandy Hook and Parkland school massacres were staged by “crisis actors”.  Oh, and that Hillary and Bill Clinton somehow caused John Kennedy Jr to crash his airplane and die.  She has called for the murder of Nancy Pelosi and assaults on other Democratic members. 

The people of Georgia still elected her to the Congress, and the Republican Campaign Committee did little to stand in her way.  And when she arrived in the House, the Party has allowed her to continue her conspiratorial rants, and even to circumvent House security measures.  There are still concerns about what actions she took on January 6^th. 

But the Republican caucus yesterday stood by their committee appointments, including sending her to the Education Committee.  This, the woman who thinks that the murder the little children of Sandy Hook and teenagers at Parkland was faked.  She even went so far as to film herself harassing an eighteen-year-old Parkland survivor David Hogg, demanding to know who was financing him.

The Right Thing

Democrats are demanding that Greene be removed from all her committees.  If the Republicans don’t do it, then the Democrats may use their majority to take the unprecedented step of doing it themselves.  While it would take a two-thirds vote of the whole House of Representatives to remove her from the chamber, they can strip her committees with just a majority vote.   Greene, of course, warns that when Republicans regain the majority in 2022, they may do the same to some of the more outspoken Democratic members – Ilhan Omar a primary target.  It’s an apple to bananas comparison, but there it is.  That’s the road the freshman Congressman from Georgia wants her Party to take.

Yesterday the Republicans could have avoided this by doing what is obviously the right thing to do: removing her from the committees themselves.  They did the same thing only a couple of years ago, when Iowa Representative Steve King was “just” outspokenly racist.  

The Road Taken

So the Republican choice was clear.  They bet that their support depends on far-right conspiracists like those who invaded the Capitol and support Greene.  They bet that Trump will still dominate the political landscape is 2022.  And they rewarded Greene with her committee assignments. They did all of those things, but tried to “cover their bets” by not punishing Cheney for her vote.  Maybe they think, Democrats will do the “right” thing anyway, so why should Republicans take the political heat?

The answer is pretty simple.  Republicans chose what direction they will go.  They continue to be the party of Trump:  the party of  conspiracy, fake news and the big lie.  They chose to be that Republican Party, not the one who claims to wants lower taxes, less regulation, and smaller government; the Party of George Bush and Dick Cheney.  

The road forked with the end of the Trump Administration.  We now get to see where the GOP will go. And it’s continues down the road of Trumpism.