Month: February 2022

The Third Rail

Midwest

If you grew up in the Midwest you might not be familiar with the concept of a  “third rail”.  Public transportation was buses, and even the light rail in Cleveland used overhead electric cables to provide power.  But if you grew in the “big city” you know what it is.  On those Subway trains the electric power is provided by a third rail (two for the wheels, one for the power) located in between the tracks.  

Touch the third rail and you’ll get a jolt of 750 volts of electricity. That’s seven times the current that comes out of the plugs in your house.  Touching the third rail is deadly.

In American politics it used to be Social Security that was considered the “third rail”.  If you tried to alter the social security system, increase the retirement age or reduce the benefit; every person over the age of fifty would consider you an absolute threat.  And since that is one of the highest voting turnout groups in the nation, you’d lose the next election.

God, Guns, and Trump

But for Republicans, particularly those that intend to run for higher office, there is a new “third rail” in politics.  His name is Donald Trump.   How critical do they see Trump to their candidacies?  Look at the latest ad for Republican Senate candidate Josh Mandel of Ohio:  “Pro God, Pro Guns, Pro Trump” (not making that up!!!).

I watched Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas on This Week, the ABC Sunday news show.  Cotton is taking a tough stand on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, demanding that every possible sanction be placed on Vladimir Putin and Russia – TODAY.  He wants arms shipped to the Ukrainian Army “yesterday”, and is adamant that Putin is a world danger.   He’s getting as far “beyond” the Biden Administration as he can, trying to “out support” them for Ukraine.

But when he was asked about Donald Trump, the titular leader of the his own political party he failed to answer. Trump called Putin “smart and very savvy”, Cotton dodged a rebuttal.  George Stephanopoulos asked him over and over again about Trump’s Putin-supportive speech at the Conservative Politic Action Committee. Cotton said he “refused to comment on other politicians”.  Of course, that refusal doesn’t include Joe Biden.

A Rock and A Hard Place

Cotton isn’t the only Republican Senator (and potential Presidential candidate) who decided to shy away from the “third rail”.  In fact, the list is so long, that it’s easier to name the Republican Senators who aren’t “afraid” of Trump:  Romney, McConnell, and Portman.  That one of them is retiring and the other two are in “safe” seats with no further ambitions, makes them “immune” from Trumpism.  Romney even said, “…(H)ow anybody in this country who loves freedom… can side with Putin; it’s almost treasonous”. 

So the Republican Party is stuck between the proverbial “rock and a hard place”:  “Putin and Trump”.  The reasonable sense of the American people (Tucker Carlson excepted) is that Putin is leading a war of conquest against democratic Ukraine. Even renegade Democrat Tulsi Gabbard agrees.  We Americans know a bully when we see one, and the tanks move across the border remind us of the Cold War.  We knew who “the enemy” was then, watching tanks roll over people as revolts were put down in Hungary and Czechoslovakia.  And we know it now, as Putin literally cannot personally stand the “scent” of democracy on his own front door step.  

Cold War

So it’s easy for Republicans (and most Democrats as well) to fall into the old Cold War language and reactions.  And, by the way, it’s the right thing to do.  But the former President has somehow set himself in the position where he cannot find any “good” in the Biden Administration.  To paraphrase Trump; “Putin is smart, NATO is not so smart, and the current Administration is ‘very dumb’”.  So if Biden is “wrong”, then Putin is “right” – and for those Republicans who need Trump voters to get re-elected, there is that crushing feeling of the walls closing in.

At least Tom Cotton simply refused to comment.  Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was effusive about Putin:  calling him talented, savvy, and a capable statesman.  In fact, Pompeo went on to say, ““He was a KGB agent, for goodness sakes. He knows how to use power. We should respect that,” as if the Soviet secret police was an admirable institution (Kansas City).

Most Americans – Democrats and Republicans alike, rise to defend democracy against oppression.  Ukraine is not Afghanistan, President Zelenskyy did not get on a plane out of town at the first hint of trouble, and the Ukrainian Army is being joined by their civilians as they fight against the Russians.  We, in the “free world” (more Cold War terminology) are doing the right thing – standing with them.  

The former President in Mara Lago  stands with Putin. Maybe, he’s finally found a way to get “left behind”.  Other Republicans should take note.

Sanctions

Playground Bully

It always seems “not enough”.  When a nation-state acts like a bully, attacking less powerful nations, the obvious response is for an even stronger nation-state to step-in and stop them.  It’s just like the school playground.  The Bully can only be countered by anti-bully force.  The vaunted “outreach” of modern militaries, that can drop paratroopers and missiles on a dime, and infiltrate “special operators” in the night, should be enough, to deter the bully-nation.

But reality is so much more complicated than that mythical playground.  There really are places where forces cannot go.  And the old military maxim:  you can’t send an army where you can’t feed an army, still holds true today.  So when Russia invades Ukraine, while it “feels” like the thing to do is send in the 101’st and 82nd Airborne and the Third Marines and the rest, reality is that Russia is fighting from their home base. Even supplying from Europe, we are a long way from home.

Old Lessons

And there is the critical lesson of the Cold War to consider.  There are three nations in the world that need to avoid “head-to-head” confrontations.  The United States, Russia, and China are all capable of destroying each other, and everyone else, with nuclear weapons.  There is no such thing as absolute military defeat of those nations – because in the last analysis, to back them to that wall means a totally devastating nuclear assault.  

So the “playground” rules don’t quite apply to those nations.  If they act as bullies, they can be countered, but they can never be swept from the field.  The end result of that is too terrible to contemplate.  Vladimir Putin reminded us of that when he spoke of moving nuclear weapons into Belarus, closer to the NATO countries.  With nuclear weapons; distance really isn’t so critical. Our current level of targeting capabilities make proximity unimportant.  But it’s the discomfort of bombs ready to be launched, only fifteen minutes away.

Money Talks

The real lesson of the Cold War, and the fall of the Soviet Union is that it was not achieved on the battlefield.  It was won by a very “American Capitalist” strategy.  The US simply spent so much money, that the Soviet Union couldn’t keep up.  We built missile submarines and aircraft carriers, “Star Wars” anti-missile satellites (that didn’t work) and M1 A1 Abrams tanks.  We raced the Soviet Union to see who could build the “best” weapons, but the race wasn’t about the weapons.  It was about the resources spent to build those weapons.  The US spent nearly 6% of its Gross Domestic Product on weaponry.  

But we forced the Soviet Union to spend nearly 20% of theirs.  It ultimately wrecked their economy, and the Soviet government fell.  the United States won the Cold War by destroying the Soviet economy.

One World

We are a “world economy” today.  We know that gas prices here in Pataskala are likely to go up as the Russian oil supply is cut.   Russia is dependent on the world economy to move it’s natural gas and oil, and to get their computers and cell phones.  If the world stops trading with Russia, the Russian economy will wither and die.

It won’t happen overnight.  It’s a “cold revenge”, not the more satisfying hot action of confronting force with force.   And sanctions work best like a vise, gradually tightening, cutting off sources in succession, over time.  Just when they think things can’t get worse, they do.  So the “west” cuts off some of Russia’s largest banks but doesn’t ban Russia from the world monetary system.  That comes later.  The major natural gas pipelines are closed, but some smaller ones remain open.  The vise will close on them further.

The world will sanction those powerful Russians who support Putin, but why not Putin himself?  Once you sanction Putin, personally attacking his money and his family, how can you then get him to “the table” to negotiate an end to the madness?  In an authoritarian government like Russia’s, if you “take out” the top, there is no one left to talk to.  So Putin is allowed to keep his wealth, as all around him, and his nation as a whole, suffers.  The people of Russia will see that, and grow to resent his “fortune”, literally.  The vise closes even tighter.

Keep Paying

Fighting a long-term war in Ukraine is expensive, and the drain on the Russian economy won’t be financed by Russian oil and natural gas.  Sanctions will dry up those funds, even as the rest of the world adjusts to removing those sources from the market.  The Russian military won’t be able to access the funds they need to replace the bombs they drop, or the replacement soldiers they need to train.

Putin embarked on a military “adventure” in Ukraine this week, for the purpose of fulfilling his own dream of rebuilding the Russian Empire.  As a dictator, he didn’t ask the “permission” of the Russian people, only of the Russian cabinet already beholden to him for their power.  Russians are going to suffer:  economically and personally, as the caskets of fallen Russian soldiers return for burial.  Even if the Ukrainian Army falls, the Ukrainian people will continue to make their captured nation difficult to control.

The Danger

The danger is that before Putin fails at home, he will launch an attack we cannot ignore.  Article Five of the NATO agreement demands that all of the nations of NATO respond to an attack on any one of them.  That obligation has only been invoked once:  after Al Qaeda’s attack on the United States on 9-11.  Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Hungary are all NATO members, and are all at risk of Putin’s expansion.  

Eventually, over months and perhaps years, the final lesson of the Cold War will be taught once again.  The Russian people will suffer enough.  And just like Christmas of 1991, they will make a change in their government.  Let’s hope that happens before Putin puts the world in a head-to-head conflict we can’t ignore. 

What Happens Next

Putin

Vladimir Putin, an authoritarian leader of a powerful nation, invaded a smaller neighbor today.  He’s using Russia’s overwhelming military might to attack the sovereign nation of Ukraine.  There was no “false flag” operation, no trickery.  The missiles fired, the helicopters took flight, the jets dropped their bombs.  It was the first, “punch in the nose”.  

Here in the 21st Century, it hard to imagine what 1914 or 1939 felt like.  We thought we were beyond “tanks at the border” or “occupation forces”.  Wars were relegated to outlaw regimes, strikes against the likes of Saddam Hussein or the Taliban in Afghanistan.  But President Putin of Russia has committed massive forces, nearly 200,000 troops, to the ultimate conquest of Ukraine.  It’s not the “shock and awe” of the 1992 US attack on Baghdad.  It’s the early beginnings:  destroy command and control centers, anti-aircraft sites, and border defenses.  

But even now, the growl of tanks, missile launchers and troop carriers is heard at the Ukrainian border with Russian-allied neighbor, Belarus.   Last night Putin made it clear that this was an invasion, his “first-step” in rebuilding “greater Russia”.  To paraphrase John F. Kennedy in a different era:  Putin is willing to, “…pay any price, bear any burden,” to fulfill his self-described destiny of bringing back the Soviet Union.

Echoes of History

The citizens of Ukraine aren’t “shocked”.  There was plenty of warning.  But they line up at the gas stations and ATM’s, and fill the highways with cars bound away from the city center in Kyiv.  Ukraine is no small nation – as broad as the distance from New York to Chicago, as wide as Toronto to Charlotte, North Carolina.   Even on a normal day, the drive across country takes many hours.  And it’s hard to say where to go – Russian troops are to the North, East, South, and on the Northwest and Southwest borders.  There is no easy exit, no “safe zone”. 

For old history teachers like me, the names echo other wars and times.  Ukraine was the battle zone of the twentieth century.  The “front” between Russian and Austro-Hungarian forces swept back and for across Ukraine in the First World War. In the Second, the Nazi juggernaut battled through Kyiv and Karkhiv and Donetsk on its way to its ultimate disaster at Stalingrad in Russia.  The Ukrainian people bore some of the worst suffering of that War.  And  Jewish Ukrainians faced extinction.  More than 33,000 were killed in just two days at Babi Yar, outside of Kyiv. 

Response

That was another generation, a time we thought was long gone.  But the tanks are lined up at the border.  And the nations of the “west” can do little to help the Ukrainian people.

What can “the west” do? (Using the term “the west” is falling back into old Cold War language, the “west” versus the Communist “east”.  Even Putin’s press secretary echoed that language – saying the Russia “will not live behind an ‘Iron Curtain’”.  And of course, Putin brought back the specter of nuclear holocaust, reminding the world that his is one of the largest nuclear forces in the world).  The “west”, the countries allied in NATO (another reminder of the Cold War), can disentangle their economies from Russia.

We can cut them off.  Russia offers mostly oil and natural gas – we can “bear the burden” here in the United States.   The world oil supply will shrink if we cut off supplies from Russia.  That reduction will inevitably raises prices, even if the “west” can pressure the Saudi’s to increase oil production.   

American Way

The United States is self-absorbed.  We wrap ourselves up in our politics and our social issues.  Even the threat of a world pandemic divided us from each other.  So how will the American people respond to the “burden” of supporting Ukraine?  Even more, what will we do if Putin goes “all-in” and tries to attack those former Soviet states that are in NATO, those that we are obligated to defend by treaty.  

Some politicians and “media personalities” (I don’t know how else to characterize Tucker Carlson) have already taken Putin’s side.  They somehow see common purpose with a Russian Empire, and think they can make political “hay” here in America by defending his aggressions.  So it’s an open question whether the American people will unite against Russian expansion, and be willing to make sacrifices for that cause.

It doesn’t seem like the “American Way” anymore.

The people of Ukraine have made a choice.  They face invasion and occupation, but they are standing against Russia.  How long they will last, it’s hard to say – but Ukraine has a long tradition of resistance to occupiers.  While their government may be driven into exile, it’s likely the citizens will not make it easy on Russia.  And in the meantime – what is the rest of the world willing to offer to protest and defend against further Russian incursions?  What of Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, and rest of the countries who languished behind the real Iron Curtain for forty-five years?

What will the American Way be then?

For the Votes

IF

The Governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, is one of the Republicans who would, “Run for President: IF…”. IF Donald Trump decides not to run in 2024. Abbott has to be prepared, to, like his rival in Florida, Ron DeSantis, step into the “breach” should Trump decide to opt out. Stepping into that breach means that Trump voters, the ultimate controlling authority in today’s Republican Party, will turn to Him as the heir to the Trumpian legacy. And to get that done, both Abbott and DeSantis need to have a record of Trump-like pronouncements and achievements.

DeSantis has “made his bones” in the anti-Covid, anti-vaxxer, anti-masker world.  He is leading the state of Florida in “personal FREEDOM” (please see Mel Gibson with blue face paint and a kilt every time you hear that expression).  That his leadership has cost Florida, the retirement state, thousands of lives isn’t really important.  DeSantis has found his niche in the Trumpian world.  He’s even out “anti-vaxxed” the former President himself.   And he’s made a healthy political profit in the process, “anti-vax” but absolutely pro-monoclonal antibodies.  Florida was the state with drive-thru antibody treatment tents.  After all, the producer of that Covid drug therapy is a leading contributor to the DeSantis war chest.

Compassion

So Abbott needs an issue to stand out in his own way.  And while Texas has made a great performance of tightening their voter laws without evidence of voting corruption, it hasn’t really made the impact he’d like.  Add to that the fact that Texas, with the longest Mexican border in the nation, hasn’t managed to build a wall, or make that traditional Trump talking point into a positive “Abbott” position.  

There’s one thing you may not know about Greg Abbott.  The sixty-four year old man is confined to a wheelchair, the result of a freak accident.  While he was practicing law at thirty-one, the former high school track athlete took a break and went out for a jog.  A large oak tree splintered as he went by, and fell on him.  It shattered his spine and made him a paraplegic.  His own website tells the story:

As he lay in a hospital bed, throttled with incomprehensible pain, doctors worked to piece his vertebrae back together. They inserted two steel rods near his spine, which will remain there for the rest of his life. During his harrowing recovery process, Governor Abbott was reminded of lessons he’d learned all his life, especially the lesson of perseverance.

The last politician in a wheel chair with Presidential aspirations was Franklin Roosevelt. It is said that being paralyzed (Roosevelt as an adult from polio) taught him to be more sensitive, more compassionate, and more aware of disabilities and the unanticipated differences that change lives. Abbott may have learned perseverance from his tragic injury. But, at least on one issue, Abbott is demonstrating his complete lack of compassion.

The Issue

The science of gender has made enormous strides in the past decades. Science now knows that “gender”, male or female, is more than just genitalia and X/Y chromosomes. Gender is determined by the brain as well as the body, and we now recognize the reality of someone with the body of one gender, may have the brain of the other. Even more, that difficult realization comes early in life, often in childhood, and is a significant cause of childhood depression and even suicide.

The experts, the doctors, biologists and psychologists; all recognize this is a valid medical and psychological condition.  But it goes against the “grain” of traditional American (and particularly) fundamentalist Christian views.  As one of my acquaintances wrote on a Facebook post, “Marty Dahlman, it’s not my biological (view), it’s God’s!”  

Parents struggle to help their child who realize they are transgendered.  For those who recognize it early, support for the child can help them avoid the depression and self-destructive behavior that can come from societal condemnation.  And for those who are firmly transgendered, adolescence is a tortuous time.  It’s when the body defines itself, regardless of the brain.  A transgendered boy is betrayed by his own anatomy, developing into a female.

Legal medical practice prevents surgical interventions until adulthood.  But those children can be given drugs that block one side of sexual development, and encourage the other.  It can allow a “boy” to live as a boy, and a “girl” to live as a girl, regardless of their birth gender.  

Bully Pulpit

But Greg Abbott is trying to put an end to that in Texas. And he’s found a “bully pulpit” attacking trans kids. He wants to declare the practice of prescribing those medications as “child abuse”, and require designated reporters, those who by law are required to report to law enforcement possible child abuse, to “out” those children who might be receiving those drugs. Parents and doctors could end up fined or in jail.  

Abbott says he is doing this to “protect” youth.   There are approximately 2.5 million 12 to 18 year-olds in Texas (Kidscount).  In the United States, approximately 0.7% identify as transgender (Williams).  So out of the millions of teenagers in Texas, maybe 17,500 identify as transgendered.  Most are not treated by puberty-blocking drugs, which means that Governor Abbott is making headlines as the expense of less than a thousand children.

Abbott, like DeSantis, has been an advocate of “personal FREEDOM” (blue face again).  And both Abbott and DeSantis have gone out of their way to demand that individual parents determine what their children learn in school (and what is banned).  They wouldn’t want them to be “uncomfortable” by the realities of American History.  But when it comes to determining the right medical course to protect transgendered kids – Abbott KNOWS that the STATE OF TEXAS is better prepared to tell them what medical treatment they should have. “FREEDOM” (blue face), except when it might not win Presidential primary votes for the Governor.  

He’s playing politics by bullying the most vulnerable.

Flawed 

Too Soon for History

It’s far too early to try to write the history of our era.  The three crises of our time:  political and societal polarization, growing world authoritarianism, and the pandemic; aren’t over.  Any analysis would struggle to summarize and evaluate.  Today, we are still in the “play-by-play”, without knowing what the outcomes will be.  To use a sports analogy:  were in the third quarter, and the Bengals are ahead.

But we have learned about individuals:  we can look at their actions and draw some conclusions about human behavior.  The obvious subjects are the leaders, but it’s “too soon” to talk about Presidents.  Donald Trump is such a toxic subject, that even mentioning him in this paragraph will stop some from going farther.  And while Joe Biden doesn’t create the same visceral reaction, any discussion of him will end up being simply current events.  So while those two are fascinating, it’s for another time. Maybe in a couple of decades when the mere mention of their names doesn’t generate emotion. (How old  do you have to be for the name “Nixon” to generate anger?).

We can look at the recent past, the original crisis of the Trump Administration, and learn a lot about right and wrong, success and failure, courage and cowardness.  Our intelligence and law enforcement agencies faced a question. Was the Trump Campaign and then Administration somehow infiltrated by Russian Intelligence?   What is critical for this essay is how two individuals faced up to the question.  Let’s look at them, dropped into the white-hot furnace of Russiagate:  James Comey and Rod Rosenstein.  

Comey

James Comey was Director of the FBI as the 2016 political campaigns began.  A highly accomplished US Attorney from the University of Chicago, he rose through the ranks of the Justice Department to become the Deputy Attorney General under President George W Bush.  He demonstrated a strict moral compass even then.  When his boss, Attorney General John Ashcroft was desperately ill and in the hospital; Presidential Counsel Alberto Gonzalez tried to gain his signature on a 9-11 plan to further infringe on American privacy and rights, Comey literally stood at the bedside and told the man acting in the name of the President, no.  

Comey believed strongly in that compass, and in the inherent strength of the FBI.  So when he saw a “flaw” in the Obama Justice Department, a perceived conflict of interest in the Hillary Clinton email investigation, he took it upon himself to mete out justice.  Instead of following his own agency’s policy of not commenting on investigations or interfering in electoral politics, Comey gave his famous “speech” castigating Clinton’s handling of classified materials, and then declining to proceed with any charges.

Crossfire Hurricane

From a solely FBI perspective, Comey’s compass with correct.  Attorney General Loretta Lynch seemed compromised by her meeting with former President Clinton.  Her Deputy, Sally Yates, didn’t “take charge” of the situation.  So Comey stepped in, to protect the “process” and the FBI.  That he was stepping into the middle of the Presidential election seemed to be a tertiary level concern.

At the same time, Comey was acutely aware that his FBI was investigating a much more serious allegation, that the Trump Campaign was compromised by Russian Intelligence.  Operation Crossfire Hurricane was at full speed, closely monitored by Comey and his Deputy, Andy McCabe.  But as open as the Clinton investigation was, Crossfire Hurricane was one of the best kept secrets in FBI history.  We didn’t even find out about it, until the New York Times printed a story in February of 2017.

Compass versus Scale

Comey followed FBI policy to the letter, recognizing that open knowledge of the investigation would have a tremendous impact on Trump’s chances.  While this met his strict compass, he seemed to be without a scale to measure the fairness of what he was doing.  Every move:  the Email press conference, the secret Crossfire Hurricane investigation, and the final devastating public letter to Congress reopening the Clinton investigation were all “correct”.  But when weighed on the scale of fairness and history, he failed.

That compass needle maintained its strict reading when Comey was asked to pledge “fealty” to the new President, and refused.  The President waited until Comey was across the country in Los Angeles, then fired him by tweet.   Comey, dissed by the President he unintentionally helped put in office, became the symbolic figure who lost his job but kept his soul.  But there remained the flaw:  the strict compass without the scales of justice.  Perhaps that’s the reason that “Lady Justice” is blindfolded. 

Crumbled

The man who helped fire James Comey was Rod Rosenstein.  Rosenstein was the Harvard educated Republican US Attorney for Baltimore, brought in to become the Deputy Attorney General.  He was unwillingly elevated to national prominence, when Attorney General Jeff Sessions, recused himself from involvement in the Russiagate investigation.  That left Rosenstein in charge of the Justice Department for these matters.

Rosenstein got his first taste of Trumpian government, when he was called on to write a memo detailing why James Comey should be fired.  A dutiful lawyer writing for his client, the President, Rosenstein created the document that served as the basis for Comey’s removal.  He later claimed that he didn’t realize that would be its purpose.  But Comey was fired non-the-less.

After Comey was fired by the President, Rosenstein was faced with a crisis in the FBI.  The new Acting Director, Andrew McCabe, was also the direct supervisor of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation of the Trump campaign.  The pressure of those days was obviously great.  McCabe wrote that Rosenstein broke into tears in meetings about what they should do.  The use of the 25th Amendment was discussed – and whether Rosenstein as “Acting Attorney General” in the Russiagate matter might have a vote in the process.  There was even a conversation about Rosenstein wearing “a wire” to get “the goods” on the President.

Only a Face 

Rosenstein seemed to hold firm publicly, and became the “face” of the Justice Department standing against the Administration.  With Comey gone and McCabe conflicted, Rosenstein brought in the highly respected former FBI Director, Robert Mueller, to be Special Counsel in charge of the investigation.  He removed direct FBI leadership, though many of the actual investigators remained.

But the Acting Attorney General than proceeded to hamstring Mueller.  Rosenstein restricted any investigation from going into Trump business, personal or campaign finances.  The old adage from the Watergate years, “follow the money”, was off the table.  Instead, the Mueller team was required to try to “make a case” without financial information.

And Mueller himself established a second standard which restricted the scope of his research.  He determined that regardless of what was found, the President of the United States could not be indicted in Court.  And since it was “unfair” to raise charges without the opportunity for trial, Mueller simply refused to answer any question of whether the President might have committed crimes.

So while publicly Rosenstein seemed to be the “White Knight” standing for Justice, he was carefully arranging for a pre-determined outcome.  Whether he also recognized that Robert Mueller was struggling personally is unknown.  But it certainly didn’t hurt Rosenstein’s apparent choice of outcome that the Special Counsel (Mueller) was in fact, of diminished capacity.

And when Jeff Sessions finally resigned, and William Barr took over as Attorney General, Rosenstein was happy to stand (literally) in the background, and allow Barr to finish the job of torpedoing Crossfire Hurricane and the Mueller Report.   It seems that the White Knight was merely a placeholder, unwilling to risk the opprobrium of the Trump Administration or his fellow Republicans.  

Failed

Two men, one of character, one who merely acted like he was.  In the end, neither “rose” up to the level of the challenge they faced.  One failed from having a too narrow view.  And the other failed by having too little courage.  They both let down our country in a time where we needed them most.

The Games Begin

Nothing Changed

Yesterday, Russian President Vladimir Putin formally recognized the “independence” of two Eastern provinces of Ukraine, and offered them military assistance.  This is “no big news” in one sense.  Russian troops have been in the Donbas region since 2014.  Of course, they haven’t flown the Russian flag or worn Russian uniforms, but they are a major part of the “partisans” that revolted against Ukraine during the Sochi Olympic Winter Games.  

But by formalizing “treaties” with these territories, Putin officially supported breaking off this part of Ukraine.  A high percentage of people in the Donbas region regard themselves as ethnic Russians, with over 70% speaking Russian over Ukrainian.  The historic analogy:  1938, when Hitler decided that a portion of Czechoslovakia was too ethnically German to remain outside of the German Reich.  So he took over the Sudetenland, a move that was formally agreed to in Munich by the other nations of Europe.  We all know where that ended up.

Proportional Response

The NATO countries, led by the United States, have to make a decision.  Realistically nothing on the “ground” in Ukraine has changed.  The Donbas was under Russian control, Putin has just made it official.  But on the other hand, by making it official, he dismantled a part of another sovereign nation, Ukraine.  How will the NATO countries react?

There are “terms of art” when dealing in diplomacy.  The first one is the theory of “proportional response”.  Some in the United States, on both sides of the political aisle, want the US to respond with a full array of the economic sanctions available.  The problem with that:  Putin has almost 200,000 troops, tanks, artillery, and planes surrounding Ukraine on three sides.  None of those who moved across the borders.  So while “on paper” the situation has changed, it hasn’t altered on the ground – yet.

And NATO is NOT committed to respond militarily to an invasion of Ukraine.  The members of NATO are committed to each other in “mutual self-defense” through Article Five of the NATO agreement.  That article has only been invoked once – after 9-11 when the NATO membership rose in support of the United States.  Ukraine is not a member of NATO.  While the NATO countries are committed to aid, they are not sending in troops.

Sanctions 

So if NATO won’t respond with military force to armed incursion into Ukraine, the only tools left are economic. The nations of the world can refuse to interact with Russia economically, including preventing Russia from using the world banking systems.  In addition, Russia’s major exports are natural gas and oil.  If those exports are cut, then Russia will quickly be in an economic crisis.  Cutting those exports will also cause hardship in the European countries, and an increase in world prices.

But all of that might not be enough to stop Putin from invasion.  A “proportional response” would call for a more moderate punishment for changes “on paper” that aren’t real changes “on the ground”.  So NATO countries are working to respond, but not to overdo it.  They are saving more serious responses for more serious provocations.

A New Empire

Putin has made it very clear that he considers all of Ukraine, not just the Donbas, as part of “greater Russia”.  He published a 5000 word essay on the topic not too long ago.  And Putin feels the worst moment in modern history was December 25, 1991 when the Soviet Union officially dissolved.  Clearly his ultimate goal is to reconstitute the Soviet/Russian empire.  His new “treaty” of yesterday, is with the “People’s Republic of Donetsk and the People’s Republic of Luhansk,” echoing the language of the Soviet Union.

If Putin wants Ukraine, and he’s willing to pay the economic and military price, he’ll have it.  Casualty estimates are over 50,000 soldiers injured or killed, with millions of civilians displaced as refugees.  A conventional war between Russia and Ukraine won’t last long, but a subsequent guerilla war will be long and bloody.  And the sanctions will create long term damage to the Russian economy.

And if Putin want’s to further “reconstitute” the Soviet Union, the next steps are now under the NATO umbrella. Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia are all members, protected by Article Five.  And the rest of Eastern Europe, vassal states to the Soviet Union for forty-five years, are also in NATO now.  Ukraine may well fall to Putin, at a high cost in blood and treasure.  But if Putin’s goal is to achieve his new Russian Empire, the cost will be World War III. 

Mind Numbing

Bob Saget

Bob Saget, comedian and star of the 1980’s classic television show Full House, died a few weeks ago.  He was sixty-five, a couple of months older than me, and he was alone in his hotel room after a stand-up comedy show.  Saget died from brain damage caused by a fall.  Originally it sounded like he “tapped” his head, then died in his sleep.  But the coroner’s report showed massive damage from whatever happened to him.  The family has asked for privacy, but there are still a lot of questions about what happened to Bob Saget.

All of that led me to think about how many times I’ve gotten hit in the head.  So here’s today’s Sunday Story, a litany of literal “mind numbing” events.  

Young Knocks

I was three years old in 1959, and one of the most popular televisions shows was Superman starring George Reeves.  To a three year-old there were few options for flying, but the nearest one was the toilet.  So I climbed on top of the seat, and jumped into the air.  Unlike Superman, I didn’t take flight – but I did show some power as I crashed my face into the floor.

My biggest remaining memory of that event was laying on a hospital table staring into a huge bright light, surrounded by darkness.  A masked figure leaned into the light. It was Uncle Howard! – and that’s all I’ve got.  My parents’ friend Howard Shriver sewed my lip back up.  Was I concussed – hard to say today.

But the first for-sure concussion was in 1964. We were at my friend David’s house, wrestling in his bedroom. I’m not quite certain how it happened, probably a “double-bouncing event”, but I took a header off of the bed, and hit my head on the bed stand as I went to the floor. I remember seeing all sorts of exciting lights, then had a serious headache. The treatment for mild concussions hasn’t changed much in almost sixty years. I was confined to bed, in a darkened room. Mom wouldn’t give me much to eat, but I remember being allowed to have all the Coca-Cola I wanted. I was only in there for a few days, then it was back to the world.

Head Rush

It was in sixth grade in 1967 that I nailed my noggin again.  I was eleven, and like many growing kids had occasional “head rushes”.  A “head rush” was when I stood up too fast, or stretched too “hard”, and got light headed and dizzy.  It was kind of a thing that all of us boys had one time or another, and we never thought of it as a problem.  In fact, we had a “method” of creating head rushes.  One boy would take a bunch of deep breathes, then another would squeeze him from the back so hard that the first would black out.  I spent a few moments unconscious on a restroom floor one day. That was a “sixth grade thing” I guess.

Sex Day  

But that wasn’t the bad one.  It was on the day (just that one) we were supposed to learn about “SEX” in school.  They wouldn’t talk about it in class, but there was an evening assembly when we sixth grade boys were brought back to “have the talk”.  We already had a “back of the bus” understanding of the topic, but there would be a film presentation and a lecture.  That was the height of excitement during the day.

So I was sitting in Mrs. Ralston’s class, and I leaned back to stretch.  I immediately got a “head rush”, and I quickly brought my head back to my desk.  But I missed the desk, and went forehead-first straight into the linoleum floor.  I was out cold for a few moments, and came-to looking up at my teacher. She was an older woman, and big – NFL linebacker big. My next memory is her towering over me.   Somehow, (I don’t remember) they got me to the office, when I realized that I couldn’t see anything but colors, swirling in front of my eyes.  I must not have communicated that well, because they put me on the green-scotch plaid cot in the nurse’s office to wait for Mom to come pick me up.  That plaid made my head really swim!

No ambulance was called, but Dad and Mom rushed me to Dayton’s Children’s Hospital, to meet with our Pediatrician, Dr. Harry Graubarth.  By then my vision was coming back, and I realized that my ONLY opportunity to learn about SEX was on the line.  I complained to the Doc that I couldn’t miss it, and he laughed as he gave me a shot.  As I faded out, he promised I’d find out soon enough.

I woke up at home, two days later.  And I had to wait until eighth grade to get the “school talk”.

Wrestle Off

I was a pretty active teenager.  I swam, wrestled, played some football, and, of course, ran track.  In that era before contact lenses and full face masks,  I had the freshman football team record for breaking my eye-glasses over my nose, six pairs.  And since I couldn’t wear glasses in the pool, my flip-turns were always an adventure.  There were a couple of times when I didn’t figure out the wall, and flipped my forehead into the side.

But it was in wrestling that I probably had my next concussion.  I was a junior, defending my 126 pound varsity position in a wrestle-off, when I shot in for a double-leg takedown.  My opponent countered by kneeing me right in the face, smashing my nose to the side.  I hung on for a few seconds, trying to clear my head, then continued the match.  After all, it was a varsity wrestle-off!  I finally won on points, and came off of the mat. My friend Jack asked, “what happened to your nose?” I reached up – and missed.  My nose was no longer straight on my face, but flattened off to the right side.

My Face

It wasn’t bleeding – and it didn’t hurt too much. It was early in wrestling season. So as a fifteen year-old varsity wrestler, I figured that my nose could wait. I showered up, and headed for home, figuring no one would notice. I managed to get through the back door, and into the family room, before Mom dropped a tray of glasses and screamed in her best English accent – “WHAT HAPPENED TO YOUR FACE!!??” Dr. Sidney Peerless was the “nose guy” in town, and was known for working late into the night. I was in his waiting room at 10 pm, and surgery was scheduled for a day later.

I remember laying on the gurney, waiting in the pre-op room.  The guy next to me was still unconscious, and I heard the staff talking about how they had mistakenly taken out all the good teeth and left the bad ones in.  I was glad I only had one nose!

School of Hard Knocks

As I survived into my twenties, I don’t remember too many head trauma events.  But I did have an exciting “head rush” event, at eleven thousand feet on a mountain in New Mexico.  I was sitting uphill from the fire, warming myself on a cold night at altitude.  When I stood up, I “grayed out”.  I stumbled downhill – straight into the flames!!!  Luckily for me, I just kept stumbling, and other than some smoldering rubber on the soles of my hiking boots, and a very surprised look from my trail-mates, no damage was done.  

There was twenty-five years of coaching wrestling, another broken nose, split lips, and several times when I got my “bell rung”.  But my next big “event” was while setting up a cross country course.  Part of that process includes putting fence posts, big steel pipes, into the ground to attach flags and fences.  The tool for putting the posts in is called a post-pounder.  If you don’t know what that is, think about the last cop show you watched in TV.  The big steel contraption they bust down the doors with – that’s a post-pounder.

Posts

The pounder fits over the end of the pipe, and you lift it and drop it onto the post, literally pounding it into the ground.  The only danger is lifting it up too far.  Then the pipe comes out of the “pounder”, and it catches on the edge.  And that’s exactly what happened in the August heat in the back field.  The pounder caught, got sideways, and bounced off the top on my head.  I regained consciousness laying in the sun on the grass, with a stiff headache.  There wasn’t much blood, certainly not enough for stitches, and I could still see straight. So I got myself back to work.  There was a course to setup!

Track coaching too had its dangers.  Our team tents were great most of the time, but always dangerous in high winds.  The tent would flap up, and the poles would come lose, and crash to the ground.  I don’t remember much about the Whitehall Relays one year after getting one on the head, and I almost lost a hurdler at the Conference meet at Hilliard Bradley to pole impact.  But the worst was when a tornado hit our “accordion” tent, throwing it into the air and into the face of one of the Assistant Coaches.  That was a mess.

War Ball

But the final blow was in a track game, and all my fault.  It was a February practice, and we had the gym for indoor track.  The high jump and pole vault pits were inside, and at the end of practice we had a team “war ball” game.  War ball, was like “bombardment”, you tried to knock your opponents out of the game (not out cold) by hitting them with the ball. The team with members still on the field at the end, wins.  But we added a twist, the high jump mat sections as hiding spots in “enemy” territory.

I had the absolutely brilliant idea of jumping up behind the mat, grabbing the top, and throwing the ball, all at the same time.  What I didn’t expect was that the mat would tip over backwards on top of me.  One hand had the ball, the other the mat.  So I went backwards, with mat in tow, right onto the back of my head.   My team didn’t win the game – dammit!

That event was good for about three days of “vagueness” in life.  And the kids who gave me messages (Austin – “I won’t be at practice on Monday”) didn’t understand why I was so mad come Monday when they didn’t show.   I don’t have much recollection about the meet that weekend either.

So I try not to get hit in the head anymore.  And I try not to think about Bob Saget’s accident too much.  I’m just glad that “Google” has all my memory on record!!!!

Talking with a Friend

Generations

I had a conversation with a younger friend of mine the other day.  He asked very serious questions:  why should the United States get involved in a conflict, far away in Eastern Europe?  Why aren’t Russian concerns about being “encircled” by hostile alliances just as valid as our worries about the Caribbean or Central America?  Shouldn’t our European “friends” spend their treasure and blood to deal with Russia, instead of the US standing in as the “world’s policeman?”

Frankly, I am always ready to answer those questions.  I am a “Boomer”, the child of World War II veterans.  That label is an honor, not an insult. My generation was the “prize” that our parents earned with their sacrifice.  I was raised in memories of their world that tried to bargain with Fascism rather than stand up to its expansion.  My parents steeped me in the loss and sacrifice of their generation, of the friends who disappeared in the air or on the battlefields.  They understood that there was no turning away from that fight – it would still come and find you, ready or not.

Realization

But it was his next question that caught me unprepared.  He phrased it a little differently, but it basically went:  how can I trust a government who spent twenty years in Afghanistan to no avail, then simply turned and walked away?  The accusation in his tone wasn’t for the leaving, but for staying with no good result. 

 And today, I watched the Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, lay out the case against Russia in the United Nations Security Council.  His words were persuasive, just as tellingly solid as the last time our highest foreign minister warned of impending war in that same body.  That was an even more respected Secretary of State:  General Colin Powell, laying out the case against Iraq.

Experience

And then I realized why my thirty-something friend was so adamant against war. In his lifetime, Americans went into Afghanistan after 9-11 with good cause, to punish the Taliban and destroy Al Qaeda.  But when we achieved both, we didn’t declare victory and leave. We instead stayed for two decades and tried, using George W Bush’s phrase, to “nation build”. My friend’s compatriots were the last to stand on the ridges of Helmand Province, fighting to no avail.  They are suffering today the devastating mental effects of that war.

 And in the midst of that, we determined to invade Iraq as well.  With all respect for General Powell, who was force-fed bad information at Presidential order: he lied about why we should invade the country.  And while getting rid of Saddam Hussein might have been a laudable goal, we opened up a world of conflict that his iron fist controlled.  The suffering in the region spread, from Iraq to Syria, and continues even today.

My friend has no experiential reason to “trust” that the United States is making a valid decision about Russia’s actions in Ukraine today.  “Where is OUR interest, so far away, in a nation where we couldn’t fight, even if we wanted to?”  He speaks with the authority of recent history, and a podcast fueled omniscience.  I get it.

Doomed to Repeat

But I look at a wider history than just the US military failures of the 21st Century.  In the 1930’s, there were two world powers; both authoritarian regimes, and both wanted to expand their hegemony in separate spheres.  They found alliance in their enemies.  One was recovering from an utter collapse at the end of World War I.  The other was seeking domination of Asia.  

The United States, embroiled in its own calamities, ignored both.  The European nations tried to negotiate with Germany, giving away chunks until there was no choice but to fight.  The United States then stood as the only power facing Japan.  We ended up fighting both, with the Greatest Generation bearing the brunt of the sacrifice.

Today’s crisis in Ukraine is not attempting to “democratize” tribal nations without foundation.  Ukraine is not Iraq or Afghanistan, it is a nation-state wishing to be autonomous from Russian control.  And if it falls, is it Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, next?   Then what? What about China expanding into Taiwan, the Sea of China, the “Pacific Sphere of Influence”?

History would have been different if we had backed Europe, standing up to Hitler at the Anschluss, or at Munich.  What if the world had stood against Japan in Korea, or Manchuria?  But even back then they said, “Where is OUR interest, so far away, in a nation where we couldn’t fight, even if we wanted to?”  OUR interest whether it’s Hitler and Tojo then, or Putin and Xi today: it is better to stand for democracy and against authoritarianism early.  

If not, then you surely will have to stand against it later.

Gold Delayed

Phenom

She’s a fifteen year-old girl.  And she’s (arguably) the best figure skater in the world.  Kamila Valieva is a Russian phenom.  And – she’s tested positive for three different drugs, which, used in combination,  has the effect of increasing endurance by impacting the heart muscle itself.  Sure skaters need strength.  But in a five minute performance, requiring multiple athletic jumps and turns – endurance definitely helps.

If she was a sixteen year-old boy who was legally prescribed an asthma inhaler by his doctor that contained a banned stimulant, they would strip him of his medal and ban him from the Games.  That’s the precedent.  Ask Rick DeMont, the American “phenom” who won the Gold in the 400 meter freestyle in Munich in 1972.   They took his medal away, and sent him home (Daily Advertiser). 

I remember that well – I too was a sixteen year-old swimmer, though nowhere near the class of DeMont.  But I related to doing “what the doctor told me to do”.  I did get to see an Olympic Gold Medal from Munich.  It was around the neck of the fifteen year-old girl who sat behind me in class – Deanna Deardurff.  She won the gold and set a new world record in the 400 Medley Relay.  Deanna was required to compete as a “boy” on our high school team – there was no girls high school swimming at the time.  

That crisis was soon eclipsed – first by the five medal performance of DeMont’s teammate, Mark Spitz.  And then by the terrorist attack on the Israeli athletes that killed twelve.

Banned from the Games

But the International Olympic Committee established the precedent then:  young age is not an “excuse” for testing “dirty”.  You lose what you’ve won, and you are banned from the Games.  Following a doctor’s orders isn’t an excuse either.  And certainly making a “mistake” by mixing your grandparents’ drugs with your own (sounds like a likely story) even at fifteen, shouldn’t get a pass.  We would spank a five year-old for that – do we expect less from a fifteen year-old?

Except – for Kamila Valieva.  She’s already won a Gold Medal for the Russian Olympic Committee in the team event.  Now, she’s favored to win another Gold in the individual contest.  And every other athlete (and all those skaters are amazing athletes) on the ice knows, that if SHE tested positive, she would never be allowed in the building, much less on the ice.

A Russian Problem

The title “Russian Olympic Committee” exists, because Russia has a chronic athletic drug abuse problem. In 2014, even the Russian Security Services were part of cheating on drug tests at the Sochi Games. Russian athletes provided “clean urine” far before the Games. Then they used performance enhancing drugs. When they won Medals, the “dirty sample” was literally passed through a secret hole in the testing lab wall, and replaced with the “clean” sample.

And figure skating has had its share of scandal.  If you’re old enough to remember when the judges held up cards scored 1 through 10 to score a performance, you’ll probably remember the old joke:  “…and the scores are – 9, 9.5, 9, 4 – that was the Russian judge, 9, 9.”  The Russian attitude is always win, at all costs.  The only failure is in getting caught.

The Russian National team has been banned from the Olympics since 2014.  But the “Russian Olympic Committee” can still field contestants, just not under the Russian flag.  And here we are again:  another Russian athlete with a positive drug test, competing in the Olympic Winter Games.  

Unfair Break

Why does she get a “break”?  Why did the International Court of Arbitration for Sport allow her to continue in the competition?  They claim that this could be an “accidental poisoning”, and that the fifteen year-old shouldn’t be held to the same standard as an adult.  They suggest that perhaps the adults, the coaches, should be held responsible, rather than the fifteen year-old (Sports Illustrated). 

Or maybe it’s because she’s on the Russian team.    The American Olympic Team would have banned her from even getting to the Games.  Sha’Carri Richardson never even got to the Court of Arbitration.  She tested positive for marijuana –  a drug with no athletic benefit to a 100 meter sprinter.  She was banned from the US team for a month, by US authorities.  That was long enough to remove her from the Olympic Summer Games in Tokyo last summer (NYT).

Or perhaps the Court is afraid that if Valieva is banned, Russia’s President Putin will invade Ukraine.  That’s not as far-fetched as it seems.  Putin’s actions at the Ukraine border already are on the knife-edge of war, it wouldn’t take much.

So the medal award ceremony has been postponed.  Just in case the Court changes its mind, after the Games are over.  Or Putin doesn’t invade.

The Winter Ends

Sun Rise

This is an old coaching expression – “no matter what the outcome of the contest, the sun WILL come up tomorrow”.  Life will go on, win or lose; so whatever the outcome: take the credit or the loss, and move on.  I know that the Cincinnati Bengals will struggle with their Super Bowl loss.  But I also know that they are incredibly successful athletes, honed by years of effort.  They will suffer the loss, but they will also use that suffering to motivate the next effort.  The sun came up on Monday, so “Who Dey!!”  Get to work.

Klaxons

But it was a more literal sun rise this morning.  Today was a “sub day”, when I struggled to get out of bed to the 5:30 am klaxon alarm. Into the darkness I wandered through the house, and let the dogs out into the back yard.  All of us, three dogs (two slept on) and I, had sleepy, half-closed eyes.  

The dogs wandered back out of the darkness, the icy yard; and quietly waited at the door for me to let them in.  Meanwhile, I downed the first cup of the first pot of coffee for the morning.  While caffeine has an absolute definite physical impact, even the first sip clears cobwebs from my brain.  That must be a matter of “placebo effect”; no way the caffeine can hit my system that fast.

The other two dogs made their sleepy appearance, the oldest smiling with half open eyes.  So there are five, looking for breakfast, waiting for the “treats” of the morning (bits of cheese with the meds, bits of carrots for the rest), their morning hors-d‘oeuvres before the regular meal.  All but one finally ate (really – 5:45 is far too early for a pit bull puppy to eat, especially when she can lay her head to the fire) and then I started to get myself together.

Early Light

By 6:45 I was out the front door, starting the Jeep to warm up against the ten-degree cold.   Then I noticed:  the sky was lightning.  There was no need to leave the porch light on – I could see around the car, and up the stairs.  Spring will come, not the fake spring of  the day after tomorrow when the temperature will approach sixty, but real spring, leaves coming out and grass growing spring.  It’s on the way.

I drive to school into a red sunrise.  Sailors might take warning, but it was beautiful, uplifting.  Sure there’s still a month of snow and ice to go, and this week’s warmup is really a false hope.  But the sun is coming up earlier, and while the geo-physics that create the seasons are inexorable, it’s still good to see the evidence.

Dis-Heartened

Last week I wrote an essay that seemed hopeless.  The extremism that has infected America is using the Covid virus to infect other countries.  Some Canadian truck drivers, anti-vaxxers, are fouling the roads, using their vehicles to block commerce and daily life.  Ninety percent of Canadian truck drivers are vaccinated, so, like the Insurrectionists of January 6th, it’s dangerous to infer a broader movement from the actions of a few.

But millions of dollars poured into Canada to support the protestors.  Extremists here in the United States bragged how much more the “truckers” raised than either of the two Canadian political parties.  But the parties raise their money from Canadians. It is the US extremists, interested in exporting their movement, that are donating across the border.  I suspect most Canadians aren’t appreciative of another American incursion into their lives.

The Canadian Way

The Canadian government is taking it’s time.  No need to provoke violence, they are carefully winnowing down the protestors, getting to the hard core crazies that may require force and incarceration to move them out of the way.  Canada isn’t interested in a spectacle, of Canadian police being beaten with Canadian flag poles (purchased with US money).   So they’ll move cautiously, courteously.  It’s their way.

And there are protests in Europe, the spread of a right-wing nationalism using Covid as the excuse to be anti-government.  I’m sure US money is behind that as well. Steve Bannon is getting his “dream-shot”, an autocratic union of the “white Northern Europeans”.  It’s what he talked about since he emerged as “Trump’s Brain” in 2016.  It was in one of my earliest essays, when “Our America” was called “Trump World”, back in February of 2017 (The Bully and Bannon).  Whether he’s “behind” all this or not, he’s definitely enjoying it.  The sun came up for him, even after the election of 2020.

Robins

But I didn’t publish my sad, dis-heartened essay last week.  It was a day, not a season, and a day I didn’t want to become a legacy.  So it wrote it, and buried it in the files.  Because the sun came up, and the Canadians are handling their extremists in the “Canadian Way”, and Omicron is diminishing, and the Supreme Courts of North Carolina and Ohio seem dead set to making voting districts fairer.  

We’ve had our “red sky” warning.  But just as spring is eternal, so is hope.  So I’ll bury dis-heartened, and believe this morning’s sunrise, and in the hope that we will continue to be a nation dedicated to becoming “more perfect”.  No matter there will probably be a blizzard next week.  The sun will come earlier, and the grass will soon grow.  Last week I saw the robins flocking in my neighbor’s tree.  They are fat – they’re going to make it through this winter.  

And so shall we.

Three Score and Twelve

Dis-Heartened

I’ve been – well – the correct term might be “dis-heartened”.  As any frequent reader of “Our America” probably knows, I  am consistently, some might say overly, optimistic about the future of our nation:  “The arc of the moral universe bending towards justice,” and all that.  And I still believe in American exceptionalism, in the idea that our nation, founded in Revolution by flawed men, can still become a “More Perfect Union”.  

But the “perfecting” is taking a hell-of-a-long time.  Maybe it’s the “Medicare thing”, the idea that at sixty-five, I may no longer see a time when we will be a Nation without strife.  I am confident that the United States will be better, but right now all I see is it moving backwards not forwards.   I’m not so sure how long it will take to change direction again – maybe beyond my Biblical three score and twelve (that’s only seven more years).  

Marching Backwards

We, as a nation, are marching firmly towards the past.  We have a Supreme Court that is turning the control over a women’s body to state governments, many dominated by right-wing male legislators only interested in pursuing their own wealth.   The Court is doing the same with the rights of what will soon by the majority of our Nation, those of color.  And state by state, the white minority is consolidating power.  

The contrived controversy over “Critical Race Theory”, created by the right-wing “think-tank” the Manhattan Institute, has convinced millions of parents their children are unable to “handle” the sins of their fathers.  Just a question:  how can we become a “more perfect union” without reckoning with the imperfections of the past?  Ignoring those flaws, is of itself Un-American.  But don’t dare teach children about those imperfections – or allow them to express their own views.  And they called us liberals “snowflakes”.

Idiocracy

The idiocracy that determines it’s better to ignore a pandemic than follow the science is not just frustrating, it’s immoral.  We are quietly approach 930,000 deaths from Covid,  “the World’s Number One” as a former President would say, and are so divided that nothing will stop us from reaching a million.  I’m reminded of the movie Meatballs, so many Americans are chanting with Bill Murray, “It just doesn’t matter, It just doesn’t matter.”   They are resigned to incapacity, and now are using trucks as the weapons of “FREE-DOM”. They just deny.  They go on with their lives – those that don’t die or aren’t affected by the losses.

There is a commercial for the travel site, Kayak, where they make fun of families split by “Kayak-deniers”.  It’s far too soon to be funny, and far too real.  There are too many families divided and friendships lost, to trivialize by commercializing the division.  I resent the ad, and I resent that it probably amuses folks on all sides of our polarized society.   But, like it or not, it does symbolize our national septicity.  

Don’t Look Up

I didn’t like the “in vogue” movie, Don’t Look Up, either, because I don’t like nihilistic stories without hope.  I didn’t like the popular Netflix series, House of Cards for the same reason.  That’s never been my view of life. But there is a whole lot of “not looking up” going on around here, a focus on internal life to the exclusion of everything else.  

Here in Ohio, a politician took a $60 million bribe from an energy company to get the state to pay for a failing nuclear plant.  And now, two years later, the politician hasn’t been tried for his crime. He’s even thinking of running for office again. And the company is still getting paid by the state.  “Don’t Look Up”, you might see that even the thieves in government are out in the open.  They are brazen, and guiltless, and Teflon.

It doesn’t seem like there’s much “bending towards justice” yet.

Geometry

It’s easy to think – well, just wait for another decade, when the Mitch McConnell’s and Donald Trump’s and, as my younger friends would say, the “old white dudes” will be dead.  But the thrust of our current universe seems to be going in the wrong direction, one of division instead of unity, ignorance instead of knowledge, hate instead of faith.  The arc of the moral universe looks suspiciously like an ellipse. 

I know optimism will return.  I’m subbing in a school, and down the hallway I hear the voice of Dr. Martin Luther King, speaking that last night in Memphis.  He went to the “mountain top”, and saw the “Promised Land”.  After all he had been through, he still had faith in America – the arc bending towards justice. If he could be optimistic in 1968, how can I be less in 2022.

Olympic Miracles

This is another in the “Sunday Story” series.

“That’s right, I start crying. Because another human being, a species that I happen to belong to, could kick a ball, and lift himself, and the rest of us sad-assed human beings, up to a better place to be, if only for a minute… let me tell ya, kid – it was pretty goddamned glorious. It ain’t the six minutes… it’s what happens in that six minutes.” – Vision Quest – 1985

Lunatic Fringe – Red Rider

Sports Fan

I am a sports fan.  So, I was fired up – the Olympic Winter Games (don’t dare call it the Winter Olympics, I don’t know why) started on February 3rd.  I was ready to spend days watching events I know little about, from figure skating to what looks like roller derby on snowboards.  And of course, there is the inevitable hours trying to figure out curling.  It’s easy to write curling off; it’s an inscrutable event.  What looks simplistic from the outside, must be a highly complex skill on the inside. 

The first few days didn’t grab me.   I was waiting for the “Jean Claude Killy” moment.  It was back in the winter of 1968, not the best year of our American history.  The Winter Olympics were in Grenoble, France, and I was an eleven year-old who knew little about winter sports.  But here was this seemingly out-of-control Frenchman, flying down the mountainside. Even at eleven I recognized that the difference between winning and catastrophe, Gold or out, is a razor thin edge. And  Killy, arms flying, seemed bound to crash into the barriers.  But he didn’t – his willingness to put everything on the line brought him the Gold.  That’s a lesson I learned – for sports and for life.

But the first few nights of the 2022 games didn’t have it.  So we moved our viewing away, back to the unending grind of the “news”.  We even read through a whole evening.  (It isn’t that we don’t read, but usually it’s during the day.  Evening reading usually means early sleeping).

Athletic Choices

Wednesday night I tried one more time.  It was the finals of the women’s snowboarding half-pipe competition.  The competitors drop down a twenty-two foot wall into the “pipe” then use that momentum to fly up the other wall – perform flips, turns, and things I can’t even follow, switches and “940’s”. Then they try to land and do it again on the other side.  It’s incredibly complex, and obviously dangerous.  

But what caught me was the choices those athletes had to make.  The scoring is the best of three attempts (a lot like track and field).  If you fall – you fail and that run doesn’t score. The strategic thinking is about how to weigh out the efforts:  go for it all from the beginning and pressure the field or get a safe run in, then build on that momentum.  And, after the first run, the “safe” run, they all got out on that “ragged edge” of Gold or failure.  They tried “tricks” that were so hard that the success percentage was low.  They fell, and yet they went back up and tried it once again.  

Citius, Altius, Fortius

Chloe Kim is the American champion.  Her runs were incredible, tricks that seemed undoable followed by clean landings into another amazing effort.  And when she had won it all, and could just “mail it in” on her final run, she didn’t.  Chloe took her third run and tried tricks that had never been done in competition before.  She tried to raise the standard of her whole event, and to risk that last Olympic moment as a failure.  And she did fail – but in the attempt personified the Olympic spirit – Citius, Altius, Fortius, (faster, higher, stronger) – even with the Gold medal already around her neck.

And after the women’s half-pipe, came the men’s figure skating.  The athleticism involved in jumping, spinning, and twirling on the ice is incredible.  And again, I watched athlete after athlete risk their entire performance, give up the “safe” program, to gain the Gold.  For me, who watches figure skating once every four years, the incredible change is the “quad”.  They leap from the ice, and spin four times in the air before they land.  And it’s not just once, it’s four or even five different quads in a performance.  At least, if you want the Gold.

They fell, one after another.  The only path to Gold was through the quad.  Only one finalist, Jason Brown of the United States, didn’t attempt it.  His was an impressive performance, surely a medalist effort in the 1990’s or early 2000’s.  He knew what he couldn’t do, so he gave everything he could.  He got sixth.

Chen

And then there was the other young American, Michael Chen.  He attempted five quads, four of them seemingly perfect, one flawed but still successful.  And the rest of his performance was incredible, from interpretation to athleticism.  His was the “Killy” moment, when he could take all of his gifts, all of his work, and channel it into a single effort.  He won the Gold medal by over twenty points.  I don’t really know the difference between a salchow and a triple toe loop, but I know an amazing, world class, dedicated athlete when I see one.  Michael Chen is one.

So I’m back watching the Olympic Winter Games.  Last night it was the men’s half-pipe, then the women’s Giant Slalom.  The incredible Sean White made his last Olympic effort, and in true Olympic style, risked it all on his final run.  He was fourth, and it required even more tricks to gain a medal.  He tried and fell:  then showed incredible “class” as he stood with his younger competitors and cheered on the final medalists. 

I’m glad I came back.  They’ll be more sports this weekend – and another athletic oddity– the Bengals in the Super Bowl?  (Coach Sam Wyche’s daughter is bringing his ASHES in a silver football to watch the game – not making that up!!). No wonder the world seems so confused.  But as a Cincy native, an original Bengals fan from the beginning in Nippert Stadium – Who Dey!!!!  Or as a young announcer named Al Michaels said in the 1980 Olympic Winter Games – “Do you believe in Miracles?”

The Sunday Story Series

Whoopi

True Compass

I’ve enjoyed Whoopi Goldberg’s comedy for decades.  And I’ve been impressed with her acting, in The Color Purple and in Ghost, when she won the Academy Award.  But in the end, I know Whoopi Goldberg best from her recurring role on Star Trek, the Next Generation (yes, a Trekkie here).  She played a knowing and insightful bartender in the restaurant/lounge of the Starship Enterprise, who had a special friendship with the Captain, Jean-Luc Picard (purely platonic).  In that role, I always felt that Whoopi played herself; explaining time distortions and alien civilizations and acting as a compass pointing to truth and fairness.

And when I’ve listened to Whoopi Goldberg in panels as herself, that same compass always seemed to come through.  She was direct and clear, and was able to cut to the core of an issue and hold her ground. 

Definitions

So it was with some surprise that I heard last week that Whoopi was embroiled in controversy about the Holocaust.  In this time when battlelines are drawn on almost every issue, the Whoopi Goldberg I knew could never be a “denier”.  And she’s not.  But she has fallen into a rhetorical “trap” about the Holocaust, one that I often had to explain to high school students when I taught about that horrific chapter in history.  I hope that teachers today can still have those conversations with their classes.  But it’s understandable that some may be frozen in fear by our battlefield culture. 

It’s a bit of an esoteric conversation:  was the Holocaust, the murder of six million Jewish people (and four million others) by the Nazi death machine, a racial issue?  After all, Whoopi isn’t wrong, the Nazis were Caucasian, and most Jews were Caucasian as well.  So it was a “white on white” attack, a genocide to be sure (“mass killing of a nation or ethnic group).  But was it a “racial” genocide?

Race or Religion

Jews are not defined as a “separate race”.  After all, people can “become” Jews just like they can become Catholic, at least they can become Reformed or Conservative Jews, not Orthodox Jews.  Traditionally, Judaism was “passed” from one generation to the next through the mother (so, though I am “half-Jewish”, since my Dad was Jewish and my Mom was Catholic, I couldn’t be an Orthodox Jew.  However, the Reformed Temple would welcome me in).   

On the other hand, Jews were isolated throughout thousands of years of history.  At first it was a tribal thing in the Holy Land, but later, it was a cultural/religious law.  Jews could only marry Jews, and outsiders weren’t allowed.  On the other hand, Jews were also persecuted and often isolated by other cultures ( in the Russian Pale, or the Jewish Ghettos in European cities). There was limited interaction between Jews and non-Jews.  So there are “racial” characteristics of those who are “culturally Jewish”, whether they are religiously Jewish or not.  

So “cultural Jews” share genetic characteristics, “looks”, certain diseases, and a long heritage of discrimination.  Whoopi’s not wrong:  Jewish people aren’t “a race”.  But they are more than just a religious group, more than the Southern Baptists down the street or even the Roman Catholic Church my mother grew up in.  She was English, born of a father of Irish descent and a mother of Scottish heritage.  So she was English, Irish, Scottish; and Catholic.  

But in much of the world, Jewish people were considered Jews, who lived in England, or Ireland, or Scotland.  And that reversal in order made all the difference.

Nazi Ideology

The “racial” aspect of the Holocaust was an outgrowth of that difference, and so much uglier.  German Jews fought for Germany in World War I at a greater percentage than regular German citizens.  To those Jews, Germany was their homeland, deserving of defense.  But after the loss of the War, and the economic catastrophe that followed, the Nazi Party used Jews as the scapegoat for all the nation’s troubles.  Jews were “at fault” for losing World War I (they weren’t), and Jews were ruining the economy (they didn’t).  

The Nazi racial theory placed the German “Aryan” race, with proto-typical blonde hair and blue eyes and Nordic descent, at the top of their “racial pyramid”.  And they placed Jews as a “sub-human” race, whose existence threatened to contaminate the “Master Race” at the top.  As the Nazi’s gained power, they began to take action against German Jews.  It started as simply identifying them throughout the nation, then moving Jews out of positions of power.  It was accompanied by a national propaganda campaign to convince the rest of the German nation that the Nazi actions were “OK”.  After all, they were “just” Jews.

Nazis’ Choice

We all know how that turned out.  Of the fifteen million Jews in Europe before World War II, six million died in the Holocaust.  They weren’t the only “racial” group to be consigned to the ovens:  as many as half a million Roma were also killed.  And they were accompanied by political prisoners, the physically and mentally handicapped, and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Whoopi Goldberg might be “technically” right about the definition of race.  But she missed the point.  Her definition didn’t matter in the Holocaust.  It isn’t important to the lost six million.  The Nazis were in power – and they determined that Jews were “a Race”:  one to be eliminated.  To those six million, and to those who understand the Holocaust today, that’s the only definition that’s important.

I hope Whoopi will get the message.

Stare Decisis

Our Courts are dedicated to following “the law”;  and the law takes several forms.  The first is statutory law, laws written by the legislature.  The easiest example of statutory law is statutory rape.  Rape is to have sex with someone without their consent.  Statutory rape is to have sex with someone who is legally unable to consent to sex, do to age or mental condition. That ability to consent is determined in law by the legislature.  So this becomes rape because of the statute, not necessarily by force.

The second form of law is precedential law, better known as “common law”.  It looks back at how past judges decided, and uses those precedents to determine the outcome of current cases.  On my first day of law school, my Torts Professor described an old English case, where two boys were throwing stones over a hill.  On the other side, a man’s eye was “put out” by one of the stones.  Neither the man, nor the boys, knew whose stone did the damage.  But the Court of Assizes found that both boys were equally liable for the damage, as they both were equally reckless.  If I remember correctly, their fathers were required to pay a pig each to the injured man.

That became precedent in English Common Law, which still influences US law today.  The  concept of “Common Law Marriage” comes from this, and  is still recognized in eight states. By simply living together as a “married couple” for a period of time an actual marriage is created with enforceable rights.  Other states have made marriage solely a “statutory” function, requiring a state license.

Precedence

The ultimate form of statutory law is Constitutional law, law written into “stone” in the United States Constitution.   But all laws require interpretation; a determination by the Court of what the written language actually means.  It is in that determination that Courts create precedent, the decisions made by Courts in the past about that meaning.  

Each state in the United States has a “highest Court” that determine the final interpretations of state statutes.  The United States as a whole has the US Supreme Court establishing interpretations of national laws and the Constitution.  Those final decisions are called “stare decisis”, the precedents used to determine how future decisions are made.

Courts in the United States and the separate states are bound by the decisions of similar cases at the highest courts.  And only those highest Courts have the ability to overturn the precedent and establish new “case law”.  Which brings us to the United States Supreme Court today.

Confirmation Pledges

When the last three Supreme Court Justices were being confirmed by the Senate, they all pledged to honor “stare decisis”.  Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett pledged to Senators, including pivotal vote Susan Collins of Maine, that they would honor the decisions made by early Courts.   This was particularly in relationship to the Roe v Wade abortion decision, but was also a general pledge to not “up-end” the law.

Supreme Court Justices received lifetime appointments, as long as they maintain “good behavior”.   Unless a Justice commits an actual crime, they will remain on the Court.  The process for removing them is the impeachment process we became so familiar with during the Trump Administration, and in our current political climate would end up with similar results.  Only one Supreme Court Justice has been impeached, in 1805, and he was acquitted by the Senate of the charges.

So whatever they say in their confirmation hearings, once a Justice reaches the high Court, they are virtually immune from prior pledges.  They are on their own.

The Trump Administration bungled a lot of things, but in one area they were ruthlessly efficient:  appointing federal judges.  In four years 234 judges gained a Federal seat, 177 at the District level (26% of all District Judges), 54 at the Appellate level (30%), and 3 on the Supreme Court (33%).  Ninety percent of Trump appointees, and all three Supreme Court nominees, have one thing in common – membership in the Federalist Society.

The Federalist Society has a common cause, a literal interpretation of the wording of laws, and adherence to the “original intent” of the writers.  They do not believe that the law, particularly the Constitution, changes with time, other than through Amendment.  This “originalist doctrine” is dramatically opposed to the “pragmatists” who see the Constitution as a document to be interpreted in light of current society and culture rather than a strict adherence to its original intent.

Loyalty

The Supreme Court has signaled its intent to change the national abortion precedents, Roe v Wade and Casey.  The six conservative justices do not agree with those decisions, and they are going to change them – stare decisis be damned.  And in the same way, the Court is changing the voter rights in America.  In Shelby County v Holder in 2013, they undercut the enforcement provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. This week, they signaled that they might not uphold the section that prevented legislative districts from racial gerrymandering.  

Abortion regulation will soon become a state issue, no longer a national right.  And voting rights and gerrymandering will also be a “state” problem.  They will make their own determination, even if that puts racism into geographic law (see Alabama’s new maps).  No matter what “promises” the Justices made to the US Senate before their confirmation, their loyalty is to the judicial philosophy of the Federalist Society – originalism.  And that takes “precedence” over everything else.

The Last Time

When someone shows you who they are – believe them the first time – Maya Angelou

Yesterday I wrote a deadly serious essay about the Republican Party, using Maya Angelou’s famous quote.  Today I find that quote applies again – but this is anything but deadly serious.  This is a Monday version of the “Sunday Story”.

Milk

So I’m lactose intolerant.  That sounds like such a “yuppie” condition – “Oh, I can’t have that, I’m lactose intolerant,” as I turn away in my Izod shirt from the ice cream stand at the country club.  But it is a real thing , a problem that I deny only at my peril.  Well, maybe peril is too strong a word, at my “discomfort” is probably a more realistic term.

And I loved milk.  I grew up in a three-glasses of milk a day home.  And it wasn’t that 2% “blue” milk – it was full scale milk-milk.  Milk was perfect with cookies, with dinner, in cereal (with as much sugar as I could get away with).  But even better:  a glass of milk with not-quite-done hot brownies with a spoon out of the oven.  Oh man – that was the “bomb”, worth getting yelled at for taking the brownies out too soon, worth even learning how to make my own so I could have the whole pan to myself.  

When I got older, milk played an important part in my travels across the country.  It might sound odd today, but give me a bag of pretzel rods and a quart of chocolate milk, and I was good for five hundred miles.  I drove from Colorado to Maine, dozens of trips from Ohio to Washington, DC; and to every near and far mountain trail I could find.  And it was always with chocolate milk and pretzels, chomping my way down the interstate with a milk moustache.

Refrigeration

When I got to college, one of the early problems my roommate Charlie and I had to solve was how to keep milk in our room.  There weren’t “community” refrigerators in the dorm (nothing would stay in there anyway), but we found we could rent a small one for $40 a year.  When I went to Denison, I wasn’t a coffee drinker.  I grew up in a British home, and Mom taught me to love tea with milk and sugar.  When I found I needed the caffeine to fuel my college lifestyle, I needed tea, and nothing was worse than “black” tea.  So we got a refrigerator.  

It didn’t work out quite as well as we hoped, and I ended up shifting to coffee.  Since I had no pre-conceptions about it, I just drank my coffee black.  No need to refrigerate anything – and no need for trips “down-the-hill” to get milk and sugar.  At the time, it was just a hot-pot and some Folger’s instant (yuck!!!).  And the refrigerator got filled with other things anyway by the middle of the semester, six-packs of beer with the red warning label – “No Greater than 3.2% Alcohol by content” on the top. 

Discovery

When I first started teaching here in Pataskala, Ohio, it was still a small (almost) rural town.  I was living in an apartment, and my mentor Coach and friend John McGowan, often invited me to his house for Sunday dinner. His wife Mary Grace was an amazing cook, and it was real family-time with John, Mary Grace and their three young kids around the table.  

I loved those dinners.  And I always had a couple glasses of milk, along with the kids.  But, all of a sudden, I began to feel queasy after I came back to the apartment.  It only happened on Sunday nights, and it took a bit to figure out what I was eating that was making me feel bad.  So one night, I switched to water instead of milk, and I made the discovery.  For some reason, unknown to me, I was now lactose intolerant.

The Can’t List

I can do a whole “Bubba Gump” list of the things I can’t eat now.  No ice cream, not even the machine ice cream from Dairy Queen. No milkshakes (or chocolate mint sodas from Greater’s in Cincinnati – my ultimate favorite).  And no cream or milk in my tea – that much will set me off.  And no Cheerio’s with four teaspoons of sugar. I can still eat pizza (whew) and other cheeses, but really rich sauces and soups like lobster bisque or even clam chowder, are out.  And what happens if I “forget”?  Well, my stomach hurts, I’m impossible to be around, and my throat fills up.  I’m not going to “die”, but for the next fifteen hours or so I’m not a happy guy.

So why am I telling you this?  So yesterday afternoon Jenn and I did some snow removal work, and decided to have a beer on the way home.  We stopped at a local restaurant, Elliot’s, and sat at the bar.  It was a cold day, and I decided to have a “stout” beer.  On tap they had a fancy brand, “Milk Stout” from a brewery in Longmont, Colorado called “Left Hand”.  So I had a couple pints of the thick, black, coffee-like beer.

The First Time

Now I thought the “milk” of “Milk Stout” was the thick texture.  But when I got home, all of a sudden, I felt queasy.  Then I started coughing, and spent the rest in the evening in some discomfort.  About midnight, I finally checked out the “Red Hand” site, and found that “Milk Stout” had “just a hint” of lactose.  The brewery promises that it is much less than a glass of milk, and that even the lactose intolerant should be fine – but not so much for me.

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time”.  That applies to beer as well. Milk Stout is – as far as my “fragile” system is concerned – more milk than stout. As Jenn said – “It did say milk on the handle”.   I should have believed them the first time.

The Sunday Story Series

Believe Them the First Time

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time” – Maya Angelou

Talking Point

It’s a recent “talking point” in the mainstream media.  Pundits point out that Donald Trump is losing his influence over the remaining Republicans, often citing the Virginia Governor race.  In that contest the victorious Republican, Glenn Youngkins, espoused Trump-like (lite?) ideas without actually being a “Trumper”.  He accepted Trump’s support, but didn’t let him campaign in Virginia.  The “talking point” is that “new” Republican candidates can appeal to the Trump ideology, but not be “Trumps”. 

This doesn’t seem to be the case here in Ohio. In the Republican Senate primary campaign Josh Mandel, a former State Treasurer and “normal” Republican, has adhered as closely to Trumpism as he can get.  His opponents are trying to be even “Trumpier” than he is. Mandel seems to be holding his own: the latest polling shows Mandel up by 6% on his nearest competitor in an eight “horse” race.

Legitimate Political Discourse

Every time a Republican seems to stray from the Trump-line, they get smacked back into place.  Senator Lindsey Graham is the latest, and perhaps, most frequent victim.  Graham had the audacity to say that January 6th insurrectionists shouldn’t be pardoned as the former President suggested.  In response, Trump called Graham a “RINO”, and said “…he doesn’t know what he’s talking about”.  Graham didn’t mention the former President in his response to that,  but held his position against pardons.

But to really see where the Republican Party is today, simply look at the actions of the Republican National Committee this week.  The Party censured Congressmen Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for participating on the January 6th Committee.  The Party went even further, saying that the events of January 6th, the Insurrection at the Capitol, was simply “…legitimate political discourse”.  They also gave their approval to Cheney’s Republican primary opponent, and promised funds against Cheney in the primary election (Kinzinger is not running for re-election).  

Maya Angelou said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time”.  The Republican Party has shown the nation, over and over again, who they are.  They are the Party of ex-President Donald Trump.  Not only do they fall in line with whatever the current Trump talking point is, but they are completely beholden to Trump financially.   Much of the Committee financing is done over Trump’s name, and Trump is getting his “pound of flesh” back.  In just October and November of 2021, the RNC paid over $720,000 in Trump’s legal bills (ABC).

Outliers

There are still Republican “outliers”; those who don’t genuflect to the former President.  Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitt Romney of Utah, and even Ohio’s current Governor Mike DeWine all fit in that mold.  But all of them are in unique positions to get some independence from the “party-line”.  Collins has just won a new six year term.  Murkowski ran as an independent Republican in Alaska, against a “Party” candidate.  Romney is from a state where his religion dominates, and they don’t approve of Trump. 

And with DeWine here in Ohio, we’ve yet to see how his independence will do.  The seventy-five year old Governor has a long political history in the state, but faces a well-financed primary challenge from Jim Renacci of suburban Wadsworth.  Renacci is following the “Virginia model”, checking all the boxes from banning “critical race theory” in schools to cutting taxes and de-centralizing the state government.  He doesn’t mention Trump in his campaign (and has not received a Trump endorsement), but even his slogan, “Putting Ohio first means putting America first” echoes Trumpian faux-patriotism.

Who Are You

The Republican Party told us “who they were” this week, for the umpteenth time.  They even went so far as to rewrite history, and told us not to “believe our lying eyes” about the January 6th Insurrection – simply “legitimate political discourse”.   They have made a choice, to castigate Cheney, Kinzinger, and any others who stand for something that looks like what used to be the Republican Party of twenty years ago.

It’s not.  And for my Never-Trumper friends who voted for Biden and now feel betrayed that Biden turned out to be a “Democrat”, I am sorry.  We told you what we were, and you determined that it was better than Trump.  By the way, that is still true.

Somewhere out there there’s a core of a National Union Party, a center-right  Kinzinger and Cheney meet Joe Manchin alliance.  But the current Republican Party isn’t it.  This week they told us who they are – a Party that is willing to throw out the US Constitution in order to gain power:  legitimate political discourse at the end of a flag pole with bear spray.  Like it or not, if you call yourself a Party Republican, that’s your Party.

The Brinks Guys

Elements

It takes three elements to prove a crime has been committed.  The first is the actual conduct, the “commission” of a crime.  The second is the intent to commit a crime – the “mens rea” or criminal “state of mind”.  And the third is the act: was the person accused of the crime the “proximate cause”, the reason the crime occurred. 

A guy enters a Seven/Eleven with a gun.  He walks up to the counter and demands money.  The clerk gives him the money in the cash register, and the guy walks away.  It seems completely cut and dried.  The actual conduct, the commission:  going into a Seven/Eleven with a gun and demanding money.  The “mens rea”:  he took a gun into a store to get money that wasn’t his.  The actual “proximate cause”:  the guy, the gun – the money was taken.

Unless, of course, he was wearing a “Brinks” uniform and it was the daily pickup.  The Brinks guy doesn’t have either the intent to commit or crime, nor was an actual crime committed.  But he did have a gun, and did demand the money.

True Confessions

Ex-President Donald Trump has publicly stated that he was looking for ways to change the outcome of the 2020 election. He wanted elected officials to “recount” the votes in his favor.  And he wanted to stop Congress from certifying the electoral votes in 2020, the votes that elected Joe Biden as the next President.  

There were multiple plans to prevent Biden from winning office. “Alternative” electoral certificates (some might say fraudulent) were provided from the states. If accepted, they would have provided a Trump victory.  A second plan called for the Vice President to “throw out” contested ballots that were for Biden. And there was even a plan for the President to declare a form of “martial law”, seize select voting machines, and hold a “do-over” so he could win.

Trump advisors Peter Navarro and Boris Epshteyn came on television and outlined their plan, called the “Green Bay Sweep”,  and how it would work.  As MSNBC commentator Ari Melber, also an attorney, asked at the time – “…Do you realize you are describing a coup?”  

From a non-attorney’s point of view, it seems that Trump, his Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, his advisors Navarro and Epshteyn (and attorney John Eastman and others)  confessed to criminal behavior of the worst kind.  They intentionally (mens rea) interfered with the lawful Congressional process (18 USC §1505), attempted to overthrow the lawful government (18 USC §2385) and interfered with the election (multiple US laws).  

Knock on the Door

So where is the FBI pounding on the door at 5:23 in the morning:  guns drawn, dogs barking, black SUV’s at the curb?  Where is the “perp walk” into the Federal Courthouse, and the preliminary hearings with “Not Guilty, your Honor” and bail set and monitors attached to ankles?  What is the Justice Department waiting for?  Where is the Roger Stone or Michael Cohen images that we all saw in the past six years?  Why did Navarro and Epshteyn go onto a television show and “confess”?  And why is Trump now using rallies to explain his actions – his crimes?  

Intent

The answer is simple:  they do not believe they committed a crime.   They think there wasn’t  intent – the “mens rea” of criminal conduct, and that their actions were, in fact, perfectly legal.  The “Green Bay Sweep” was a simple parliamentary maneuver.  They look back at the 12th Amendment and the contested election of 1876, and believe they just found a “better way” to win the election.  Ex-President Trump believes he was acting within his “powers” as President, and as a candidate for office, by devising any plan to contest the election.  

And – this is the real important part – none of them are willing to accept that they are the “proximate cause” of the attack on the Congress, the violence on the steps, or the vandalism in the building. They all say: they “aimed the crowd and pulled the trigger”, but they did not have the intent for them to attack the building. They only wanted the protests outside of the Congress to try to press Pence and other Republicans to go through with the “Green Bay Sweep”.

Garland’s Dilemma

The Department of Justice has a very long tradition of NOT prosecuting former Presidents or their administrations. Barack Obama did not allow his Attorney General Eric Holder to charge members of the Bush Administration for enabling the torture of prisoners at “black sites”. Gerald Ford went so far as to pardon his predecessor, Richard Nixon, to avoid the spectacle of a US President “in the dock”. Even the Trump Justice Department stayed away from indicting former Obama staffers (though they did go after the FBI agents who investigated the Trump campaign).

The Biden Administration got elected on the theme of “returning to normal”. Prosecuting members of the Trump Administration, much less the Ex-President himself, would be highly unusual. That doesn’t make it wrong, just “against the flow” of what Biden usually would do.

But there is a real question of whether the President’s plans, while completely outside of the norms and traditions of the US Constitutional Republic, were illegal.  And that creates three issues for the Department.  First, how to demonstrate that what Trump, Meadows, Navarro and the rest did was against the law.  Second, how to convince a jury of non-lawyers of that illegality.  And third, proving that the accused knew, or should have known, that what they were doing wasn’t just against the “norms”, but against the Law. 

Were they robbing the Seven/Eleven – or were they simply the “Brinks” guys?  That’s the question Attorney General Garland will have to answer.  

Trip Wire

Bombs

I went to Denison University to study history and political science from 1974 to 1978.  The Vietnam War was just ending, but the larger Cold War was at its height.  The world was poised on the brink between the nuclear weapons of the United States and the Soviet Union, weapons that could destroy the world several times over.  “Moscow in flames, bombs on the way, film at eleven,” was a dark joke with way too much truth to it.

While I learned a lot about the American Constitutional system and the functions of American government, my favorite courses were about what led us to the current crisis of our time.  I took “War and Revolution in the Twentieth Century”, “Modern European History”, World Political Geography”, and “History of the Modern Middle East”.  But my favorite course was “Problems in American National Security Policy”.  The title was too long to explain – so the “shortcut” name for the course was “Bombs 360”.  

Cold War

The “Cold” of the Cold War was really more of a goal:  that neither the US or the USSR would use nuclear weapons to resolve their conflict.  Atomic weapons were used once, against Japan in the actions that ended World War II.  The damage done by those two bombs was comparable to the  conventional fire bombings of Tokyo, Japan (90,000 killed) or Dresden, Germany (25,000 killed).  But Hiroshima (90,000 to 140,000 killed) and Nagasaki (60,000 to 80,000 killed) were qualitatively different.  The Tokyo and Dresden attacks took hundreds of bombers and thousands of airmen to cause the devastation. Hiroshima and Nagasaki each required just one plane, with a crew of twelve, and one bomb. 

The power of nuclear bombs seemed virtually limitless.  By the time I was studying the subject in 1975, the B-52 bombers that took off from nearby Lockbourne Airbase (now Rickenbacker) had four nuclear weapons, each three hundred times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Japan.  Twenty megaton bombs were “standard”, well over a thousand times those first atom bombs.  The Soviets even tested a sixty megaton device.

Attack and Counter

Learning about foreign policy in the shadow of nuclear holocaust was all about maneuvering just short of the nuclear threshold.  Whatever the Soviet Union and it’s “allies” or the United States and its coalitions did, it couldn’t be an action that would “force” the nuclear hand of the other.  The United States tried to develop the “Star Wars” anti-nuclear missile project.  It didn’t work out (thirty-five years later we’re still trying to stop “a missile with a missile”) but if it had, then the Soviet Union might be forced into a “first strike” with nuclear weapons.  The would either use them before they were blocked, or lose their functionality entirely.

But both the US and the USSR played a worldwide game of conventional, non-nuclear military threats, attacks and feints.  The US was involved in the War in Vietnam.  The USSR was supplying the North Vietnamese military and fighting the Americans with Soviet pilots flying some North Vietnamese fighters.  The USSR invaded Afghanistan.  The US supplied the Mujahedeen (Afghan fighters) and ultimately drove the Soviets out.  (And yes, some of those Afghans later fought just as hard to throw the US out as well).

Iron Curtain

But the essential flashpoint of the Cold War wasn’t in Southeast Asia, nor even in Central America (Cuba, Nicaragua).  Those were the points of harassment, but not the real point of conflict.  That was the border between Soviet controlled Eastern Europe and the free nations of the NATO alliance.  That’s where the tanks were poised, the fighting planes were circling, and the thousands of American and Soviet troops stared across the barbed wire and walls.  Churchill aptly named “the line” the Iron Curtain.  

The American, British, French and German troops stood poised to defend.  The Soviet tank corps stood ready to roll.  World War III often was in the hands of junior officers, who might make the wrong move, and create a crisis that could engulf the world.  It was in this era – from 1948 to 1989 — that both the Soviets and the United States and NATO, learned to do “the dance” of Cold War diplomacy.

Reagan

I was never a supporter of Ronald Reagan as President, but there is one issue where he proved to be successful.  The Reagan Administration determined that the United States, with a GDP (gross domestic product) of $3 trillion, could outspend the Soviet Union with $1.2 trillion GDP.  So we began to build missiles and planes, tanks and aircraft carriers, advanced submarines and possible space weapons.  The Soviets might not want to compete economically, but they had little choice but to try to stay “in the game”.  After eight years, the financial pressure wrecked the Soviet economy, and caused the fall of the Communist government. 

When the Union fell, the Eastern European countries under Soviet control gained independence:  Poland, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic and Slovakia), Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, East Germany, and Albania.  Several other European states, integrated in the Union itself, broke away to be independent: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine set up their own governments. 

So endeth the history lesson. 

Putin 

The modern day President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, grew up in the Soviet Union as an up-and-coming member of the KGB, the Soviet spy organization.  When the Soviet Union fell, Putin “morphed” into a successful politician, using his Intelligence skills and making deals with oligarchs who got rich on the Soviet collapse to gain the Presidency.  He has been leading Russia since 1999 (though he installed a “puppet” President in his stead for four years).  His goal is to regain the power of the Russian Empire – the Soviet Union.

There are over 100,000 Russian troops on three sides of Ukraine.  They are poised to strike, to return Ukraine to the Rodina, the traditional Russian homeland.  While there are 170,000 soldiers in the Ukrainian Army, the Russians out-power them in weaponry, technology, and perhaps most importantly, supplies.  But make no mistake, an all-out invasion of Ukraine by Russia wouldn’t just be video of tanks streaming towards Kyiv.  There would be a fight, an ugly fight, that wouldn’t end when the Russians inevitably took nominal control.  The Ukrainians are already prepared for an insurgency after a Russian takeover.

Putin’s Dream

So if Putin is determined to have Ukraine, he will have it.  But it will have a cost, not just in Ukraine itself, but in the NATO reaction throughout Europe.  Russia is facing huge economic sanctions that could detach them from the world economy.  And NATO is making it clear:  while Ukraine is not a part of NATO, many of the other former Soviet states are, and NATO will defend them from attack.  Need a demonstration of that resolve?  3000 additional US Troops are shipping to Eastern Europe now.  They are a “trip-wire”:  attack them and “all bets are off”.

Vladimir Putin is a skilled negotiator.  It may be that he is simply playing out a “bluff”, that, with the right incentives, can be called off.  And the Biden Administration and NATO are giving him both some incentives to back down, and punishments if he chooses not to.  In the end, it comes down to whether Putin is “just” looking for an edge, or is determined to fulfill his dream of rebuilding the Russian Empire.  

The Cost

But Putin is also aware of why the Soviet Union failed.  Russia’s 2021 GDP was $1.7 Trillion.  The European Union GDP was $17 Trillion.  And the US 2021 GDP, was $23 Trillion (because you want to know:  China 2021 GDP $18 Trillion).  So while Putin may have more tanks and planes than Ukraine, he is in no position to “win” an economic war with NATO and the US.  

It’s not really about what Putin wants – it’s about the resolve of the US and NATO to protect those Eastern European states.  And it’s probably not a “blood” issue – it’s an issue of treasure. Will NATO allies will  spend enough of their treasure to “buy” the poker game that Putin is playing?  

And that’s an old “Cold War” maneuver.  Thanks for the solution, Mr. Reagan.

Fair and Balanced – 2022

Two Sides

There are two sides to every issue – that might be the “theme” of this third decade of the twenty-first century.  And if you take one side, you aren’t supposed to “listen” to the other.  Take your stand, choose a side, make up your mind:  then don’t let an ounce of doubt ever make you question.  And go find “affirmation”, information that wholly supports your view. 

Like it or not, the motto of Fox News, “fair and balanced”, is what’s supposed to happen.  Not that Fox News has ever been “fair and balanced”.  Like a line out of Orwell’s 1984, where the Ministry of Truth does nothing but spout propaganda, Fox News tries to take the high ground with their motto, then tells their tales of a biased world.

Fair

Fair means to tell both sides of the story.  That’s the original “two sides” to every issue.  There are “Gen X and Z” directed news shows, that make a big deal about letting their viewers make up their own minds.  They present the two sides, and then leave conclusions to someone else.  And that sounds eminently reasonable.  But it presumes something that often isn’t true:  that the audience has the expertise to understand and analyze the “two sides”.  

That plays into the conceit of the Google (or Duck, Duck, Go wouldn’t want to be tracked) generation.  They can become “experts” in any field, with a few clicks on the mouse and fifteen minutes on YouTube.  And that “faux” expertise makes them vulnerable.  That’s a flaw, whether it’s in Cheddar News or Fox News itself.  

Balanced

 Then there’s the falsehood in the second part of the motto: balanced.   Fox always “balances” it’s new analysis with “liberal” voices.  Juan Williams was the original.  A well-known NPR commentator, Juan was ultimately fired from NPR for his association with Fox.  He was the “one” on the panel, maybe the “one” liberal, maybe the “one” black man, that created balance.  But Juan’s balance was often, maybe always, drowned out by the chorus of “right-wing” voices on the other side.

And before you start writing your rebuttal, I’m well aware that some of the NBC news shows do the same thing.  Meet the Press often has two liberals, two “neutral newscasters”, and one conservative on their panels.  And those conservatives serve the same purpose as Williams does on Fox, to be the counter-point to the more liberal views of the others.  Rich Lowry, editor of the conservative National Review often plays that role.

So we can agree that both sides create a “faux balance” in some of their news shows.  

Preponderance of Evidence

But there is a more subversive form of balance, one that plays into the “internet expertise” so prevalent today.  For example, let’s talk about a subject most folks agree on:  climate change.  A fair newscast would present “both sides”, the scientists who carefully explain why human action is causing rapid climate change, and the scientist who says it’s all “just nature” and we’ve been here before.

But a balanced newscast would present the ninety-nine scientists who know that climate change is exacerbated by man, and then the one who disagrees.  That’s the real “balance” in the scientific community – the vast preponderance of climate scientists who can demonstrate humanity’s role in climate warming, versus the few “outliers”.  The outliers may be amplified by the massive industries, particularly oil, who finance their media campaigns.  But in the end, there are very few climate scientists who believe that climate change is natural without a major human component.  

Internet Expertise

Of course the debate doesn’t happen that way.  And since the climate scientist and the climate denier are “head-to-head”, they apparently start on an equal footing.   And that’s the problem.  Because when you look at the vast majority of science, they aren’t.  But since we can all be “climate experts” with a click and a view, we can pick and choose our “affirmative” data, or follow our trusted commentator’s opinion (even after he says that he doesn’t have “a side”).

While climate change may ultimately be the greater threat to humanity, and should be the center of scientific debate, that’s not what our current scientific crisis is about.  We all know the scientific “sides” we are taking.  It’s not about the atmosphere, it’s about the virus.

Set Up

We’ve been set up.  

We are told we can become experts ourselves, just by watching a YouTube video, or reading a synopsis of someone’s theory.  And as we invest our time and brain-width trying to understand virology (you could replace that with “rocket science”) the years of study  required gets condensed to a one hour podcast. And we believe.  I get it.

I’m a pole vault coach.  I’ve spent over forty years teaching and learning about the event.  I’ve “apprenticed” with some of the best coaches in the nation.   And I’ve had thousands of vaulters to teach, coach, and learn from.  The technique of pole vault I teach is proven to be effective, and not just by me (want to check that out – Ohio Pole Vault Safety).

But you can click on the internet, and find so-called experts teaching pole vault like they know what they’re doing.  And what they’re doing could ultimately get someone killed.  It’s dangerous, and even more so because they say:  “Just follow our internet instructions and you’ll be great!!”  You won’t be, you’re more likely to be broke (financially and physically).

I won’t in any way advance their cause, so I won’t publish the website.  But if it can happen in something as esoteric as pole vaulting, what about something as politically volatile as the Covid vaccine.

In my way, I’m trying to make pole vaulting safer.  The real “experts” in the field are with me.  And none of us learned how to coach from a website or YouTube video.  Maybe we should all be listening to the vast majority of experts about vaccines (and climate change) as well.