Category: Uncategorized

Rock Hard Conservative

She’s a conservative, standing in the way of many of the programs I would like to see our Federal Government create.  She’s led her Republicans, the party of “obstruction” for the past several years, and she helped them oppose liberal change.  And she stood in line with the legislative agenda of the Trump Administration.

And she’s a Cheney, daughter of the former Vice President, and generally channels his views.  Vice President Cheney was a “Neo-con”, pushing us into an unnecessary decade long war in Iraq and shifting the rationale that kept us in Afghanistan for over twenty years.  He betrayed the morality of the United States, putting torture and perversion “in play” in American foreign policy.  Remember Abu Gharib?  It was a direct consequence of the decisions of Dick Cheney.  And while Donald Trump damaged America’s standing in the world, Dick Cheney did even more.  He began from a  position of high moral standing, a nation suffering a surprise attack on 9-11.  The world stood with us. And he blew it.

So in the end there’s not a lot about Liz Cheney that I like.  But that doesn’t mean I don’t recognize courage when I see it.  And I see it in Liz Cheney today.

Voters

I’ve spent several essays trying to understand why the Republican Party stands with Donald Trump, after the “Big Lie” and the Insurrection.  In the end the conclusion is clear:  Trump controls the Republican primary voter, and regardless of what the leaders of the Party “know in their hearts”, they can’t stand against their voters.  Instead of saying “out loud” what they seem to constantly say behind closed doors, the pay public obeisance to Trump and the Trump lies.  

As South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham openly said, he can see no way forward for the Republican Party except with Donald Trump.  So Graham “cleaves” to him.

Liz Cheney does not.  She reached the clear (and obvious) conclusion that Trump encouraged the Insurrection, and attempted to overthrow the Congress.  It’s the same conclusion that most other Members of Congress, Democratic and Republican, reached that night when they returned to a battle-littered Capitol Building to certify the Electoral vote for Joe Biden.  It is the same conclusion that Graham voiced that night on the Senate floor. 

In the Wind

But unlike Graham, or House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, or a multitude of other Republican members, Liz Cheney didn’t “put her finger to the wind” to see what side to support.  While the vast majority of her compatriots in the GOP “crab-walked” their positions over to support the former President, Cheney stuck to what she saw, and what she experienced.

In this day of rampant expediency, Liz Cheney is showing remarkable courage.  She is standing by her beliefs, regardless of the political consequences.  Today, it is likely she will be removed as the leader of the Republican Caucus in the House of Representatives.  She will be replaced by Congressman Elsie Stefanik of New York. Unlike Cheney, Stefanik is much more moderate in her political views.  But she made a decision two years ago, in the first impeachment trial of the then-President.  She determined that her votes, and her financing, were dependent on supporting Trump.  So from a candidate who in 2016 wouldn’t even name him, only calling him the “Republican nominee”, she became a full throated, Jim Jordan-like Trump apologist.  

Stefanik knows which way the Republican winds are blowing.  She altered her course, and her ideology, to fit the current model.  She doesn’t stand for much, except being on the “winning side”.  And for that – today she will be rewarded.

Pay the Price

Cheney stands for what she believes.  And for that – today she will pay the price.

John F. Kennedy, a hero himself in World War II, wrote a book in the late 1950’s.  It was about eight United States Senators who showed a different kind of courage, the courage to risk, and lose, their political careers for ideas they believed in.  The book was about moral courage rather than physical courage, and Kennedy titled it Profiles in Courage.  That title has become a watchword today, to contrast political expediency over political fortitude.

I don’t agree with Liz Cheney on almost every issue.  But I know courage when I see it.  And Liz Cheney is a “profile in courage” today.  

Suburbs

 I know suburbs.

I was born in Clifton, a residential section in the City of Cincinnati just north of the University, and lived there my first five years.  Dad was working his way up the television management ladder, so we moved a lot after that. First it was to the suburbs of Detroit for a year, in Bloomfield Village.  Then it was back to Clifton for another two years.  Next Dad went to WLW-D in Dayton, and we moved to suburban Kettering, for five years.  And finally it was back to Cincinnati, this time to Wyoming, a suburb north of town, where I finished out high school.

So while I lived a little in the city, most of my developing years were spent in the suburbs.  When I graduated from Denison University over in Granville, I took a job at Watkins Memorial High School.  At the time I thought Watkins was “in” Pataskala, and Pataskala was “out” in the country. 

Lost Countryside

My mistake.  It was 1978, and the Southwest Licking Schools (the name of the school district where Watkins Memorial is located) still echoed from its cataclysmic beginnings in the 1950’s.  Southwest Licking was a consolidated district, an uncomfortable combination of Etna, Pataskala and Kirkersville Villages schools.  The High School itself was located in Etna Township, and strategically placed almost equidistant from the three early village buildings (2.6 miles from Pataskala school, 2 miles from Etna, 2.5 miles from Kirkersville – it mattered).  And it also included Harrison Township, another governmental entity, which was part of the original Pataskala Schools.

Back then there was still talk about the “Etna” position on the eighth grade boys basketball team, and how Pataskala “kids” were different from Kirkersville “kids”.  Watkins was just ending the era of being a “rural” school.  The Future Farmers of America (FFA), a group that dominates rural high schools, was fading out.  The corn field behind the school, maintained by the FFA, only lasted until the end of the 70’s.  It soon became a practice field, subsumed into the building expansion of the early 80’s.  Southwest Licking was becoming a suburb of Columbus.

Welcome Change

And for a while, the area welcomed the changes.  Roseberry’s Grocery replaced the My Little Market in Pataskala.  Etna Market had great pizza and limited selection.  But soon Cardinals bought out Roseberry’s and built  a true “Super Market”.  The High School marching band played at the opening of McDonald’s on Broad Street in Pataskala, a harbinger of real changes in our community.  

And then Kroger’s came in – plowing under the farm equipment sales place and the fields around it.  With Kroger’s came more mass housing developments and the race was on.  How many residential homes could they build?  How many houses can fit in a single acre of former corn field?  And how will the volunteer fire department (if went professional) and the local police (they expanded) deal with the huge influx of folks?  The Etna Market shrunk to just Etna Pizza, and then closed its doors.

Industrialization

The “Village” of Pataskala merged with a neighboring township – but not Etna or Kirkersville or even Harrison, with their shared old school district.  It merged with Lima Township, with a wholly different school district.  The “City” of Pataskala now split loyalties to two different school systems – Licking Heights and Southwest Licking.  And while the “City” has held off a lot of big industry, Etna Township embraced it full force.

Drive down the National Road – US 40.  Actually, don’t do that right now, they are tearing it up and putting a new road down.  That’s because the number of warehouses (now called “distribution centers”) including the literal miles of Amazon Buildings are attracting thousands of semi-trucks and trailers each day.  They are stressing the roads all around Etna beyond their abilities to hold up.  What used to be some suburban developments surrounded by farm fields are now houses dwarfed by the giant concrete walls of the distribution centers.  Kids on bikes stay in the confines of their developments – there’s no safe crossing of US 40 or State Route 310.

Interstate Service

The nearby interchange of SR 310 and Interstate 70, the subject of rumored development for decades, is finally “blooming”.  It’s not just another McDonalds, a Speedway and a BP.  Now it’s a Love’s Truck Stop, and rumors of a motel and a “better than fast food” restaurant.  The two lanes of SR 310 through old Etna now is four and five.  The old town precariously clings to the expanded edges of the highway, semis roaring through.  Even the old Etna School, long empty of children, is now half gone.  It became unsafe, bricks falling off the walls – and the District tore the “old building” down.  Only the more recent (1930’s, 1960’s) additions are all that’s left.

And what of the remaining farm fields in Etna, and soon Kirkersville?  Their value is so much greater as “developmental” land than as growing fields, it’s almost impossible for farmers to stay.  One large farm will soon be hundreds – that’s hundreds of homes.  All of that traffic will somehow merge onto two-lane country roads, then funnel onto SR 310 – more traffic, more kids in schools, more sewer plants:  more, more, more.

On the Cusp

This community (Etna Township, Pataskala City, Kirkersville Village, and Harrison Township) is on the cusp.  There are the “hard-liners” who moved here to “be in the country”.  But that ship sailed with the end of FFA, and My Little Market – we ARE the suburbs now.  But what will we be next?  Etna has committed to industry AND suburban development.  Pataskala City is more cautious, but covets the tax base that industry brings.  Harrison Township is stubborn – housing only.  And where goes Kirkersville?  No one is sure.

There are still a few farms left.  Facebook explodes when the farmers fertilize their fields (manure) or drive combine harvesters down the road at rush hour.  But their time is ended – and they know it.  We are suburban Columbus, like it or not.  How our multiple communities will deal with the changes: two school districts, two sewer and water districts, and four municipalities, all with conflicting plans and goals – leaves our community “writ-large” at a loss. 

The “cusp of change” looks a lot more like the edge of a cliff, with four different governments arguing whether to hold each other up, or push each other over the side.  But, in the end, they will jump – together or separately. 

 It’s all about the landing.

It’s National Teacher Appreciation week – and I appreciate it!!!  I spent twenty-eight years in the classroom (and another eight in the front office) so I know a bit about schools and teachers.  As the “Dean of Students”, I grew to respect even more what my compatriots did “when they could close the hallway door”.  There were miracles of interaction, intervention, and inspiration. 

But behind every teacher is sixteen years or more of being taught.  We were students first, and it’s out of those experiences that we came into “our” classrooms.  Hopefully, we were inspired by the great teachers we had.  And we also learned from those teachers who, for whatever reason, failed to make the mark.  For me, there were two teachers that made a tremendous impact on my life, literally forming my career.

Van Buren

The first will be a surprise to those who know me.  I was an eighth grader in Van Buren Junior High School in Kettering, Ohio, when I discovered the impact that a great teacher can have.  I was a “math block” kid.  Put me in a social studies or English class, and I would sail along.  Even in biological sciences I did fine.  But put a chalkboard and a math equation in the front of the room, and I was bound to struggle.

I don’t know where that came from. Dad and my oldest sister were math whizzes, but for me math was always hard.  Perhaps it was because math, like foreign languages and learning a musical instrument, required drilling and repetition to “get”.  And I was never a great driller – ask my trumpet teacher.

And then there was my seventh grade math teacher, the model of the teacher I never – ever – ever wanted to be.  She was old (probably my age now), and an old-school teacher.  She had no problem taking a kid in the hall and shoving him up against the locker to make her point: doing social studies in math class was unacceptable.  But more importantly, she could take a subject that I didn’t like, and make it as boring as possible.  By the end of that year in math, I was ready to never see a number again.

Coach Weikert

Then the next year, I was in Mr. Weikert’s class.  Doug Weikert was a young teacher, in his early twenties when I had him.  And he found a way to make math “easy” and understandable.  But more importantly, Mr. Weikert cared about you – and because he did, you wanted to learn and improve for him. 

I can’t say I got “A’s” in math all year, but I did manage to get ‘B’s.  And more importantly, I discovered that a good teacher can overcome all sorts of obstacles, including “math blocks” and the indentation of a locker combination on a thirteen year old’s spine.  

It didn’t hurt that he was a track coach, though I didn’t get to run for him until the next year.  And looking back at that, I wonder how much that influenced what I did in my career.  After I left his class, I fell back into “math block” world. No math teacher ever really measured up to him.  But he made me see what was possible.

We moved out of Kettering after ninth grade, and the next time I saw Coach Weikert, it was at the State Track Coaches Clinic.  He was the track coach at Kettering’s Fairmont High School by then, and I was into my career at Watkins.  And even later, I discovered that he painted the markings on tracks for his “summer job”.  One summer I found him on “my” track here in Pataskala.  Somewhere in all of that I know I thanked him for his example, but I don’t think I made too big a deal of it.  I should have.

Doug Weikert passed away in 2015, young at sixty-eight.  But he always served as the example for me of what one teacher could do by “just” doing his job.  Listening to folks from the Dayton area, I know he made a whole lot of people better students, athletes, and human beings as well.

Wyoming

The teacher who most impacted my life was in my senior year of high school.  I was a budding student and politician, steeped in the middle of the Watergate crisis.  And then I met Ms. Bolton (it was definitely Ms. not Miss), fresh from Wooster College.  Eve was an amazing teacher, inspiring in the classroom.  And she was an amazing mentor, willing to introduce a student into the “real world” of politics.  She campaigned for Ed Muskie in 1972, and was just beginning her long alternative career in Cincinnati politics as well as teaching at Wyoming High School.  She’s still in elective office today, forty-six years later.

So I learned from her in the classroom, and I learned even more about politics on the Frank Davis for Juvenile Court campaign and later on Eve’s own campaigns for office.  And she even got me involved in her first years of creating the now legendary Wyoming High School drama department.  

Eve Bolton inspired me as a teacher, and as a political mentor.  She taught me, more than anything, that if you want something, you’ve got to work for it.  And she served as a “safe haven”.  In an era where America was politically divided as much as it is today, I was on the “wrong side” of politics for many of the Wyoming social studies staff.  Eve couldn’t protect me from my own statements in Mr. Wagner’s government class, but she did let me know that while my timing was terrible, my sentiments weren’t “wrong”.  

When I went into a classroom as a young teacher, I wanted to teach like Eve.  I wanted to inspire kids, to make them feel like that could achieve whatever they dreamed.  I hope I came close.  If I did, it was because of the inspiration of Eve Bolton.

And I also took Eve’s example for building a school program.  She showed me that you could be a track athlete, a swimmer, a member of the Thespian society and on the State Social Studies team.  She supported the football team with the same enthusiasm as the next one-act play done “in the round” in the school cafeteria.  And she made sure students had access to both.

My last political campaign was for Eve, as manager of her first run for Cincinnati City Council.  I then determined to leave my brief sojourn at Law School, and go back to teaching at Watkins.  It was 1982, and we lost contact, so I never really got the opportunity to tell her how much she influenced my life.  I hope somehow this essay finds its way to her – I just want to say thank you for setting the example for my career and my life.  You were THE teacher that made a difference.  

I definitely appreciate it.

Texas Says It All

In Texas they made it clear.  They said the real meaning “out loud”.  They were voting to preserve the “purity” of the ballot.  For anyone with an understanding of the history of racism in the United States, the word “purity” is loaded with intent.  There was “purity” of the slave-owning Founding Fathers, the “purity” of the Southern Cause in the Civil War, and maintaining the “purity” of the white race.  And the original, most insidious use of the word, maintaining the “purity” of white women, supposedly so “vulnerable” to defilement by Black men.   So they said, and used the word “purity” to try to maintain first slavery, then the Black Codes, the Jim Crow Laws, and now the White Supremacist organizations that purport to defend American “purity”.  Lynching was about “purity”.

And who was voting for “ ballot purity”?  The 2021 Texas State Legislature, voted for a law supporting additional restrictions on the voting process.  They claimed to be protecting the “security” of the vote from their own made-up threats of voter falsification.  They created a false problem to pursue a malevolent solution.  There is no voter fraud, no ballots brought in from Asia with bamboo in the paper, no “Big Lie” numbers added into the counts of inner-city precincts. But because they’ve invented these problems –  they are going to solve them.  That solution is to take action to keep people of color from voting.  They want the ballot pure – purely for White people that is.

Not Fooled

To folks in the suburbs (like me) some of these solutions seem to be “no big deal”.  So you have to re-request absentee ballots for each election.  And the “drop boxes” for early voting will only be open on weekdays during business hours.  Oh, and they won’t be boxes, there will be one per county – even if the county contains Dallas, a city of 2.63 million.  And there will be less early voting days, and fewer locations to vote.

It doesn’t seem like a big deal – until you deal with the economics.  Let’s think about a hard working single mom, whose got a day-job:  forty hours a week plus overtime.  She’s already struggling – paying a big chunk of her paycheck for daycare costs for the kids.  So trying to get to the polls on election day – well that’s a tough process.  She doesn’t get a “day off” for voting, and she can’t get it done on her thirty minute lunch break.  The polls are farther away from her home, “consolidated for ballot security and efficiency”.  And they close earlier, making it even harder to get there.

To the Polls

So early voting is good for her – as long as the early voting have hours that aren’t her working hours.  Restricting those days and hours makes it tougher – and you can’t take the kids to stand in line for hours.  And since those ballot locations are fewer, it requires public transportation.  That’s an actual financial cost – a form of poll tax in reality.  And one “banker’s hours” drop off box – for all of Dallas?  What the likelihood that she can get to that?

So she should vote absentee – mailing the ballot in.  But Texas has increased scrutiny of ballot signatures, allowing workers to compare the ballot envelope signature to any past signature on file with the state.  Think about that, an early signature from a new young voter might be compared to one signed on a ballot twenty years later.  It makes it more likely that an untrained election worker might throw out a legal ballot.  And if that happens – there is no legal recourse for the voter, no appeal process (but, if the voter has internet access, they can track the ballot to see its been tossed).  

Who Is Impacted

These kind of voting laws make it harder for everyone to vote.  But they are deceptive in that the impact of those laws are much greater on folks with lower incomes, and in fact, people of color.  And since people of color are much less likely to vote for Republicans – well we know the real “purity” the legislators of Texas are trying to get. 

Arizona, Georgia, Florida, Texas: the litany of voter “integrity” measures rolls on. But here in Ohio, with the election machinery already dominated by Republican appointees, you might think that we’d be above all of that. But then there’s this:

“Legislation introduced in the Ohio House calls for prohibiting placement of ballot drop boxes anywhere but at a local elections office, eliminating a day of early voting, shortening the window for requesting mail-in ballots and tightening voter ID requirements” (AP).

I guess some Republican legislators in Ohio who think we need more “purity” here too. 

Et Tu, Ohio?

“Morning Joe” is cable news MSNBC’s morning show.  For three hours from 6 am, former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough (“Joe”) and progressive news analyst Mika Brezhenski along with Willie Geist and a cast of regulars analyze the news and events of the day.

Open Microphone

Joe and Mika –  Please stop.  You’re doing it again.  It’s like an addiction: “I’ll just have a little bit, just a couple of drinks – what can that hurt?”  And if you hadn’t already been down the hole, down the bitter catastrophe of 2016, maybe it wouldn’t hurt.  But you were.

You put a charlatan on the map.  You gave him literally millions of dollars of free air time in 2015 and 2016, enough that he was able to “call in” and make himself a legitimate Presidential candidate.  To use the language of addiction – you were enablers, giving him the free podium to America.  In religious terms, you gave him the “imprimatur” of respectability.

And it made your ratings.  Because the half-hour conversations, even when Joe got the chance to chastise and harangue, confirmed your show as the premier cable morning program.  Those who supported his fraud, well they watched to hear what he said.  And those that scoffed at his candidacy, well they watched too.  They watched to hear him make a fool of himself, and to hear Joe condemn him, and to hear Mika’s sly commentary about what he said.  

His supporters saw him as courageous, coming onto MSNBC, the ultimate enemy.   And the “haters” laughed in their sleeves.  “Was this the best the Republican Party could do?  Listen to Joe chastise and control him on the phone line”. But who is laughing now?

It’s A Choice

It was more than five years ago.  But you, Joe and Mika, are falling into the trap once again.

I am an addict myself.  MSNBC goes on at 6:30 am (Eastern) in my house, and it stays on most of the day.  It is the background to our lives, whatever else we are doing.  It’s on right now, even as a write this missive.

Joe Biden is doing good things.  He’s crossing the country, reaching out beyond the Congress to convince Americans that rebuilding our infrastructure is a critical.  It  shouldn’t take much convincing:  drive any highway and you’ll know there’s work to do.  My MSNBC flickers multiple times a day – it’s coming from the internet, and there’s always a glitch, a momentary pause.

Biden’s doing the “good work” of reuniting families cruelly separated at the border.  He’s getting more and more Americans vaccinated against COVID.  And he’s bringing consistency and strength back to America’s image in the world. 

Joe, Mika:  talk about that.

It’s the News 

Sure you have to cover the fate of Liz Cheney, and the “Big Lie”, and election suppression in America.  But you don’t have to give the charlatan any more room in your busy schedule.  

I understand why you would.  He’s a ticket to ratings – even now – in exile in his “Elba Island” of Mara Lago.  His “lovers” aren’t watching you – they are over at Fox and Friends or worse.  But his haters want to hate – I want to hate – and feeding that hate gets more viewers.  And you are “winning” the ratings war.  You are the most watched cable morning show (Adweek).

But history does repeat itself.  Returning to your addiction threatens to have the same consequences.  He’s not history, and he’s not a joke.  He’s a threat, just as Napoleon was a threat during his first exile.  Don’t play into his game.  We know his strategy:  better to say bad things about me, than not talk about me at all.  And we’re talking about him again, over and over.

Joe and Mika, you are keeping him relevant.  I know that you are “reporting the news”.  But beware:  understand your addiction. You were in recovery, but the lure of the ratings is dragging you back down again. 

The nation went down with you five years ago.  We can’t afford to fall into that rabbit hole once more. 

“If you’ve got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow” – Teddy Roosevelt

Your Lying Ears

We all heard it.  Mitch McConnell followed his impeachment acquittal vote with an impassioned (for Mitch) speech condemning the ex-President’s actions.  Lindsey Graham told us all in the late evening of January 6^th:  “…All I can say is enough is enough.  Count me out”.  Even House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said, “The president bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters…”

Yet all three today are back to support the ex-President, now a “Florida Man”.  McConnell says he would support him if he earned the Republican nomination in 2024.  Graham has made a pilgrimage to Mara Lago, to play golf and mend fences.  And McCarthy has literally rewritten the events of January 6^th, and now is supporting the Florida Man’s candidate for Republican Caucus Chairman of the House against the most “establishment” Republican ever, Liz Cheney.  

Over and over again you hear folks of my persuasion, that is the Democratic persuasion, say:  “What the Hell is wrong with those guys?  They had chance after chance to get rid of ‘that Florida Man’ but instead they ask forgiveness and go right back to him.  He’s like the Godfather, or an opiate drug.  ‘Every time I get away, they pull me back in.’” (At least, I say.)

Kompromat

There are lots of possible factors.  Some, like Graham, may somehow be compromised.  Graham accepted a ton of NRA money, money we later learned came directly from Russia.  That’s not well known in the world, and perhaps there is other “dirt” in Florida strong enough, or different enough, to bury Graham for good.  And we know that McCarthy and McConnell are trying to lead their minority caucuses, many of whom are “Florida Man” adherents.  “There go my people, I must follow them, for I am their leader,” seems to be the only solution they can find.

But I think the Florida Man’s grip on the Republican anatomy is much more immediate than just “kompromat” or even money.  And it’s much more dangerous.

Fifty-five percent of Republicans believe that the Florida Man won the 2020 Presidential election.  And that majority of the Party is an even larger percentage of the voters in the Republican Primaries.  So it’s pretty simple really.  The fundamental question for most politicians is:  how do I win the next election?  And if that politician is a candidate in a Republican Primary, the easiest way to win is to support the leader the voters support – the Florida man.

Ohio

Look at the Republican race for retiring Ohio Senator Rob Portman’s seat. The two early leaders, former Party Chairman Jane Timken, and former State Treasurer Josh Mandel, were once mainstream Republicans, even supporters of now ex-communicated former Governor John Kasich.

But now, both are literally falling over each other to demonstrate almost religious fealty to Florida man. It’s all about winning, and the celestial highway to a Republican nomination, though maybe not to victory in the general election, passes through the front door of the club at Mara Lago.

The Big Lie

The Mara Lago “machine” is building an essential case to back their “Big Lie”.  Republican gerrymandering has created a “fundamentalist” majority in multiple state legislatures, who now are backfilling the false election claims by creating fake investigations.  The Arizona “Cyber Ninja” investigation of the Maricopa County vote is just one example.  Not only does this legitimize the false claims, but it also provides a strong base for fundraising.  Millions of dollars will pour into Florida Man accounts, whether they are used for his own campaign, or to back his acolytes.  That money becomes even more important because what’s donated to Florida Man is money not available for other Republican candidates – adherents of the “Big Lie” or not. 

But that majority of Republicans believing in the “Big Lie” is all around us.  Republicans who recognize the truth are so marginalized in their own Party, that they are shouted down.  Look at Mitt Romney last week at the Utah State Republican Convention, or Cheney, or the early retirements of Portman or Toomey of Pennsylvania.  If the Democratic Party is the “Big Tent” Party, from Bernie Sanders to Joe Manchin, the Republican Party is the “Blind Faith” Party.  Open eyes are not acceptable to the rank and file.

Most of the Republicans in Washington know in their minds that this brand of fanaticism isn’t good for their Party or the nation. Their eyes might be open, and, in their hearts, they want a better choice for the American people.

But those aren’t the body parts that the Florida Man is holding.

 

Florida Man

If you haven’t played the “Florida Man” game before – here’s how it works. Take you birthday, and Google it and the words “Florida Man”. It’s a lock to be bizarre.

My Birthday – Shirtless Florida man travels to Myrtle Beach to head bang during Hurricane Florence

Jenn’s Birthday – Florida woman sentenced to probation after pulling live alligator from her pants during traffic stop

“Those Democrats”

It’s everything the Trumpers warned us about.  Joe Biden is pursuing a massive spending bill, threatening to increase the US debt but more importantly, to reduce the income gap between the “one percent” and the rest of the nation.  Many state legislatures, the last remaining bastions of Trumpism, have risen up to protect the government from too many people voting.  They don’t want the “masses”, especially of color, to determine who our leaders are.

“Those Democrats” want the whole country to be vaccinated to stop the spread of COVID.  How dare they demand that we ALL participate in something that would protect our National health?

They – the Democrats – want to take away our guns, or at least some of our guns, a few, or even just our ability to fire hundreds of rounds a minute.  How will we be able to overthrow the government if we can’t have our high capacity magazines?  You can only fight off the police with “Blue Lives Matter” flag poles for so long.   

Democratic Revenge

And now the greatest fear of all:  the “Biden” Justice Department is prosecuting the “un-pardoned” Trump associates.  They searched Giuliani’s office and home last week. They treated Rudy, America’s Mayor, just like that traitor/lawyer Cohen a couple of years ago.  And there are even assassinating the character of dynamic young Congressman Matt Gaetz, dragging his name through the mud without bringing an indictment. Pardoned Roger Stone has re-entered the fray to defend his young friend.  Even MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough came to Gaetz’s aid.  He compared the poor man’s treatment to the Hillary Clinton investigation.

It’s all a matter of perspective.  Or what news source you choose.

“Trump World” is fighting back.  Finally, the 2020 votes in Arizona and Michigan are being honestly investigated by the “Cyber Ninjas”.  Those “good guys” have finally got their hands on the actual ballots and out of the corrupted Boards of Elections.  They are bound to find what “everyone” already knows:  that Trump really won the election, and that the Democrats somehow subverted multiple Republican-run state Boards of Elections.

Enough of that.

Historic Perspective

I am reading a book about Virginia Hall.  Hall was an American woman who led an extra-ordinary life.  She grew up in the Roaring Twenties, and left America to live in Europe.  Hall worked for the US State Department there, and watched the rise of Fascism and the inability of Democracies to control it.  

With the beginning of World War II, Hall did everything she could to support France, and then when it fell, she went to Great Britain.  Ultimately, she went to work for the Special Operations Executive and became an “operative”, a liaison going into Nazi occupied Europe to work with Resistance groups.  That’s the same work that my mother did during the war.

I am struck by the reaction of Ms. Hall to the rise of Fascism.  She watched as Hitler and Mussolini, and the Fascist government of Petain in France subsumed the surrounded democracies.  They did it with the “Big Lie” (actually originating with Hitler’s Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels).  Hall’s response was to do anything she could to defend the world she loved against the absolute evils of Fascism.  She was willing to risk her own life when she could have just gone back to America and safety.

Fascists

The echoes of the 1930’s Fascism reverberate in our own time.

It’s not just the obtuse Fascism of the “Proud Boys” or the “Oath Keepers”; the leaders of the January 6^th Insurrection.  It’s the voter suppression we see in the several Republican led states that want to make sure their opponents don’t win again.  It’s the use of fear:  of vaccines and gun controls and the “Big Lie” of election fraud.  And it’s the screams and chants against Mitt Romney from his own Republican Party in Utah this weekend, or the outcry over Liz Cheney. Both dared to deny the “Big Lie” and vote for impeachment.  

Donald Trump was just a symptom.   The United States, the home to the Ku Klux Klan, the John Birch Society and Father Coughlin, is no stranger to racism and Fascism.  The Roaring Twenties, the era of jazz and speakeasys and women’s rights that produced the courageous Virginia Hall (and Babs Dahlman) also was the “high tide” of the Klan and rampant gangsterism here in the United States.  

We’ve got bigger worries than an ex-President in Florida.

In the Movies

We’ve all seen a movie like this.  The world is faced with some incredibly awful crisis, say, a global pandemic or alien invasion.  At first, we struggle to find a way to work together, and it looks like the entire globe will be consumed.  Funeral pyres burn in the streets – the ancient nursery rhyme of plague, “Ring around the rosy, pocket full of posey, ashes, ashes, all fall down,” has immediate meaning.

Then science finds an answer, and the world joins together to end the crisis.  The final scene, looks like the last scene from “Independence Day”, where folks all over the world celebrate the victory over the dark forces they faced.

Can’t we just skip to the end of the movie?

Science

The science is simple.  However COVID 19 came about – whether from some bat meal in the wet market of Wuhan, or a more nefarious mistake by the Chinese lab there, it’s out. Over 152 million cases are confirmed worldwide, probably only a tenth of the real number of infections.  More than 3.2 million have died, with more being added every day.  Here in the United States we suffered the worst casualties (so far) at just under 600,000 dead, but we seem to have “turned the corner”.  

The vaccines are near miraculous, something from “a movie” where what normally takes years is compressed into minutes – like the 1995 film “Outbreak”.  They work:  95% effective against catching the virus, and near 100% at keeping the virus from causing hospitalization or death.

And they are out here in the US – readily available at your local pharmacy, grocery store, or Wal Mart.

Politics

There is the answer – we should be smoking the big cigars like Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum.  Everyone gets vaccinated and the virus stops spreading.  The big risk isn’t the current virus, it’s a future virus that could mutate from the current strains of COVID-19.  And how do we stop those mutations?  

If there are fewer people with the virus, there are fewer opportunities for the virus to mutate.  So if we can vaccinate a high percentage of humans (not just Americans) we can control COVID-19 – period.  

This is not a question about “personal freedom”.  And it’s not the stupid comment often made:  “well if you get vaccinated then I don’t have to, since you can’t give me the disease”.  COVID-19 did not have a candidate for President in 2020, nor does it favor Republicans or Democrats today.  It is an equal opportunity virus and you can get it regardless of your political ideology.  Basically, like the measles, if we don’t want COVID-19 around we have to take care of it.  WE ALL NEED TO BE VACCINATED.  

Vaccines

Like the measles vaccine, there are a few who cannot tolerate vaccination.  Those few need the rest of us vaccinated to protect them.  But more importantly, at least 80% of us need to be vaccinated to reach “herd immunity”, when the virus stops spreading and, (to quote the President, “This is the big f**king deal”) has less chance of mutating.

So, when do we get to the part where we unite as a world to put the now-known science into effect?  We know there are four vaccines:  Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and Astra-Zeneca, that work well.  There are others we aren’t so sure of.  We don’t have the studies to determine how effective or safe  Russia’s “Sputnik” and China’s “Sinovac” are.  But all the vaccines are out there, and there are more coming.

Save the World

What’s stopping us from the world-saving, cigar-smoking moment? Well here in the United States, it’s not science. It’s the use of fear for political benefit. And it’s also that the Trump plan, named for another heroic show, “Operation Warp Speed”, was to make vaccines for AMERICA. We didn’t prepare for the world. How was a vaccine (Pfizer and Moderna) that needs storage at 70 below zero going to be used world-wide?

So the “plot line” of this particular disaster film is far from completed.  We have reached that turning point in the movie – when the heroes figure out how to stop the catastrophe.  But now we have to deliver, to actually save the world and earn the medals and the cigars.  That hasn’t happened yet.  Sure we in the United States can go back to restaurants and ball games, and even concerts.  But the funeral pyres are burning now in India.  And we can’t stop COVID-19 unless we stop it everywhere.  

Otherwise – “Ashes, ashes, we all fall down”.

This is another in the “Sunday Story” series.  No politics or deep philosophical points to be made.  Just another story “from the trail”.

Bear Bags

So in a previous life, I spent a lot of time in the wilderness.  Some portion of each summer I was out on the trail backpacking.  I started at eleven as a Boy Scout, hiking Southeastern Ohio and Kentucky.  From there, it was a trip to the Scout reservation in Cimarron, New Mexico, two hundred square miles of mountains and wilderness called Philmont Scout Ranch.  

I went to Philmont twice, once as a kid, and once as an adult leader.  We always saw a lot of wildlife out there, but bears were the big concern.  The black bears at Philmont were very used to the thousands of kids who marched the trails there each year.  They were so good at stealing the “crew” food rations that it wasn’t enough to just hang “bear bags” over tree limbs.  The bears had that strategy figured out – they’d shimmy out the limb and slash the rope.  Then they’d climb down and feast on three days food supply for twelve people.  Once they did that, the “crew” had to divert from their “itinerary”  to find more supplies.

So we made the equation more complex.  We’d string a rope between two trees, then had the “bear bag” rope over that – suspending the bag high enough that the bear couldn’t get it.  That seemed to work.

Bear Rules

We were warned – bears like things that smell good.  There were horror stories:  the kid who washed his hair with shampoo that a bear scalped, and the other poor Scout who decided to wear deodorant on the trail.  A bear came in his tent and ate his armpits.  Whether those stories were actually true or not really didn’t matter – we were convinced.  No midnight snacks in the tent, no smelly soaps for “pot baths”.  If everyone smelled bad, no one noticed – we were united in stink.  But the theory was the bears wouldn’t notice either.

I was thirteen that first time out in New Mexico, so I was ready for any story they told.  Looking back, I’m not absolutely sure that a bear stuck his head in my tent the second night out on the trail.  It sounded like a bear, the grunts and the shuffle, and I heard the canvas tent flap open in the night (it was 1970, no fancy lightweight nylon tents for us).  I was convinced a bear was “checking us out”, and concerned that my tentmate Mike might have snuck a Hersey’s Tropical Chocolate into the tent.  (The “Trop Choc” was a Hersey bar made so hard that it didn’t melt in a backpack, nor in the sun, nor in your mouth, honestly.  But it sure tasted good after dehydrated chili mac and hard tack crackers.  It, at least, was real).

Close Encounters

But now I’m not so sure there weren’t Philmont Staff or other adults making sure that the “young-ins” were snug in their sacks.   And I can’t say I actually saw the bear, just the inside of my sleeping bag, pulled over my face, waiting for the shred of bear claws. 

We emerged in the morning with a good story, and no injuries.  And bears, real or not, weren’t our only contact with wildlife on our trip.  We also had an encounter with a less intimidating creature – porcupines.  Now we were all smart enough to avoid touching the animals (I told a porcupine tale in an earlier “Sunday Story,” Hiking with Jack).  But what we didn’t know was that porcupines had a special taste for toilet paper. 

AP Paper

 We were encamped in a staffed area that had “Kaibos”, wooden outhouses.  That was a luxury:  most of the time we had to dig small holes and hang onto trees to do our business.  Now in the normal course of camping it’s a “nice” thing to leave AP paper in the “Kaibo” as a courtesy to the next user.  (That stands for All Purpose Paper – toilet paper was used as paper towels for cleaning dishes as well as its more normal use). 

And at Philmont, the porcupines were more than happy to accept such courtesy.  They would take the rolls of toilet paper and chew them into tiny white balls.  Then they would  scatter the balls throughout the camping area and woods.  The next morning the “Staff” had a duty for us Scouts.  For two hours we wandered the area, picking up little white balls like snow of carefully chewed AP Paper.  Keeping Philmont clean was an important goal.

It Was This Big

When I went back to Philmont years later as an adult, I was less concerned about the wildlife.  I’d met a bear in Pennsylvania – we were hiking the same trail.  He was going South and I was going North, and when we met, we both turned and headed the other direction quickly.  So I assumed bears didn’t want to meet us any more than we wanted to meet them.

Our crew had just climbed Mt. Baldy the day before, at 12,400 feet the highest peak in Philmont.  So we had an easy day planned, spending the morning hanging out at a staffed camp.  The kids all went down to pan gold in the nearby creek – and I had a few minutes of quiet at camp to relax.  We had a short hike scheduled for the afternoon, so the “bear bag” was down, ready to be apportioned out to the group.

The grunts and shuffling noises hadn’t changed.  I looked up from our fire to see a small (maybe 400 pound) bear trying to work his way through the heavy duty plastic surrounding our food.  Now Philmont protocol was to bang pots and pans together to try to “scare” the bear away.  My suspicion is that nothing scares bears, but maybe the banging would annoy him enough to leave.

So I took a pan and our coffee pot, and banged them so hard that the pan was useless afterwards.  The bear, happy as a “bear in a food pile”, didn’t seem particularly interested in my noise.  He was working on our lunch.

Glass Houses  

It was a fourteen mile round trip to get re-supplied – and I wasn’t looking forward to it.  So I committed the “cardinal sin” of how not to be on the good side of bears.  I picked up a rock, and chucked it at him.  Now today I couldn’t hit a barn, but that shot was lucky, and I pegged the bear right on the nose.  He was not pleased.

He dropped our lunch, and began to advance on me.  Now I knew I was in trouble – you can’t outrun a bear, and you can’t out climb them either.  But I started a quick retreat anyway.  Luckily, after a few steps the bear remembered he had a lunch already in paw,  so rather than making a dinner of me, he headed back to the pile.  He grabbed OUR lunch, and dragged it up into a tree nearby.

Soon after the kids came back and seemed skeptical of my bear story.  Even the dented pan didn’t seem enough to convince them.  So we tore down our camp, and got ready for our afternoon transit.  But as the tents were coming down, I heard a yell.  The bear was back for a second course.  The kids were yelling and running, and I was doing a whole lot of “I told you so”.  The bear seemed confused by all of the action, and retreated back to his tree.  

He posed for pictures there and several of the crew got one. I think there is still a bear portrait hanging in the Scout Cabin here in Pataskala.  But picture or no, we all got a good bear story to tell.

The Sunday Story Series

• Riding the Dog  – 1/24/21
• Hiking with Jack – 1/31/21
• A Track Story – 2/7/21
• Ritual – 2/14/21
• Voyageur – 2/19/21
• A Dog Story – 2/25/21
• A Watkins Legend – 3/7/21
• Ghosts at Gettysburg – 3/14/21
• Lessons from the State Meet – 3/28/21
• More Lessons from the State – 4/4/21
• Stories from the Road – 4/11/21
• A Bear Wants You – 5/1/21

Who’s Fooled

Joe Biden has everyone fooled, and he’s happy about it.  To Trumpers, he’s a doddering old man, just a “fool” manipulated by  the “socialist progressives” surrounding him.  They mention folks like Vice President Kamala Harris as leading the shadow government, though the “real socialist progressives” in the Democratic Party don’t include her on their roster.  

And if you look at Biden’s cabinet picks, there’s not a real “socialist progressive” in the bunch.  They are all pretty “mainstream” Democrats,  though in contrast to the white-male conservative Trump cabinet (and Mrs. DeVos and McConnell), they are a lot more “liberal”.  Just check out the Biden “team picture”, only a couple of old white men in the bunch.

In the Middle

To conservatives (not Trumpers), he’s offering a Roosevelt like “New Deal” big government.  “Yee Gods” – he’s talking about spending trillions of dollars!  To those conservatives, you are only allowed to use that number if you’re talking about a top one percent tax cut, or a missile system to counter a military threat from the 1980’s.  Spending government money on child care, or college loan relief or nationwide broad band:  “why that’s a frivolous waste of taxpayer dollars that our children will have to pay for”.  (Maybe we could just get Amazon and Facebook to foot the bill; they could actually pay some taxes on their COVID windfall profits).

And to the real socialist progressives of the Democratic Party, he’s not doing enough.  They want Biden out farther (though did you hear him whisper about the $15 minimum wage in his speech to Congress on Wednesday? Didn’t he start at $12?)  But they’ve got another Joe to really be angry with, not Biden but Manchin.  So, much of the vitriol that might have been directed at Joe Biden and should be directed towards Mitch McConnell and his obstructionist Party, is going towards the Senator from West Virginia.

Super Power

And to the great mass of the American people, Joe Biden is a man of lowered expectations.  We don’t expect Obama-like oratory from Biden’s speeches.  In fact, for most of his supporters we’re just glad he gets through without a famous “Biden gaffe”.  So when Biden does more than just slog through an hour-plus speech on Wednesday, actually using his voice from a whisper to demanding assertion, hey – it’s a great job!  

The one “super-power” of Joe Biden is that he can relate to Americans on the most basic level.  We all suffer loss, and particularly in our pandemic era, even more people are hurting.  Joe Biden can relate to loss, to suffering, and to redemption.  His story, and his empathy comes across in almost everything he does.  He can literally reach out and touch the grieving parent, or the unemployed steel worker, or the orphaned child.  We all know that about Joe – and it’s not a “skill” or a “political ploy”.  It’s all him.

Historic Presidency

Out of all of this, Biden is powering the government to one of the great legislative Presidencies.  The conservatives are right – Joe Biden, fumbling, old Joe, is proposing big ideas that we haven’t talked about since the Roosevelt’s New Deal or Johnson’s Great Society.  Biden is trying to reshape America.  It’s about roads and bridges, trains and airplanes, broad band and electric cars.  Physically America will be modernized by the Biden Administration.  And whether the actual Republican Party vote for any part of it or not, Biden knows that a large majority of Americans want this.  They want their highways fixed (drive through downtown lately?) and they want their utilities to work.

And Joe Biden wants to create an America that lifts all of its people.  Reagan “trickle-down” economics, give money to the rich and they will spend it on the poor, doesn’t work.  But it has been the basis of American economic policy since Reagan took office.  Clinton nibbled around the edges but made little change.  Obama wanted to alter it, but found the politics of division blocked him at every turn.

Biden’s Place

Biden seems to have found a “place” where he can get things done.  No one “expected” Biden to be successful.  He was supposed to be “only” a transitional figure, a step from Trumpism in 2020 to the “New Progressives” of 2024.  But “Old Joe” seems to be smarter than we give him credit for.  He’s quietly getting things done in his own way. 

Franklin Roosevelt had an overwhelming majority in the Congress, and an overwhelming mandate from the American people for change.  Lyndon Johnson also had a Congress and an electoral mandate, and he also was the “right man”, a Southern Democrat, to lead the fight for civil rights and improving urban life.

And Joe Biden, a man of the Senate and of the center, may have found his place in making major changes in America.  He’s not the “charismatic leader”. He’s the “transcendent legislator,” letting every side get “some” credit, while he gets the job done.   For our time, he’s the right man.

And he’s laughing up his sleeve as he does it.

Hardened

Our political lives are hardening.  What used to be a conversation among friends, a “mental exercise” of point and counter-point no longer occurs.  The conversation now dances like a water bug, flitting from subject to subject but always wary of breaking the surface tension and plunging into the emotional depths of the issues of the day.

Talk about “going out to dinner,” and flit on the surface of COVID, of vaccines and masks and “rights” to “do what you want” in a pandemic.  Discuss driving, and dodge the question of police afraid to enforce safety laws.  Talk about watching television, and avoid tonight’s national address by the President.  Talk about the city, and skirt the issues of poverty and crime.

I hoped that the end of the Trump Administration would mark the beginning of political dialog once again.  I believed (and still do) that people of good faith could have differing views:  that disagreement doesn’t require hate.  And I thought that perhaps the emotion of the Insurrection on January 6^th would be enough to “scare” us back to each other, to communicating, to recognizing that there was more in common than ever separated us.

But I’m not so sure that’s so.

Framers

I’m driving a lot these days, travelling to officiate high school track meets.  As I travel, I’m listening to lectures on the Federalist Papers, the essays of three of the Framers of the US Constitution.  That may make me as big a “history geek” as everyone always suspected, but the arguments of 1787 still ring true today.  

Hamilton, Jay and Madison; the authors of the Federalist Papers, all were morally opposed to slavery.  Hamilton and Jay were founders of the New York “Manumission Society”, dedicated to freeing owned humans from bondage.  And yet Jay owned slaves, and while it’s unsure whether Hamilton did, his father-in-law Phillip Schuyler absolutely did.  And Madison, scion of a Virginia plantation owner, had over a hundred.

Madison believed that the infamous Three-Fifths Compromise written in the Constitution, that counted those owned as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of population and taxation, actually was “good” for those in bondage.  It demonstrated that they were not “chattel property”, they had a portion of “humanity”, three-fifths.  Madison thought once that “humanity” was enshrined in law, it was inevitable that the “peculiar institution” would ultimately end.  Three-fifths humanity is more than none, better than the cows and horses also traded in the markets.

They Were Wrong

They all believed, as Abraham Lincoln did, that ultimately, “…the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place in where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction…” (House Divided Speech, Chicago 1958).   They were wrong.  The course of ultimate extinction required a Civil War, a national blood-letting with over 600,000 dead, to resolve the issue.

From the carefully constructed compromises in the Constitution, the issue hardened to the point that the US Congress literally banned debate on the topic.  People “of good faith” could no longer even discuss it.  As John Brown said, in a letter written prior to his execution, “I John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away, but with Blood.”  It only took two more years for that prophecy to come true.

Polarized

America has been so divided in the past that there was no alternative but “blood”.  The question today:  is that where we are?  

•  Our nation cannot even discuss the issue of mass shootings – there is no point.  We have given up on any solution that would require controlling guns.  
•  We have allowed fiction to become fact when it comes to our election process.  Our Constitutional Framers believed that the ultimate check on the government was our democracy:  the vote of the people to change their leaders.  But today, a fictional accounting of our elections is encouraging impediments to voting.  If a portion of our citizenry is kept from voting, they can be kept from having a voice.
•  And many of us are in denial about the recurring issue of race in our society.   The fact – we will become a “majority/minority” nation in the next score of years – appears to some as a threat rather than a benefit.

Our history does not promise easy answers.  Nor does it provide many examples of solution.  We will determine our own fate, but we must do so despite the past, not because of it.  

We need to talk.  

Extremist

Who would be an extreme, radical character in support of Democrats in general and the “left wing” of the Party in particular?  If we had to choose one person who might represent that image, “the man” is Markos Moulitsas.  He’s the owner and manager of The Daily Kos, a liberal news outlet with 2.6 million subscribers, and over 8 million views a month.  Want to know the unabashedly liberal side of a story:  check out what The Daily Kos has to say.  Want to know what Democratic politician has “run afoul” of the left wing of the Party – again, it’s all in The Daily Kos.

Today’s headlines are good examples of what you can expect.  

• – Its not rare:  Fox News again sends conservatives into a panic with a new high-steaks hoax (no mistake – it’s about meat policy)
• – Kevin McCarthy helped promote election lies.  Now he’s trying to whitewash the resulting insurrection
• – Nicolle Wallace on Republicans:  Fear of Trump was the excuse.  We were wrong,  They are Trump.
• – Rick Santorum explains how white Christians built this country all by themselves.
• – AOC on the first 100 days:  “Biden has definitely exceeded expectations that progressives had”.

You get it.  It’s not quite Fox News in reverse – I would argue that The Daily Kos is much more “fact based”.  But the “slant” is definitely there.  Bernie is the ultimate hero.

So if I wanted to pick an organization to investigate Republican shenanigans in the elections, and I wanted to make sure they came back with a result I would agree with, Markos and the Daily Kos team are exactly who I would chose.

Chutzpah

And it is exactly what they would do.  But I don’t think I would have the temerity, the “Chutzpah,” to claim that they were an unbiased source.  And I certainly wouldn’t feel it was right to spend public funds to get a predetermined answer.   

But the Republicans in the Arizona State Senate have no such concerns.  They are willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in Arizona taxes, in addition to perhaps millions of dollars in privately raised funds, on an “audit” of the 2020 Arizona election results.  Or more specifically, two state-wide election results:  Joe Biden’s victory in the Presidential election, and Mark Kelly’s victory in the Senate race.  Gee – the two races where Democrats won statewide.

This is after the Arizona Supreme Court rejected all of the claims of election fraud or irregularities, and after the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors were forced by subpoena to hand over the ballots by a local judge.  Did I tell you they were only checking Maricopa County – the largest in the State and where the Democrats won by the biggest margins? 

Cyber Ninjas

The Arizona Senate wants a “full hand count” of the 2.1 million ballots, and they’ve got “the man” to do it.  They’ve hired the absolutely serious sounding company named Cyber Ninjas (not a misteak there either), founded by Doug Logan.  As the Arizona Mirror notes:

“(Logan advocated the) Stop the Steal” movement (and) repeatedly alleged on social media that the election was rigged against former President Donald Trump.

And as Logan himself tweeted:

“I’m tired of hearing people say there was no fraud. It happened, it’s real, and people better get wise fast,” (AZmirror).

The Arizona Republican State Senators know what they want, and Doug Logan will deliver it to them.  He has less “neutrality” in the issue then Markos would have.  Oh, and one last point.  Cyber Ninja is a computer security firm, with no specific understanding of ballots, election law, or auditing elections.  We’ve got a company that doesn’t know what it’s doing, a company leader who already has reached his conclusions, and a State Senate willing to spend public money to get the pre-determined answer they’re looking for.  Guess what – they’ll find that the Maricopa results were fraudulent.

Foundation of Fraud

And since we all know that’s BS, it doesn’t really matter, does it?  The answer is yes.

The Republican in the Michigan State Senate are looking to Cyber Ninja to step in and muddy their 2020 results.  Don’t be surprised if the Republican State legislators in Pennsylvania try to get them in as well.  Because this is the “back-filling” of the Big Lie – that the 2020 election was a Trump victory ripped away by Democratic perfidy.  In hundreds of cases, the Federal and State Courts threw out Trump’s claims, including “his own” US Supreme Court.  But now, there will be the false underpinning of Cyber Ninja “facts” to prove it.  And with over sixty percent of Republicans still believing that the election was stolen (NPR), it means that Trumpism and “fake news” isn’t anywhere near being over.

Markos Moulitsas and the Daily Kos would be less biased.  And our nation won’t be able to move on from the turmoil of Trump.

“Ohio has been moving away from Democrats in such a significant way” – Kasey Hunt, MSNBC

Brutally Red

Hey Ohio, it’s your turn now.  Ohio is a brutally “Red” state in many ways.  There are sections of the state, particularly in the West towards the Indiana border, that are “pure Republican”.  They have been since the Civil War, and nothing will change their voting characteristics.  There’s a reason that Congressman Jim Jordan isn’t worried about much of anything when it comes to his burgeoning scandal:  he knows that he will have his District’s support, no matter what.  Besides, it will all be “fake news”  and “Lib” George Clooney’s movie to them anyway.

And Appalachia Ohio, the full quarter of the state south of I-70 and east of SR-23, is politically adrift.  Many voters, who used to be “Vern Rife Blue Dog Democrats”, have become Trump supporters.  And, much like their relatives in West Virginia, they are struggling to see what the Democratic Party has to offer them.  

If that sounds racial, in part it is.  But it’s more than just that.  Appalachia not only lost its coal mining industry, but was devastated by the opioid epidemic as well.  And the government answer, Democratic or Republican, was to shut down the “pill mills”, the pain clinics throughout the Southeastern part of the state.  While that stopped the “legal” pill distribution, it did little to deal with the addiction that was created.  So those addicts became prey to other forms of illegal drugs, including heroin and fentanyl and homemade crystal meth.  Democrats didn’t help, and neither did Republicans, which left those folks to make their political determinations based on the “wedge” issues:  abortion, race, guns, and religion.  Other than a “liberal bastion” in Athens, home of  the Ohio University, they choose the GOP.

Marginally Blue

So if rural Ohio is Republican, and so is Appalachia, that what’s left for Democrats to win?

The votes are in the cities:  Cleveland, Akron, Youngstown, Columbus, Toledo, Dayton, Cincinnati.   That’s where elections are won and lost in Ohio.  And for Democrats they is some semblance of good news.  The suburbs surrounding the cities, areas like Delaware County north of Columbus and Warren County north of Cincinnati, are no longer as “red” as they once were.

If – and that’s a HUGE if – a Democrat could win the cities big, and then break near even in the suburbs – then the Red West and the marginal Southeast just won’t matter.  

It’s a recipe for a Democratic win.  There’s an ongoing problem with Ohio though, and that is the candidates of the Democratic Party have failed to inspire an election turnout among their own voters.  In short, Democrats, even Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, won the cities, but they didn’t bring out the massive numbers of votes required to overcome the rest of the Red state.  Those votes exist – the registrations prove it.  But they aren’t coming out to vote “Blue”.

Look at Georgia.  Even with the voter suppression laws enacted by the State Legislature in the last few months, the Republican Party is still in trouble.  In the 2022 election, Georgia is likely to have Senator Raphael Warnock and Stacey Abrams on the ballot – both dynamic Black candidates that excite Democratic voters. It’s no wonder that Republican Governor Brian Kemp is doing everything he can to stifle Democratic turnout. 

It’s Possible

So who are the Democrats in Ohio who that will inspire turnout?  Sure, there’s the perennial Senate winner Democrat Sherrod Brown – but he won’t be on the ballot in 2022.  And the Party doesn’t have anyone else (so far) that excites “the base” to come out and vote.  It’s not just that there doesn’t seem to be a statewide candidate of color, it’s there hasn’t been any recent candidate of any race that fires folks up.

So maybe Congressman Tim Ryan can fill the “Sherrod shoes” in 2022 in the Senate race.  And maybe Mayor Nan Whaley of Dayton can excite voters in a run for the Governorship.  But Ohio also needs a statewide candidate of color to change the voting dynamic.  We don’t need Stacey Abrams, but we certainly need a ticket that’s inclusive of more than just white people.  Otherwise Kasey Hunt might be right.

Mike Coleman (former Columbus Mayor) – where are you??

We Didn’t Start the Fire – Billy Joel

Deadline

It’s a lot like the lists from the famous Billy Joel song  We Didn’t Start the Fire.  This week alone, the lyric might go: “…Derek Chauvin, Matt Gaetz, Infrastructure, Columbus Cops, Russian Armies, Vaccines, Helicopters on Mars! We Didn’t Start the Fire…” Even though we are no longer in the continual state of “impending doom” of the Trump Administration, there are so many things happening so fast, it’s hard to take the “long view”.  Fires of immediate crisis light up every day.  Putting them out seems to be more than enough to consume our attention.

But there is one hard and fast deadline that refuses to budge to any current crisis.  We are faced with the “red line” of climate change.  What seemed far in the future when “Earth Day” began back when I was in eighth grade in 1970, now is current.  We knew then that what our modern society was doing to the environment would ultimately have devastating consequences.  Now, fifty-one years later, we are much clearer about what those consequences may be.

Dancing Naked

It’s not about dancing naked in the fields, picking daisies and chanting at the puffy clouds (Earth Day really wasn’t like that back in eighth grade either.  Eighth grade is not a good “dancing naked” age).  Now it’s immediate:  rising tides, more radical temperature shifts, changing climate zones, and vast inhabited areas of the globe changed.  It’s the southern border migration situation here in the United States.  It’s the number of category Four and Five storms that wrack our shores each fall.  And it’s the rising levels of skin cancers in our hospitals. 

The science is clear.  We have a limited number of years, maybe not even twenty, to change the amount of carbon we are putting in the environment.  The United States isn’t the only country on the list – but we are number two.

Science

This is the number – in billions of tons.  Let me say that again, a billion tons of hydro-carbons.

China leads the world – 10.3 billion tons of hydrocarbon emissions per year.  The United States is second, 5.3 billion tons, while India is a distant third with 2.2 billion tons.  Russia and Japan round out the top five, with 1.7 and 1.2 billion tons a piece.

And that massive dump of hydro-carbons into the environment is earth-changing.  It’s literally  raising the average temperature of the globe.  It’s melting ice caps and raising sea levels.  If you live in a nation like Bangladesh, the entire nation may be flooded out by the next typhoon.  And that typhoon is likely to be even stronger.  Heat equals energy when it comes to killer storms, so a warmer world means more violent weather.  

And once that temperature is raised, it will “tip” the earth into a different cycle.  The world that I grew up in for the last fifty years since the first “Earth Day” will not be the world my grand nieces and nephews will experience.  There world will be harsher, and filled with “climate refugees” who have lost their traditional homes.  That includes those in the Northern Triangle of Central America, already feeling the impact of the current changes with failing crops and more powerful storms.

The Cure

There’s still a chance to gain control.  If the top five countries radically cut their emissions in the next decade, the earth “warming” would slow.  But to stop those emissions, it requires reduction in the burning of fossil fuels:  coal, petroleum, natural gas.  

Coal is a huge culprit.  It is dirty – there is no such thing as “clean coal”.  It’s why China, with huge reserves of coal, leads the list with almost double the pollution.  The Chinese leap into the modern world economy has been coal fired.   And while the United States has generally moved away from coal, our addiction to individual gasoline powered transportation (cars) is keeping us high on the list of polluters.

None of this is “new news”.   We’ve known for at least fifty years what course we were on, and what was going to happen.  And for the past twenty years we knew that the crisis wasn’t in some “far future”, but in the mid-twenty first century.  So it’s 2021, and we are entering that mid-twenty first century.  We have done the “easy” things here in the United States.  Our cars are cleaner, and our power plants no longer belch the coal-fired smoke.  But it’s time to make the “hard” choices.

Our Kids

We aren’t making those choices for some indefinite future generation.  This time – now —  it’s for our kids, our eighth graders, and what their world will be like.  We have continued to “light the fire” with hydro-carbons, and we are burning their future world.  We didn’t start the fire, but it’s our direct responsibility to replace it, with new technology that already exists.  That will make their world a place where we would want them to live. 

Maybe that won’t go dancing naked in the fields, but if they do, they won’t have to travel to Canada to find daisies. 

The Verdict

Yesterday, Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of the murder of George Floyd.  In less than twelve hours of deliberation, a jury of twelve citizens determined he was guilty on three charges:  second degree murder, third degree murder, and manslaughter.  The nation held its collective breath on that jury’s decision.  America was poised for upheaval.  The National Guard is already in place in Minnesota, and out in cities nationwide as well.  

It was one of the most well documented deaths in history.  Each of the four police officers directly involved was wearing a body camera.  Street cameras had a clear view of the event as well.  And outraged bystanders, helpless to prevent Floyd’s unnecessary death under the knees of Chauvin, documented the murder on cell phone cameras.   

The trial was televised gavel to gavel.  So for many Americans, we were all in the jury box, all listening to the testimony and seeing the videos.  We listened to the carefully developed Prosecution case, and we heard the attempts of the defense to somehow create enough reasonable doubt to alter the verdict.  

Justice

So why was the Nation so prepared to celebrate or protest the outcome of the trial? 

Neither the death of one man, or the destruction of another man’s life is cause for joy.  Yet there was cheering and parading at the announcement of this verdict.  It wasn’t about joy; it was about justice.  Historically American courts give police officers wide latitude in performing their duties.  In some cases, that is justified.  The citizenry has placed the burdens of our society on those officers, asking them to make the difficult choices to control and protect us from crime and harm.

But in the defense of Derek Chauvin, the jury was asked to “Not believe their lying eyes”.  They were told to ignore what we all saw from multiple angles:  the “depraved indifference” of nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds, as Chauvin snuffed out the life of George Floyd.  And that failure of justice has happened so many times before.  

Facts

Police officers kill about 1000 people a year in the United States (NYT).  From 2005 to 2019, 104 police officers were arrested for murder or manslaughter for on-duty killings.  Only 35 were convicted of a crime, and only 4 were convicted of murder (BGSU).  Not every police killing is murder, and not every police officer charged is guilty.  But holding police officers accountable in Court happens so rarely, that even the slow-motion suffocation of George Floyd was still in doubt.

There are issues of race and intent. This week, while the Chauvin trial ended and we waited for the verdict, a young Black man was killed in a Minneapolis suburb, and a fifteen year old Black girl was killed here in Columbus.  The young man was killed “unintentionally”; the officer acted as if she was using her Taser but instead used her service weapon.  And body camera footage here in Columbus seems to indicate that the officer was justified in shooting the young girl.  She was attacking other young girls with a knife, and he was acting to protect them.

It Takes Outrage

It is difficult to know if former officer Chauvin would have been held accountable without the national outrage the “bystander video” created.  The “default position” of the Minneapolis police was that the “death was incidental” to the arrest.  It was only in the marches and protests, and even the rioting and destruction, that the “default” action was reversed, and this first officer held accountable.  There remain three more also complicit in Floyd’s death. We have yet to see what will happen to them.

And during that time the “default position” exonerated officers of the controversial death of Breona Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky.  She went from being an innocent victim, killed in her own home, to “collateral damage” of a misguided attack.

So the National problem continues:  enforcement of the law somehow depends on race as much as actions.  Justice is not blind to color in the United States today, and until it is, then what should be the normal course of justice will remain a matter for celebration.

Democratic Doom

The media doomsayers are already out:  “Democrats will lose control of both the House and the Senate in 2022” they cry, “and it’s their own fault”.  I watched MSNBC’s morning personality Joe Scarborough attack Democratic Congressman Sean Patrick Maloney on a Friday interview.  Scarborough is a former conservative Republican Congressman from Florida. He demanded that Maloney answer for Democratic vulnerabilities on “socialism” and “defunding the police”.  

Maloney is the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DSCC). He’s in charge of getting Democrats elected to the House of Representatives.  He had the temerity to call Scarborough out for using “Republican talking points”:  that the Democrats are all “socialists” and want to cut all funding to police departments.  Scarborough lashed back, saying that Maloney would be to blame if Democrats lose the House.

Democrats don’t need to defend socialism, because they’re not socialists.  But there is vulnerability in the “defunding” issue.  Democratic leadership quickly pushed back from “defunding” when it came up in the Black Lives Matter protests, but their willingness to look at “repurposing” funds to solve non-law enforcement issues can be misinterpreted.  “Defunding” is a loud slogan, and hard to move away from.  It is a sticky point for the Party.

And finally, there is the “common wisdom”.  “Every President,” commentators like Scarborough intone, “loses seats in the Congress during the mid-term elections”.  And history is on Scarborough’s side.  In nineteen mid-term elections since World War II the opposition Party has gained seats. There were only three exceptions.

Precedent or Exception 

In politics, the exceptions become the difference.  Looking at those exceptions may well give Democrats hope to hold onto the Congress, and in fact increase their margins.

The first exception is in 1934, two years after Franklin Roosevelt was first elected President.  In 1932 Democrats won a massive landslide both in the Presidency and in the Congress.  Two years later, they padded their lead in both, adding nine seats in both chambers.  All of this is as a result of the early success of the New Deal legislation, as the United States struggled to emerge from the depths of the Great Depression.

Roosevelt and the Congress got a lot done.  They gave Americans hope for the future over the bleak present.  That should sound vaguely familiar. Biden and the Congress have rapidly passed massive COVID relief, accelerated the vaccination program to reach almost all Americans, and now are working on an even bigger infrastructure legislation.

The second exception was the 1998 midterm of Bill Clinton’s Presidency.  This was in the heart of Bill Clinton’s sex scandal, but somehow the Democrats managed marginal gains in the House.  The analysis:  Americans didn’t like what Clinton did, but they liked what he was getting done.  And they were frustrated with Congressional focus on the scandal.  

And the third exception was the 2002 midterm.  George Bush, a marginally elected President, was strong in leading the nation in response to 9/11, and the nation responded approvingly by adding to Republican members of both Houses.

Where Biden Stands

So will the mid-term elections of 2022 follow the pattern of the nineteen, or the three.  My prediction is the latter, and here’s why.

Joe Biden, like Roosevelt, faced multiple national crises as he entered office.  The economy was struggling from the impact of the pandemic, and the nation was suffering from the actual disease.  Like Roosevelt’s famous first 100 Days, Biden immediately set powerful goals and took action to alter the nation’s course.   In Biden’s first 100 Days, over 84 million Americans have been fully vaccinated with another almost 50 million having at least one shot.  The $1.9 trillion COVID relief package was passed through Congress on a straight party line vote, even though it was overwhelmingly popular with the electorate.

And Biden is proposing a $2 trillion infrastructure plan, that is likely to pass in some form through the Congress this year.  The nation went from the disruption and disfunction of the Trump Administration to the carefully plotted action of the Biden Administration.  That alone may be enough to increase Democratic Congressional seats.

And like George W. Bush, Biden entered in the midst of the national crisis of Insurrection.  How Biden ultimately handles that situation, as well as the economy and the pandemic, will help determine what happens in the 2022 mid-terms more than “historic precedent”.  

And finally, many Americans are recognizing that the Republican Party in Congress has become the Party of obstruction.  That, in the middle of the multiple problems facing the nation, puts them in the same position as they were in 1998.  They are focused on something that the Nation doesn’t care about.  They may well pay an electoral price for that.

It’s Still Trump

But overriding all of that, is the factor that will be the most important in the 2022 elections.  The Republican Party is clearly still the Party of Donald Trump.  Republican voter turnout is “all about” Trump himself.  We saw that in the past three elections.  In 2016 Trump managed to increase Republican turnout enough to eke out an Electoral College majority, and gain majorities in the House and Senate. 

But with Trump not on the ticket in 2018, Republican turnout fell of sharply, and Democrats gained control of the House and made in-roads in the Senate.  With Trump running again in 2020, Republicans gained some House seats back, but failed to regain control.  In the Senate, the GOP lost control by the narrowest margin.

So in 2022, the Party of Trump will be running without the “flag bearer” on the ticket.  Those that were driven to vote by Trump, won’t show up.  All of that puts Democrats in a strong position to increase both their House and Senate margins.  

But it all depends on whether the Democratic voters will be as motivated to vote “for Democrats” as much as they were to vote “against Trump” in 2018.  If Democrats come out to vote, and the Trump voters don’t – the outcome is clear.  It’s politics, and anything can happen.  But the lessons of history are more nuanced than simply saying “All Presidents lose Congressional seats in the mid-terms”.  It’s not all Presidents, and there’s good reason to believe that it won’t be this President either.

Pre-Dawn 

I woke up to shouting outside.  It was 5:30 on Sunday morning, still dark in April, and I could just make out the yelling, but not the actual words.  Who is shouting before dawn on a Sunday?  It’s against all the neighborhood “norms”.  Don’t cut your grass before 9am on Saturday, or 10am on Sunday.  We’re a working neighborhood, and those are the days where people try to catch up on sleep.  So shouting in the pre-dawn dark is, as Monty Python would say “right out”!

Our dogs are still asleep – if someone was shouting outside the dogs should be up and barking.  But there was our yellow lab’s head was still tucked in beside mine, and I could hear our older shepherd/collie mix gently snoring on the floor on my side of the bed.  The other two are quiet in the family room.

I got up and went to the front window. I pulled up the heavy blind, and there they were – my friends marching in the street outside of the house.  They had signs, and a bullhorn, yelling about not supporting their causes and betraying “Our Values”.  I thought – “They are standing in my yard, they can’t do that.  And there’s no sidewalk, so they’ll have to block the street to do continue their ‘protest’”.  That’s got to be illegal.

Legal Protest

One next door neighbor was out, talking to the marchers.  He offered them his yard to “legalize” the demonstration. But they said no, it wouldn’t work.  Our camper blocked the view of the house.  Good thing they came this morning – I hope that today we’ll sell the camper.  It might not be here to serve as a blockade tomorrow.

But I’d better call the prospective buyer.  Can’t have him drive three hours to check a camper in the middle of a protest.  We’ve been trying to sell the camper for more than a month, and now this protest is going to scuttle the sale. Damn, that was going to be a cash deal.

So maybe I need to call for help.  I need the authorities.  But who could I call, the police?  They were on the protest line as well, in uniform with a police dog!   Fat chance that they would “break up” the demonstration.  Maybe the Sheriff’s Department, but they were marching too, wearing their black and gray, pacing up and down my street.  Guess there’s no help there either.

It would be easy to shut the blinds, lock the doors, and turn up the music to try to drown them out.  But these were my friends, out there, shouting and demanding that we leave.  So I took one of the red folding chairs from the garage, and sat in the middle of the front yard.  If they were going to yell at us, well, here I am.  Yell at me.  It was just what we used to do when the Pataskala Parade came down our street – then it was a “front row” view of all of the horses.  Now, it was to this spectacle.

Being Neighborly

And then I had an even better idea.  I went and got a long white table from the storage shed in the back. I was going to go to Kroger’s and buy cookies, but there wasn’t a way to get out of the driveway to go anywhere.  A big black SUV, like a Secret Service car, blocked the end.   So  I quickly (really quickly) made cookies in the kitchen.  They were done and cooled almost instantly, and I found a case of water in the garage (when did we buy that?).  

I went to the end of the driveway,  beside the SUV.  And I set up the table, offering plates of cookies and bottles of water to the protestors, like I was a water stop on a road race.   It seemed like the “neighborly” thing to do.

Then the Sheriff’s Deputies came up and arrested me – handcuffing me against the Black SUV.  It was against the law to feed or give water to protestors in the street.

Someone jumped on me –

Just Light

And I woke up to our younger rescue dog, the only female. It was a little after six on Sunday morning – and time for her to go out, and patrol the back yard. Her morning ritual is to jump up on the bed and demand a morning snuggle as her first duty of the day.

It was all a dream.  There was no shouting outside, no picket line in the street.  Just the cold early light of an April morning, and the dreams of someone who has spent time thinking about our world today.  

My wife and I have talked a lot about it – and how different our views are than those around us.  Our neighbors, friends and town has been pretty “tolerant” of having an “openly liberal” family here.  With only a couple exceptions, we made it through two Presidential campaigns without incidence.  But Biden’s election didn’t  seem to “make things better” as far as the neighborhood is concerned.

It’s like some have just “dug in” in their views even more than before.  It’s not just the stubborn “Trump for America” signs that still “grace” several yards.  And it’s not even the “F##K BIDEN” banner that hangs from a suburban front porch nearby. It feels like conversations that we could have, even before the election, are no longer possible  The “chat on the street” or the offer to “wander down for a beer” no longer occurs.  It all feels wrapped in an aura of betrayal – “how could you believe that”.

But we do – and we try not to put our views too much in our neighbors’ “faces”. That is, other than the Biden signs during the election – still stored in the garage. One fell on my head yesterday. Maybe it takes getting hit on the head to discover what I’m really worried about.

The dogs don’t go back to bed in the morning.  And as my Mom would say – “no rest for the weary”. Or was it”no rest for the wicked?”  

So here’s my Sunday story.

Jordan For ?

No one is really sure what Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan is running for.  Is his goal the Governorship of Ohio?  Or does he have some plan to unseat Kevin McCarthy and become the leader of the Republicans in the House – with hopes of becoming Speaker some day?  Or, is he so worried about the fallout from his actions as an assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State three decades ago, that he wants to be invaluable to the “right”.  That way, no matter what he failed to do to protect his athletes back in the day, the right will still support him.

And Jordan has found the focal point for his right wing rage:  Dr. Anthony Fauci.  In a Congressional hearing yesterday, he demanded of Dr. Fauci, almost pounding his fists on the table: “When will we get our freedom back!!!”

He might just as well have said, “when did you stop beating your wife,” to the eminent virologist.  Fauci, rightly, refused to accept the premise of Jordan’s question.  The restrictions of COVID control aren’t about “freedom”, they are about keeping more Americans from dying from the disease.  What Jordan calls “freedom” is really the “right” to hold super-spreader events, and kill people.  And that’s not a right, that’s just stupid.

Fox Whipping Boy

But Jordan has found his “whipping boy” for all the so-called lost freedoms that COVID has caused.  Fauci managed to be the “last man standing” from the original Trump response to the virus.  Other scientists and physicians, and the list is long, were disgraced by the end of Trump’s term:  Birx, Redfield,  and Azar among them.  They lost their credibility trying to navigate science and a President who found COVID an inconvenient  truth.  Fauci, on the other hand, became the alternative to the Trump craziness.  He spoke the truth when the Trump appointees spouted political fiction.  He served an “exile” under Trump, banned from the national press.  And he emerged as the scientific leader of America’s virus response under the Biden Administration.

So Jordan really gets “three for one” by attacking Fauci.  He gets to be a “Trumper” against the one scientist who rose above the Trump Administration.  He also gets to support all those folks who believe that the COVID responses – from online school and church to cancelled Little League Baseball games, weren’t necessary.  And he gets to try to pass the COVID “blame” to President Biden and the Democrats.  And Jordan loves to blame Democrats for almost every evil known to man.

So the facts of COVID really don’t matter much to the former wrestler from St. Paris.  It’s so much easier to follow his Fox News friends and pretend that the almost 600,000 Americans lost in the past year weren’t really there in the first place.  Or that the vaccines, that many of Jordan’s supporters refuse to take, will “solve” all the COVID problems.  Or that Jordan’s version of “freedom” is contingent upon not wearing a face mask.

Masks, not Muzzles

It’s the same version that Senator Rand Paul tried to “sell” in another hearing with Dr. Fauci.  Paul ripped Fauci for wearing a face mask after being full vaccinated.  It was straight from the Facebook “meme”:  “if the vaccine works, you don’t need a mask – if you need a mask then the vaccine doesn’t work”.   

You’d think that having a medical degree would allow Dr. Paul to deal with more complex thought concepts – but those don’t make good “sound bites” on Fox News.  Yes, the vaccine works, better than the flu and the chicken pox  shots.  But it isn’t perfect.  And as it is so new, we don’t know the impact that “variants” of COVID will have (the variants driving the COVID spike in Michigan right now).  So the prudent thing to do is to continue to wear a mask – both for the wearer and those around them.

And while we don’t know what office Jordan is lusting for, we do know that Rand Paul longs to fulfill his father’s dream of winning the Presidency.  So Fox News coverage is mandatory.

Know Nothing

Both Jordan and Paul represent a “Know Nothing” view of COVID – that somehow it was all a hoax on the American people, perhaps designed to bring Donald Trump down. That view is amplified in the “silo” of right wing media.   It’s easy for their constituents in rural fields of Ohio or the Appalachian “hollers” of Eastern Kentucky to pretend that COVID is just a “Democrat” disease.  

But it’s not just a Democratic disease, and Dr. Fauci continues to tell Americans the scientific truth; even when it’s hard, and even when it’s not what Americans “want” to hear.  The advent of the vaccines and the spring are driving the attitude that “it’s all over” – but it’s not.  And the politically motivated protestations of Jordan and others won’t make it so.  We will – by doing what needs to be done to control COVID, and protect the American people. 

And that’s what Dr. Fauci is trying to do.

Gibbs

For those of you that aren’t TV fans, one of the longest running prime-time dramas is a show called NCIS (for Naval Criminal Investigative Service).  It’s a “cop show”, about a team of investigators who work out of Washington DC. They are led by their now aging leader, Leroy Jethro Gibbs.  After eighteen years we know a whole lot about Gibbs.   He served as a Marine sniper and lost the love of his life and his child to a drug smuggler. He was first tutored in investigative work by Mike Franks.  Gibbs has an addiction to redheaded women and building boats in the basement.  And, of course, “Gibbs Rules”, carefully numbered one (twice) through sixty-nine.  They are how an old Marine navigates the complications of life.

While Gibbs lost his family, he always has his “team”.  And while the team has changed over the years, they all depend on Gibbs. He is their leader, their father-figure, and their friend.  But throughout the eighteen years of the show, there has been one stalwart, one compatriot who has remained.  Dr. Donald Horatio Mallard, better known as “Ducky” to his friends, is the now retired Chief Medical Examiner of NCIS.  Ducky, as well as the quirky and brilliant Forensic Scientists Abby Sciutto (replaced by Kasie Hines) and new Medical Examiner Jimmy Palmer, bring scientific method and investigative techniques to the show.  Those processes, combined with Gibbs’ famous “gut feelings”, solve crimes.

Ducky

Ducky himself has a long storied history.  A graduate of the Eton College in England and Edinburgh Scotland’s famed Medical College, he was a physician in the Royal Medical Corps of the British Army.  His accented and rambling stories always somehow bring historical perspective to the deceased.  Ducky talks to his “patients”, the dead on his autopsy table.  His goal is to bring them closure for their untimely demise.

If you’re a television fan, you are very used to scientific facts about the dead brought to you with a British accent (with an occasional Scottish brogue).  Ducky has been explaining to us what caused a victim’s death for eighteen years.  And he is almost always right.

Tobin

So what’s the chance both sides of the Derek Chauvin trial managed to find key scientific witnesses that sound like “Ducky”?  The Prosecution presented Dr. Martin Tobin, a pulmonologist from Chicago’s Loyola University. He was born in Ireland, and educated at University College in Dublin and King’s College Hospital in London.  

He’s been in the United States since 1981, and with his calm Irish accent carefully walked the jury through the processes of the body getting oxygen.  It was his long testimony that generating the most damning scientific evidence against the defendant.  He carefully explained how Chauvin’s knees in George Floyd’s back for over nine minutes slowly prevented him from getting enough oxygen, and extinguished his life.

Dr. Tobin volunteered his testimony as “the” expert witness in respiration. 

 Fowler

The Defense countered with an “expert” witness of their own, Dr. David Fowler.  Fowler was born in Zimbabwe (then part of the British Empire called Rhodesia).  He attended the University of South Africa in Cape Town, where he earned his medical degree.  Fowler then moved onto the United States in 1991, where he completed further study at the University of Maryland, and became a Medical Examiner for the state.  He rose through the department to become the Chief Medical Examiner for Maryland in 2002 and retired from that position in 2019.

To the uninitiated, Dr. Fowler’s South African accent sounds “British”.  And he too had very convincing theories for the death of George Floyd.  He speculated that Floyd died from a heart arrythmia due to drug use, or coronary artery disease, or possibly inhalation of carbon monoxide while he was held in the “prone” position on the street beside the vehicle.  In fact, Dr. Fowler came up with almost every possible reason for Floyd’s death, except for the most obvious one:  that someone was kneeling on his back, holding his neck to the pavement, while the man’s arms were handcuffed behind his back.

Dr. Fowler is now a “forensic consultant”.  That translates to mean he is a paid expert witness, earning hundreds of dollars an hour to testify in Court.  And while he is bringing all of his decades of scientific expertise to bear, you can be sure that if he reached a conclusion that the defendant was at fault, he wouldn’t be on the stand at all.

Rules

Gibb’s rules have been around since the beginning of the series eighteen years ago.  But it took seven seasons for us to learn about Rule #39 – “There is no such thing as a coincidence”.   That one “British” accented scientist would appear on the stand of the Chauvin trial might be happenstance, but that both sides brought their accented “experts” to explain the “science” of George Floyd’s death to the jury – I call “Rule 39”.

I’m sure there are forensic experts born in the United States, who don’t have an accent originating from the British Isles.  But they also won’t sound like “Ducky”.  Americans have been hearing the scientific truth from Dr. Mallard on NCIS for almost two decades.  And don’t forget, we live in a nation that once elected a President mostly based on his character on a television show.  It’s all about Rule 39.

Beginnings

If you’ve read many essays here in “Our America”, you’ll know that I spent a big portion of my life as a track coach.  I kind of fell into that.  I was done with track when I started student teaching at Watkins Memorial High School back in 1978.  But I learned a quick lesson about public school teaching in those first weeks.  If you want a job, you’ve got to offer more than “just” a classroom teacher.  My mentors, Bob Cramer and Gary Madden, suggested that I help out with an extra-curricular program in order to “enhance” my resume.

I ran track, freshmen through senior in high school, and my freshman year in college.  But my interest in politics and off-campus study moved me off the team.  When I started at Watkins, it was two years since I’d been on a track.  But it was late winter – the kids were practicing track in the hallway down by the cafeteria.  The track coach, John McGowan, had sixty boys and with only himself and Bob as the coaches.  So I wandered down to watch some sprint starts after school.  The blocks were bolted to a big piece of plywood and set on a mat on the tile floor. 

A little technical detail:  the better your sprint start out of blocks, the closer you are to falling on your face.  I watched the kids, and decided to “show-em” by taking one myself.  There’s an art to sprinting on tile – even back in my high school, the halls we practiced in the were carpeted.  So I took my typical “power” start – it was always one of my strengths.  Two steps out — and I fell flat on my face.  Getting traction on tiles just isn’t the same.

And that was “the test” with the 1978 track team.  When I laughed at myself as hard as they laughed at me – the kids knew that I wasn’t too “stuck-up” from Denison University.  I got back in the blocks and tried it again – modifying my drive to stay on my feet.  And then we had a few short races to see who was fastest.  I was about two years older than the seniors – and still had my “track speed”.  So we were soon good.

Career Choices

I had no idea at the time that track and field would be such an important part of my life.  In fact, I really didn’t think teaching would be my life.  Law school, political campaigns, getting back to Washington DC were all my goals at the time.  Teaching and coaching was fun, exciting, and fulfilling, but not really on my career trajectory.  

But that spring of 1978  I got to know John McGowan.  John knew a lot about track and field, in fact I was always amazed how he could move from one event to another with technical insight to help kids. And he did that a lot:  John coached all the events but the throws (shot and discus) when I started.  But more importantly, John knew about kids.  He was able to reach them, to find out what motivated them, and to make them feel important, whether they were the best on the team, or just better than they were the day before.  

I joined John and Bob as the unofficial sprint/hurdle coach for the ’78 season.  And by the time May rolled around and I was ready to graduate from Denison myself, teaching and coaching were definitely an option.  

I “crossed the stage” at Denison, and went back to Cincinnati to work on a political campaign.  We lost the primary in June, and I decided not to go to law school right away.  When Pete Nix, then the intimidating Principal of the high school called and offered me a job, I decided to take a year and teach at Watkins.

That year stretched into two and then three.  John retired as the track coach, but remained as cross country coach.  And I joined him in the woods and learned about a whole new world of athletic competition, cross country running.  That was something I had little experience with.  Running distance for me was always punishment.  I was that kid who would think about quitting when I was told to run two miles, but had no problem running sixteen 220’s in a row (that’s two miles by the way).  It was all about sprinting.

Family

And those years with John and Bob framed my entire coaching philosophy.  It was about caring for the kids as much as the performances.  The cross country and track teams became families: that had fun, worked hard, they got in trouble, and always fought to achieve.  That’s a powerful combination:  family and competition.  It pulled us all along through the years of the kids’ high school careers, and the decades of coaching.

I fell in love with two sports, cross country, and track all over again.  That was all forty-three years ago.  

I left coaching track and field after the 2017 season.  For a year I stayed away almost completely; going to a few meets and helping out, but giving the team and coaches some space to build their own family.  Two years ago I decided to take up officiating track and Cross Country again (I let my license lapse back in 2000).  Officiating isn’t the same as coaching. Your role is that of the neutral arbiter, providing the opportunity for fair competition.  As vocal as a coach as I was (and I definitely was) I try to be a quiet official.  I’m not “the show”, I’m just the person making things happen efficiently and fairly.

And as far as Watkins is concerned – it’s been four years.  There’s no kids left who knew me as a coach. Most on the team just think I’m another old “official dude” with a loud gun, if they know me at all.  Of course the coaches know me, some I coached myself, some I worked with for decades. But I don’t have a problem “officiating” fairly – that’s what I do, and that’s what those coaches, my friends, expect.

But I will say – seeing teams that are families – Watkins or otherwise – reminds me of why I coached in the first place.  Last night was a long one, a “tri-meet” that went almost four hours.  I fired so many “blanks” from the starting pistol my hands were darkened with gunpowder. My ears are still ringing as I write this morning.  But out on the track you could feel the camaraderie, the family, from all three teams.  It reminded me of why I stayed for so long, and what was so special about life “on the track”.  

It’s weird to be an “observer” rather than a “participant”, and sometimes hard to keep my mouth shut. But it’s good to be “home”.