Monday Wake Up Call – October 11, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Dusk, Mayflower Beach, Cape Cod, MA – October 9, 2021, photo by Andrei Anca

From Newsday: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“School boards have become the latest political battleground in America, with passions running so high that this week Attorney General Merrick Garland sent a memo to the FBI, US attorneys and state attorneys general asking them to discuss strategies to combat threats of violence against school workers and school board members.”

These school board battles are about Covid-related vaccination and masking policies, and about teaching anti-racism, racial equity, and cultural diversity. Both turn out to be culture-war battles that set groups of parents against each other. Margaret Talbot in the New Yorker:

“…it’s easy to find in YouTube videos, and local news reports by the score—protesters fairly vibrating with January 6th energy as they disrupt school-board meetings, raging against mask mandates and other COVID precautions, or that favorite spectral horror, critical race theory.”

This is not what people had in mind when they said more people would get involved with their local school boards. Adam Laats, professor of education at Binghamton University SUNY, wrote in the WaPo:

“Conservative pundits have talked up these confrontations as part of a larger political strategy….The Heritage Foundation declared July “National Attend Your School Board Meeting Month” and celebrated the “Great Parent Revolt of 2021,” which includes the founding of hundreds of new parent activist groups that might thwart ‘the radical tide of educators, nonprofits and federal education bureaucrats’.”

This is a specific Republican election strategy. CNN reported that Senate Republican minority leader Mitch McConnell told Attorney General Merrick Garland that parents “absolutely should be telling” local schools what to teach during debates over mask and vaccine mandates, the role of racial equity education and transgender rights in schools. Here’s Mitch:

“Parents absolutely should be telling their local schools what to teach. This is the very basis of representative government….They do this both in elections and — as protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution — while petitioning their government for redress of grievance. Telling elected officials they’re wrong is democracy, not intimidation.”

It’s a big issue in 2021’s Virginia gubernatorial election. Republican nominee Glenn Youngkin quickly used comments by Democratic opponent Terry McAuliffe into an attack ad aimed at invigorating base GOP voters and parents ahead of this November’s election.

McAuliffe’s comment was: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” Count on a Clinton ally to give Republicans another “deplorable” quote for Republicans to rally around.

This trollification of local politics began in 2009 with the Tea Party taking over politician’s town meetings. In 1970, Tom Wolfe famously referred to the confrontations between militants and hapless bureaucrats as Mau-Mauing the flak catchers. Back then, the militants were Black people who hinted at a Mau Mau uprising in the US, and the hapless bureaucrats who were paid to take their flak.

Now it’s White militants who are “mau-mauing” their school bureaucrats and the elected school board volunteers who we charge with managing our kids’ education.

We think that social media is where this kind of venom is spewed. But since the Tea Party, people are too ready to boo and jeer others in public spaces who express opinions different from theirs. Some militants even accuse school board members of being part of child-trafficking conspiracies.

America has walked away from its social and political norms.

Trump was among the first national politicians who was willing to say the quiet parts aloud. Those who are resentful in the face of societal change, e.g., having their hate speech corrected, found a voice in Trump. And he’s happily encouraged them. He refused to control his racist, sexist speech and behavior, and they respect him because he never did anything he didn’t want to do.

Don’t want to pay your taxes? Trump’s flouted the tax system for decades.

Tired of dealing with women on the job? Just listen to what Trump does to women.

Don’t like the way the last election turned out? Well, here’s what to do while we’re working on the coup.

And there will always be enough grifters and demagogues to throw gas on this dumpster fire. These Trumpy Americans have such a big emotional investment in their false reality, they don’t really care what’s true.

Time to wake up America. There are reasons for societal norms. They stop us from only focusing on the “I” and allow us to remember the “We.” The We protects us from the worst in ourselves.

To help you wake up, listen to Eddie Vedder’s (Pearl Jam) new single “Long Way” from his upcoming solo album, “Earthling”:

You can hear Tom Petty’s influence in Vetter’s tune.

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A Not-So-Soothing Saturday – September 11, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Remembrance of an Idealized WTC. (This is a 2015 screen grab from The Economist)

On this 20th anniversary of the 9/11 disaster, let’s take a short look back, and a longer look forward.

Wrongo and Ms. Right lived 2 blocks from the WTC in the early 1980s. We were urban pioneers, living and working in the Wall Street area. That part of town didn’t have supermarkets, and few stores were open after 5pm.

Occasionally, we would have dinner at Windows on the World, the restaurant at the top of the North Tower. In fact, one of our children had her sweet-sixteen dinner there, with all of New York at her feet. Back then, I visited the Towers often, seeing friends and colleagues who worked there.

On 9/11/2001, Wrongo was in Maine, visiting a company he had just acquired. Like in Manhattan, we watched a beautiful blue sky as the terrible breaking news turned into harsh reality. We spent the next week vainly trying to work, while mostly sitting in a nearby restaurant with a huge TV wall that was tuned in to all terrorism, all the time.

We had a grandson born in New Jersey on 9/14. I drove to the hospital from Augusta, Maine, while Ms. Right drove east from State College, PA. He’s turning 20.

Today, it gets progressively harder to remember what the US used to be like before 9/11. We forget what it was like to be able to arrive at the airport 20 minutes before a flight. What it was like to walk into a building without going through a metal detector.

Most important, it’s hard to remember what it was like to believe that the US’s version of democracy would remain ascendant for all time. Some context for our 20-year War on Terror comes from Spencer Ackerman’s 2021 book, “Reign of Terror”:

“In response to 9/11, America had invaded and occupied two countries, bombed four others for years, killed at least 801,000 people — a full total may never be known — terrified millions more, tortured hundreds, detained thousands, reserved unto itself the right to create a global surveillance dragnet, disposed of its veterans with cruel indifference, called an entire global religion criminal or treated it that way, made migration into a crime and declared most of its actions to be either legal or constitutional. It created at least 21 million refugees and spent as much as $6 trillion on its operations.”

Quite the achievement, no? We responded in a primitive, unthinking way and unearthed a weakness in our national character that continues to haunt us today. Among 9/11’s legacies are not just mass surveillance and drone strikes, but also the rise of right-wing extremism. More from Ackerman:

“When terrorism was white….America sympathized with principled objections against unleashing the coercive, punitive, and violent powers of the state….When terrorism was white, the prospect of criminalizing a large swath of Americans was unthinkable…”

He’s thinking about the Oklahoma City bombing. Then things changed:

“The result…was a vague definition of an enemy that consisted of thousands of Muslims, perhaps millions, but not all Muslims — though definitely, exclusively, Muslims.”

It’s important to remember that GW Bush insisted that Muslims weren’t the enemy at one moment and then described the War on Terror as a “crusade” the next.

Many authors say there’s a direct line between 9/11 and the rise of right-wing extremism in the US. For example, the Ground Zero Mosque enraged Republicans. The buildings, a few blocks from the WTC, were damaged on 9/11. In 2009, the NYT reported on plans to replace some of the buildings with a mosque and Islamic cultural center. Republicans were still angry enough to complain that the new building was a “victory mosque”.

It is one thing to oppose radical Islamist terrorism. But when Republican politicians redefined the enemy not as violent jihadists but Muslims in general, they also redefined their Party as one welcoming xenophobic rhetoric and candidates.

From Cynthia Miller-Idress:

“…al Qaeda terrorists and their ilk seemed to have stepped out of a far-right fever dream. Almost overnight, the US…abounded with precisely the fears that the far right had been trying to stoke for decades…far-right groups saw an opportunity and grabbed it, quickly and easily adapting their messages to the new landscape. A well-resourced Islamophobia industry sprang into action, using a variety of scare tactics to generate hysteria about the looming threat.”

Will Saletan of Slate connects this to our botched Covid response:

“When al-Qaida struck America on 9/11, Republicans completely reoriented our government to confront terrorism….Republicans instituted new measures to track and halt the spread of terrorism at home. They upgraded domestic surveillance and tightened screening at airports and other public places.

Today, in the face of a far more deadly enemy, Republicans have done the opposite. They’ve belittled the coronavirus pandemic, scorned vigilance, defended reckless individualism, and obstructed efforts to protect the public.”

Their campaign of obstruction and propaganda has contributed to millions of unnecessary infections.

In this respect, Covid was a test of that Party’s character. It challenged Republicans to decide whether they’ve moved from being a party of national security, to a party of grievance and animosity. We now know the answer to that question.

Elliot Ackerman (no relation) in Foreign Affairs observes:

“From Caesar’s Rome to Napoleon’s France, history shows that when a republic couples a large standing military with dysfunctional domestic politics, democracy doesn’t last long. The US today meets both conditions.”

Let’s close with a 9/11 tune. The October 20, 2001 “Concert for New York” can’t be beat. It was a highly visible and early part of NYC’s healing process.

One of the many highlights of that 4+hour show was Billy Joel’s medley of “Miami 2017 (seen the lights go out on Broadway)” and his “New York State of Mind”. Joel wrote “Miami 2017” in 1975, at the height of the NYC fiscal crisis. It describes an apocalyptic fantasy of a ruined NY that got a new, emotional second life after he performed it during the Concert for New York: 

The concert brought a sense of human bonding in a time of duress. It isn’t hyperbole to say that the city began its psychological recovery that night in Madison Square Garden. It’s worth your time.

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Saturday Soother – August 7, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Badlands NP, SD – photo by Nik Eviston

Random end-of-the-week thoughts about Covid. First, from ABC News:

“Seventy percent of US adults ages 18 and older, or roughly 180.7 million Americans, have received at least one vaccine dose, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.”

It’s difficult to get 70% of the American people to agree on anything, but given today’s Delta variant, somehow that doesn’t seem to be nearly enough. We’re down to a hardcore 30% who for all sorts of reasons, arrive at the same conclusion: They’re not getting vaccinated. Some may get vaccinated later, some will never get the shots.

That 30% is not only stopping the rest of us from getting on with a semi-normal life, but they’re also placing the country in grave risk.

Second, it’s always good to remember that the pharmaceutical companies are in the game to make profits. Earlier this week, Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna raised prices on their vaccines. Apparently, the European Union now has to pay 25% more than it was paying for the Pfizer vaccine, and 10% more for Moderna’s. Their costs didn’t go up, but their market power has increased. Pfizer has already raised its financial  estimates, telling investors it will generate $33 billion in revenues this year from selling the vaccine.

It’s important to note that neither firm is making enough doses to vaccinate the world. They’re focused on production for rich countries. In general, there isn’t enough vaccine supply. And this makes it much harder to bring the pandemic under control, since poorer countries just can’t get the vaccines they want.

Third, Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis said recently that immigrants are causing the spread of the Delta variant of Covid. This map from the USA Today refutes his nonsense:

High test positivity is happening nearly everywhere in America. On parts of the southern border where illegal immigration is heavy, the risk is lower than anywhere in Florida.

Finally, From the Morning Brew:

“What does Covid-19 vaccine developer Sarah Gilbert have in common with BeyoncĂ© and Marilyn Monroe? They all have Barbie dolls in their likenesses. Toy company Mattel debuted Barbie dolls modeled after six female health workers fighting on the front lines during the pandemic.”

Here’s Mattel’s lineup of Covid new role model dolls:

Over the decades, Mattel had been criticized for its unrealistic portrait of womanhood with its original Barbie, a white, blonde, who although turning 60 in 2019, still has that impossible physique. Mattel now offers dolls with careers such as firefighter, doctor, and astronaut, and in a range of skin tones.

These six women all have had important roles in fighting the pandemic, so that’s something new. Also, sales of Barbie dolls last year hit a six-year high.

On Sunday, Wrongo and Ms. Right are attending a new musical, held in an outdoor tent, at the indispensable Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, CT. Goodspeed, like theaters everywhere are feeling their way forward in a time of increased infections, and we’re happy to support them.

But today is the start of the weekend, and that means it’s time for our Saturday Soother, a few minutes to disengage from the media cacophony, and focus inwardly. It’s a short few moments in which we search for repair and renewal.

To help with that search, grab a seat outdoors if possible, and listen on your wireless headphones to Claude Debussy’s “Nuages” (‘Clouds’) from his “Three Nocturnes”, with the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Leopold Stokowski. Debussy finished writing the piece in 1899. Stokowski recorded the first two of Debussy’s Nocturnes in 1937. Here is “Nuages”, a musical impression of slow-moving clouds, taken from his 1950 recording, re-engineered to produce a better sound, and reissued on a Cala CD:

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Monday Wake Up Call, Thin Blue Line Edition – April 19, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Morning has broken, St. Augustine, FL – April 13, 2021 photo by Wrongo

What does the American Flag really mean to us? To quote Heather Cox Richardson:

“Flags matter. They are the tangible symbol of a people united for a cause.”

Today we’re going to talk about a flag that increasingly unites only some Americans, the Thin Blue Line Flag.

That Thin Blue Line refers to a black-and-white American flag with one blue stripe. It’s come to mean that the police are the line which keeps society from descending into violent chaos. The “blue” refers to the blue color of the uniforms worn by many US police departments.

But in addition to being a sign of police solidarity, it has appeared as a symbol of white supremacy. From the Marshall Project:

“Those who fly the flag have said it stands for solidarity and professional pride within a dangerous, difficult profession and a solemn tribute to fallen police officers. But it has also been flown by white supremacists, appearing next to Confederate flags at the 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. County officials in Oregon recently paid $100,000 to a black employee of a law enforcement agency there, after she said she was harassed by coworkers for complaining about her colleagues displaying the flag at work.”

A “Blue Lives Matter” movement grew in the wake of multiple killings of police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Brooklyn, New York; and Dallas. But the movement took off when Trump, as a presidential candidate, called police “the force between civilization and total chaos.”

Soon a few states passed laws to categorize physical attacks on law enforcement officers as hate crimes.

But it has come to be a symbol for many sides. By the 2020 presidential election, Trump often replaced the American flag with the Thin Blue Line flag as the centerpiece of his rallies. The implication was that he was the leader of the alt-right. It was not inadvertent: after a Wisconsin rally, then-White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany tweeted:

“The Thin Blue Line flag is flying HIGH at President Trump’s rally in Wisconsin!”

The Thin Blue Line flag was prominent at the January 6 attempted coup in DC:

The BLM movement sees it as anti-BLM, and a racist symbol. The Thin Blue Line flag is supposed to convey solidarity with the police. But isn’t it also saying that it’s us against them?

The first reference to a thin blue line is in the early 1950s from William H. Parker, then-chief of police in Los Angeles. He worked with a short-lived TV show called the “Thin Blue Line“. He said that the blue line is what separates different kinds of Americans: those who abide by the law from those who do not.

The use of the concept grew from our military abroad, where it meant that our troops were holding a line against a foreign enemy.

Now, with the emergence of a quasi-military focus of policing in the US, that has been modified: For the police here at home, the enemy is within. The police see themselves as holding the line against criminals and elements of disorder that in their view, are undermining our society. There are now other flags that are designed to show solidarity: a red lined flag for firefighters, a yellow lined flag for emergency responders.

The police and community should be working together to produce better public safety. But if you’re looking at the community as a potential enemy, or a threat, that’s never going to produce a positive relationship.

Does America need specific flags for specific groups? In America today, we’re no longer a homogeneous society under one flag. A significant percentage of us no longer even support one president! The American flag is used by many groups, often with diverging views and ideologies.

Why should the Thin Blue Line flag be allowed to co-op the flag that belongs to all of us?

Wake up America! We’re on a dangerous path. There have always been interest groups that had their own message, some with colors and uniforms, or yes, even flags. But the Thin Blue Line has come to represent an insidious subtextual message of us vs. them that is particularly evident when it is flown alongside the ongoing murders of black and brown Americans by police.

To help you wake up, watch the Nashville-based group BR549 perform their 2001 tune “Too Lazy To Work, Too Nervous To Steal”:

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Are We Having a Border Crisis?

The Daily Escape:

Dead Horse State Park, Moab, UT – 2020 photo by Schmats1

From Pew Research:

“The US Border Patrol apprehended nearly 100,000 migrants at the US-Mexico border in February, the tenth consecutive month of increased apprehensions and a return to levels last seen in mid-2019.”

Is this a self-inflicted wound by Biden, another Republican effort to drive a wedge into Biden’s political support, or both? Since the next 20 months will be a battle royal for control of the last two years of Biden’s term, how Biden handles the immigration issue has huge political consequences.

Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) flipped his seat in November 2020, but he must face voters again in 2022. Immigration could easily be a powerful wedge issue against him, threatening the Democrats’ control of the Senate.

Texas elects a governor in 2022, and while Texas isn’t really in play, last November we saw Latino voters in Texas edging away from the Democrats, toward the Republicans. Residents of these border states experience unauthorized immigration directly; and it’s clear that many Texas Latinos embrace enforcement-minded views on immigration, even while empathizing with the reasons migrants want to come to America.

Republicans assume that they’ve hit on a strategy to beat Democrats in 2022 by saying that the President’s immigration policies have led to a surge of migrants crossing our southern border. But here’s a chart from the Pew Research article showing that’s not the whole story:

Apprehensions peaked in May 2019, then dropped precipitously through April 2020, and have risen ever since, including under Trump in 2020. Today they are at about 73% of the high point that occurred under Trump, but way above that of prior years.

It’s important to remember that migration is seasonal. Border apprehensions have typically peaked in the spring, before declining during the hot summer months that make migration more dangerous. That pattern started to change in 2013, when the mix of new arrivals shifted from being predominantly from Mexico to being from the countries of the Northern Triangle (Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador). The migrants also changed to predominantly families and unaccompanied children.

But now, according to Pew Research, those patterns are starting to reverse:

  • Around 42% of those apprehended at the southwestern border in February were of Mexican origin, up from 13% in May 2019, the most recent peak month for monthly apprehensions.
  • People from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras accounted for 46% of apprehensions in February, down from 78% in May 2019.
  • The number and share of single adults being apprehended at the border has also increased dramatically.

It isn’t clear whether these trends will continue, but it’s possible that February’s spike in apprehensions could also be a return to the seasonal nature of migration.

Republicans are saying that the current spike in border apprehensions is entirely a result of policy changes by the Biden administration. Here’s what Biden has changed according to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas:

  • The majority of those apprehended at the southwest border (71%) are single adults who are being expelled under the CDC’s authority to manage the public health crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
  • Families apprehended at the southwest border make up 20%. They are also currently being expelled.
  • Unaccompanied children make up 10% of the current spike. They are not expelled but are brought to a Border Patrol facility and processed for transfer to HHS while they await placement with a sponsor. These children go through immigration proceedings if they are able to present a claim for relief under the law.

What this says is that when Republicans and some in the media throw around scary numbers about a surge of more than  100,000 “illegal crossings” in February, what they’re not telling you is that approximately 90,000 of those migrants (single adults and families) were apprehended and expelled.

Still, 10,000 kids are a giant task to house, feed, and process. That’s why as a group, they are overwhelming current shelter capacity. On Wednesday, Ambassador Roberta Jacobson, the White House coordinator for the southern border, said in Spanish: “The border is not open.”

The Biden administration has struggled to find the right message but hasn’t abandoned enforcement. It removed almost 1,000 Haitian nationals in February.

Politicians criticizing what’s happening with Biden’s policy need to show us what specific change Biden implemented that they think is causing the current spike. They need to explain what should be done instead.

But, of course, they won’t do that. It is much easier to simply claim that Biden is implementing an “open border” policy, something that is complete nonsense.

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Monday Wake Up Call – March 1, 2021

Sorry that we didn’t have Sunday cartoons. For the first time in 11 years writing this little blog, Wrongo couldn’t find much that was worthy of publishing, except this one:

The NYT reported that around one-third of America’s military have declined to take the Covid vaccine. The reluctance is largely among younger troops, and that it’s a warning about the potential hole in the broad-scale immunity goals for the country. Here is what’s known: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“Roughly one-third of troops on active duty or in the National Guard have declined to take the vaccine, military officials recently told Congress. In some places, such as Fort Bragg, N.C., the nation’s largest military installation, acceptance rates are below 50%.”

The Defense Department doesn’t collect data on who fails to take the shot, but says: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“…there is broad agreement that refusal rates are far higher among younger members, and enlisted personnel are more likely to say no than officers. Military spouses appear to share that hesitation: In a December poll of 674 active-duty family members conducted by Blue Star Families, a military advocacy group, 58% said they would not allow their children to receive the vaccine.”

Although hundreds of thousands of military members have received shots so far, taking the vaccine is voluntary for military members, since it’s only been approved for emergency use by the FDA. If it becomes a standard, approved vaccine, the military can order troops to take the shot.

The rule limiting the Pentagon’s authority to mandate vaccinations unless they’ve been approved by the FDA was designed to protect soldiers from being treated as medical guinea pigs by Uncle Sam. Troops cited the military’s use of an anthrax vaccine in the late 1990s which was believed to cause adverse effects as evidence that the military should not be on the front lines of a new vaccine.

There are many other examples from LSD experiments to radiation exposure that have been visited on America’s military in our lifetimes. But this is an example of a good rule that’s produced a possibly bad outcome, since the vaccine has already been given to nearly 50 million Americans.

This shot doesn’t quality as “experimenting” on the military, but rules are rules and vaccine skeptics within the ranks are taking advantage. Mandating compliance is likely to bring other problems. The NYT says:

“In some ways, vaccines are the new masks: a preventive measure against the virus that has been politicized.”

We’ve written about how the military is moving rightward politically. Most of the reasons quoted by the Times for not getting vaccinated sound more like the QAnon party line than what we hear in civilian society.

More from the Times, quoting a 24-year-old female airman in Virginia who said she declined the shot even though she is an emergency medical worker:

“I would prefer not to be the one testing this vaccine”….She also said that because vaccine access had become a campaign theme during the 2020 race for the White House, she was more skeptical, and added that some of her colleagues had told her they would rather separate from the military than take the vaccine should it become mandatory.”

The NYT says in the article that the military’s vaccine skepticism is simply a reflection of the society at large. They quote  Dr. Michael S. Weiner, the former chief medical officer for the Defense Department:

“At the end of the day, our military is our society….They have the same social media, the same families, the same issues that society at large has.”

What’s happening in the military is like what we’re seeing across the entire US: There’s a higher percentage of older people taking the vaccine, and that percentage trends down with age.

According to the latest poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation, 77% of Americans 65 or over have either gotten a shot or plan to do so as soon as possible. But just 41% of Americans aged 18-29 say the same.

The military traditionally operates in confined quarters. On ships, in barracks, or at a duty station where there’s little room for social distancing. There soon may be enough military anti-vaxxers where they can cause issues with readiness. There was a Covid outbreak on a navy ship that infected 1,100 crew members, about 20% of the ship’s crew.

Time to wake up America! Returning to nearly normal will take a few things: First, keeping your distance from others who may have the virus; it doesn’t spread easily at distance. Second, taking FDA-approved precautions like getting the shots. Or third, at least wearing a mask.

If you won’t do any of those three, you risk yourself, your family and the rest of us.

To help you wake up, listen to Hennessey the Band do their song “8 Men“:

Sample Lyric:

8 men have all the money.

8 men have more than half of the money than everyone else in the world has combined.

8 men control the economy.

8 men have all the wealth.

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Saturday Soother – January 30, 2021

The Daily Escape:

View of Torrance, CA from Palos Verdes, CA – January 2021 photo by Gary W. Stuart. A perfect reason to live in Palos Verdes, where Wrongo and Ms. Right lived for 10 years: Views of ocean and mountains on a rare crystal clear LA winter day. The San Gabriel Mountains in the background are ~35 miles away.

We’ve had a few bitter cold days on the snow-covered fields of Wrong. Friday morning, it was 6° with a 20+mph wind, making it a tough walk for the dog.

The emotional temperature is also icy in DC.  There is a growing rupture between Republicans who insist that the deadly Capitol riot was not the work of Trump supporters, and who insist on carrying concealed weapons onto the floor of the House, and Democrats who say they are afraid they’ll be harmed by those very same Republicans.

Since Republicans refuse to hold their colleagues accountable, some House Democrats have started refusing to work with some of their GOP counterparts, specifically those who favored the election sedition and who refuse to wear masks.

Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) is moving her office away from the office of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). Greene and her staff are berating and harassing the Congresswoman and her staff because they wear masks. Bush said:

“I’m moving my office away from hers for my team’s safety,”

Three weeks after the attack on the Capitol, and two weeks after the disgraced president was impeached for the second time, the GOP is wallowing in a debate over impeachment, trutherism, and… Jewish space lasers?

Yes to the Jewish space lasers: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene is also a gun-toting’ QAnon disciple elected by the same Georgians who elected Biden. She says that California’s Camp Fire was started by a laser beam fired from space by “Rothschild Inc.”

Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI), sums up THE issue of 2021:

There were plenty of jokes made about the space lasers, but one thing that isn’t a joke is the palpable fear by Democrats who have to deal with this lunacy every day. We learned that the new acting head of the Capitol Police wants a wall around the Capitol:

“Vast improvements to the physical security infrastructure must be made to include permanent fencing”

The acting head of the Capitol Police has no faith that we can satisfactorily explain to Republican-Americans that Biden was fairly elected. That his victory was reasonably large. That Trump and most of his enablers lied continually about the outcome of the election.

She thinks the only option is to put fences and razor wire around the Capitol to discourage people whose minds have been poisoned, from attacking it again. And our government may well follow her recommendation. We can’t harden a free society. Whatever you fence off will be “safe” while other places are open to attack. As Jonathan Last says,

“The fences and razor wire at the Capitol are the physical manifestation of the Republican lie. Every time you see them, remember Kevin McCarthy and Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley and Jim Jordan and Matt Gaetz and…the hundreds of elected Republicans across the country who created this lie.”

The tragedy of Trump is that words and deeds, no matter how reckless or disconnected from the truth, carry no political consequences.

Organizer Bree Newsome translated Republicans’ current attitude:

“Sorry we tried to assassinate you & overthrow the election. We didn’t expect it to fail & create this awkwardness between us. Let’s move forward & get back to normal with us blocking any legislation you introduce while we continue to feed a racist terrorist movement. Love, GOP”

We live in disturbing times, but we must find ways to let go of the anger and fear, at least for a few moments on a Saturday. Outdoor activities are not recommended when the wind chill is below zero, so pick up that long read that you’ve been putting off, settle into a comfy chair and get going!

To help get you started, brew up a vente cup of Dafis Abafita Natural Ethiopia ($21.50/12 oz.) from Topeka Kansas’ PT Coffee Roasting Co. The roaster says you can taste mulberry, cocoa nib, tangerine zest, and agave syrup in the cup. Sounds like that cup is doing a lot of work!

Now put on your Bluetooth headphones and listen to “Born in the Right Country” by the group River Whyless, from the mean streets of Asheville, NC. This song is a powerful and elegantly drawn statement about racism in America. It’s a must-watch:

Sample lyric:

I’ll tell you baby a secret
Manufactured truth is easy to sell
When you own the factory
And you own the hearts of the clientele

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Trump’s Mass Radicalization of the Right

The Daily Escape:

Bentonite Hills, Cathedral Valley, Capitol Reef NP, UT – photo by BonsailLXIV

Donald Trump exits the presidential stage today, and not a minute too soon. In a sense, we’re very lucky that he was limited to one term. His mass radicalization of the far right of the Republican Party took just four years to become the Party’s mainstream, and to start an armed insurrection.

Throughout his term, he behaved as if Democrats, immigrants, Black Lives Matter protesters, Blue state residents, and the press had seized the country from Real Americans, the Trump voters. Since the election in November, he’s blanketed the nation with the Big Lie that the election was stolen.

Trump used mass radicalization to build a huge group of followers. The feedback loop was clear: Trump projects omnipotence, while the followers yearn for someone who has all the answers. Some would call it a “lock and key” relationship.

On January 6th, his followers stormed the US Capitol believing they were supposed to seize it for Trump. What is striking are two characteristics his followers seem to show. First, they display global grievance: They are angry at nearly everything outside of a fixed group of ideas and concepts like “freedom”, the Constitution, gun ownership and hatred of “socialism”.

Second, they have an overwhelming sense of entitlement: They alone are the arbiters of right and wrong. They have the right to be the judge and jury if something needs redress. If they commit a violent act, it’s the other side that’s responsible for inciting them.

Domestic terrorism analysts are concerned about the security implications of millions of right-wing Americans buying into baseless claims. The line between mainstream and fringe is vanishing, with conspiracy-minded Republicans now sitting in Congress and marching alongside armed extremists in their spare time.

These self-proclaimed “real Americans” are cocooned in their own news outlets, their own social media networks and, ultimately, their own “truth.” They support bogus claims like the November election was rigged, the coronavirus is a hoax, and liberals are hatching a socialist takeover.

Jason Dempsey, a military analyst notes that too many people are turning to force as a response to fears about political divisions:

“…they’re carrying guns and wearing body armor…We’ve got to get past that and be wary of the idea of militarism that doesn’t lead to a common conception of service, but leads to the kind of tribalism where we have to protect ourselves and our families by force against those we disagree with.”

Nobody expects this mass radicalization to go away when Trump’s out of office. As Arie Kruglanski, a University of Maryland professor who’s written extensively about radicalization says:

“We don’t trust the government. We don’t trust the Congress. We don’t trust the Supreme Court. We don’t trust now the science. We don’t trust medicine. We don’t trust the media for sure….So who do we trust? Well, we trust our tribe. We trust conspiracy theories that tell us what we want to hear.”

The danger of insurrection is here, and probably, thanks to Trump, will stay here for a long time.

QAnon, proliferated last year. The Q followers insist that Trump was all that stood between us and a “deep state” cabal that was running a global sex trafficking ring and harvesting a chemical from children’s blood.

The cherry on the top was the myth that the presidential election had been stolen: 33% of Republicans say they believe that the QAnon theory about a conspiracy among deep state elites is “mostly true.” And 36% of registered voters think voter fraud has occurred to a large enough extent to affect the election outcome.

The QAnon conversation online pivoted from taking down the global cabal to “Stop the Steal.” So when Trump invited supporters to Washington for mass demonstrations on Jan. 6, pro-Trump agitators and QAnon believers saw it as a demand for action.

Who believes in conspiracy theories? Those who have negative attitudes to authority, who feel alienated from politics, and who see the modern world as unintelligible. Conspiracy theory believers are often suspicious and distrustful, and see others as plotting against them. They struggle with anger, resentment, and other hostile feelings as well as with fear. They have lower self-esteem than nonbelievers, and need external validation to maintain their self-esteem. Belief in conspiracy theories often also goes along with belief in paranormal phenomena, and weaknesses in analytic thinking.

Trump, has created what James Meek calls “a self-contained alternative political thought space.” Loyalty to Trump is now a social identity for many people. So if Trump says that the 2020 election was rigged, why would a Trump loyalist disagree?

At the same time, Trump both sows and leverages a growing mistrust of institutions. Only 35% of Americans feel “a lot of trust” that what scientists say is accurate and reliable. Educators and media who try to tell the truth, aren’t useful weapons against conspiracy theories, because they simply become targets of the conspiracy theorists.

Let’s give the last word to Paul Krugman:

“Unlike the crazy conspiracy theories of the left—which do exist, but are supported only by a tiny fringe—the crazy conspiracy theories of the right are supported by important people: powerful politicians, television personalities with large audiences.”

When Richard Nixon resigned and Al Gore conceded, pundits and politicians smugly reassured us that things were fine because there were no tanks or soldiers in the streets, proving that the system worked.

How’s that working out for us this time?

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Sunday Cartoon Blogging – End of an Error Edition

How about some good news for a change?

Flint Michigan may finally get some justice: Former governor Rick Snyder was charged with two misdemeanor counts of willful neglect of duty in his handling of Flint’s water crisis. Six others were also charged, including the former director of the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services and the state’s former chief medical executive. They were both charged with involuntary manslaughter related to the deaths of Michiganders.

Wrongo was delighted that Biden named Jaime Harrison as Chair of the DNC. His commitment to retail funds raising and voter turnout should help change the Democrat’s chances of winning in the southern states. Harrison has done what others haven’t — organizing and getting out the vote in marginalized communities, zip code by zip code. If Harrison can keep the Party’s energy high, we may have a chance to keep the majority and win more seats in both Houses in 2022.

Oh, and TRUMP’S PRESIDENCY IS OVER, very soon. On to cartoons.

The empty promises of the past four years:

Members of Vanilla ISIS are being brought to justice:

It shouldn’t be this way:

Even GOP Congresscritters were scared:

The impeachment game:

NOW you’re ready to heal?

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Saturday’s (Not much of a) Soother – January 16, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Sunrise, Foster Bridge, Cabot, VT – photo by Michael Blanchette photography

Predictions for the year ahead are probably pointless, but 2021 could easily include more domestic terror. Biden’s inauguration will look like an armed takeover of the US Capitol, because the new president must be protected from a potential return of the mob that attacked the Capitol on Jan.6.

That group included some very serious, most likely, coordinated people who had temporary restraints and a plan. Reuters reports that US prosecutors said in a court filing that rioters intended:

 “…to capture and assassinate elected officials.”

The Trump Coupists believed that the election had been stolen, and that democracy in the US had been overthrown. It was, therefore, their duty to right the wrong that had been done, including taking captive those most responsible like Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence. The WaPo says the mob got within 100 feet of Pence’s hiding spot:

“If the pro-Trump mob had arrived seconds earlier, the attackers would have been in eyesight of the vice president as he was rushed across a reception hall into the office.”

This is a Republican problem. Here’s polling data from Quinnipiac, who surveyed 1,239 registered voters nationwide, from January 7-11:

  • 73% of Republicans say Trump is protecting, not undermining, democracy.
  • 70% of Republicans say Republicans who voted to block electors were protecting, not undermining, democracy.
  • 73% of Republicans say there was widespread voter fraud in 2020.

So what will these 50+ million Republicans out of the 74 million Trump voters who think they are disenfranchised, do? Their numbers are more than sufficient to sustain a domestic insurgency. They are geographically diverse, many are armed to the teeth. They believe they are part of a Trump movement, and it is their patriotic duty to fight in order to restore US democracy. From David Brooks:

“You can’t argue with people who have their own separate made-up set of facts…It’s a pure power struggle. The weapons in this struggle are intimidation, verbal assault, death threats and violence, real and rhetorical. The fantasyland mobbists have an advantage because they relish using these weapons, while their fellow Christians just want to lead their lives….The problem is, how do you go about reattaching people to reality?”

A distinct possibility for 2021 is a low grade insurrection, led by heavily armed true believers of the Trump movement. The challenge for America is whether these true believers can be deprogrammed and return to reality.

A return to reality requires all of us, but specifically Republicans at the local, state and federal levels to reject the Big Lie fomented by Trump. Republicans need to look in the mirror. The FT’s Janan Ganesh says: (paywalled, emphasis by Wrongo):

 “Whether we date it to the congressional midterm election of 1994, or Barry Goldwater’s White House bid in 1964, or the McCarthyite 1950s, the party has not policed its right flank for a long time. The Republican portrayal of government as inherently malign is hardly new….The impugning of opponents’ legitimacy did not commence with president-elect Joe Biden’s this winter.”

Few of us know insurrectionists. We see them on TV as armed, angry brainwashed people eager for a second Civil War. We’re all unsure if deprogramming will work, because it rarely works for cult members.

We need brave Republicans who will speak out against the tyrant, and the Big Lie, regardless of the threats.

If the Big Lie persists, America could then be faced with mutually exclusive, and terrible choices: One is to become a police state. We could see more cameras, security checkpoints near state capitols, combined with more social media suppression and expanded no-fly lists. But if there are millions of armed true believers, they won’t be easily suppressed. We could face a long term insurrection, one that will not be put down, short of imprisoning many more millions of Americans.

Whether the trained and armed groups of (mostly) white men scattered all over the country, many of whom are currently in police forces or on military active duty, will coalesce sufficiently to conduct periodic quasi-terrorist actions is difficult to say. But even in the very red states where the Trump movement is powerful, there are urban centers. Those cities are much less red. And few in the Trump movement will want their family and friends getting killed for the cause.

Second, we can try peacefully to encourage the insurrectionists into the mainstream by making our politicians cut out the BS. And by creating a better society. A decent, livable America is currently out of reach for many. In that sense, we all could profit by working to make America great again.

Let’s climb down from all of the recent hysteria, and enjoy a brief moment of Saturday Soothing. Here is the Cadenza from “Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto”, with Canadian Chris Coletti on solo trumpet, conducted by Paul Haas with the Symphony of Northwest Arkansas, in October 2017. His playing is remarkable:

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