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Wednesday, January 22, 2025

Let the Backpedaling Begin

On January 20, 2025, some hours after his inauguration as "president", Donald Trump issued full pardons or sentence commutations (to time served) to all persons convicted of offenses related to the January 6, 2021 riot at the US Capitol

Among those pardoned were: A guy who stomped on Capitol Police Officers' heads after attacking them with a variety of weapons. A guy who sprayed Officer Brian Sicknick (who died of a stroke the following day) in the face with pepper spray. A guy who crushed Metropolitan Police Officer Daniel Hodges in a doorway using a police riot shield. A guy who jammed a Taser into the neck of Metropolitan Police officer Michael Fanone and shocked him repeatedly. That's just to name a few of those who violently attacked the police officers guarding the Capitol that day and are now walking free. Except, I guess, for that guy who already had several felony violence convictions, was awaiting trial for multiple acts of violence on January 6 and was arrested on gun charges a couple days after his pardon

Supporting our local police.

Driving home from work tonight I listened to a story about Trump supporters who disapprove of his January 6 pardons. Similar stories have been published elsewhere. Some Republicans in Congress also profess disagreement.

So where exactly is that thin blue line?

The Fraternal Order of Police, the largest US police union, which endorsed Trump in every election he ran in, is not happy about the pardons. They said so in a joint statement with the International Association of Chiefs of Police.

You may want to rethink that.

But guess what? He told us he was going to do this. He talked about it before he even declared his candidacy for the 2024 election. He told us at his campaign rallies that he would do it. He posted about it on his "Truth Social" platform. There is nothing to be surprised about here.

So if you endorsed his candidacy, or voted for him, or as an elected Republican official just passively let him do his thing: you know who this man is. You know what he said he would do. You supported him anyway. You endorse this. You want this. You own this. No excuses, no "I never believed he would…", no "Sure I voted for him, but I disagree with…". None of that. You knew what the program was, and you consciously and willingly joined with like-minded others to make it happen. You bear direct responsibility for this, and for all of the craziness and pain to come.

Tuesday, November 19, 2024

Fool Me Twice

Well, it's happened again.

Just about eight years ago today I was writing a little essay about the recent election of Donald Trump to be the 45th "president" of the United States. I made note of the despair turning to rage within the largely liberal/Democrat circle of people I tend to associate with, along with my own bafflement that such a thing was possible. I wrote about the many people who voted for him even though they didn't think he was qualified, the blame put on Democratic politicians for ignoring the grievances of the white working class, and my own prognosis for the next four years with Trump as "president". I ended on a somewhat cynical note by saying that it was probably necessary for Trump to make a royal mess of things in order for at least some of his followers to comprehend what a poor choice they had made.

Around four years ago today, I was looking at the Electoral College results and breathing a sigh of relief that we had made it through the four years just ended, and that we were finally rid of that incompetent egomaniac. Little did I know what was coming on January 6, 2021 and for the whole following four years of extended Trump-based drama. And now he's back. The atmosphere feels a lot like it did eight years ago—the anger, the finger-pointing, all that stuff. But for me, it feels a little different than it did then. 

This time around, Trump won the popular vote with around three million votes more than Harris, so we can't just blame the weirdness of our Electoral College system for putting him back into the White house. He made inroads among demographic groups that the Democrats want to think are firmly in their camp. A majority of voters took a look at four years of craziness and incompetence and said, "Yup, that was great, please give me some more." All I can think of to say to these people is an old aphorism: Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

I have heard over and over that the economy, really meaning inflation, was a deciding factor, maybe the deciding factor. It's tempting to say that Americans care more about the price of eggs than about handing over the nuclear codes to a criminal narcissist, and I have indeed said that to a few friends and family members. To put it in perspective, this same inflation happened at the same time all over the industrialized world, but the US economy has recovered far more, and far faster, than the economies of any of its peer nations. At a macro level, things are pretty good, economy-wise.

I nonetheless understand that there are a lot of people in this country living paycheck to paycheck, for whom the sudden increase in the price of groceries (and a lot of other things) coming out of the pandemic has been a huge and genuine problem. Knowing that the US has a more favorable rate of inflation or unemployment or wage growth than Italy or Japan or Australia does not somehow get the bills paid, or shrink the size of those bills back to their pre-pandemic size.

But… Americans have incredibly short memories. So many think back to the first Trump administration with some vague sense that they were better off then. They don't consider that Trump inherited a robust economy from the Obama administration, and was able to coast on that for some distance. They seem to forget the massive economic disruption that came with the COVID-19 pandemic, the impact of which was undoubtedly amplified by Trump's mismanagement, especially early on when he tried to pretend that it wasn't even a problem. All they know is that the cost of living has gone up, and Biden, and by extension Harris, were in charge, so we should turn to Trump, who promises, "We will rapidly drive prices down." So yeah, eggs. 


This is all your fault.

And let's garnish those eggs with a generous sprinkling of magical thinking. Prices aren't going down. On the contrary, actual economists say that Trump's policies will drive an entirely new round of inflation—even as I write this, the CEOs of Wal-Mart, Auto Zone, Lowes and other mainstays of our consumer economy are talking about raising prices to compensate for coming tariffs. Some say that his policies will trigger a recession and damage the entire global economy. So for now, in mid-November 2024, let's take note of some key economic indicators:

If you follow these things, you know that that these are pretty decent numbers. Maybe we'll come back in a year or two and see what they look like, and how happy his constituents are.

But enough on economics. There are plenty of other things to worry about. As I watch him put his cabinet together, all I can do is shake my head. His choice of Little Marco to be Secretary of State surprised me, involving as it did someone with actual credentials for the job—I'm betting he'll either quit or be fired somewhere between six and twelve months in. Otherwise, it's been a parade of ideologues and sycophants with little to no actual qualifications for the offices for which they have been selected. Most of his nominees are just some guy he saw on Fox "News"; we might as well replace the presidential seal with one of those "As seen on TV!" logos.

Below cabinet level, Trump's plan to reinstate Schedule F is the beginning of a program to replace qualified, long-time civil servants with substantial experience and expertise in their respective fields with lackeys and toadies whose primary job skill is loyalty to Trump and willingness to unquestioningly toe the party line. All I'm going to say about that is: now there's a recipe for success.

I could go on and on. I could expound on how he's determined to make good on his promises to round up and deport illegal immigrantsroll back environmental regulation, promote fossil fuels and kill alternative energy, and continue his tax cuts that benefit only the highest-income earners. But to cut to the chase: I think it's going to be bad. It was bad last time, but it'll be much worse this time around because Trump is out for revenge and he is determined not to again make the mistake of surrounding himself with people who will say no. He'll be surrounded by people like Musk, Ramaswamy, RFK Jr. and others who'll be egging him on instead. I'm sure this sequel will also feature at least a few characters from the first movie, like Steve Bannon, or Steven Miller, the Jewish Eichmann (I get to say that as a Member of the Tribe). I can only hope that the infighting that will be produced by all of those monumental egos vying for the attention of the Ego in Chief will get in the way of them getting at least some of their program done.


Proceed with caution.

But the people have spoken. Or at least a majority of voters have spoken, and said that they want this. They didn't get the full program last time, but with so many of the guardrails gone, their chances are better this time. So give the people, the true believers, what they want. I will have to do what I can to insulate myself, my family, my friends against the worst effects of what I think is coming. Fortunately, unlike so many of his ardent supporters, I am not dependent on the kinds of programs that are most likely to disappear if their hero gets his way. I think they are in for a rude surprise and I can only hope that it will leave the whole MAGA program discredited in the long run.

We shall see. In that other thing I wrote eight years ago, I ended on the image of an addict having to hit rock bottom before finally swearing off the drug for good. That image seems just as apt now. We just might get there this time.

Tuesday, September 19, 2023

Stumbling Through History

My Favorite Wife (aka MFW, for those of you who don't follow this deeply neglected blog closely) and I spent a few weeks in Germany recently, visiting family and friends that we hadn't seen in four years, due to the complications of traveling during the COVID-19 pandemic. At one point we found ourselves in the small provincial town of Landau in der Pfalz, walking around the small market square to do a little shopping. As we walked, we came across a number of Stolpersteine. I've seen these many times in various German cities, but in light of recent political developments in my own home country (which I'll get to eventually) they made a completely different impression on me than previously.

These "stumbling stones" or "stumbling blocks" are part of a long-running project of the artist Gunter Demnig to memorialize victims of the Nazi regime that governed Germany from January 1933 to May 1945. Stolpersteine are embedded into the pavement in front of the houses in which those victims lived. You find them all over Germany and in another two dozen European countries. They tell a story that is mostly pretty grim. Back home, I felt compelled to research those stories and was able to piece together more than I had expected.

In front of the house at Marktstraße 81, we found two different stories. The Rosenblatt and Stützel families lived here.

Stolpersteine, Marktstraße 81, Landau in der Pfalz

We can see that in 1938, Nathan and Natka Rosenblatt lived in the house with their children Wolf (7), Doris (9) and Leo (13). By this point in time in the Third Reich, the Jewish Rosenblatts would have been stripped of German citizenship, severely restricted in their movements and prohibited from essentially any participation in public life. The children would have been kicked out of school. Nathan and Natka would have been fired from any job they had and prohibited from practicing any profession. If they owned a business, they would almost certainly have closed it or sold it at a heavily discounted price because the institutionalized boycott of Jewish businesses would have rendered it unviable. At the time there were even more new discrimination and harassment measures in preparation by the Nazi government, but they would not be around to experience those.

From the inscriptions on the Rosenblatt Stolpersteine we can see that they were among around 17,000 Jews deported to Poland as part of the Polenaktion in October, 1938. Its victims were arrested without warning, taken to a prison or transit camp with only whatever they happened to have on their person at the time of arrest, and then transported to the Polish border and forced across. Any who tried to cross back into Germany were shot. The Polish border guards had no idea what to do with the new arrivals; a few thousand were eventually admitted into Poland but most remained stuck first in the open and then in squalid refugee camps that arose in the no-man's land along the border. We can see that Natka ultimately ended up in Auschwitz and was killed there in May of 1942. The fate of the rest of the family is unknown; they may have died of disease or starvation early on, or later in some camp or ghetto, or were shot or gassed or worked to death wherever they eventually ended up. In any case it's safe to assume that there wasn't a happy ending for them, and the fact that only Natka shows up in records is also an indicator that the family was probably separated at some point in their final journey.

We know more about Heinrich Stützel. There's a small street in Landau named after him. Stützel wasn't Jewish, but he was a leading member of the SPD, the German Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) and an active opponent of the Nazis. After the latter came to power, Stützel, a tailor, was unable to find work. As a member of a small resistance group that distributed prohibited newspapers and pamphlets smuggled into Germany from nearby France, he was subjected to multiple house searches and police interrogations. Eventually arrested in May, 1935, he was imprisoned for his activities until early 1937 on a charge of "preparation to commit high treason". Following his release, he would be arrested and jailed again numerous times. One of his sons later recalled how whenever his father was in jail, the authorities would regularly appear in the middle of the night to conduct searches of the family home.

In early 1945 Stützel found himself in a holding camp from which he was to be deported, but before that could happen, the camp was liberated by the advancing Americans. The French occupation authorities overseeing Landau after the German surrender on May 8, 1945 would eventually, in an act of poetic justice, appoint him to lead the local security police, in charge of internment camps that held former Nazi officials as part of the postwar "denazification" progress. He died in 1951.

Down the street, at Marktstraße 48, we saw the house in which the siblings Friedrich ("Fritz") and Luise Schwarz resided. Friedrich ran a drapery business on the ground floor of the house and was married to a Catholic woman; their two children were baptized. Luise lived in a separate apartment above the store. From the inscription on their Stolpersteine we can see that the two of them met very different fates.

Stolpersteine, Marktstraße 48, Landau in der Pfalz

But first, some historical background. One of the many families caught up in the aforementioned Polenaktion was that of seventeen-year-old Herschel Grynszpan, who at the time was living in Paris illegally, one step ahead of the police who were trying to find and deport him. Incensed upon learning of his parents' desperate situation, he bought a revolver and walked into the German embassy on the morning of November 7, 1938, claiming to have important information to share with the German ambassador. The ambassador wasn't available, so he was sent to the office of a junior official named Ernst vom Rath. He drew his gun and fired five shots into vom Rath, who died on November 9. 

The death of vom Rath was the trigger for the Kristallnacht, a country-wide riot led by the SA (Brownshirts) and Hitler Youth, in which thousands of Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues were ransacked and looted. There followed, over the next few days, mass arrests of around 30,000 Jewish men. From his Stolperstein we can see that Friedrich was one of them, sent into so-called "protective custody" in the Dachau concentration camp near Munich, where they were subjected to beatings, psychological terror and general maltreatment. The arrests had taken place on orders of SS Gruppenführer (Lieutenant General) Reinhard Heydrich, who was tasked by Hitler with forcing Jews out of Germany; the arrests and subsequent detention were meant as an incentive to leave the country. Curiously, his orders included instructions not to mistreat the arrestees, but here we see the difference between theory and practice.

Most of those arrested were released within a few months, as was Friedrich, who returned to his family in Landau. His mixed marriage afforded him a modicum of protection from deportation, although he was still subject to all kinds of restrictions and persecution. A loyal Nazi party member was moved into the house to keep an eye on things (apparently a common practice, as something similar happened to the—devoutly Catholic—household of MFW'S grandmother). He was later moved to a different house in Landau together with his sister Luise, his daughter Ann and others as part of a common Nazi practice of concentrating all the Jews in one place for better control. His luck (if you can call it that) eventually ran out when he was deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto in about March of 1945. It appears that he managed to escape the ghetto during the chaos of the final days of the war and began to make his way home, but died of pneumonia along the way.

Luise's path was a different one. She was swept up in the "Wagner-Bürckel-Aktion" in late October, 1940. During that two-day action, 6,504 Jews living in the Baden and Palatinate regions were given surprise orders to be ready to travel in two hours or less. They were driven in buses to waiting trains, for a journey of around three and a half days to the Gurs internment camp at the foot of the French Pyrenees. As with the Polenaktion, they were permitted to take little or nothing with them, and anything of value they left behind was confiscated by the government. Friedrich's mixed marriage protected him and Ann from being forced out, but Luise had no such status.

Gurs, by all accounts, was a squalid hellhole in which starvation, disease and death were rampant, but it wasn't particularly well guarded. In March of 1942, half a year before transports of the Jewish prisoners to Auschwitz began, Luise managed to escape with twenty other female prisoners, who made their way across southern France to the Swiss border. Of that group, it appears that only Luise was permitted to cross the border by the border guards, who took pity on her because she was so ill at the time. She remained in Switzerland as a refugee until March of 1951, when she returned to Landau. She died there in 1966.

Our final stop is Xylanderstraße 6, where Emil and Annette Fried lived with their daughter Marianne. Emil Fried, together with his brothers Sigmund and Theodor, owned and operated several cigar factories, processing the tobacco that was a major cash crop in the region around Landau, as well as importing tobacco from around the world. Their products were mostly sold through dealers in the eastern part of the country. The house at Xylanderstraße 6 was the firm's head office.

Stolpersteine, Xylanderstraße 6, Landau in der Pfalz

Recognizing the writing on the wall, the brothers started looking for a buyer for the firm in January 1938. By July they had found one, but the sale was prohibited by a local Nazi official who had other ideas as to who should acquire the firm. Emil, who was the one authorized to sign off on the sale, was arrested on Nov. 10, 1938, in the Kristallnacht aftermath. On November 11, shortly before he was taken away to Dachau, he was forced to sign a contract of sale to the official's preferred buyer. The determination of the final sale price would drag on until July of 1940. The proceeds of the sale paid out to the Fried brothers were based on a very buyer-friendly appraisal of the firm's value, from which multiple charges were additionally deducted, including the Judenvermögensabgaben (Jewish capital levy) that was alone 20% of the sale price.

[According to family lore, the same kind of fate befell a distant relative of my own. As co-owner of a shoe factory in Berlin, so the story goes, he sold his share to his non-Jewish business partner and fled to America while that was still possible. I've long wondered, did he get a decent price, or did his partner pay him pennies on the dollar (or Pfennige on the Reichsmark), as was generally the case with "aryanized" businesses? How much of whatever he got was he able to take with him, and how much was confiscated in the form of the "Reichsfluchtsteuer" (Reich flight tax) levied on those fleeing Germany?]

Emil would not have had much opportunity to make use of his share of the sale proceeds. After his release from Dachau in December of 1938, he and Anna had moved to Baden-Baden, from where they too were deported to Gurs as part of the Wagner-Bürckel Aktion a few months after the sale closed. Sometime in July or August of 1943 they were released from Gurs, temporarily finding refuge in Nice, France, but were arrested in September 1943 and a few weeks later sent to die in Auschwitz.

"Sent to die" sounds ugly enough, but nevertheless glosses over the brutal horror of their final days, so let's consider what that actually meant. At the Drancy internment camp near Paris that served as a collection point for Jews being deported eastward, Emil and Anna would have been crammed with 80 to 100 other prisoners into a cattle car, too tightly to even sit down, with no windows, no food, no water, no heat, no toilet. They would have endured a multi-day journey in these conditions across France, Belgium, Germany and occupied eastern Poland.

Upon arrival at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, assuming they were among those who survived the journey, and assuming they were not shot or clubbed to death on the spot for failing to immediately follow a guard's orders, they would have been forced onto the selection ramp and separated, Emil with those men and older boys who were deemed unfit to work, Anna with the women and all other children. They would have then been marched by SS men to the gas chambers (or loaded on trucks and driven if they were too infirm to walk), forced to disrobe and then herded inside. With the doors bolted shut, guards would have poured in a load of hydrogen cyanide-based insecticidal fumigant pellets through vents in the ceiling. All of the occupants would have been dead within the space of ten or so minutes.

Their daughter Marianne had moved with them to Baden-Baden, then to Berlin, and then in mid-1940 back to Baden-Baden. In September of 1940, five or six weeks before the Wagner-Bürckel Aktion, which she threby escaped, she relocated to Neu Isenburg, near Frankfurt/Main. She was trained as an Erzieherin, or childcare specialist, and appears to have practiced that profession in the Heim Isenburg Jewish orphanage. Her last known address is in Frankfurt, from which she was deported to, and killed at, the Sobibor extermination camp in June of 1942. 

So why am I telling you all this unpleasant stuff? Two reasons.

The first reason is a simple one. I just want to remind myself, and you, that all of these names are more than just words etched into the sidewalk (although it is remarkable enough that they have been memorialized in this way). These were people who were just living their lives, and surely wanted to go on doing that, but instead were subjected to an organized system of persecution and brutal violence that would cost most of them their lives, simply because they belonged to the wrong group (or in one case, the wrong political party). Four generations after the end of the Third Reich, those events seem distant and abstract. I think their stories, or as much of them as I can piece together, are worth remembering. These were living, breathing human beings and not just footnotes to history.

The second reason, as I alluded to at the beginning of this piece, has to do with current events in my own home country. But first, back to Germany, now in the postwar period.

Directly after the end of the war, the prevailing attitude was to avoid talking about the crimes of the preceding twelve years and instead focus on rebuilding. In the Soviet occupation zone, which would become communist East Germany, that attitude was state policy. The official line was something like, "we are communists, and the Nazis persecuted communists, so we were also victims"—and thereby absolved from any need to consider what went on under the previous regime.

In the West, under a pluralistic and democratic society (imposed by the Western allies), the postwar generation coming of age in the 1960s and 1970s—MFW'S generation—demanded an actual reckoning. They viewed the horrifying legacy that had been handed to them with shame and outrage and wanted to know exactly what their parents and grandparents and everyone else did during those twelve years. Were they active Nazis? Did they have blood on their hands, and whose? Were they Schreibtischtäter, "desk murderers" who kept the trains to the East running and the war machine supplied without ever getting their own hands dirty? Did they actively or passively resist? Were they just trying to keep their heads down, hoping they would somehow come out the other end alive?

The broadcast of the American miniseries "Holocaust" in 1979 created a much wider discussion in (West) German society. The public reckoning continued with widely and intensively discussed events such as the traveling exhibition "War of Annihilation. Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944" or the publication of Daniel Goldhagen's book Hitler's Willing Executioners, both of which dealt with—and exploded—different aspects of the myth that the crimes of the Nazi era were purely the work of a relatively small segment of German society.

There are certainly voices, mainly on the right-wing fringe, who say that it's time to stop talking about this and move on, or that it's all exaggerated, or that none of it really happened, etc. But those voices remain a distinct minority (though a larger one in the East than in the West), tend to be shouted down or just ignored, and do not have the power to turn those beliefs into broad public policy. It of course remains to be seen whether that will be the case ten or twenty or thirty years hence, but that's the way it is now and the way it's been for the past several decades.

The history and the crimes committed by the Nazis—and ordinary Germans—are standard topics in German schools in the post-reunification East and West. Teaching about the war and the Holocaust generally begins somewhere between sixth and eighth grade. The treatment of these topics is not simply one unit that takes up a few weeks in history class, but rather is handled in a fairly comprehensive way across the curriculum in an age-appropriate way for each class level. History classes do of course look fairly extensively at the events of the period and the conditions that led up to them, but the curriculum weaves these topics into other subjects as well. For instance, a high school-level German class might read and analyze post-war novels written about the period by famous authors like Günter Grass or Heinrich Böll, or analyze the rhetoric of speeches by Hitler or the propaganda of Goebbels. An art class might look at the Nazis' obsession with purging society of what they called entartete Kunst, (degenerate art). 

The depth and breadth with which the topic is treated varies from state to state and school to school, but in general, it's a very frank portrayal of a framework of discrimination and persecution that evolved into a system of organized murder on an industrial scale, within the wider context of a militaristic, totalitarian state that waged an unprovoked war of conquest that killed tens of millions of people and ultimately led to the near-total destruction of the country itself. Classroom learning is frequently supplemented with trips to monuments and concentration camps, to witness the scene of the crime, as it were. There are connections to a difficult past made at a more local level. For example, there are actually two Stolpersteine in Landau that invoke the memory of Marianne Fried. One is the one I told you about above; the other is one of 25 that memorialize the fates of the Jewish students of her former school, a project of tenth-grade students of the school itself.

The message of all of this can be boiled down to this: This is an actual thing that happened in your country, right here in your town, even right here in your school. It was an unspeakably terrible thing that our people collectively—many actively, many others just by looking away when they saw what was happening—did to other human beings, starting with fellow citizens and members of our community. You are not responsible for this thing that happened long before you were born. You are responsible for knowing what happened and what conditions led up to it, and helping to ensure that it can never happen again.

The extent to which that message resonates with the target audience is of course inevitably going to be mixed. What matters—in my mind, anyway—is that this is the officially sanctioned and mandated message. The topic is handled head-on, with a very clear emphasis that this definitely happened and was unequivocally malevolent, no ifs, ands or buts. There is no tolerance for arguments that this is going to make young Germans "uncomfortable" or that it will be "divisive" or other such drivel. There is no state government requiring schools to teach that there was some silver lining, the way that Florida's 2023 state academic standards for social studies prescribe that "Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit." There are no discussions of "positive aspects", or arguments that those were different times with different rules, or that maybe there were at least some plausible justifications, or that the victims could have done more to avoid their fate, or that bad things happened in other places too and that maybe makes what we did somehow not so bad, relatively speaking. There is no tolerance for assertions that the facts of history are exaggerations or just never happened, or that there was somehow another side to the story that deserves consideration. On the contrary, Holocaust denial is a crime in Germany.

I contrast that with how Americans deal with the nasty stuff in our own history. Or, really, don't deal with it. Many, if not most Americans, have at best a vague awareness of these things. We don't talk much about how the original inhabitants of the land were systematically driven off their landforced to give up their culture, and murdered in large numbers. We, or at least those of us who are not descended from its victims, talk about slavery as a thing that happened a long time ago and was, umm, sort of bad, but we don't really know all that much about it and it's over now anyway and so we certainly don't dwell on it; we don't talk about the physical and mental violence and the general brutality of how slaves were treated. We don't learn about the physical violence of lynching of Blacks in the post-slavery era, or the economic violence of redlining in the north and west. We don't discuss the forced relocation of over a hundred thousand Japanese-Americans to internment camps during World War II. Some of us read The Diary of Anne Frank in school, but few of us learn about the undercurrent of antisemitism that created deliberate bureaucratic hurdles that thwarted her father's attempts to find refuge for his family in the U.S. Yes, the information is there if one chooses to go look for it, but seldom if ever is one ever directly confronted with it.

A fairly substantial segment of the population wants to keep it that way and is actively resisting efforts to change that. A considerable number of state legislatures has banned, or is considering a ban on, the teaching of critical race theory in schools. Not that this kind of teaching is actually happening, mind you; critical race theory (CRT) is an academic social theory that is a topic of study in colleges, not kindergartens. What the proponents of these laws really mean is simply that they just don't want the ugly parts of American history to be taught. "CRT" is just their shorthand for any teaching that would confront students with the unpleasant reality of their country's history of slavery and institutionalized racism, and the aftereffects that continue to reverberate decades after the more overt elements were officially abolished.

Another word the same people have taken up a crusade against: "woke". To me, this word simply means acknowledging the historically structural nature of racism in American society and recognizing that the non-white population still faces both subtle discrimination and not-so-subtle maltreatment by state institutions. Florida governor and presidential candidate Ron DeSantis has built a whole identity around this. Other Republicans are attacking the U.S. military for its supposed promotion of "woke" culture. The message is that we must not only not talk about these things, we must wage a war to keep anyone else from talking about these things.

The claim is that doing so is "divisive". That it makes white people feel "discomfort" to learn about the dark side of their history or to contemplate the possibility that racism has structural elements that are built into American institutions. That is why these topics must be avoided at all cost. This, I note, is coming from people who will waste no time in decrying those on the opposite end of the political spectrum as whiny snowflakes who constantly complain that their feelings have been hurt.

But what is the point of this? Are we collectively so morally feeble that we can't handle anything that might cast in a different light the image of The Greatest Country On Earth that we are spoon-fed from our earliest days? Is it just the backlash for the recognition that the country will inevitably continue to become less white? Is it a material concern about being asked to pony up for reparations of some kind? All of the above, I would guess.

Simple ignorance of history might be excusable, but an active political program of a major party and its adherents to deny history, to whitewash it, to hide it, to erase it? The contrast with how the Germans have diligently, even if imperfectly, struggled to come to terms with their own past, something I was once again reminded of as I looked at those names inscribed in the sidewalks of a small town, could not be more profound.

Thursday, February 22, 2018

The Price of Freedom

Wayne Lapierre, speaking at CPAC, said this today:

“The elites don’t care not one whit about America’s school system and school children... Their goal is to eliminate the Second Amendment and our firearms freedoms so they can eradicate all individual freedoms.”

We've seen this film over and over: the spectacular act of violence, the shock, the grief, the calls for something to be done, the shouting down of those who make those calls, the petering out of the discussion as other important topics grab the headlines and so on, until the next mass shooting. The thoughts and prayers offered by hypocritical, NRA-funded politicians, followed by the NRA's own assertions about how we need more, not fewer guns.


Follow the Money

It's hardly an earth-shattering discovery to observe that in the modern, industrialized countries that we consider to be our peers among nations, they strictly control access to firearms and they also have low rates of gun violence, whereas in the US, we have significantly looser controls on firearm access (and vast numbers in circulation) and substantially higher rates of gun violence. Even within the US, states like Massachusetts that put strong restrictions on gun ownership have measurably lower rates of gun violence than those that don't. It's a simple, consistent and obvious correlation that gun rights advocates stubbornly refuse to concede. 

Instead, gun rights advocates love to admonish those of us who don't see it their way for "blaming the gun". Don't blame the gun, they say, blame the guy who pulled the trigger. Well, guess what? I do blame that guy. But I also blame the people making that argument for insisting on perpetuating the policies (or lack thereof) that made it possible for that guy to have that deadly tool. And I don't want to hear that if you take away that guy's gun, he'll use a knife or a club or a bottle of acid or whatever to wreak as much havoc as he can. That's just an assertion with no empirical evidence to support it that also ignores the special place guns have in our national mythology and our ideas of masculinity.

Lately the fashionable variant of the "don't blame the gun" argument is a claim that the best solution to the problem of gun violence is to improve treatment for mental health problems and keep guns away from people who have those problems. Well OK, who wouldn't want to do those things? By and large, I think it's the same people who are making that argument, because they seem to be the ones who always vote for the party whose political agenda includes cutting funding for mental health care.

Apart from that, how are we going to identify these people who are too mentally ill to possess a firearm? Are we going to subject everyone who wants to own a gun to a battery of cognitive tests, and are we going to re-test them periodically to ensure that they have not developed problems that weren't apparent the first time? Or are we going to just ask them to self-identify, knowing full well that people with mental illness generally don't recognize that they have it? It all sounds good on paper, but ultimately it's just an attempt to change the subject without addressing the fundamental problem.

I've argued these and other points with gun rights advocates. I've pointed out that I myself grew up around reasonable and responsible gun owners, and really like shooting them myself, but have long since concluded that I don't need one and don't think most other people do either. It always comes down to the same point: more guns, more gun violence. Fewer guns, less gun violence. And then they pull out the Second Amendment and beat me over the head with it. As Americans, they say, we have the right to own guns, and there should be few if any restrictions on that right. Take away my gun, you take away my freedom. It says so right here in the Constitution.

So, freedom is a room full of small children and their teachers ripped to shreds. Freedom is a concert in which dozens are killed and hundreds are wounded. Freedom is twenty-odd dead churchgoers or seventeen dead high school students. But freedom is also the steady stream of a person here or a few there killed or maimed by a guy with a gun in incidents not spectacular enough to make the national headlines, but no less terrible for the victims and their loved ones. You may not like it when your child, your spouse, your parent, your friend or other loved one, or maybe you yourself end up dead or maimed by a guy with a gun, but hey, that's just the price of freedom.

Tuesday, December 13, 2016

Goodbye Mitt

Donald Trump today confirmed his pick of Rex Tillerson to be his nominee for Secretary of State. I can hardly rejoice about that choice but I can find one small consolation in it. Namely: I think we're done with Mitt Romney.

Romney was governor of my adopted state of Massachusetts 2003-2007. One of the votes he got was mine. I rarely vote for a Republican for any office (although I'm not sure whether a Massachusetts Republican even counts as a "real" Republican) but in my view at the time he was the most qualified candidate running. This was coming off the 2002 Winter Olympics, which I felt he had managed pretty competently, whereas his Democratic opponent just seemed to focus on criticism of Romney as a person, with comparatively little to say about her own policy proposals.


My problem with Romney began about midway through his term as governor, when he seemingly lost interest in being governor and wanted to be president instead. Apart from spending more time out of the state campaigning than in the state governing, he also started to transform himself—outwardly, at least—into a "real" Republican, apparently having concluded that being a Massachusetts Republican was more of a liability than anything else. Mitt's peculiar transformation would continue as he traveled the road to being nominated as the 2012 Republican presidential candidate. The most irritating, yet somehow unsurprising, aspect of that for me was how he portrayed the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) as "an unconscionable abuse of power" and called for it to be repealed, because while the latter may not be identical with Romney's own signature achievement as governor, 
the Massachusetts state health care reform, it's pretty hard to treat them as being somehow fundamentally different with respect to their core principles; unless, of course, you don't mind being a disingenuous hypocrite.

Clearly Romney doesn't mind. It was surprising—or not?—when Romney came out and so vehemently attacked Trump during the presidential campaign, summing up thusly:
"Here's what I know. Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud. His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University. He's playing the American public for suckers: He gets a free ride to the White House and all we get is a lousy hat.
"His domestic policies would lead to recession. His foreign policies would make America and the world less safe. He has neither the temperament nor the judgment to be president. And his personal qualities would mean that America would cease to be a shining city on a hill."
Let's recall that back in 2012, after Trump endorsed Romney, Romney praised Trump for his "extraordinary ability to understand how our economy works and to create jobs". And of course now that Trump has won and was dangling the Secretary of State job before Mitt's eyes, Mitt now wanted us to know that "[W]hat I've seen through these discussions I've had with President-elect Trump, as well as what we've seen in his speech the night of his victory, as well as the people he's selected as part of his transition, all of those things combined give me increasing hope that President-elect Trump is the very man who can lead us to that better future".


So who's the sucker now?

I wondered as I watched this whole thing play out whether it was just a clever trap set by Trump and his team, baited with Romney's own opportunism and vanity. Whether it was really part of some Machiavellian plan or just lucky (for Trump) happenstance, Romney is now in a pretty poor position to criticize anything Trump or his team say or do in the next four years, and looking at how his whole transition process has been, there will be no shortage of things to criticize (to put it mildly). It's hard for me to see why anyone would take anything the man has to say seriously at this point, and although stranger things have happened in American politics, I suspect that Romney's political career is over. Goodbye, Mitt. I won't miss you.