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.

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:

• Annual GDP growth, Q3 2024: 2.8%
• Inflation: 2.6% for the 12 months ending October 2024
• Unemployment: 4.1% as of October 2024

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 immigrants, roll 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.

Coming to Terms with the Aftermath

It's been nearly two weeks since the Nov. 8 election as I write this. The liberal bubble that is my Facebook newsfeed was a landscape of despair for the first several days after the election, but that has since given way to seething anger and outrage. Needless to say (for the two or three of you who read my occasional scribblings here), the election didn't end the way I wanted or expected it to. I genuinely believed (and still do) that Clinton was the most qualified of the entire field of candidates, Democrat or Republican, but I was also conscious of the baggage she brought along for the trip, some of it real, much of it fictional. One might have thought that a substantial plurality of the electorate would have considered those failures, real and imagined, to pale in comparison to Trump's manifest lack of fitness for the presidency (in case you've forgotten, a quick look at James Fallows's Trump Time Capsule series should refresh your memory); one would have been wrong.

So here we are. We had an election and Trump won. As I write this, the latest counts show that Clinton won nearly two million more popular votes, but the Electoral College result—sadly—is what counts. Like it or not, that's the system we have and we all knew the rules going in. I don't think you can excoriate Trump before the election for saying he'll only accept the results if he wins and then say after the election that the Electoral College result is not legitimate because you don't like how the Electoral College is going to vote. I personally think that institution is an obsolete anachronism and would like to see it eliminated. That would take a constitutional amendment, which is a complicated process, but I'm holding out some hope that the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact will render an amendment unnecessary in time for the 2020 election. 

Now candidate Trump is president-elect Trump; I wince every time I hear that term. In the first few days after the election he made kind of a sobered impression. To some he was looking presidential and statesman-like; to me he just looked like the dog who finally caught the car he was chasing and now has no clue what happens next. Since then he's gone to the White House for a little "Presidency 101" from Obama, for whom it must have been a profoundly bitter experience, the professor preparing to hand over the keys to the carnival barker.

I have mixed feelings about the protests that have followed the election. I won't hesitate to condemn the violence that occurred around protests in Portland, OR; it's morally unacceptable, but also just tactically stupid. As for the peaceful protests elsewhere, those people are exercising their first amendment rights, and I understand the anger, but the fact that they are essentially protesting against the result of a free election makes me uncomfortable at some level. I tend to apply the "if the shoe were on the other foot" standard—if those were Trump supporters protesting a Clinton victory, wouldn't we be sounding warnings about "Trump's brownshirts" and worse to come? At the same time I recognize that we are facing something unprecedented here, a genuine moral crisis, which makes it harder for me to say people shouldn't be out in the streets making their feelings known, as long as they can do it in a peaceful manner. I see the value in reminding Trump and his pals that while they won the election, they did not win a popular mandate for their plans.

Ambivalence about protests at this early stage not withstanding, I accept the election results as the legitimate outcome of the system we have, stupid though it may be, but not the "now all Americans must come together behind our new president" crap I've heard from some quarters. In his acceptance speech Trump said "I will be president for all Americans". Technically that's of course true, but Trump spent the entire presidential campaign demonstrating that in practice he intends to be anything but. If he wants my support he can earn it; the last eight years of Republican obstructionism have taught me that I'm under no obligations here. The role he awarded to Steve Bannon, as one of his very first official appointments, speaks for itself as far as any claim of being "president for all Americans" goes. His appointments of Jeff Sessions and Mike Flynn are equally indicative of where this is going.

At least part of his constituency thinks it knows where it's going: back to a time when the white man ruled and everyone else knew his place. The rise in incidents of open racism following Trump's victory, many of which cite his name in one form or another, is well documented, as here or here. Trump has issued a sort of weak, half-hearted directive to his followers to "stop it", but only after he was prompted on national television, and he hasn't publicly said a word since then on the topic, even though racist incidents citing his name continue unabated. In Bannon, he's very publicly elevated to his inner circle a man who is intimately associated with the so-called "alt-right", so how can anyone take his "stop it" as anything other than an obvious ploy to establish plausible deniability? So many Trump voters deny racist inclinations and claim to be insulted to be associated with the bigotry of a few, but they've heard their candidate speak and they knew exactly who and what they were choosing when they cast their votes. If you voted for this man, you are a knowing accomplice in whatever comes next. Oh yes, I know, you were just following orders.

The Shape of Things to Come

The Monday-morning (or Wednesday morning, I guess) quarterbacks have been dissecting the election results ever since the election, amidst general finger-pointing on the Democratic side. Hardcore Sanders supporters have assured me that he would have beaten Trump if he had gotten the nomination, but let's not kid ourselves. If Sanders had been the candidate of the Democrats, all we would have heard after the convention is how he's a self-proclaimed socialist, "just like Stalin or Mao or Castro", and how he's going to take away our property and nationalize private enterprises and force us all onto collective farms and set up gulags and reeducation camps and other such nonsense. Trump would have dubbed Sanders "commie Bernie" and the same people who lapped up his "crooked Hillary" line still would have voted Trump into office.

The consensus diagnosis that has now developed goes something like this: The Democratic Party used to be the party of the working man. Then it decided to focus more on college-educated professionals as its core constituency and embraced globalization as an organizing principle for society. In the meantime, white working-class men have seen their economic and social status consistently eroded, and Democrats have done nothing to help them, preferring instead to belittle them as a bunch of stupid hicks. After eight years of Obama, things haven't gotten any better for them, they're angry as hell about it and so, looking for a radical change and also just to make a point, they've voted en masse for Trump and elevated him to the presidency.

I have no doubt that this analysis explains a lot, but it's hardly the whole story, as exit poll results (reported here, among other places) show. Yes, Trump did better among whites of all ages. But he also did better than Clinton in the upper income groups, among white college-educated voters, and in the suburbs. Downwardly mobile working-class whites may be a core Trump constituency, but they clearly have no shortage of allies among what are considered to be the better-off white elites. Demagogues always have friends in high places who are looking for a way to harness and exploit the anger of the masses for their own ends.

I took out my ancient pocket calculator and tried to dig into some of the exit poll numbers a little further. A few things I noted (apologies for all the calculations that follow, I just think I should show my work before I state my conclusions):

• The most up-to-date numbers I could find on the vote (here, as of 11/17/16—may have changed by the time you read this) indicate these results in the popular vote. These are the numbers I used for the following extrapolations: 
• Trump: 61,864,015
• Clinton: 63,541,056
• Other: 7,034,595
• Total: 132,439,666.
• Of the 24,537 respondents polled, 33% said that only Trump is qualified to be president, 46% said only Clinton is, 14% said neither is. Of the last two groups, 2% and 69%, respectively, were Trump voters. Extrapolating to the total vote count of 132.4 million voters noted above, that means that (.02 x .46) + (.69 x .14) = 10.6%, or around 14 million people, voted for Trump even though they do not consider him qualified to be president.
• Asked whether Trump has the temperament to be president, 63% said no, and 20% of those respondents were Trump voters. So .20 x .63 = 12.6% of voters, or around 16.7 million, voted for Trump but don't think he has the temperament to be president.
• 39% of all respondents said that the candidate quality that mattered most was "can bring change"; this was mostly driven by Trump voters (83% of the 39%). 21% said the most important quality was "right experience", 20% said "good judgment"; these choices were mainly driven by Clinton voters (90% and 66%, respectively).

So after all that fiddling with numbers, my brilliant conclusion is that statistically speaking, Trump voters mainly just want a change, but a substantial contingent of them don't give a damn about the qualifications or temperament of the guy they've selected to bring it. That pretty much aligns with the anecdotal evidence from multiple TV, radio or print interviews of prospective Trump voters I saw/heard/read in the weeks leading up to the election, in which this or that person expressed reservations about Trump's readiness for the presidency while at the same time pledging to vote for him nonetheless. Now there's a recipe for success (not).

Trump's voters are going to get changes, but I have no doubt that those changes are not going to make many of those Trump voters happy, especially that core constituency of working-class white men. Let's ignore for a moment (but only for a moment) things like Trump's pick of Jeff Sessions to be AG, and the impact that's going to have on civil rights actions by the DOJ, since the people who will be affected were very probably not Trump voters.

Let's focus instead on things like his tax "reform" plan, which economists think will add trillions to the national debt while benefiting almost exclusively taxpayers with very high incomes. Let's consider Trump's plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare), which is likely to leave millions of formerly uninsured people once again uninsured. Let's think about how much the cost of living will rise for low-income people who depend on all those Chinese imports at Walmart and elsewhere if Trump really slaps a tariff on them. Let's look at the loss of millions of export-related jobs that could occur from a Trump-incited trade war (and are not going to be replaced by an equal or larger number of new jobs mining coal and making steel). Let's ask how those who voted the whole Republican crew into office are possibly going to come out ahead if Trump signs off on Paul Ryan's plans to "reform" Medicare and Social Security.

We should also consider the less direct impact on Trump's core supporters (and all the rest of us too). There's the environmental impact to be expected from Trump's plan to withdraw from global climate deals and destroy the EPA from within—soon we can all be living in Flint. There is the infrastructure program that I think is actually a good idea but which I also think, based on statements from Trump's guy Bannon, will be so uncoordinated and poorly thought out that it—assuming the Republican Congress will even vote for it—will probably waste a massive amount of money without delivering any real long-term benefit (and, I bet, will probably see a lot of that money siphoned off into dubious channels).

Even more generally, there are the already-apparent massive conflicts of interest that I think will make this the most scandal-plagued administration since Harding was president. And then there's the infighting within Trump's transition team that I believe is just a preview of what we will see once the Trump administration is sworn in and which will keep it more preoccupied with itself than with the good of the country.

In short, I hardly think we have grounds for optimism with a Trump administration, and I think the people who are going to get screwed over the most are the people he convinced to vote for him for the sake of "change". They have not merely cut off their metaphorical nose, they have ripped their whole head off—and mine, and my family's, and all of my friends'—to spite their face. Let none of these people complain to me a year from now that they've been negatively affected by this or that Trump administration action, because that will be a very short conversation, possibly involving a lot of yelling.

My heart tells me I should now be pushing my own solidly Democratic Massachusetts congressional delegation and all of the rest of the Democrats to fight every stupid policy the Trump White House and it's allies in the Republican-controlled Congress may cook up in any and every way possible. I should be donating to the ACLU and other such organizations. I should be out on the street demonstrating against every anti-progressive policy this administration will try to implement.

But there's also a little voice in my head that says that maybe what needs to happen here is for Trump & co. to get everything they want; let Democrats put up token, symbolic resistance but otherwise step aside and let the country have this foolish populist experiment and see it end in the disaster that I expect. It has been popular leading up to the election to draw parallels with pre-Hitler Germany. Maybe it's time to look ahead to some parallels with post-Hitler Germany, whose citizens drew certain conclusions from the self-inflicted smoking ruins of their own country and of the countries all around them, owned up to (and 70 years later continue to seek atonement for) their country's heinous crimes, and established a prosperous and relatively egalitarian society that undeniably has its problems and shortcomings, but in which even an arch-conservative leader like Merkel is perceived by many in our own country to be one of the world's remaining champions of human rights and democratic institutions.

I hate to end on a dark and cynical note, but maybe it's going to take letting the likes of Trump and Ryan and their pals fuck up the country so badly that the "government is the problem" rhetoric that has been the Republican mantra since Reagan, the stupid idea that the best way to help average people is to award the wealthiest among us an ever-larger slice of the pie, and the ridiculous notion that the best way to make the country work right is to choose an inexperienced outsider to lead it, can be thoroughly and definitively discredited. Maybe, just maybe, we can all learn something and then pick up the pieces and agree to do something a little more constructive. I don't know that that's what I truly want, because of all of the people who will be made to suffer through no fault of their own. But with a vain, ignorant and amoral man like Trump elected to the highest office in the land with the approval of nearly half of all voters, I have to wonder if the only way we're going to get out of our national addiction to stupid and short-sighted policy prescriptions is to finally hit rock bottom hard enough that we're ready to swear off the drug for good.

Health Care and Apartheid: Basically the Same Thing

As Republican politicians fight their never-ending battle to out-stupid one another, one of the more consistent front-runners is Rick Santorum. Santorum's regularly demonstrated ability to combine right-wing dogma, pseudo-Christian hypocrisy and general tone-deafness is nothing short of breathtaking. That someone with multiple university degrees is capable of saying so many profoundly dumb things (as reported previously) just goes to show that book-larnin' ain't everything, I guess.

Today's award-winning demonstration of Santorum's ignorance took place on Bill O'Reilly's show (an appropriate forum for that sort of thing). Discussing the passing of Nelson Mandela, Santorum told O'Reilly, "Nelson Mandela stood up against a great injustice and was willing to pay a huge price for that, and that's the reason he is mourned today, because of that struggle that he performed… And I would make the argument that we have a great injustice going on right now in this country with an ever increasing size of government that is taking over and controlling people's lives, and Obamacare is front and center in that."

Wow! I'm impressed. And he said all that with a straight face, no less. Yes, Rick believes that a law enacted to extend the benefits of affordable health care to tens of millions of Americans, and to keep millions more from getting screwed over by their health insurance providers, is pretty much the same as a brutal government-mandated system of racial discrimination that regulated where you could live, where you could work, where you could go, whom you could associate with. The similarities are pretty obvious, no?

You're right, this does remind me of Obamacare

I think that with this pronouncement, Santorum has secured himself a comfortable lead in the stupid sweepstakes, ahead of perpetual challengers Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann. Not that they aren't putting up a fight, mind you. Palin's recent statement about the federal debt and slavery come to mind (helpful hint: when someone prefaces a statement with, "and this isn't racist, but…", you can safely assume that whatever comes next will be pretty offensive). Bachmann has since countered with claims that Barack Obama "has rewritten the Constitution for himself as a part of his effort to fundamentally transform the United States of America"—golly, I didn't learn in my high school civics class—the one in which I scored 100% on every test but only got a "B" because the teacher said I "had a bad attitude"—that the president gets to rewrite the Constitution. But I think Santorum, with his "ACA=apartheid" equation, once again leaves Sarah and Michele in the dust.

What is it about these right-wing Republicans that enables them to make these pronouncements that attain an almost magical level of stupid? I am simultaneously fascinated and repulsed; I guess it's the same thing some people get out of watching those "Saw" movies. I don't need to watch that stuff—I can just watch Republicans being interviewed on Fox News to get the same kind of sick thrill.

Turn that thing off! It's frightening the children.

Nelson Mandela was, and I'm sure will remain, an inspirational figure to people the world over. He was a man who fought against outrageous injustice, suffered his punishment for that with dignity and ultimately emerged triumphant. Where others might have sought retribution, he worked for reconciliation. He was a respected statesman who was elected to lead his country and, unlike so many of his peers among African leaders, when his term was up, he went. I cannot for the life of me imagine a Santorum or a Palin or a Bachmann (or a Cruz or a Paul or practically any of the more vocal Republicans) ever rising to even a small fraction of that level of moral authority. That Rick Santorum, the supposed champion of Catholic teachings, would somehow link this figure, who for the good of his country truly turned the other cheek to seek rapprochement with his former tormentors, to his own immoral crusade to deprive America's least privileged citizens of a little bit of progress toward health care security tells me everything about him (and his fan base) that I would ever care to know.

Wait… Jesus said what??!!

A Lose-Lose Proposition

So, we're back from the brink. At least for another three months, then the whole cycle of madness starts again. I am, of course, talking about the debacle that was the Republican attempt to destroy the Affordable Care Act and threatening to wreck the economy if they didn't get their way. I don't know what I can say about it that hasn't already been said by someone somewhere, but I just have to vent because keeping all that impotent rage bottled up always messes up my digestive system, which can prove embarrassing to everyone around me.

I don't know that I should expect any better of them, but I can't help but be utterly repulsed by things like John Boehner, shortly after the vote, going on some stupid radio program to babble nonsense about how Republicans fought the good fight but didn't win, then going on to say, "We did everything we could to get them to the table to negotiate… They just kept saying no. No, no, no." 

Of course the Democrats said no! Is Boehner too stupid to understand why? Actually, he probably isn't. But he clearly thinks you are. And he may be right. I went to get my hair cut today, and one of the barbers was going on and on about how bad it's going to be for everyone when the ACA kicks in fully on Jan. 1, though he wasn't able to articulate any specifics. Ironically, this is a guy who had a quadruple bypass a couple years ago and might be facing a cap on benefits and an inability to get different insurance elsewhere, were it not for the provisions of ACA that now prohibit such insurance company practices. But that's just the way we think in this country, especially if we rely on sources like Rush Limbaugh and Fox News for "information". (As an example of the latter, see this article exposing Sean Hannity's extremely misleading "reporting" on the ACA on Fox News.)

Let's replay what happened here. In a nutshell: Obama put his Affordable Care Act before Congress. Congress approved it. Obama signed it into law. The Supreme Court confirmed it, with a few exceptions. A minority of House Republicans, egged on by the idiot Senator Ted Cruz, demanded that the ACA be defunded before the House would approve a continuing resolution on the budget and approve an increase in the debt ceiling. Boehner, fearing that it would cost him his job as Speaker if he did, refused to let the CR come to a vote, even though it was clear that enough Republicans would vote with the Democrats to pass it without any problem. The Democrats, following the principle that one should not negotiate with terrorists, refused to budge, and Boehner & Co. ultimately had to back down. So what do the Republicans have to show for this whole circus?

Well, they got a couple of very small face-saving concessions, like a requirement that the Department of Health and Human Services report to Congress on procedures to verify income of people who would get subsidies for health insurance. There was a guarantee to pay back pay to federal employees who were forced to work without pay while the government was partially shut down. Oh, and some pork. Who doesn't like pork? The Republicans can be glad they got anything, since at some point they themselves apparently didn't even know what they wanted any more, as illustrated by Representative Marlin Stutzman (R-Ind., with Tea Party backing), who famously told the Washington Examiner, “We’re not going to be disrespected… We have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is.”

And what did the rest of us get? Well, we eventually got the government reopened. Also, according to Standard & Poors we got a reduction in GDP equivalent to around a $24 billion cost to the US economy—exactly the sort of thing we need right now. Remember when Boehner said this?

“Helping Americans get back to work is our number one priority, and we’re going to do everything we can to help create jobs and to boost our economy."

That was back in May, 2011. It's good to know that Boehner's job creation plan includes temporarily putting thousands of people out of work, threatening all the small businesses that depend on their patronage, creating the threat of a global financial crisis, and generally shoring up international investors' faith in US Treasury Bonds by demonstrating to the rest of the world that our government is capable of financial management on par with the governments of Greece or Cypress. It's a novel strategy. Good work, John.

Why didn't you just smack him with that thing while you had the chance?

Cold Dead Hands

I got an unexpected piece of mail today. It was one of those envelopes that pretty obviously contains advertising while at the same time attempting to convey the message, "Treat me with respect, for behold: I contain something official and important." In large type above the address window was printed "Registered Documents Enclosed". In the upper left-hand corner there was the admonition, "ATTENTION: Carbon copies enclosed—Handle with care". Somehow the picture of a pocket knife with the legend "Free Knife!" seemed out of step with the otherwise serious-looking envelope. Looking carefully at the picture of the pocketknife, I noticed that it bore the logo of the National Rifle Association.

Yow, free stuff!

Now let me tell you something about me. I like shooting guns. I had a BB/pellet gun from the time I was around ten years old. I never missed out on the chance to go to the rifle range at Scout camp (yes, I was also a member of that organization). I spent my high school years in a rural area in Northern California, where guns, mainly rifles and shotguns for hunting, were pretty common. Some of my friends hunted with their fathers and owned firearms of their own. A couple had .22 rifles; one had a .22 magnum pistol that was a lot of fun to shoot; a couple had 12- or 20-gauge shotguns. A favorite pastime was to have a parent—yes, a parent—buy us a few boxes of shotgun shells and a box of clay pigeons, which we would take out to a flat, largely deserted area outside of town for some trap shooting using the shotguns that various friends owned.

Since my high school years I have rarely had the opportunity to do any shooting. The last time was probably a good 7–8 years ago when I was visiting my mother in a rural part of Texas and my stepfather brought out a .22 rifle and we went out and shot at a crude target we set up. I had forgotten how much fun that could be, but after we put the rifle away I didn't feel like I needed to go back out the next day and do it some more.

I've never owned a gun of my own, though I considered buying a shotgun of my own at one point in high school, so I wouldn't have to borrow someone else's gun to go trap shooting. But somehow I just found other ways to spend my somewhat limited money. I also never felt entirely comfortable with having a gun in the house, especially after an incident during my high school years in which a friend of mine accidentally discharged a rifle while unloading it and lightly injured a family member. This was a guy who had grown up around guns, and he was exercising due care, and yet this one time circumstances nonetheless conspired to remind us that these were dangerous weapons we were handling. Once I had kids of my own, the thought of having a gun in the house was entirely out of the question.

So why is the NRA looking to make me a member? Maybe it has something to do with the current push to tighten gun laws in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting (and the Aurora theater massacre, and the Sikh temple shooting, and the Gabby Giffords Arizona shooting, and…). I'm sure they feel a need to mobilize and expand their forces. That's apparently why I "have been selected to represent gun owners in [my] area through this special survey". Said "survey" is one of those ridiculous pretend surveys that seem to be favored by right-wing organizations as part of their campaigns for donations and new members, in which you have a bunch of questions that are worded in such a way that it's pretty obvious how you are supposed to answer if you are not some kind of UN-loving commie scumbag. And, conveniently, there's a section at the bottom to fill out in order to become a member and claim that cool free pocketknife.

Remember your credit card number,
that's the part that matters.

I have no idea why the NRA is looking to me to join their ranks. Maybe everyone on the street got one, or maybe they got my name from the same mailing list that used to cause me to inexplicably receive invitations to $10,000-per-plate fundraising dinners for George W. Bush. (Fun fact: I have actually been to NRA headquarters. It's in an innocuous-looking building in an office park in Fairfax, VA. Were it not for the gun museum on the ground floor, you would not know that you were standing on hallowed, Second Amendment-guaranteed ground. I wasn't there for the NRA; I was visiting a consulting client who, it turned out, also happened to be in the same building.) 

I'm really not the right guy to recruit for the NRA, though. I did say I like guns. I don't worship them, though, and I don't understand people who do. After the horrific mass murder of twenty small children, after all the mass shootings that preceded it, and in view of the general background of gun violence in this country, I don't see how any sane person can say that there should be no limits on gun ownership rights. And yes, I am familiar with the Second Amendment to the US Constitution. It states, "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." We get to have guns, but we get to have them in the context of "a well regulated militia". Ooh, there it is—that "R" word that gets NRA types so riled up.

Having read up a little (and I emphasize a little) on the history of the Second Amendment, I accept that at least some members of the Congress that produced it, as part of a process of debate and ultimate compromise, did think that those arms in the hands of the people were there as a check on the power of some hypothetical future tyrant. And I disagree with those who say that the prevalent weapon of the times was the muzzle-loading black-powder musket, so that's what the Second Amendment allows us to have today; we regularly interpret the US Constitution to apply the probable intent of its authors to technologies such as modern telecommunications that they could never have imagined. 

But let's be real. The US military has assault rifles, just like the "patriots" running around Montana in their camouflage fatigues. It also has a fair number of machine guns, mortars, grenades, rockets, artillery, tanks, armored fighting vehicles, attack helicopters and all manner of other assorted hardware that the camo crowd doesn't. Its members, insofar as they are not currently engaged in actual combat duty, train day after day after day in the use of all that stuff. The notion that some rag-tag guerrilla army of citizens armed with their Bushmaster rifles is going to somehow take to the hills and overthrow some future rogue government is just a childish Hollywood fantasy that is happily instrumentalized by the arms industry and their mouthpiece, the NRA. The NRA, whose letter that accompanies all of the aforementioned material begins like this:

Dear Mr. --------------

With the re-election of President Barack Obama, we must face the fact that we are at the beginning of a four-year nightmare.

You know as well as I do that our freedoms are in far greater danger of being dismantled and destroyed than they were four years ago—not just our Second Amendment rights but all the freedoms enshrined in our Constitution.

The full weight of freedom's future is now on our shoulders…

And so on in the same vein. The letter goes on enumerate all the ways the NRA will fight for me. They will fight in Congress, they will fight Supreme Court nominees who don't share our interpretation of the Second Amendment, they will "fight to ban the U.N. from using even one thin dime of [my] tax dollars for their global gun-ban crusade." They will fight a bunch of other stuff as well, and all I have to do is send them twenty-five bucks. Such a deal! That's a lot of fighting for a paltry $25.

Actually, there's a bunch of other stuff I'd like them to fight for me. I'd like them to start with the Tiahrt Amendments, which prohibit the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Explosives and Firearms from releasing data about the use of firearms in crimes and hinder law enforcement in various other ways. Oh wait, the NRA supports that, so never mind. Or how about if the NRA were to fight its own highly effective lobbying in Congress to prevent the Centers for Disease Control from studying the effects of guns and gun policies on firearms-related injuries and deaths? Not going to happen, I guess. The NRA wants to protect me by making sure that practically everyone has a gun, but they don't want to protect me from the downside of making sure that practically everyone has a gun, and they want to make it really hard for me to research what that downside might even be. Maybe that's partly why gun violence is listed as one of the factors that helps to keep my life expectancy among the lowest in any industrialized country.

I don't need to cite all the statistics about how severe gun violence is in the US compared to any other modern industrialized country. You've seen those before. You know there's a huge problem, even if you don't want to admit it. You may not agree with me on the solution. But I hope you agree that to shrug and move on is not the solution.

The NRA and its adherents insist that the solution to the problem of guns in the hands of bad people is to put more guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens. Put guns in schools, guns in churches, guns in offices, guns in homes, guns everywhere, the theory being that if I have a chance to fight back I have a better chance of escaping with my life when some crazed gunman, or just a garden-variety criminal, points his weapon at me. In principle that sounds logical. In practice I'm not so sure. If I'm carrying a gun, it's probably going to be a handgun; I'm not likely to go everywhere with my trusty rifle slung over my shoulder; that's just a little too cumbersome. I will have to keep that handgun on me and easily accessible at all times, though. And have you ever fired a handgun? I have. Not many, but a few. And I can tell you that it's harder than it looks to hit what you're aiming at. So I guess I'll have to spend a lot of my limited leisure time practicing at the shooting range.

Now, add the adrenalin of an actual life-or-death situation; even with practice, I'm not a trained marksman, and I'm certainly not accustomed to armed combat. What's going to happen when the you-know-what actually does hit the fan? As I contemplate that I think about the recent incident in which a guy took out a gun outside the Empire State Building, fatally shot a co-worker and then carried out a gunfight with two police officers. The police killed the guy; in the process they also wounded nine bystanders who had the bad luck to have been there at the time, and I assume those policemen train regularly with their weapons. But what if instead of two policemen it had been two random citizens blasting away at the gunman—the NRA scenario? I suspect that the collateral damage might have been a lot more than nine bystanders wounded. To spin it a little further, what if other bystanders had been armed, and in the sudden confusion didn't know why those two guys were firing in their direction and decided to return fire? This kind of scenario is why I'm not so convinced that all of us running around like it's Dodge City in 1875 is such a brilliant idea.

Consider also what happens to guns that are kept in homes for "protection". I absolutely understand the impulse to want to protect oneself, one's loved ones, one's property from evildoers. That's not how it works out a lot of the time. I already mentioned the NRA's attempt to squelch research into gun violence; apparently that's partly the result of a study by Art Kellermann of Emory University that found that guns were 43 times more likely to kill a member of the gun owner's household than to kill an intruder.

So what's the solution? Maybe first we should agree what the problem is. The general problem is a country awash in guns, in which gun violence is far more prevalent than in any of the other modern nations we would view as our peers (okay, I know that we are better than every other country and therefore have no peers as such, but humor me). The more acute problem is that of mass killings perpetrated by deranged individuals wielding weapons that give them massive firepower. Where do we start?

Maybe we could start by taking some of those guns off the street, and making sure that way fewer of them even make it to the street. Institute a real ban on high-powered weapons and high-capacity magazines, and not one like the earlier so-called "assault weapons ban" that was so full of loopholes that it still enabled guns like the one used at Sandy Hook to be bought and sold perfectly legally. Make it illegal for anyone but a licensed gun dealer to sell a gun, the one exception being that a private citizen may sell a gun to a licensed gun dealer (but not to another private citizen), and register every sale; have ATF audit the books of the dealers to identify any possible funny business, and let the dealers pay for that through their license fees. Prohibit gun dealers from selling any weapon or magazine that falls under the new ban; have the federal government purchase those items at the dealer's cost and destroy them. To pay for that, tax gun and ammunition sales, and by more than just a token amount—gun-related violence creates huge costs to us as a society, so let people who want to own guns bear some of that cost. Make all of the restrictions on gun sales apply to gun shows just as to gun stores. Prohibit all sales of firearms, accessories and ammunition over the Internet or through the mail. Require all gun owners to carry liability insurance, just like we require car owners to do; hold them civilly and criminally liable if a gun they purchased is used in a crime.

At the same time we need to better manage who gets to buy guns. Above all, we need to eliminate the many holes in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) that is the basis for those background checks. Even John McCain, no bleeding-heart liberal he, was for that once upon a time. We also need to better ensure that people whose mental state should prevent them from ever owning a gun end up in NICS as quickly as possible. Currently, if I tell my therapist that I'm angry at the world and I'm going to get a gun and shoot as many people as I can, the shrink has no obligation to tell law enforcement about that—that should change. I know the argument is that breaching doctor-patient confidentiality in this way will make some people less likely to seek help for mental problems, but if you can make a professional judgment that someone is a danger to himself and others and should not have easy access to weapons, shouldn't the obligation to tell someone about that trump the confidentiality argument? According to the widow of a victim of the Aurora theater shooting, that answer would be "yes"—I will be interested to see where her wrongful death lawsuit against a psychiatrist who treated James Holmes goes. Maybe instead of trying to keep that important information from finding its way into NICS, we should be working to destigmatize mental health issues.

Finally, we need to do something about the culture of violence that permeates our society. I will confess up front that I have no idea how to do that. Maybe it's simply not possible to remove the archetype of the crusader who takes the law into his own hands, visiting righteous violence upon the bad guys, from our national psyche. That's been there for generations, but somehow something has changed; I know that back in the mid- to late seventies, when my friends and I were running around with guns as an instrument of leisure entertainment, the thought of taking them to school to seek vengeance for real or imagined slights would have been utterly inconceivable to us. Nowadays when I sit in front of my TV and a promo for the new Schwarzenegger film comes on,  much of it seems to be about the arsenal of weapons that he will employ over the course of ninety minutes or so, and I am mindful of the fact that these films, these TV shows, these video games in which the guns themselves are practically supporting characters… they generally come with "Made in USA" stamped on them. If I watch a detective show from, say, Belgium, or Australia, or Japan, at the end the hero will outwit the villain; in the American show the hero will as likely as not outshoot the villain. I'm not saying there's causality between violent media products and violent acts, but it's hard for me not to conclude that there's at least some correlation there.

Vice President Biden this week presented the findings of his gun violence task force to the President, who will be announcing some sort of policy initiative based on that. I hope that there will be some real effort to do something meaningful as part of that, and not just a lot of watered-down symbolism. And I hope that responsible gun enthusiasts will find something in there that they can also support. I am hoping that the nuts who spout that nonsense about giving up their gun "when they pry it from my cold dead hands" will get shouted down for a change. There have been plenty of cold dead hands already.

What Was, What Is, What Will Be—Part Two

I promised this story would be continued whenever I got around to it, so now I'm getting around to it. I know that you've been waiting in suspense to hear how it continues. Recall that when we left off, my job had just been saved by the appearance of a benefactor from the Far East, who had founded a new company, Phoenix, from the ashes of XYZ Corp. 

The initial period right after the creation of the new company was one of improvisation, because there were no physical facilities as such. Phoenix rented a couple of offices in one of those places that rents out temporary office space, and into that were crammed a few desks and some file servers and networking equipment. Most of us either worked remotely from home or at a client site.

Right before XYZ Corp. finally threw in the towel, I had been staffed on a project to redesign the Internet presence for a large regional bank. I was taking over the security design part of the project from a colleague of mine, a competent member of our information security group at XYZ, but a guy who was also a little over-intense in his devotion to the principles of what we in the business affectionately refer to as "infosec", and generally kind of an oddball; the kind of person who presents a happy, friendly facade but who simultaneously gives off a vibe of having  something dark and troubling bubbling away under the surface. At some point he mentioned to me that he took regular medication for chronic depression; I don't know why he felt like sharing this with me and it wasn't something I necessarily wanted to know anyway, but it did explain some things.

But as the uncertainty created by XYZ's slow death spiral mounted, it turned out that my colleague was having marital problems at the same time, and I guess the situation got to be too much for him at some point. He began skipping meetings and ignoring deadlines for the one project he still had—the aforementioned bank project—and ultimately stopped showing up for work at all. I was given the task of taking over his role and cleaning up the mess that he had left with what was now going to be my client. I hate taking on those kinds of assignments, since starting out a consulting assignment with an already irate client is generally somewhat less than amusing. But hey, this was no time to be picky about work assignments.

There was another complicating factor in all this as well. The bank we were working for had also been an investor in XYZ. Not a major investor, but the sum of money that their CEO had committed with great fanfare as part of a "strategic partnership" wasn't trivial, either. That commitment was not without controversy, coming at a time when XYZ was already on the ropes, and Mr. CEO was left with a fair amount of egg on his face when XYZ gave up the ghost just three months later. Word was that he was not terribly happy about this.

So I knew that the meetings I had scheduled for my first on-site visit on a Tuesday morning in early September of 2001 were going to be somewhat challenging, happening as they were under the double shadow of both the overall flame-out of XYZ and the acute mess that had been left by my now ex-colleague. The office I needed to visit was just over the border in a neighboring state, about an hour and a half away. I arranged to get a ride with another of my colleagues who was working with the client. It was a beautiful fall morning as we drove down there.

It was about 9 AM when we got into the building in which we were supposed to meet our other colleagues. I went to find the guy from Phoenix who was in charge of our group to ask where to park myself until my first meeting. He was on the phone with someone, talking in kind of an agitated way and saying things like, "a plane?" Another colleague turned to me to say that apparently an airplane had just flown into one of the World Trade Center Towers in New York.

I had been to the top floors of one of the towers a couple of times for business meetings and I remember watching the traffic of small planes and helicopters flying up and down the Hudson River and thinking how weird it was to be so high up in a building that I was actually looking down at air traffic going by. So when I heard that a plane had hit one, I assumed it must be an accident, that a small plane had somehow veered off course and into one of the towers. But when I finally got online a few minutes later and went to the CNN web site to get some details, I saw a picture of a gash across most of the front of the building that didn't look like it was made by a little four-seater Cessna. About the same time, the same colleague who earlier told me about the plane hitting one tower announced to whomever happened to be listening that another plane had just crashed into the other tower. I remember at that point just sitting down in a state of slack-jawed disbelief, with the feeling of all my blood rushing to my head, and thinking: This is Pearl Harbor. 

Somewhere in the midst of all this it was also announced that we all needed to attend a very important meeting at 10 AM with the client's management team. We spent the time until then doing the same thing as everyone else around us, i.e., scouring news web sites to try to find out what was going on. Somewhere in there it was reported that a plane had now crashed into the Pentagon as well. A little before 10 we all trooped off to our client meeting.

As the meeting was getting started, someone stuck his head in the room and announced that one of the WTC towers had collapsed. The meeting itself was a relatively short one. The gist of it was that the bank had had a relationship with XYZ Corp., and XYZ was no more. Nobody in the bank knew anything about this company "Phoenix", and certainly nobody from the bank had asked anyone from this unknown company to come on site, ergo our group had no reason to be there and we were to vacate the premises immediately. On the way out of the meeting room I paused to take in some news updates on one of the TV sets that had now been set up in various places in the office and learned that the other WTC tower had also just collapsed.

Ultimately, the work would resume, since Phoenix had in fact legally taken ownership of all of XYZ's client relationships and contracts, and the project would be brought to a successful conclusion. But for now, we just had to pack up and clear out. The immediate problem I had was that I had gotten a ride there with my one colleague, who had disappeared pretty much right after we arrived, and I hadn't seen him since, nor was he answering his cell phone. So I ended up sitting on a bench outside the office building for the next couple of hours until he eventually turned up and we drove home listening to the radio and trying to make sense of the events of the morning.

I arrived home to begin what would be days of shock, confusion, speculation, rumor-mongering and marathon CNN viewing. The sudden and unexpected demise of the bank project left me without much to do, but nobody was really doing much work anyway in those first few days after the attacks. A lot of people from our office had been traveling to client sites all over the country and were now stranded as a result of air traffic being suspended for the next several days, so the focus of company management was mainly on how to get everyone back home somehow.

That first week or so after the attacks was a very strange interlude. What I remember most of all was that it was just very quiet. Air traffic had come to a standstill, and so the accustomed periodic sound of planes heading to or from Boston Logan Airport, which is around 10–15 miles from my house, was strangely absent. Traffic of other kinds was also pretty low-key. Everyone was in a state of shock, wandering around in stunned silence, infused with a sort of undifferentiated dread about what might happen next. There was mass paranoia about vague, unconfirmed reports of plots to poison reservoirs or spray nerve gas over population centers from crop-dusting planes. The general mood was that we were all just waiting for the other shoe to drop, with no real idea about when or where or how that might happen.

The silence was initially broken for me by groups of people standing on various street corners around town waving signs that said things like, "Honk if you love America!" and cars honking back in response. I sort of understood the thinking and sort of didn't. Was this  the best we could come up with in the way of a response?

I of course wondered what this meant for me personally. Were we going to war? If so, with whom? If we've just relived Pearl Harbor, is the right thing to do to enlist in some branch of the military? That latter thought came and went quickly, considering that at that point I was already 40 years old, but it was there nonetheless. If I'm a citizen of this country, and this country is under attack, am I not obligated to do my part in some active way?

What I did expect to happen was to see my taxes raised to pay for whatever response was going to be undertaken. I hardly consider myself to be a hawk with regard to military matters, but I fully expected that part of the response to this event was going to be to rain down death and destruction on its authors, and I did not have a problem with that. And I emphasize: part of the response—more on that later. But I assumed that I and everyone else would  be asked to sacrifice in one way or another in order to support what was going to come next. 

Remember, this was only a couple of years after Tom Brokaw's book, "The Greatest Generation", had been published. You may not have read the book, but at the time, all the media coverage would have ensured that you nonetheless would have been familiar with its theme: a celebration of the generation that endured the hardships of the Great Depression and then went on to endure the additional hardships of fighting and winning World War Two, a time in which every citizen was called upon to live with rationing of food and strategic materials, to scrimp and save and recycle, to pay his income taxes and the special Victory Tax and buy War Bonds to help finance the war effort, to supplement the food supply by planting victory gardens, and so on.

Donald Did His Part

I was of course asked to do no such thing. On the contrary, my president told me to go out and spend. He wanted me to "[g]et on board. Do your business around the country. Fly and enjoy America’s great destination spots. Get down to Disney World in Florida. Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed." Instead of asking me to chip in a few bucks more to help fund the war in Afghanistan, and the one he had just started in Iraq, in 2003 he actually cut my taxes. My president didn't want me to sacrifice a thing. On the contrary, he wanted me to live my life as if absolutely nothing had changed. I know I'm not the first to make this point, but that doesn't make it any less valid: what a missed opportunity. In the wake of 9/11, Americans were ready to do whatever needed to be done, to contribute and to sacrifice whatever it would take to ensure such a thing would not go unanswered. But the leaders of our country just said, "Thanks all the same, but that really won't be necessary. Maybe you should take a nice vacation instead."

The other missed opportunity: the chance for maybe fifteen minutes of introspection. I in no way wish to excuse or apologize for the cold-blooded murder of thousands of people in the service of a political cause infused with a heavy dose of religious extremism. But when the president of the USA boiled the genesis of this event down to this: "Americans are asking 'Why do they hate us?'… They hate our freedoms.", he hardly did the citizens of his country a service. Sure, I  realize that from a rhetorical standpoint, a speech given a week and a half after the event was probably not the right time to say, "guys, maybe some part of this was our own fault." But there could have been a policy response that at least implicitly recognized this principle. We could have asked ourselves what these guys were so angry about that they would do such a thing, and whether we should at least consider what implications that might hold for how we comport ourselves. What did we get instead? A misguided effort to try and reshape the Middle East by force, framed in idealistic language but smelling suspiciously of an obsession with settling old scores, executed in breathtaking ignorance of the history and the political and ethnic dynamics of the region and leaving a legacy that I suspect we will all still be chewing on for many years to come.

More than a decade later, I'm reminded of all this more often than I would like to be. For the last nine months or so, every two to three weeks I find myself in the offices of a current client in Jersey City, NJ, which are situated right on the banks of the Hudson River, directly across the river from the World Trade Center site in lower Manhattan. Right outside the building is a monument consisting of a twisted hunk of steel from one of the World Trade Center towers. In the background, across the Hudson, I see the slowly rising frame of the new Freedom Tower, which in the course of various visits to NYC over the years I have watched grow from a muddy hole in the ground to its present state, in which it appears to have reached something approaching its planned final height of 1,776 feet. I think about the horrible spectacle for which the people in that building must have had a front-row seat on that day some eleven-plus years ago. I wonder what it will be like, when that new building has itself been standing complete for a decade or more, to convey to the generation looking up at it what it was like on that day in September of 2001.

What Was, What Is, What Will Be

So now I've veered way off course from my original story about how I found an old newspaper and what I found in it. I guess I'll tell you about that some other time.