Author Archives: stephenleon7@gmail.com

I’ve Seen This Road Before

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And in some ways, it was darker then

If you’re old enough to remember Neil Gorsuch’s mother, then you’re old enough to remember that the practice of appointing people to run government agencies whose mission they fundamentally oppose is nothing new. To put it another way, Donald Trump is hardly the first president to hire anti-government thugs to dismantle those parts of government that actually serve ordinary people—schools, parks, environmental protections, social security, etc. President Ronald Reagan did the same thing back in the eighties. The difference was, Reagan had a charming smile—and a lot more popular support than Trump will ever have.

Maybe calling Anne Gorsuch a “thug” is a bit strong, but she certainly did her part, as the first female administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, to undermine its mission. Gorsuch (who conveniently shed that professional name after it had been tainted by scandal, remarrying to become Anne McGill Burford) cut the agency’s budget by 22 percent, relaxed regulations, reduced the number of cases filed against polluters, and hired staff from the industries they were supposed to be regulating. Her already-tarnished reputation was irreparably damaged when the EPA was charged with mishandling monies for toxic-waste remediation under Superfund, and she refused to turn over records that Congress demanded. Gorsuch then became the first agency director in US history to be cited for contempt of Congress. The EPA at that point was widely criticized for being dysfunctional, and Gorsuch resigned under the pressure.

I am not bringing this up to cast any shadow over Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court vacancy (if there are shadows to be cast, let them come from his own record). It’s just an interesting coincidence to be reminded, by bloodline, of a time when the US government was behaving in a manner not at all unlike it is behaving today. The extreme and unusual features of Trump’s early administration (Trump’s unprecedented conflicts of interest, his widely questioned mental state, his administration’s near-daily barrage of jaw-dropping lies) mask the fact that in other ways, this is business-as-usual in the era of Republican governance ushered in by Reagan.

Unlike Trump, and George W. Bush before him, Reagan did have popular support: in 1980 he beat Jimmy Carter in the popular vote by almost 10 percent, and then trounced Walter Mondale in 1984 by a whopping 18 percent. But while his voters cheered, his administration set about undermining the long-term prospects of the American middle class, most notably by lowering income taxes on the wealthiest Americans, an upward redistribution of wealth that triggered a long-term structural income inequality that persists to this day. Favoring privatization and deregulation, the Reagan team took on social goods and institutions with contemptuous disregard for the needs of the ordinary. And if you’re worried (understandably) about what sort of dangerous entanglements Trump and his foreign policy wackos might get us into, remember (or read up on it) how the Reagan administration was committing terrorist atrocities in several Central American countries, most notably Nicaragua, where Reagan’s own wacko supreme, Oliver North, was caught funneling illegal arms profits to fight a covert and illegal war against a democratically elected government.

The Reagan administration did all this and more under the cover of a popular mandate, and while it did mobilize some amount of dissent, “liberals” were very much marginalized in mainstream culture and media. To any mainstream Democrats still sore at Bernie Sanders for stealing Hillary Clinton’s thunder with his 2016 primary appeal to progressive millennials, you might want to reflect on a term that was coined in the eighties: “Reagan Democrats.” Yes, some of you voted for the Gipper—what was your excuse then? And what did you think of the results?

Today, the liberal/progressive opposition to Trump feels strong, organized, potent—I daresay it even feels like a majority. If you’re part of it, take heart and keep fighting. And thanks to Bernie Sanders, it’s okay to identify yourself as a socialist today without being laughed off whatever stage you happen to be on. In 1988, Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis was afraid even to say he was a liberal. Speaking out in those days was trickier and more isolating. And we had no Jon Stewart or Samantha Bee to validate our feelings on national television.

(In a longer piece about my great-aunts, and a dying way of life in rural Washington County, New York, I mention my hapless attempt to counter Reaganism on a local call-in radio show circa 1985.)

Anne Gorsuch did not survive the fallout of her disservice to the American people, and perhaps more of Trump’s cabinet will meet similar fates. But Reagan’s legacy outlasted his presidency. Maybe it just took our nation too long to see through that wide cowboy grin.

Copyright 2017 Stephen Leon

 

Fasten Your Seat Belts

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The runaway train is rumbling toward us. It’s almost here. What do we do? (A) Jump out of the way? (B) Lie down on the tracks and let it crush us? (C) Pop cans of spinach into our mouths, extend our now-bulging arms, and stop the train dead on its track (or get crushed anyway, trying)?

Okay, now, seriously, folks. We are about to enter partly uncharted (and partly charted) territory. When I feel like my head is about to explode, I like to stop, take a deep breath, and compartmentalize.

In the two months since Donald Trump was elected king by less than a quarter of eligible American voters, all of the impending disasters seemed to run together in one orange blob. But as we turn the corner into an actual Trump-led government, I’m beginning to see three areas of distinct concern that may have less and less to do with each other as we go forward: (1) Trump himself; (2) the hate-filled nutjobs who think they’ve just inherited the country with a mandate to mock and scare and drive out and possibly even kill their nonwhite, non-Christian, non-male enemies; and (3) the Republicans in the House and Senate who are licking their lips at the prospect of turning the clock back to 2000, or 1980, or 1850, or something like that.

I’ll offer a few thoughts on each. I’ll try to be brief; I don’t want to miss Toby Keith.

The nutjobs. This is a very real and scary problem, but one you’d think all reasonable people should be able to unite behind. The litany of threats and attacks that have been made since Trump’s election is too long to recite, but it certainly came home to those of us who live in Albany when the local Jewish Community Center received a bomb threat yesterday (along with Jewish organizations across the country). I certainly hope anti-hate organizations will be joined by a vigorous law-enforcement effort to root out these assholes, but I also hope that the various targets of hate—foreigners, Muslims, Jews, blacks, women, and members of the LGBT community—will be reminded that we all need to be united in opposition to bigotry and hate. In the meantime, there’s a chance this fervor will subside when the hatemongers begin to notice that the billionaires in charge have stopped acting like they care, and also have taken away their health plans.

Trump. This is the real uncharted territory. Megalomaniacal, narcissistic, mentally unstable, unpredictable, unhinged. I don’t know if anyone knows what he is going to do at any given moment, except that he will send off blistering tweets to those who disagree with or mock or publish damning stories about him. And that he’ll revoke press credentials, but since he doesn’t like to give press conferences, I’m not sure how much difference that will make. His business conflicts of interest and international entanglements, his lack of interest in the fundamentals of national security, and his apparent readiness to hastily realign America’s place in the world order, are scary enough before we even consider how he will respond to foreign-policy crises (with tweets?). I should add that Trump also appears to lack interest in running a government, period. Besides clearly preferring to stay at Trump Tower over the White House, and blowing off security briefings, he is way behind in nuts-and-bolts staffing of his administration (see https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-01-18/the-empty-trump-administration)–which may well mean that basic government functions will be run ineptly, and also suggests that the appointments he has made (besides relatives) likely have been suggested by others who know exactly how the whole thing works.

Back to the business conflicts–I believe he will be in violation of the Constitution, and therefore impeachable, the second he takes the oath of office. But we’ll see who wants to go there (and remember, Mike Pence would not change the dynamic of part three below). I also think Trump is fundamentally at odds with the Republican establishment—even though there hasn’t been much talk of that lately—because of a fundamental difference in their agendas. Trump’s agenda is himself, his ego, his delusions of unlimited power and awesomeness (also frightening, though I for one don’t see him as Hitler). As for the Republicans who actually make the laws …

The Senate and House Republicans. I don’t think most of them give a damn about Trump, except that he has given them the enviable circumstance of having control over all three elements of the legislative and executive branches (and he has cheerfully provided them with the most deplorable of foxes to guard the cabinet henhouses). And what they want is nothing new—this is the “charted territory” part. They already have begun trying to dismantle all the good stuff government does, and they won’t stop trying until … they don’t have majorities any more! Now repeat after me, there’s no time like 2018, there’s no time like 2018 …

Copyright 2017 Stephen Leon

 

Thanksgiving

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Stories of lasting friendship, and a message to an old buddy’s daughter

***

Last September, Mark summoned up the courage to jump out of an airplane.

And I couldn’t even get up enough nerve to play and sing “For a Dancer” in front of 30 people.

I can play “For a Dancer” on the piano, and I have an okay singing voice, so I could have pulled it off. I got the idea because Mark’s sister, Jane, played a song for the occasion, one she had been practicing, and she performed admirably, even though I could tell she was nervous and shaking and struggling to follow the sheet music in a couple of places. It still sounded lovely.

I gave up trying to read sheet music a long time ago (I’m terrible at it) because I can play by ear, but at the gathering last Saturday, my courage just was not there. Maybe I worried that performing the song would seem like a distracting ego trip—I certainly didn’t want it to be about me. But “For a Dancer” did seem fitting. The event was almost over, and some people had left, when I finally sat down on the piano bench and played a couple of verses. No singing. I was surprised that most of my friends didn’t recognize what I was playing—see, singing the words would have been so much more meaningful! When I stopped, a few people thanked me and asked if it was something I had written. Across the room, someone I didn’t know made a remark about Jackson Browne.

I discovered the music of Jackson Browne and David Bowie when I was in high school, and I think it was Mark who introduced me to both. He was very passionate about finding interesting new things happening in music and art; another friend recently found and shared a Bowie album review Mark wrote for the school newspaper. Senior year, while our high school building was being renovated, we had classes in a half-dozen buildings scattered around downtown Pittsfield, an arrangement they called “open campus.” It meant, among other things, that we were free to go to the public library for study hall (or for any other period we decided was “free”). I think the library had some contemporary albums you could listen to on the house audio equipment and headphones. If I didn’t listen to Browne’s Late for the Sky album there, I certainly did at home. And one evening, lying on a blanket under the stars at Tanglewood, I listened to him play “For a Dancer” live, and the song’s simple elegance and melancholy left its mark on me.

The arc of my long friendship with Mark began in high school, when he and I and a handful of other friends and girlfriends would hang out together just like any other teenagers—in class, at sports events, at parties, at Boys’ Club dances. We scattered for college but always visited one another, and mostly spent summers back in Pittsfield. It was during those years, on one particularly sweltering summer night, that we went for a midnight swim that resulted in our most enduring story. Leaving our clothes piled next to the cars we had arrived in, we set out for the middle of Onota Lake. Good swimmers all, we nonetheless agreed to have names for a periodic “check-in” to make sure everyone was fine. Mostly, we chose goofy sounds—except for Dick, who couldn’t think of one, so his handle was “I don’t know.”

At one point Chris decided to stand on George’s shoulders so that it would look, to the next car that came around the bend and momentarily trained its headlights on the middle of the lake, as if Chris were walking on water. And that is exactly what the occupants of the next car saw—but they were not amused. So on came the flashing lights and out came the blue searchlight that probed the lake in a sweeping motion from one end to the other. I still remember waiting underwater for the light to pass overhead, then coming up for air and doing it all over again. We drifted this way and that, waiting for the cops to leave, which they finally did. We eventually swam back to our cars, though Chris had entertained the idea of swimming instead to the public beach to look for something in Lost and Found to wrap around himself before walking home.

The group stayed in touch for a while. In the early years there were letters (try to explain this to the kids …), holiday weekends home, visits to apartments in Boston, New York, and Buffalo, and class reunions every five years. But geography, new families, and years take their toll on old school friendships. I saw less and less of everybody until it pretty much ended. George left for Colorado, Mark for California. I saw Mark in 1989 when I flew to Los Angeles for a conference, and drove out to his house in the suburbs one evening for dinner with him and his wife Diana. Their daughter, Phoebe, had not been born yet. We told stories, we laughed, we had a great time. We probably talked about art (Mark was working as an engineer but longed to work as an illustrator, which he eventually did). And I remember watching Mark make homemade croutons. I’ve always made my own croutons since that night.

Prior to 2016, I hadn’t seen anyone from the old gang since the last class reunion, in 2001. Then, early last year, Chris sent around an e-mail titled “Cheese Dogs” (don’t ask) as a conversation starter about an upcoming class reunion, teasing us with references to funny moments from our school days. One by one, we responded with stories of our own.

Before long, the “Cheese Dogs” thread took on a life of its own. Soon our whole high school experience was being replayed on our laptop and iPhone screens. Every class, every teacher, every awkward date, every strange thing one of our classmates did, every zany night out—all reconstructed in hilarious detail. People everywhere have their own stories—ours are not uniquely funny, or even unique, but they are unique to us. And like photographs tucked away in a drawer for decades, they were a joy to share all over again. And like time travelers, there we were: wondering what to do with a fallen streetlamp after Chris’ car skidded on an icy road and into a snowbank; playing soccer hungover because the game was postponed by a day, but Margo’s party was not; watching in shock as a classmate, trying to close the Venetian blinds for a movie in chemistry class, yanked the whole thing out of its casing and watched helplessly as it smashed into thousands of dollars worth of Pyrex glassware. And of course, swimming nude in Onota Lake and ducking the police searchlights.

Reconnected, we all vowed to make it back to Pittsfield for that weekend in July, and most of us did. And what an amazing reunion. I had all but forgotten what awesome friends I made all those years ago in high school. Our e-mail group has remained active ever since. Not everyone is so lucky; I do know people who couldn’t wait to leave everything about high school behind, for whom high school was like one three- or four-year-long root canal.

As the official reunion event ended and many of us agreed to meet for a nightcap at my hotel, Mark asked me if I could give him a ride. Prior to the weekend, I had told everyone I was in the middle of a divorce, so it wouldn’t come up as a surprise. Mark and Diana had divorced several years earlier. He wanted to ride alone with me to find out how I was doing, and to share his experiences. And Mark is so funny and easygoing about everything, talking about divorce with him was anything but a downer. We were having such a good time, we stayed in the parked car for another 10 minutes before going into the bar.

At the gathering this past Saturday, we retold the midnight-swim story with four of five participants present—Chris, Dick, George, and me. We even remembered our check-in sounds. Everyone got a nice laugh out of it. I also met Phoebe, now a graduate student, for the first time. Later, I learned that she had had considerable difficulty letting go of the anger she felt toward her parents over their divorce.

That got me thinking about my own children, but also about Phoebe, and whatever between her and her father may have been left unreconciled. If I could say one thing to her, it is this:

I don’t know enough about you or your life to understand what you have gone through or how you feel. All I do know is this: If you’ve been married for any length of time, and especially if there are children, divorce is difficult for everybody involved. It doesn’t matter if it’s his fault or her fault, or everybody’s fault or nobody’s fault. It’s no fun for the kids and it’s no fun for the parents. It breaks their hearts to tear their children’s lives apart, but for one reason or another, they have reached the conclusion that there is no other choice. Mark loved you, but I’m sure you know that. He made that clear to us as well. You know what else about him, that you might have heard once or twice these past couple of months? When you talked one-on-one with him, it was as if you were the only other person in the world. We all try to be that much in the moment, but Mark did it effortlessly. And for me, it was a blessing to have that last 20 minutes in the car with him, as he shared his own difficult experience with me to make sure I didn’t feel like I was going through it alone.

On the night before Thanksgiving, at the home in Laguna Beach he shared with Corrin, his partner, Mark Warren Peronto died suddenly, unexpectedly, of a heart attack. Last Saturday, we gathered in Williamstown to toast his memory and tell stories celebrating his life—and to watch a video of him skydiving, smiling from ear to ear as he fell to Earth.

Copyright 2017 Stephen Leon

 

Decency Is Not a Dirty Word

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Meryl Streep.

Did you have a visceral reaction to that name just now?

If you know why I’m asking that, my guess is that you thought her speech at the Golden Globe awards was either powerful and eloquent and exactly what the country needs to hear as the Bully-in-Chief prepares to take office, or an inappropriate, off-topic, partisan attack on the president-elect by an out-of-touch liberal elite living in her privileged Hollywood bubble.

And if your reaction falls somewhere outside those polar stereotypes, I’d love to hear it. I dream of a society in which every single action and speech of consequence does not drive us to rush to one side of the room or the other to huddle in the comfort and safety of our supposed ideological soulmates.

Or to put it more simply, I dream of a society consumed less with ideology and more with cooperation, tolerance, kindness, and finding common ground. And enlightened enough to realize it is not always necessary or constructive to take sides—or for that matter, to make sides where sides don’t need to be.

In her speech accepting an award for lifetime achievement, Streep wove in a story about what she called one of the most effective acting performances of the year—by Donald Trump, in which he mocked a disabled reporter for calling out Trump’s lies about a story the reporter had written after the 9/11 attacks.

Here’s the portion of the Streep speech that, without naming him, directly referenced Trump: “It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter. Someone he outranked in privilege, power and the capacity to fight back. It kind of broke my heart when I saw it, and I still can’t get it out of my head, because it wasn’t in a movie. It was real life. And this instinct to humiliate, when it’s modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody’s life, because it kind of gives permission for other people to do the same thing. Disrespect invites disrespect, violence incites violence. And when the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose.”

In 2001, reporter Serge Kovaleski co-wrote a story looking into claims that there were Muslims on New Jersey rooftops celebrating the fall of the Twin Towers. The allegations were never substantiated, but Trump, during his presidential campaign, claimed that he saw “thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey cheering the attacks, and then cited Kovaleski’s story as backup. Kovaleski correctly countered that his story did nothing to support Trump’s claim. So during a campaign rally, Trump lashed out at Kovaleski—who has a disease that limits the function of his joints—and mocked him by flapping his arms spastically. If you watch this video and still deny that Trump was mocking Kovaleski’s disability, I’m pretty sure your trousers will erupt in flames.

It didn’t take conservatives long to fire up the backlash, on Twitter and elsewhere. Meghan McCain tweeted that “this Meryl Streep speech is why Trump won, and if people in Hollywood don’t start recognizing why and how, you will help him get re-elected.” The clumsiness of her logic aside (one must assume she meant Trump voters were rejecting Hollywood-style elitism in general, not having a collective moment of clairvoyance), McCain left us wondering what exactly in the speech she objected to. Other conservative pundits criticized Streep for turning an awards ceremony into a leftist political rally. Former Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway asked why Streep didn’t use her platform to address the public (on Facebook) torture of a mentally challenged boy by four young African-American adults in Chicago. Conway’s apples-and-oranges twist of logic might have seemed bizarre had not Fox News been employing the same diversionary tactic for years, blunting necessary discussions about police brutality against blacks by asking why the media weren’t spending more time covering black-on-black crime.

And the Supreme Tweeter himself shot back that Streep was “over-rated,” and repeated the provable lie that he had never mocked a disabled reporter.

Now Streep’s speech did hit one unfortunate sour note, called out by, among others, Trevor Noah and The Washington Post. “Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners,” she said. “And if you kick ’em all out, you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.” As Noah scolded on The Daily Show Monday, “You don’t have to make your point by shitting on someone else’s thing.” If you want to make people think you are one of those privileged Hollywood elites who doesn’t understand Middle America, go ahead, make fun of “low-rent” entertainments like football. (And by the way, Meryl, like many of us educated East Coast elites, I would have been watching a certain NFL game instead of the opening of the Golden Globes had I not been detained by soccer-coaching duties.)

That said, there is nothing about Streep’s takedown of Trump over the Kovaleski incident that warrants left-vs.-right hostilities. The core of Streep’s message was not about politics—it was about decency, and the abuse of power to encourage similar indecent acts. This is what saddens and disgusts me about the world that Fox News and its ilk have created and perpetuated. As with the obstructionist Republican Congress, nothing that comes from the other side can be validated as correct or even a pretty good idea. There is no common ground. It’s bad enough that the Republican Party rejects science and welcomes racism and homophobia within its ranks. When we cannot agree that the parents of a fallen soldier deserve to be treated with respect, or that language demeaning women and condoning sexual violence is disturbing at best, or that a disabled man who dared to speak truth deserves not to have his disability mocked in public—by the soon-to-be-most-powerful man in America, no less—then we are in deep trouble.

And as long as the right is programmed to avoid these questions by simply lying its way around them, our national discourse is doomed to parallel the obstinate sez-who of an angry Facebook argument. Meryl Streep is asking us to be better than that, and if it takes a “privileged elite” to have the platform, and the gravitas, to say so, I don’t have a problem with that.

Copyright 2017 Stephen Leon

 

Dark Clouds and Silver Linings

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The electors have made it official: in January, a schoolyard bully will assume the office of President of the United States.

Those of us who didn’t believe this could happen, who thought that Trump was too crude and scary and unqualified to elected president, have had several weeks to argue over who’s to blame. Racists! Misogynists! Bernie! Jill! The Electoral College! Sleepwalking Democratic Party strategists who ignored flyover country!

I have participated in this to an extent, but I’m done. I’m not going to blame anyone any more. I’m moving on.

(I still don’t trust electronic voting machines and the corporations that own them and the people they hire to program them, but I have no proof, and someone else will have to break that story. I think Greg Palast is still working on it.)

I’ve become more interested in (and concerned about) how divided we are as a nation, how stubbornly partisan we are, and how little that is changing right now in any meaningful way. And trying to figure out the true nature of presidential elections. This much I think I know: as long as we use the electoral-college system, which tilts the playing field toward smaller states and Republicans, elections are not necessarily a case of “may the best candidate win” or even “may the most popular candidate win.” It is more like a football game in which either side can put up numbers, late momentum counts, and a good strategy for winning coveted swing states can pull out a last-minute victory like a trick-play touchdown with the clock running out.

A little more than half of eligible citizens vote; about half of them vote Republican and half vote Democratic. And only a minuscule percentage of the electorate really counts: the people directing the ground game, and the voters they turn out (or turn away), in states like Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Florida.

Demographic trends do not appear to favor a Republican future, unless the party figures out how to appeal to more minorities and women, but Republican voters remain doggedly loyal, even when the candidate at the top of the ticket is saying things that make them wince. One of the most revealing things I’ve noticed in conversations—live, on Facebook, and in other media I’ve seen and heard—is that when milder, mainstream Republican voters (not the “alt-right” fringe whose only apparent mode of conversation is to shout crude insults) are asked how they could support such a dangerous and unqualified man for president, they usually respond with some variation on “Nothing could be worse than the last eight years.”

It almost doesn’t matter what actually happened in the last eight years—to most Democrats, it’s been lovely, to most Republicans, it’s been a disaster.

According to recent surveys by the Pew Research Center, people’s views on the accomplishments and/or failures of the Obama administration vary dramatically along party lines, by a wider statistical margin than with any administration since Eisenhower. As for this year’s two major-party presidential candidates, both Trump and Clinton received historically low “thermometer ratings” from members of the opposition party. Generally, the nation is more divided along partisan lines than at any time since Pew surveys on this subject were first conducted. More than ever, Democrats and Republicans are highly unfavorable toward both the opposition party and its members, and report being “fearful” of each other and view each other’s policies as a “threat” to the nation.

Looking at these numbers only confirms the depressing conclusion many people have already reached: we are a profoundly divided nation, lacking in common ground and shared ideals. We are in the midst of a long-running political civil war that does not appear to be ending any time soon.

There was a time not all that long ago when Americans supposedly shared core values and beliefs that were more important than our disagreements. In the post-World War II era, there were prominent American intellectuals who advanced a theory called “consensus history,” which rejected a class-conflict-based approach and stressed our presumably shared belief in capitalism and economic individualism. And if there was any one media icon the nation looked to for reassurance during the turbulent sixties and seventies, it was Walter Cronkite and his soothing baritone voice. But a consensus of white men in suits could never adequately speak for all of America, which became apparent as more marginalized people began to find their voices. Still, even as more non-mainstream ideas vied for attention, the two major parties seemed more similar than different in their generally capitalist value systems. And whatever party was in power, the rest of us lived with it.

Was Bill Clinton’s presidency the turning point, when Republicans, instead of working with him, tried to undermine him at every turn? I’m not sure, but ever since those years it seems as if our disagreements have shifted from differences over policy to differences over what is truth and what is fiction. The divide is so complete now that many people who identify as liberal or conservative simply don’t believe each other’s preferred media. I’ve heard plenty of criticisms of The New York Times over the years, but only this year did I begin seeing right-wingers refer to it as “fake news.” And this has an echo effect on how public opinion shades other important issues. For example, many on the right not only doubt climate scientists (who, they say, are advancing theories on global warming merely to advance their own careers), but also the media who report on such left-wing “hysteria.”

Are you ready for a silver lining yet? I’ve got one.

The Republican Party has long supported dirty energy and opposed regulation aimed at curbing pollution, and Republican voters tend to listen to the party’s reasoning as filtered through right-leaning media. So Republicans are typically measured to have low trust in the validity of climate science and to be generally anti-regulation. That is the party line, after all.

But ask people a slightly different question, and the silver lining appears. According to Pew, there is now broad, bipartisan support for expanding investment in wind and solar power—more so than for any fossil fuels.

Partisan environmental politics aside, clean energy is making more and more sense to more and more people. The future brightens.

Martin Luther King Jr., borrowing from Theodore Parker, famously said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Race relations in America have been severely strained in recent years over the many deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of police or overzealous vigilantes. But Pew has found a silver lining here too. After the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Eric Garner, American opinion split significantly across racial and partisan lines on police culpability, case outcomes, and whether race played a significant role. There were also smaller but significant differences across age, with younger people being more critical of the killings and more sensitive to the racial issues.

However, while there was and still is a predictable disparity between black and white respondents to the questions of whether blacks’ rights are being violated, and whether racism in society is a significant problem, an interesting thing happened after the percentages remained fairly steady from 2009 to 2014. In 2015, across all races, the numbers of people saying society should give more attention to racial problems spiked significantly.

In dramatizing the need for change and driving public opinion, social movements matter. Occupy Wall Street brought a measurable change to the words media used to describe class issues—it mattered. And what the 2015 survey on race relations tell me is that Black Lives Matter does, in fact, matter. There’s a long way to go, but maybe the arc has begun to bend, however slightly, toward justice.

One more.

In a 2001 Pew survey, 35 percent of respondents supported same-sex marriage, and 57 percent opposed.

In 2016, 55 percent supported, and 37 percent opposed. And while younger people have driven a great deal of this change, the shift in support for same-sex marriage, and LGBT rights, has taken place across all generations.

Bending toward justice, indeed. And I don’t believe this one will ever bend back.

Copyright 2016 Stephen Leon

 

Entertain Us

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I never bought that Ronald Reagan was a “great communicator.” I thought he was phony and simple-minded. I didn’t like him as president and probably wouldn’t have liked him as governor. Come to think of it, I didn’t even like him in movies.

But I suppose even I have to admit that Reagan had a certain charisma. He was warm and positive and reassuring, and he smiled a lot. And for an old guy who seemed befuddled half the time, he was oddly telegenic.

And he was elected president twice—the second time by a landslide margin that no one has come close to matching since.

Charisma and likeability are pretty subjective qualities, but I’ve been thinking about them since reading an essay whose author thought even the establishment media subconsciously wanted Trump to win this year because, whatever his many negatives, he is more interesting to watch and cover (and they sure game him enough coverage) than the duller, wonkier Clinton—or as the media marketers might put it, he has more “pop.”

I know a lot of other things have an impact on election results (and you probably have read all you ever need to about the many factors that supposedly turned this election). Still, I find it scary to think that, in the end, the candidate who wins is almost always the most charismatic or interesting or entertaining or telegenic one. Even if many of us aren’t swayed by bluster passing as charisma, well, many others are.

Let’s work backward.

2016: Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. Admittedly, this one gets my thesis off on the wrong foot, because Hillary won the popular vote by 2.8 million. Still, Trump won where it mattered most. And many of you do not want to hear this, but he is more entertaining than Hillary. I never said that was an important qualification for president.

2012: Barack Obama over Mitt Romney. No argument here, right? Obama had the pixie dust, Romney didn’t.

2008: Barack Obama over John McCain. See above.

2004: George W. Bush over John Kerry. This one is a little tricky for a couple of reasons. The election might have been stolen from Kerry in Ohio, but even so, Bush won the popular vote. And he remained president. Now what about Kerry’s personal appeal? Maybe the Swift Boat liars put him on the defensive, but whatever the reason, Kerry was not at all the second coming of JFK he was supposed to be. Meanwhile, Bush, as much as liberals hated him and thought he wasn’t very smart, had a certain je ne sais quoi—to many, he comes off as personable and likeable in a way that brother Jeb will never. Better still, George was the nice guy on the ticket. I’ll give the nod to Bush on this one.

2000: George W. Bush over Al Gore. What I said above (just insert “Florida” for “Ohio,” and invert the popular-vote result), including the part where I admitted Bush has a likeable personality. Now, picture Gore in his earth-toned suits, repeating the word “lockbox.”

1996: Bill Clinton over Bob Dole. Dole did have a very appealing dry wit, and I actually kinda liked the way he would say “Bob Dole” instead of “I.” But he was no match for one of the most charismatic presidents of all time.

1992: Bill Clinton over George H.W. Bush. See below.

1988: George H.W. Bush over Michael Dukakis. In 1988, Bush (also the incumbent VP) had just enough fatherly appeal to ward off the boring and tentative Dukakis, who could barely bring himself to admit he was “liberal.” Four years later, Bush met his charisma match.

1984: Ronald Reagan over Walter Mondale. The country must have been feeling good or something, because this was the big landslide. I’ve already talked about Reagan; apart from Mondale’s one “aha” moment in the debate where he jumped on Reagan’s “There you go again” cliché, I don’t remember a single thing he said or did, apart from picking a woman for his running mate.

1980: Ronald Reagan over Jimmy Carter. Now I thought Carter was likeable. I guess more people thought Reagan was likeable. And what was it about those hostages?

1976: Jimmy Carter over Gerald Ford. When he was president, Ford always reminded me of my grade-school principal, who always had a blank expression and never said anything. Voters may have wanted a break from the party of Watergate, but Carter also was the more charming candidate.

This brings us back to Richard Nixon, and a very different time in history. I just wanted to point out that after Nixon, in my humble opinion, the more charismatic or entertaining candidate almost always seems to win.

Trump no doubt will keep us entertained. He also may be the most dangerous and unqualified president of all-time.

Sometimes charisma and style also come with substance and competence. Which is why I will miss Barack Obama.

Copyright 2016 Stephen Leon

 

Call Me Crazy

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trump-and-pence

I often enjoy and entertain conspiracy theories. I don’t often believe them. But I do often find them fascinating, especially when the official story is even less believeable than the conspiracy theories (see Dallas, November 1963).

So here’s a “what if” for you. And if you’re already rolling your eyes, there are a million other fine websites you can visit that are just a click or two away.

Just suppose …

Sometime late in the presidential campaign, Donald Trump looked like toast. His numbers were sagging, he was insulting parents of dead servicmen and bragging about grabbing pussies, and Republicans were stepping away from him as if worried that his stench would envelop them too.

Then Trump’s numbers recovered a little bit, and the secret GOP brain trust, sensing an opening, went to work.

Trump already had three consituencies locked up: the “Make America White Again” people, the “Anything to Stop That Uppity Bitch” people, and the “Republicans Will Protect My Wealth Better Than Democrats Will” people.

The secret GOP brain trust looked at the electoral map and did the math. They calculated where Clinton might be vulnerable. They called their friends and operatives in key swing states. Someone paid a visit to James Comey.

With election day closing in and Trump gaining momentum, they performed their final magic tricks. These may have taken any of several forms. Use your imagination.

The day after the election, Donald Trump (arrogantly independent, radically unpredictable, dangerously combustible, laughably unqualified, and mired in a worldwide web of conflicts of interest) was president-elect.

And Mike Pence (predictably and zealously ultra-conservative, and practiced in the ways of Washington) was vice-president-elect.

The secret GOP brain trust smiled and helped Trump (who really had no idea what to do) pick out a snarling pack of right-wing attack dogs for his cabinet.

Now they can just sit back and wait for Inauguration Day.

How will they do it?

With all those conflicts of interest, not to mention Trump’s behavioral instability, treasonous liaisons, and daily lying, there ought to be a hundred ways to impeach him. They shouldn’t have to find another borderline crazy person to take the fall for an assassination.

And then we can say hello to President Pence.

Sorry, it’s just my imagination, running away with me. From one nightmare to the next.

Copyright 2016 Stephen Leon

On Climate Change, No Defense Allowed

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pentagon

According to Reince Priebus, President-elect Donald Trump’s chief of staff, the Trump administration’s official position on climate change will be denial. If true, I’m saddened, but not shocked.

When conservatives deny climate change, I am often tempted to suggest that they check in with two groups they usually identify with: Middle American farmers, and the US military.

The relationship of farmers to climate change is tricky. Most say it is happening (when you’re raising crops, it’s hard to ignore changing temperature zones and increasing extreme weather), but then, a majority do not blame it on human activity. On top of that, studies have shown that farmers’ views on the subject depend on how much trust they have in their sources of information (generally speaking, less trustworthy sources include the federal government, mainstream media, and environmental groups, while agribusiness, farm associations and the farm press are considered more trustworthy). So the trust factor skews farmers’ beliefs on what causes climate change away, somewhat, from human activity, though all farmers do no not think in lockstep and some do put more faith in scientific evidence presented by environmental groups or the mainstream media. The important point is that most of them do agree that climate change is real.

So if Trump and his campaign staff were the ones listening to these folks, they weren’t listening very hard. Or now that he has won, Trump and his advisors who are pushing far-right cabinet appointments just don’t care. Both seem likely.

As for the Defense Department, there is nothing tricky about its position on climate change. For some time now, the Pentagon has been in the vanguard on this issue, arguing that global warming presents clear threats to US national security, and that the military needs to be planning accordingly. This is the Department of Defense’s job, to study evidence of potential future risks and take concrete steps to counteract them. And earlier this year, the department put a plan into action, issuing a directive that assigned specific duties to specific officials to prepare for climate change, covering areas like infrastructure, weapons procurement, and disaster response.

What did the Republican-led House of Representatives do in response to this directive? It passed an amendment prohibiting the department from spending any money to put its plan into effect. Not a single Democrat voted in favor of the amendment, but the Republicans outnumbered them.

For as long as I can remember, we have been told that the Republican Party is the only party that gives top priority to our national security interests. The evidence has not always supported this assertion, and many would argue that the top priority over the years has been enriching military contractors. Today, we have a Republican Congress that won’t spend money on national security for no other reason than it collides with the party’s larger priority of denying climate change. And now, they have a president on their side.

Who knows, maybe they’ll stop making their bizarre, scientifically ignorant arguments against the measurable reality of global warming, and just say “I’m with Stupid.”

Copyright 2016 Stephen Leon

 

Before Fox and Fake News, It Was Daddy’s Job to Indoctrinate the Racism

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The headmaster of the prep school was a former military man, and the overall atmosphere was conservative to the point where few of the more liberal faculty members dared or bothered to voice their opinions. Instead they went about their business teaching math or English or history, coaching lacrosse or baseball or ice hockey, sitting at the ends of long wooden tables at meals to ensure that the young men seated with them learned the manners they would need later in their lives of privilege, making sure the students on their hall had their noses in their books until lights out, and gathering at one of the local pubs a couple of nights a week to unwind.

I wasn’t much different, but it was the middle of the Reagan presidency, and if I hadn’t realized I leaned left before, it was starting to come out. My students noticed, and soon I was known to them—somewhat affectionately, I think—as “Mr. Liberal.” Some of them seemed conservative, occasionally reciting some right-wing wisdom they had been spoon-fed back home. Others seemed apolitical, concerned more with normal teenage preoccupations like sports and girls and impressing their peers with sarcastic remarks in class. Then there was Paul.

A fairly quiet, serious kid from Memphis, Paul wasn’t shy when it came to expressing his conservative views. And he took a liking to me, singling me out as his sparring partner. I returned the favor, challenging him (not too aggressively, he was only 15 or 16, and I didn’t want to make him angry and earn myself a trip to the headmaster’s office) with ideas and points of view he might not have considered before. It actually was quite fun, sort of a political chess match, and I came to really like Paul. I don’t know what became of him, and I left the school after a year.

One thing that stayed with me is the story he told me one day of his father packing him in the car and driving him around Memphis (cue Springsteen’s “Your Hometown”). As his father drove through African-American neighborhoods, he told Paul to count all the Cadillacs, just in case he ever felt a twinge of compassion, which the memory of all the luxury cars would quickly extinguish—because the blacks in these neighborhoods could never afford Cadillacs unless they were drug dealers or welfare cheats.

I do recall from the ’70s and ’80s the stereotype that blacks were particularly fond of Cadillacs, and observed that there appeared to be some truth to it. (Even the ’70s blaxploitation films acknowledged the place of Cadillacs and other luxury sedans as status symbols in black culture.) And apparently, statistics on car buying during this era do bear out that African-Americans were proportionately more likely to purchase Cadillacs than whites were. Does that mean they were all drug dealers and welfare cheats? Of course not.

And as always, there’s a story behind the stereotype.

General Motors was on the verge of ceasing all Cadillac production in 1932, when a company official named Nicholas Dreystadt made the audacious proposal to market the cars to blacks. Prior to that, corporate policy had been to not sell Cadillacs to blacks at all. But there was a small, growing black bourgeoisie of doctors, small businessmen, boxers and entertainers, and Dreystadt had noticed, while working as Cadillac’s service manager, that a surprising number of blacks were bringing the cars in for service. Unable to purchase the vehicles themselves, they had paid whites to front for them and buy the coveted cars. As Ed Cray wrote in The Chrome Colossus, “Dreystadt had investigated this unexpected phenomenon and found that the Cadillac was the only success symbol the affluent black could buy; he had no access to good housing, to luxury resorts, or to any other outward signs of worldly success.”

Dreystadt’s foresight turned the Cadillac division around and inspired other businesses to market to minorities. And as more and more blacks earned enough income to afford the cars, the love affair with the Cadillac grew. The Cadillac became the status symbol of choice for many upper- and middle-income blacks, who did not move out of predominately black neighborhoods en masse just because they had taken a few steps up the economic ladder, in part because of the long-persistent barriers to moving into more affluent, white neighborhoods.

Meanwhile, by the late ’60s, white, conservative critics of welfare had created the fictional but enduring stereotype of black “welfare queens” who drove Cadillacs, despite the reality that poor blacks were less likely to even own a car than any other segment of the population (which helped keep them poor, but that’s another story).

So by 1980, what Paul was seeing through his father’s car window seemed consistent with the racist stereotypes now embedded in the nation’s conservative consciousness. The stereotypes were inaccurate, though I’m not sure Paul’s father understood that any more than his son did. They saw what they wanted to see. Today all they’d have to do is troll Facebook to find the sites and stories that line up with their worldview. I’m tempted to give Paul’s father credit for actually driving them through real neighborhoods to observe real scenes. The problem was that they didn’t know what they were looking at. And I tend to doubt they would have believed any information that would have conflicted with the conclusions they had already drawn—which sounds suspiciously like the world we live in today.

Copyright 2016 Stephen Leon

 

Did the Democrats Screw Up the Election? It’s Not That Simple

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chuck-todd

I groaned through my tears when Chuck Todd, desperate to understand why Hillary Clinton’s insurmountable lead was crumbling, told election-night NBC viewers that “rural America is basically screaming at us, ‘Stop overlooking us!’ ”

Here it comes, I thought: The Democratic Party has to move back to the middle, stop yapping about renewable energy, stop coddling Black Lives Matter, stop worrying about which bathroom to use, and start appealing to the Average Joe on the shrinking farm in Wisconsin or in the unemployment retraining program in Pennsylvania.

By the way, I care about those guys. I want them (and all of us) to have decent incomes and healthy, productive lives. The Democratic Party should care about them and do what it can to help them, and also court their votes.

Within reason.

Some pundits have indeed argued versions of the italicized passage above. But never mind that for a moment. Let’s talk about the electoral map.

***

In terms of presidential campaigning, most states don’t really matter. California, New York, Illinois, and Massachusetts aren’t going red anytime soon, while lots of smaller Southern and Western states are red as red can be. Texas, Georgia, and Missouri are still red, but time will tell.

Currently, there are only a dozen or so “swing states,” and the most important ones this year were Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Florida, which all went to Trump by razor-thin margins (Michigan, still not official, could tip back to Clinton, but it won’t change the overall outcome). Combined, that’s 75 electoral votes, and they made all the difference. Trump won Florida, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania by about 1 percent each; he currently leads Michigan by a scant 0.2 percent.

Barack Obama took all four of these states in 2012. Almost 10 percent of the Michigan vote shifted Republican this year, with about 8 percent shifting Republican in Wisconsin and 6.5 percent in Pennsylvania—all with relatively little change in voter turnout. Florida’s voter turnout increased by 11 percent this year, but its voters shifted Republican by only 2 percent.

What does it all mean? I don’t think anyone knows with pinpoint accuracy—probably a perfect storm of several things: 1. Overconfident Democratic strategists could have done more to secure these states, and blew it. 2. Some angry white males—and females—were energized by Trump’s message. 3. In the cities especially, Obama supporters, black and white, did not turn out in the same numbers for Clinton. 4. Clinton was attacked relentlessly for alleged ethics violations, which did not amount to anything but probably cost her votes, especially after FBI Director James Comey stirred up the hornet’s nest a little over a week before the election. 5. On top of all that, some fraction of voters still won’t vote for a woman president.

And what if the election was stolen? The notorious election investigator Greg Palast says it was, and cites both early exit polls (before they were “conformed”) and voter-purge operations as proof that Clinton should have carried several swing states, including not only Michigan but also Arizona and North Carolina. If Palast is too incendiary for you, I would suggest at least reading this interview with Jonathan Simon, an “election forensics” expert who (unlike Palast) does not claim to have proof, but observes that a consistent “red shift” from exit polls to final vote counts, which happened again in states where the voting apparatus is controlled by Republicans, is not consistent with sampling and margin-of-error issues in which the errors should, statistically speaking, move in both directions and mostly cancel out.

On the ground, there were election-day irregularities reported in states like Michigan, where would-be voters were turned away for not having IDs they were not legally required to show, and Wisconsin, where the state’s restrictive voter ID law was struck down, then reinstated, with the state promising to issue free IDs, which never materialized. While there are no hard data on the number of voters turned away in Michigan, observers in Wisconsin say the number of voters disenfranchised (as many as 300,000) cost Clinton the state. (Trump’s Wisconsin margin of victory stands at 0.9 percent, or 27,257 out of 2,791,677 votes cast; in Michigan, his lead now is a mere 11,612 out of 4,547,998 votes cast.)

Taking all of the above into account, it is quite possible that Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party actually ran a sound campaign, good enough to win, only to be derailed by some combination (choose as many items as you like!) of overconfidence, racist anger, misogyny, scurrilous ethics attacks, voter disenfranchisement, and vote-count rigging. And by the way, she still won the popular vote, at last count by more than a million votes.

***

Now, back to “Average Joe” America.

A few days ago, Bernie Sanders said, “It is not good enough to have a liberal elite. … I come from the white working class and I am deeply humiliated that the Democratic Party can’t talk to the people where I came from.” I respect Sanders immensely, and he clearly believes the white working class can fit under the umbrella of his core progressive values. But listen to others making this plea, and the underlying message is not so progressive—sometimes even thinly veiled code for going back to the way America used to be, if you know what I mean.

Joan C. Williams, writing in the Harvard Business Review about how liberal elites don’t understand the working class, says that Hillary Clinton epitomizes the “smugness of the professional elite. … Worse, her mere presence rubs it in that even women [emphasis hers] from her class can treat working-class men with disrespect. Look at how she condescends to Trump as unfit to hold the office of the presidency and dismisses his supporters as racist, sexist, homophobic, or xenophobic.”

Besides the twisted logic (Donald Trump clearly is not working class—does she mean that a woman, by gender definition, is condescending even if she criticizes a billionaire?), the passage seems to apologize for all of the phobias and “isms” it cites—and it especially drips with how-dare-she sexism regarding the “mere presence” of Clinton as a tough-talking candidate. What was she supposed to do, keep quiet and offer to bake them all cookies?

Williams admonishes the Democratic party elites to understand why the white, working middle class resents the poor (I believe most educated people, especially those in politics, DO understand this—but what are the Dems supposed to do about it? Cut social programs so the middle class doesn’t feel so bad?). She suggests that Democrats stop prioritizing cultural issues like LGBT rights. And she criticizes liberals for their overzealous attention to police brutality and their attempts to identify and combat racism. “Avoid the temptation to write off blue-collar resentment as racism,” she writes.

Really? You could just as easily say “Avoid the temptation to write off blue-collar racism as resentment.” If you resent people because of their color, and don’t want them in your neighborhood because of their color, and think they don’t deserve whatever they have because of their color—and you vote for a candidate because says things about minorities and immigrants that make it sound like he’s on your team—that’s racism.

As the United States becomes steadily more multicultural, and as increasing numbers of younger citizens reject their elders’ cultural biases (and in some cases outright bigotry), the Democratic Party should be the party of inclusion, with principles that are far more progressive than those of the opposition party, and also, unavoidably, somewhat more progressive than those of the average working-class male in Middle America. We can find more common ground without giving up those principles.

And, as I’ve tried to argue, even this election shows that we don’t have to.

Copyright 2016 Stephen Leon