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The Pyramid of Hate and Violence: On Race, Bigotry, and the American President

That is why Obama stays on the tip of Trump’s tongue. The invocation of him is a hot-wire shorthand that gives an emotional charge to his statements that his audience receives intuitively. The racism is coded, received, without the burden of delivery.    Charles M. Blow, Oct. 13, 2019

[Dear Reader:  While this is not a short essay, there is a 90-second version embedded in it.  For that version, just follow the bold-faced portions of the essay. –PCY]

Told by a new friend, several weeks after I had entered a new public high school in a new state my junior year, that the first friend I had made there was Jewish, I was shocked.  He couldn’t be Jewish, I said.  Then an even more shocking thoughtRacismGraphic(2) occurred to me:  Where did the first thought come from?  To that point in my life, I had never, to my knowledge, met a Jew, having attended only Catholic schools and lived only among Christians before our family moved to the new state.  Yet I clearly had imported into my subconscious some ugly stereotypes against which I had unwittingly measured the normalcy of my friend Alan.

Continue reading “The Pyramid of Hate and Violence: On Race, Bigotry, and the American President”

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Father’s Day Fever

I was passing through the kitchen one night when my father, alone there, called me over.  Then he did something very unusual.  Well past the time when I thought such a thing could happen, he pickb5418bedbd5b9978cd81176259a0ddfa--fist-bump-newborn-photographyed me off the ground as if I was still a toddler and hugged me close.  Then, lips to ear, he asked me a secret.  “Tell me,” he said softly, so as not to be overheard elsewhere in the house, “that you will love me no matter what I do.”

I found his words more mystifying even than his lifting me off the floor.  I didn’t understand them as foreboding.  After all, he was my dad.  I remember pausing to try to figure out what he was talking about before I answered him.  Nothing came to me, and all I could think of to say was, “Sure I will, Dad.”

I was 10 years old. Continue reading “Father’s Day Fever”

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Sense and Nonsense in the Climate Change ‘Debate’

In a recent email conversation with friends and acquaintances, two conservative correspondents sought to challenge the scientific consensus on climate change and its impacts by citing facts they believed undermined the accuracy of that consensus.

One tried to debunk the issue with a recent Wall Street Journal reprint of a 1989 news article in which a U.N. environmental official said that rising sea levels could eliminate whole nations if the global warming trend was not reversed by the year 2000.  Another raised a familiar ‘challenge’ by asking how we can explain major weather changes hundreds of years ago before industrialization and the invention of the internal combustion engine.

More substantially they also pointed to the NASA finding in 2015 that the ice sheet in Antarctica is growing rather than shrinking, contradicting other studies that found a loss of ice mass in that region as they have also found in Arctic ice. Continue reading “Sense and Nonsense in the Climate Change ‘Debate’”

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To Impeach or Not to Impeach

This is the question that has pushed to the fore in the wake of the release of the (redacted) Mueller Report last week.  Given the array of presidential misconduct described in the Report, the question has given rise to more debate than one might have expected.

The impeachment question does not arise for Congressional Republicans.  As with all of the President’s misconduct since he took office, they are largely silent.  Only Senator Mitt Romney has condemned the President’s and his campaign’s behavior after reading the Mueller Report.  But he misread it to say that Mueller found insufficient evidence to bring charges against the President.  That is not the case.  Instead, Mueller decided not to reach conclusions about whether obstruction crimes had been committed because of the Department of Justice’s policy not to indict sitting presidents for crimes.
Continue reading “To Impeach or Not to Impeach”

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Five Cliff Notes on the Mueller Report

The much-anticipated (redacted) Mueller Report was released today by the U.S. Attorney General, William Barr. Here are five brief initial observations on it.

I. There is a very important distinction in American law between decisions not to prosecute crimes and whether or not crimes were in fact committed. Decisions not to prosecute potential criminal cases are commonly NOT based on prosecutors’ judgments that the suspects are innocent of crimes. Continue reading “Five Cliff Notes on the Mueller Report”

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The GOP Abandons Democracy

Democracy is a fragile form of government.  It consists of humankind’s loftiest principles supported only by rules created and monitored by altogether fallible beings: us.  And we have proven over time to be unreliable and inconsistent caretakers of this precious system, at times even setting aside some of its central requirements in the service of very undemocratic impulses.

Both major American political parties have participated in these insults to democracy.  We need only recall the shameful internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, or the gaming of Congressional voting districts (gerrymandering) to favor one or the other party.   But never has a major party assaulted the premises and requirements of democracy so consistently, deeply and on so broad a front as has the current Republican Party. Continue reading “The GOP Abandons Democracy”

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What Does the Flag Stand For?

Our American flag has long been a complex symbol.  First created in 1777, it has inspired patriotic unity in times of war and it has flown proudly over a nation that denied slaves their very humanity and women their full rights of citizenship.  It has unblinkingly blended these disparate traditions when African American soldiers fought for the Stars and Stripes in segregated military units in World War II, during which it also flew over the internment camps in which Japanese Americans were incarcerated.

Today, long past the eradication of slavery and the extension of citizenship rights to women and minorities of color, the flag still registers the nation’s deep cultural and political divides.  Its power as a unifying symbol of national values is regularly demonstrated in Fourth of July parades in towns both red and blue across the country.  But presently it is also used as a political cudgel by the American president to condemn African American football players who take a knee at the national anthem to protest the denial of basic civil rights by racial inequality and police brutality.  And refugee children forcibly separated from their families at the country’s southern border are required to stand and pledge allegiance to the flag while incarcerated in Texas.

Continue reading “What Does the Flag Stand For?”

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Social Media, Politics and Us

Social media have changed the equation in American politics.   From fake Facebook stories planted by Russian trolls to influence the 2016 election in favor of Donald Trump, to Roseanne Barr’s deeply racist Twitter message this past week–to say nothing of the President’s constant barrage of self-serving, denigrating and false tweets–social media have made our national political dynamics more divisive, ill-informed and counterproductive.  The premium these media place on bite-sized bursts of no-need-to-explain-or-defend assertions has only exacerbated this process. Continue reading “Social Media, Politics and Us”

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Do Conspiracy Theories Have a Conservative Bias?

There is a not-so-old saw that facts have a liberal bias.  Here I am flipping this political aphorism to ask the related question:  whether conservative thought is especially attracted to outlandish conspiracy theories.

First, let’s clear out some ideological underbrush.  Neither left nor right in American politics has a monopoly on the truth.  Nor is either immune to the attraction of far-fetched theories that appear to explain noxious or threatening political developments.   Continue reading “Do Conspiracy Theories Have a Conservative Bias?”

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State of the Union: Freeing Slaves, Liberating Corporations? A Short Story

In his first State of the Union address, in January 2010, President Obama broke decorum and delivered a most unusual rebuke to the Supreme Court, six of whose members were sitting only feet from his podium.   He was objecting to the Court’s decision only a few days earlier in which it extended corporations’ First Amendment rights to free speech to allow companies to fund their own advertisements for or against political candidates (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission).  In his address the president asserted that, ‘I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests.’

The Court’s narrow, 5-4 decision overturned its own precedent in a 1990 case, in which it had ruled against such corporate political ads because of ‘the corrosive and distorting effects of immense aggregations of wealth’ on our political processes.

Most careful observers will conclude that the Court got things right the first time.  As it turns out, the Citizens United decision was built on both a historical irony and a Supreme Court error that dates back more than 130 years. Continue reading “State of the Union: Freeing Slaves, Liberating Corporations? A Short Story”

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