Search Results for: I Saw An Angel Last Night

“Simply put, then, the key to heroism is a concern for other people in need—a concern to defend a moral cause, knowing there is a personal risk, done without expectation of reward.”  – Philip Zimbardo.

The death of Ruth Ginsburg radically alters the tenor, intensity, consequences, and import of the presidential campaign.

Nobody needs a pundit to tell us that.

What interests me the most over this explosive and jarring weekend is that the 2020 election campaign has its first real hero – a gangly 87-year-old jurist who has somehow become a cultural icon.

Ruth Ginsburg is a hero to many people. She is now just as important as Donald Trump or Joseph Biden Jr. I’m not blowing smoke.

Just Google Memorial Services for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, pour yourself a drink, and go on a wrenching tour of America – every state, every city. You really cannot and should not underestimate the power of this person.

Over the weekend, there was a great outpouring of love for her from women, many men,  young people, working mothers (she was a role model), Democrats, progressives, liberals, and feminist activists.

These are all cohorts and voting blocks the Biden campaign desperately wants, voters that will allow them to win the election in a big enough margin to avoid eternal and divisive court battles.

Her death and the already bitter conflicts raging about her replacement are dispiriting and frightening. The Republican Party, following its leader, has become a part of about one-third of the people, the other two-thirds can go to Hell.

Our democracy is broken and will need to be considered and repaired. Trump has succeeded in tearing the country apart. The Republican Party will almost surely support him. The Democrats have agreed to help.

The rhetoric on both sides is out of control, over the top.

Neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump has the strength or vision to even try to talk to one another and heal these wounds, rather than widen and deepen them.

But that’s for the daily news to report.

I’m more interested in the impact that Ginsburg’s death will have on the election; we have not had a genuine hero functioning in America since John McCain fell ill, or John Kennedy before him. Heroes in American politics are rare, few, and far between.

When one comes along, big things happen. Ruth Ginsburg had a powerful vision of America. Decency without cruelty, civility without hostility, freedom without compromise. She just kept going, and never quit or despaired.

And she was not just a hero to women. That is a disservice to her work. Men are grieving for her as well. She fought for a fairer society for all of us.

It makes an enormous difference to have a hero suddenly pop up in the middle of a presidential campaign. You can see this for yourselves in the coming weeks.

Trump is banking on his newly drooling evangelical supporters to come rushing to his rescue if he chooses a conservative advocate of religious freedom and an almost certain opponent of abortion rights.

What you can’t win at the ballot box, you can get from the courts. I pity poor Jesus, these people ought to pray he never comes back.

Power and religious fervor will drive fresh donors and existing supporters to his campaign. He feels no compunction to give us all a say in this important decision. In fact, his whole idea is to deny us that chance.

But fear and hero worship are among the most powerful forces in politics. Ginsburg’s death has touched a flame to both of them.  This is a woman who cast a very long shadow.

And her many followers are angry and afraid. There is no better clarion call to the ballot box than that.

Evangelical voters will not lose nearly as much as progressive women if Trump gets his judge appointed. And people needing health care or Blacks wanting to vote and Dreamers who have spent their whole lives here can lose a lot if Trump gets to stack the court with another far-right conservative.

But I would caution against losing perspective. Once again, Trump shows us that he will always overplay his hand, and miss the message of the moment.

I am far from seeing the Apocalypse we are being promised, such talk makes me twitchy. I’m getting a different message.

Trump could have chosen a moderate conservative that would have muted so much of the furor and rage over Ginsburg’s death and softened the opposition of women, moderate voters, and independents.

As always, he chose the toughest and most divisive route, one that will excite the supporters he already has, but enrage, frighten and engage almost everyone else, including the many supporters who see him as an imminent threat to the environment, their personal freedom, their access to college, their right to stay in American with their families.

These groups, especially the young and black and white women, have difficulty engaging with the political process at times.  In recent years, the far-right has seen most of the electoral energy.

I think we saw that change this weekend. The energy is flowing from a different direction. Trump is a Revolution Maker.

If you followed the news last weekend, you would have seen the staggering outpouring of love and admiration for an 87-year-old jurist who hardly fits the hero’s stereotype.

For years, Ginsburg has had an enormous following among the young and working mothers, the women Trump calls “housewives.”

“I attribute my success in law school largely to Jane,” Ginsburg told the Atlantic about starting law school when her daughter was 14 months old.”I felt each part of my life gave me respite from the other.”

This and many other insights about parenting and working inspired and guided and comforted working women, millions of whom poured our admiration of her this weekend in vigils, social media posts, and public meetings.

I can’t recall ever seeing images of so many people gathering with lit candles to celebrate RBG over the last few days. For me, it was a lot more stirring than MAGA rallies in big trucks and boats.

A hero is someone to rally around. A hero is someone to get out and vote for or stand in the cold to say goodbye to.

A hero is someone to get angry about when their death is trivialized, blown off, or exploited.

This weekend, Trump did all three things. Instead of reassuring the many millions of Americans who are frightened by his death, he makes sure to frighten them further and thus disrespect their hero.

We are beginning to see that this is not strength, but just another form of madness.

In another very different world, Trump could well have been one of those people living on the streets in a tent, raging and mumbling about the demons in his head. But those people are not born with money or supportive and rich dads.

His lust for hurting people is his tragic flaw.

To me, this is an important time to step back and be careful of dystopian, hysterics and doomsayers. I will not use this time to argue with people, succumb to doomsayers, or freak out whenever I see some Trump signs.

Keep fighting, stay calm – Ruth Ginsburg’s mantra.

I am sorry that no one in either party has emerged to try and mediate or compromise or even talk openly about top this onrushing train wreck, which could harm our democracy.

So much trouble all at once, and so little of if being dealt with in a rational way.

That is a sign of our sickness. We seem to be getting tired of democracy.

There is always compromise, always a middle ground of people are brave enough and strong enough to look for one.

My dream for Joseph Biden Jr is that he stands up faces a great truth: “This isn’t working, it is only tearing our country apart. We have to sit down and begin talking to one another.”

I understand that this is not likely to happen now, but even talking about and thinking about it could be the beginning of a healing movement, rather than more divisiveness and fury.

It seems a cliche, but love and respect will serve us a lot more than arguing and hating.

Ginsburg understood that she could disagree with people without being hateful or betraying her values or goals. Some of her best enemies were her best friends.

In this country, we don’t fight for our values with guns; thus, we fight with ideas and beliefs and votes.

That was surely Ginsburg’s message.

Here’s where it is tonight. Trump appears to ram a controversial choice down the throats of most Americans who are concerned about his ethics, politics, and intensions.

No justice appointed in this way will ever have the moral authority and leadership Ginsburg or Antonin Scalia had. The Supreme Court will lose the protection of its integrity.

Trump has inspired a new generation of Americans willing to break the law or disregard it.

He will have ripped open many of the binds that have held our ideas of government and freedom together. He seeks a candidate who will vote to send all of the Dreamers homes, has made it clear she will vote to overturn Roe-vs. Wade, support the government’s persecution of immigrants, undermine womens rights,  and is opposed to legal protections for gay and transgender people.

It is one thing to argue that these positions are wrong. It is another to stuff them down people’s throats.

It turns out Ginsburg didn’t abandon women; she gave them a hero to finally and enthusiastically rally around.  She is very much a presence. On election night, Trump’s folly will be clear enough to him.

Even many of Trump’s strongest supporters worry that an extremely conservative Supreme Court Appointee – Amy Coney Barrett –  might galvanize not just Democrats but also suburban women and independent voters who have made clear they favor a more mainstream choice, and the nomination of such a person is far from certain.

That is a perfect formula for bitter civil conflict and human suffering that will go on for decades, if not longer.

How sad we don’t have a President who might have appointed a moderate experienced, even conservative jurist who believes the court should be bi-partisan and independent.

What a different country that would be overnight. But Trump lives on the extremes. His motive seems to be to tear us apart, he never tries to bring us together. He won’t speak to me.

Still, Ginsburg’s ghost might be one of the most important turns in the election. Biden is now fighting for her legacy, not just his own. And that is a new and very different story.

Having a hero to so many people changes everything. Donald Trump is unwisely betraying every belief and purpose Ginsburg had in her life.

It’s one of the great ironies of history that people most love their heroes when they die.

Trump has unleashed something he neither respects nor understands. Just put your finger up in the air and feel the wind.

His disrespect for Ginsburg and what she stood for, his failure to grasp the meaning of her,  will haunt him and cost him dearly, no matter who he tries to appoint to the U.S. Supreme Court.

When you do what he is doing to a hero, you create yet another movement. There is no magic wand. There is no turning back.

It is common for mass media to favor one candidate or another or be a candidate’s favorite outlet.

It is unprecedented for a President and a presidential candidate to use media as their primary governing and campaigning resource.

Trump is our first President Of Media; he is a creation and a creature of media. Without it, he would not be President or have any chance at all of winning re-election.

For most of his life, say his biographers, he has been trying to manipulate the media. In Washington, he made his Hellish  Bargain. He’s figured it out.

Joe Biden has benefited from media exposure, but Donald Trump is almost nothing without it. He uses media to distract, lie, and feed his supporters, starving for outrage and grievance.

In a different time, Biden would be toast.  Donald Trump has become so vile and hateful he makes his opponent look like a saint.

Our modern media is only too happy to oblige our newest and most successful demagogue; they all smile all the way to the bank.

This is a time of great insincerity.

Almost nobody in public life actually believes what they say, and those that do – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the women of Black Lives Matter come to mind – are driven to our culture’s margins and harassed mercilessly.

Nobody in our country seems to want to live in a country with good health care, no gun violence, free child care, a longer life span, free vacations, and job security.

How can any citizen be blamed for mistrusting this system and wanting it to change? I feel for these poor people. They have created a true civic monster, he is their problem, not their solution. One way or another, they will soon learn this hard lesson.

I hope they remember how the media helped to betray them once more.

In terms of governing – I honestly don’t say this as a partisan, but as someone looking at the campaign from a distance – Trump has been the most disastrous and incompetent president in American history.

He hates democratic governance, rejects compromise or negotiation, fellates dictators, considers political opponents and critics as enemies, messed up our trade agreements, failed to get Mexico to pay for the wall, and regularly pollutes the very idea of independent governance.

He has failed to respond effectively to a single one the major issues of our time – climate change, the coronavirus pandemic, economic balance and equality, a historic deficit, racial conflict, police brutality, and systemic racism.

And I almost forget – illegals immigrants are crawling under, over, and around his little wall.

He breaks the law again and again by abusing his powers for personal gain.

Does anybody but Trump’s discredited army of Evangelicals care that Bahrain has recognized Israel? I’m Jewish, and I couldn’t care less. It has nothing to do with me.

But then, I’m not an Evangelic Christian who has lost his way and turned to blasphemy, greed, and hatred to soak up some political power.

Trump’s storied economy was focused overwhelmingly on the already wealthy, and his war in immigrants and refugees is a national stain we may never live down.

He has made us the object of ridicule worldwide, damaged the hardest fought international alliances, made us the only country on the earth to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord,   subjected refugees to cruelty and suffering, insulted soldiers and veterans, and generals.

What a novel record of accomplishment. Lots of people can’t wait for him to do it again.

The list is even longer, but enough is enough.

Trump benefits from a Perfect Storm of media changes and evolutions.  It was a marriage from Hell, a hideous marriage of greed and power.

The Internet has shattered the journalistic structure seen for years as an unofficial fourth branch of government.  U.S. Newspapers have shed half of their newsroom employees since 2008.

In 2008, there were 114,000 newsroom employees; by 2019, that number had declined to about 88,000, a loss of about 27,000 jobs.

The Internet and digital and cable media has become the primary source of news for most Americans today, a hole big enough for a shameless demagogue to walk right through and into history.

Over 65 million Americans live in counties with only one local newspaper – or none at all.

When I worked as a producer for CBS News in the early 1980’s, there were nearly 2,000 employees, and there were more than 400 fact-checkers.  My boss told me the only thing that could get me fired was putting a lie on the air and failing to spend whatever was needed to be best.

Today, there are about 400 employees altogether. They don’t get to travel much.

News programs were deliberately not rated so that producer wouldn’t feel pressure to air inaccurate or sensationalized stories.

Most media was not considered to be “left” or “right” or to speak only to liberals and conservative.  We tried to speak to everybody. That was considered unethical.

Today, it is the standard.

When media was corporatized in the late ’80s and ’90s, all programs were rated so advertisers could be charged more, and cable news channels began looking for profitable niches rather than accurate and important stories.

Thus the rise of Fox News and MSNBC and even CNN. These outlets make a lot of money off Trump but have few reporters out in the country talking to ordinary people.

Polling was much cheaper, and that became the funnel through which information is channeled to the public—what a shame. The old pundits did a much better job.

Trump’s Presidency is actually a co-production of him and Fox News and several conservative websites.

Like the country, media has branched off into a left and right. Two ways of looking at the world, any others are forbidden.

The few remaining media of influence – the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Atlantic – have almost been forced to take up left of center marketing positions, since people on the “right” have their own media now and don’t tend to pay attention to any others.

Media organizations have learned to find their own marketing niches in order to survive – the Times and the Post by reporting on President Trump and challenging him. Even the once centrist CNN re-inventing its tepid self an aggressively anti-Trump medium.

The problem is that partisanship has become profitable because it gives the news corporations marketing opportunities that draw advertisers looking for ways to reach specific buyers.

Fox makes a billion dollars a year by targeting older white men. They are grumpy and angry, but they also have lots of money to spend and plenty of advertisers who want to reach only them.

Advertisers hate to waste money on people who are not potential customers.

Fox has made it very easy for them.

Men love their toys.

A business report in the Atlantic recently on the “Trump Effect” on Cable News found that the network has destroyed the GOP, pluralism, and all adult and journalistic standards of ethics, responsibility, and decency.

And their profits are soaring.

A year before Donald Trump was elected, cable news appeared to be fading; it was in its twilight. He changed all of that.

According to the respected Pew Research Project, in 2015, Fox, CNN, and MSNBC all saw their profits surge.

New York Times media critic Jim Ruttenberg wrote about news organizations plastering Trump stories on every chyron and headline in a desperate and successful effort to win new viewers and make a lot of money.

After reaching a 21st-century peak in 2008, the average primetime viewership across the three cable news channels fell by a third by 2014. The median age of Americans watching CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News was 61, 63, and 67. In short, cable news was and is a gerontocratic kingdom where Fox News serves, asking, with more than twice the CNN audience and triple that of MSNBC.

Since Trump descended that escalator in June of 2016, wrote Derek Thompson in the Atlantic, cable news’ fortunes—particularly CNN’s—have been ascendant. Total primetime viewership for the three channels grew by 8 percent in 2015, and profits soared by about a fifth at both CNN and Fox News.

Trump may be destroying U.S. democratic norms, but he appears, for the moment, to be one big beautiful orange life raft for the flagging cable news business.

CNN has averaged 2.2 million total viewers in prime time through the first week of April 2020, more than double its viewership in the fourth quarter of 2019, and roughly 57% higher than its election-season peak, according to Nielsen data.

Fox News is up nearly 50% since the end of last year and has over four million viewers in prime-time, increasing its lead over its two main rivals.

The three networks have also seen large audience gains.

Although Trump loves to rail at “fake news,” he is its main supplier, and they are his most enthusiastic recipients and enablers. They are in business together.

It’s a convenient myth to suggest that Fox News is responsible for the mess the country is in. It takes a Media Village to create a monster like Trump. And Fox is a relatively small piece of the overall media pie.

I mean, let’s be honest. Grumpy old white men are not the favorite target of most businesses.

 Trump has shattered almost every principle of responsible journalism, standards that were sacrosanct for generations, shaping American politics.

Journalists were the enforcers, the watchers, the institution of accountability, a check and balance. See what happens without them.

Cable created this sensational new reality – they broadcast lies and distortions day and night, month after month, year after year. Trump says something almost every day that would have forced any other candidate or President into ruin, resignation, or impeachment long ago.

His assaults on the Constitution make Watergate look like a parking violation. He has reduced the powerful GOP to a cowardly and increasingly corrupt rabble of butt-kissers.

Modern media has figured out how to handle Trump by hiding behind the idea of faux fairness and equivalence.

The new ethos is he-said and she-or he-said. And then said it all again, 24/7.

There is no longer any great injustice or unacceptable behavior in this business arrangement.  Not lies, corruption, racism, or sexual harassment.

It is all on the one hand, and on the other hand, all of our politics is not a reality show.

There is no consensus on truth, fairness, decency, or morality. The poor citizen is overwhelmed by information, much of it false. How can an ordinary person sort it out?

Even the professionals can’t keep up with it.

A veteran reporter explained Washington to me this way: “Trump is a shitstorm, there is so much of it flying around and it smells so bad nobody can keep up with it.”

To appease his many oil and coal supporters, Trump pretends that he believes that climate change is a hoax, and has wiped out almost every climate change regulation or agreement. Much of it was hard-fought.

When fires burn up a million acres of forest in the Northwest, it is not presented as a scandal enabled by a complacent U.S. government; it is simply another he-said, she said political debate. Another argument.

Trump has made it so that there is no such thing as an outrage; everything is outrageous.

The New York Times coverage summed up the problem this way on its digital home page:

 “Joe Biden attacked President Trump’s record on climate change, saying his inaction and denial had fed destruction.

 President Trump blamed the wildfires not on climate change but on the failure by western states to manage their forests.“

An argument, not a catastrophe. Pick one, pick the other. We just present the arguments; you are on your own. 

The New York Times clearly knows better than to accept Trump’s absurd position at face value; they report on climate change all the time.

Presenting it as an argument (one that even Trump is known not to believe) legitimizes the idea that climate change is a hoax, even as it destroys the lives of hundred sof thousands of people and kills many others.

They make it easy to dismiss it.

Every day, Trump holds one kind of press conference or another and lies about almost everything he says. Every day, the media broadcasts and reports his lies, and then claim to be shocked to discover that millions of people believe them.

And why shouldn’t they?

Most people assume that if cable news channels broadcast hours and hours of commentary and opinion from a President, it might be true. Why would they broadcast if they knew it was a lie?

What a good question.

The answer is really quite simple. It makes money, even if the price we all pay is the erosion of our electoral system, our country’s future, and the criminal misrepresentation of a pandemic.

Trump and the media love to pretend to hate each other, but that is another lie, this time on both sides.

Journalists follow Trump around everywhere, fly on his plane, ride in his motorcades, wait for him like hungry puppies on the White House lawn, slobbering eagerly to pass on ever falsehood and vicious attack, and pretend they are challenging him.

They are his court-in-waiting, his transmitters, and broadcasters, his heralds. Once in a while, they ask him a tough question; most of the time, they just repeat what he says and call it work.

Challenging him would mean getting out of the White House, going home, talking to humans,  and reporting on the government rather than be the willing transmitter of lies and cruelty.

Joe Biden is not nearly as charismatic as Trump, nor is he so willfully outrageous and sensational. He will never get as much air time as Trump does.

He is fortunate that Trump is so obnoxious and hateful now that so many people are coming to hate him and are getting weary of his nastiness.

But even then, it is close. He has months left to take over thousands of hours of air time and talk and talk. He is Big Brother in 1984, always on the wall.

Journalists are happy to transmit every lie about the President’s opponent – that he is senile, demented, corrupt, and stupid. That he hates God and supports the murder of police officers. They add a few timid disclaimers and hold their noses.

Journalism puts some lotion on their culpability by using words like “undocumented,” or “without evidence,” as if every viewer will notice this and dismiss the accusations as false.

We see every day that this doesn’t happen.

Tens of millions of Americans believe the pandemic was a hoax, that Antifa killers are organizing to murder conservatives, that our election system is riddled with fraud, that socialists are planning to take over the country.

Journalism was never meant to be an enabling institution. It evolved, for all of its flaws, as a check on power and its abuse.

Greedy corporations changed all of those lofty ideas; profit comes first and trumps any other democratic value.

Trump is our first truly media President.

Neither he nor his fawning Fox commentators and supporters believe a single word they say. There is no ideology involved, only ratings and money.

The network founders were right – ratings have destroyed the credibility of broadcast news.

Fox sets the agenda for our lazy President, who has none of his own, and everybody profits: Trump has a powerful mouthpiece waiting to praise and defend him, and Fox makes a billion dollars.

That is how Corporate Think works.

We put up with it; we deserve it. We watch and listen, and then go on Facebook and Twitter to argue and stew.

Is there a silver lining in this mess? I think so. Organizations like the New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Atlantic are also thriving, expanding their digital footprints and calling Trump on some of his worst instincts and lies.

They have done some astounding reporting in the last two years. When this nightmare ends, which it inevitably will, we will owe them a great debt.

Trump may have boosted the earnings of Fox News, but he is also boosting the earnings and audience of lots of other media outlets as well. He is saving journalism in a number of ways.

I don’t buy the idea that journalism is dead; I buy the idea that journalism deserved to die in its old form and is already re-inventing itself for the future.

Look for some powerhouse news on new media, from Tik Tok to the new kind of newspaper.

Trump has spurred a great awakening among women,  suburban and otherwise, African-Americans,  black and white journalists,  young people, and ordinary Americans who yearn for a more normal life and a more empathetic President.

Wouldn’t it be nice, said a recent TV ad, if we didn’t wake up worrying what the President said, and if the President woke up worrying about us?

The New York Times digital platform has exploded; the Washington Post has hired more than 50 new reporters this year alone.

Journalism’s finest and most influential hours (think William Paley at CBS), John Knight, even William  Randolph Hearst) were funded by millionaires and wealthy business people,  who expanded the media’s reach and power.

Some were better than others, but they paid for journalism to be relevant and vigilant.

That is happening again.

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has insulated the Washington Post from the hemorrhaging affecting most newspapers, Laurene Powell Jobs has made the Atlantic the most influential and substantial magazine in America. She and Bezos can give their publications a lot of support for a very long time.

They are two of the richest people on the planet.

These people and publications are re-shaping our journalism idea, beginning its inevitable revitalization, recognizing its importance. In a curious way, we are going back to the old way of doing it.

Just as women are learning the importance of women in positions of power,  the country is learning the consequences of leaving journalism to Hedge Fund ghouls and cereal manufacturers and corporate cable channels.

We see that journalism needs to change, just like police departments need to change.

A lot of people in America have learned a lot of lessons in the past four years. I am one of them.

 

(I’ll be away most of Monday.  Thanks to all of you for making my political writing feel like a success. It was the right thing for me to do.)

This week it’s Donald Trump’s chance to try to turn things around. He is, as expected, obsessed with the opportunity to be a producer again on such a big stage.

He is reportedly convinced he alone can put on the greatest nominating convention program ever.

The media will be in a frenzy, keeping everybody angry or frightened over his every word and utterance. I’m here to suggest that you don’t buy into that.

He erred in claiming that Joe Biden was senile, so the pressure is on.

He would have been wiser to portray his opponent as being out of touch than incoherent. Moral errors don’t bother Trump, but this was a strategic one. He made himself look more incoherent than ever.

One of the curious things about Trump is that he always shoots too low when going even a teeny bit higher would be more successful.

By deciding to be more vicious than he needed to be and crueler,  he gave Biden an easy way to look timely and relevant just by breathing and speaking loudly.

I can’t remember much of what Biden said, but it didn’t matter.

Being kind has never in American political history been considered an asset. But Biden is a good man, which years of his nasty competitor have transformed into a valuable asset.

He is surrounded by a ring of remarkable women, that has never been a valuable asset before either.

They are every bit as tough as he is nice.

Donald Trump is not nice, and he seems to dislike remarkable women. It’s not a good formula for him.

So here we are—the Republican Presidential Nominating Convention, which Trump is planning mostly by himself. Lord Help Us.

This week, the media will try to rattle your nerves by writing endlessly about all the past presidents and candidates – Democrat Michael Dukakis (1988) in particular – who were far ahead at this point in their campaigns, but who fell to one or more of the Republican’s now finely honed kneecapping assaults.

I’ve read this story a half dozen times this week, and it’s so full of holes I couldn’t begin to count them.

Trump, like Bush and Reagen before him,  is essentially the candidate of Aggrieved White People. Only Trump is more enthusiastically racist and less competent than any of the others. Bush and Reagan felt bad about their racist ads, both said letter.

For Trump, it’s just a chance to crow about who he is.

I call the Republican’s the Angry Old White People’s Party, about to state the Angry Old White People’s Nomination Convention, some Black people sprinkled in like sprinkles on a cake.

The campaign seeks to fuel the very entrenched white American fear of Blacks and immigrants of any color, legal or not.

Many working-class whites believe-  as their fathers and grandfathers believed – that these “others” are interlopers who benefit to their disadvantage.

Their welfare checks are too big and generous, their food stamps too expensive, their unemployment checks too large, they take white people’s jobs for little money, they use our social services,  the deserve their evictions, and health problems are their own lazy fault.

They should go back where they came from, Americans as well as foreigners.

For generations now, the Republican Party and its wealthy corporate supporters have advanced the idea of “preserving whiteness.” Nobody asked me, but this is a tragic mistake.

At a time when at least a half dozen Republican governors are busy trying to suppress Black voters, the party has become an almost tragically short-sighted official home of racism.

They ought to check the numbers. There is no future in this for them. President Trump is taking them back a hundred years.

Rather than attract and welcome immigrants, the party enables the idea that they should be kept out, that the doors be closed; Whiteness needs a big moat around it.

Even after scores of horrific mass shootings in schools, polls found that Americans were more than twice as to blame “illegal gun dealers” or “mental illness” than politicians, policies, or the NRA.

Mass shootings and violence are not seen as a social problem to be addressed by the government, but a need to fortify the walls and guard the gates from the barbarians.

Americans, like their President, are narcissistic, they don’t care that every other civilized nation in the world doesn’t let people run around with lethal combat machine guns.

And contrary to the stereotypes, as many rural kids get shot as urban kids. The American Pediatric Association found that fire-arm related injuries among children occur more frequently in rural than in urban locations. Researchers found that more than 60 percent of these injuries are preventable.

This is the core ethos President Trump will present to the American people at his convention this week, his great gamble for re-election, this idea that poverty, violence, and poor or no access to health care should be defended, not prevented.

Sociologists call this the Castle Doctrine. Whiteness is a Castle; Trump is their guardian. White Privilege doesn’t begin to describe it.

The first mainstream practitioner in the modern take-no-prisoners presidential campaign world was George Bush, whose “Willie Horton” attack ad invited acceptable racist grievance politics and knocked Michael Dukakis out of his lead and led to his defeat.

Willie Horton was an African-American prisoner in Massachusetts who, while released on a furlough program, raped a white Maryland woman and bound and stabbed her boyfriend.

Bush cited the case as evidence that his opponent, Gov. Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts, wasn’t tough on crime.

At the time, Horton was the prototype suburbanite’s terror, and politicians have been exploiting this fear ever since.

Trump is making the same accusation about Biden and Harris. The ad became infamous for stoking racial hatred and is already much milder than the ads Trump is putting out all over social media.

This ushered in the era of win- by- all- costs- and- by- any means.

This not-to-subtle racism was a powerful elevation in the white castle culture that is now an integral part of presidential campaigns.

This movement writes Jonathan Metzel in his book Dying Of Whiteness,  has succeeded in casting Whiteness as a castle under siege.

The policies that sustain this do come with cultural benefits and privilege.

People can now carry guns openly in much of the country, but this idea of whiteness has also come at a terrible cost to working-class whites themselves.

Mostly, the Republican Party and their conservative followers have been chipping away at the idea that government serves as a social net, instead of cutting programs, lowering taxes and shrinking the number of federal and state workers.

Democrats have been too busy shipping jobs overseas and getting paid by lobbyists to do much to stop it.

Republicans and conservatives have also been relentless – and successful – at challenging science and scientific theory, from climate change to epidemics and pandemics.

We are learning the price we all pay for that.

These messages find a receptive audience in many working-class white people, who have seen their communities and jobs and families and farms ravaged by the indifference of both political parties. Some are merely re-playing the Civil War.

The Republicans have won this grievance war, Democrats have lost their once-powerful grip on working people.

This change in the way we see government obscures the plagues that have arisen within the castle walls. It has made life much harder and more difficult for every group but the rich.

Evermore guns and ever more tax cuts have weakened the foundations of life in white communities, as well as Black ones.

Whites in rural America are now also suffering terribly from gun violence, lethal drug epidemics, high unemployment and suicide rates, the death of Main Street and small business, the collapse fo the family farm,  the lack of health care.

The federal government is no longer taking responsibility for or committing significant funds to address any of these problems, either in rural or urban America.

All of these tragic crises could have been addressed and were once addressed by governments, especially the federal government, which alone has the resources to help.

Trump has made himself the King of the Castle, the idea that white people, especially working-class white people and Evangelical Christians, are under siege. Some are beginning to figure out that he is the problem, not the solution.

Even though he has been the leader of the country for four years, he has and will this week present himself as the outsider fighting to keep the castle safe. It is a wonder of our curious times that his supporters don’t ask, “Hey, aren’t you in charge now?”

In presidential politics, it’s usually the incumbent who is set upon by the “outsider,” but Trump plays both roles. Racist advertising is no longer very controversial, it’s now a staple of our presidential elections.

In St. Louis, lawyers Mark and Patricia McCloskey drew guns on peaceful racial justice protesters who marched – illegally and without permission – through the grounds of their $1.5 million mansions last month.

Although none of the protesters harmed them or their property, the McCloskeys cane out to point their guns at them, they saw and responded to the very thing some white people and many Trump supporters have long feared the most:

Black people coming through their gates.

In so doing, they became willing poster children for the Castle Culture. The McCloskeys were widely condemned by Black, Democratic and progressive leaders.

President Trump immediately sensed their significance as spokespeople for “whiteness” and invited them to speak at his convention this week.

One might argue that the worst thing a President could do in racially charged times was glorifying and even honor people who draw guns on Black people who are protesting peacefully.

Trump can’t help himself; he always makes a bad situation worse.

Upon stepping down in 1809 from the presidency, Jefferson wrote to his republican supporters that the most important lesson he learned while President was how “the care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.”

Donald Trump’s core belief is precisely the opposite, a theme that will almost certainly be front and center at his nomination and acceptance.

If you consider Jefferson word for word against Trump,  you can see for yourself that Trump’s values are almost entirely the opposite of Jefferson’s, in every way.

Trump presents government as a corrupt plague, a leftist conspiracy out to destroy him. That will be another critical theme of his nominating convention.

This is the old and bitter conflict now playing itself out in our presidential election.

I’ve been crawling out on limbs in much of my political writing, and so far, so good. I’ll do it again this week.

In a few days, Trump will get his “bump” the media talks about so much; presidents always do when they are re-nominated.

But it will be small and short-lived. Be prepared and unimpressed.

Trump does not read his history or anything else much; his grievance was formed early and powerfully as progressive and social elites of New York thought him pathetic and gauche and refused to invite him to their parties and summer homes.

Trump’s niece Mary and now, his sister Maryanne have testified to his cruelty and lack of principles.

His friends have told interviewers that he never forgave the  “elites” for snubbing him in New York when he was desperate for their approval.

Once in the White House, he began taking his revenge on the country. His “Deep State,” say his biographers, is just a handy pseudonym for New York snobs.

It isn’t policy or ideology that drives Donald Trump, it’s an outsider’s grievance, and in that, he connects with the battered and increasingly displaced world of Whiteness.

But this can’t work in 2020.

The reason is that the “others” are much more numerous and powerful and politically connected than George Bush could have imagined when he approved those racist adds.

George Bush was an experienced, qualified, and articulate candidate.  He was no Donald Trump.

Joe Biden is no Michael Dukakis; he is known, much warmer, and more experienced.

And Black people, especially  Black Women, are no longer either voiceless or powerless. Just look at Black Lives Matter, now the largest social movement in America.

Black women mayors are all over TV, explaining and defending themselves and torture the white mayors who try to block and stop their every move.

Racists and brutal police officers are called out on cellphones and social media platforms all over the country. If George Floyd were not seen by so many people on social media videos, the country would be in a very different place right now, another Black man killed by police officers without much fuss.

The national conversation on racism (and statues) has just begun. And Donald Trump is leading his party to the wrong side of the bridge.

There were no social media to speak of in 1988. The network’s evening newscasts and morning newspapers were about the only place people could go to follow the campaigns.

That goofy photo of Gov. Dukakis sitting in a tank turret in an oversized helmet was seen by everyone in the world.

Everybody is making ads these days, not just the political people.

Almost everyone saw one of the evening newscasts in 1988.

Our media world has splintered a thousand different ways since then.

No one ad can define a presidential race when the country is split into two halves of partisan, ideology-driven voters, most conditioned to despite the opposition and never change their minds.

Women alone can make the difference in this election, and from all accounts, they are not likely to change their minds about Trump because he bullies, lies, and bloviates on TV for a few nights.

Trump has an established habit of pleasing his core supporters and enraging almost everyone else. Good for promoting hatred, bad for winning national elections in 2020.

That is what Trump can’t get and won’t understand.

I find it hard to believe he will change and become reasonable and competent and empathetic just because he is being nominated and gets hours of free air time.

He has seldom done the rational thing. Big audiences drive him wild, like animals hearing frequencies the rest of us can’t hear. Free air time is always his formula for disaster.

Many people of color live in wealthy and culturally powerful cities, and thanks to social media, they have become skilled in connecting with one another. Women, in particular, have developed a skill at embracing and manipulating new communications tools.

They are well organized and well connected, and almost every one of them is out for the President’s hide.

Journalists are often stuck in the past; few seem to grasp the new present or the future. These alarmist comparisons with previous elections are foolish and unknowing.

In George Bush’s time, there was no MeToo movement, no Black Lives Matter, no Portland moms, no women Black mayors, no suburban women who hate to be called “housewives,” no Black Vice-Presidential candidate with a prosecutor’s heart and a movie star smile, no politicized army of black female voters, led by people like Stacy Abrams, a type who also did not exist in public life 15-20 years ago.

The other opponent that George Bush and the Republicans did not have to face was the coronavirus pandemic, one of the greatest opponents any President has faced in American history.

Trump, for reasons that are becoming obvious now, never accepted the virus as a threat, he sees it only as a means of threatening his get-even campaign and is tearing up much of the government every day trying to turn his disastrous campaign around.

The limb I’m claiming out on is this: I don’t care what the pundits say, or what Fox News or CNN or MSNBC commentators say or what the hyper-heated media says.

Trump can’t do it.

He can’t figure out how to stop the pandemic, he can’t make the economy come back in time for November, he can’t conjure up a vaccine people will trust, he can’t hide from the Post Office outrage.

As the election looms, he is unprepared for the inevitable rise and spread of the pandemic back and forth all over the country because he has dug such a deep and stupid and tragic hole for himself that there is no way of stopping it now.

You can see the panic in him now by his reckless politicizing of the federal government for his personal gain.

I don’t believe  Republicans will be able to get away with demonizing Black Americans for too much longer; Black activists are finding their voice and their political power.

More than any other group of Americans, American women – white and black and yellow –  are feeling their oats and beginning the long and painful task of helping to first save their country, and then heal it.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and all those women are in the right place at the right time and the right way to capitalize on these very radical changes in American life.

Watch Trump this week if you need to, but be forewarned. It will be hateful and upsetting. And there will be no escaping it. It is unlikely to do more than make a deafening amount of noise.

So brace yourself and take the long view.

And it won’t work, I don’t care how many government agencies Trump throws into chaos. It can’t work because he isn’t up to it.

America is his seventh bankruptcy, and this time, he is being called to account.

“A mother is the truest friend we have, when trials heavy and sudden fall upon us; when adversity takes the place of prosperity; when friends desert us; when trouble thickens around us, still will she cling to us, and endeavor by her kind precepts and counsels to dissipate the clouds of darkness, and cause peace to return to our hearts.” – Washington Irving

It took me a while to dig it out, but there is one statistic out of Portland that practically screams out to be seen.

The President of the United States and his loyal puppy Chad Wolf, the acting and illegal head of Homeland Security have claimed the situation in Portland is so dire that the President had to order his own Palace Guard into the city to bring law and order to this idiosyncratic community.

The President seems to be uncomfortable with the lack of obedience in Democratic cities. So he’s sending men with guns and tear gas in to bring them into line, save statutes and federal buildings.

In the first place, good luck with turning Portland into Main St., Disneyland.

Portland has been protesting and it’s citizens marching and breaking store windows forever. It is part of Portland’s DNA. This city is much loved by the people who live there, mayhem, and all.

And almost all of the city is untouched by the protests.

Not one citizen of Portland has asked for the federal government to come in and run their city.

The question I had been pondering is how many people have died in more than 50 nights of this anarchy and violence? I couldn’t find the answer in all those stories online.

Close your eyes, and take a guess.

The answer is that there have been four injuries, none of them life-threatening and 113 arrests.

In Los Angeles, there were 6,000 arrests in one night after George Floyd was killed, more than 2,000 protesters in New York were arrested the first night of protests there.

There have been no fatalities in Portland, not one protester, one police officer, one innocent civilian, or bystander. 

To me, that seems to be the most essential information to come out of Portland, but I’ve yet to find a major media outlet that has seen fit even to mention it.

Between 1999 and 2018, 450,000 people have died from overdoses from opioids. President Trump has not sent a single solder from his private Army to stop this tragedy. That is our value system in America.

More than 140,000 Americans have died from the coronavirus, the President has barely mentioned it in weeks.

How does one define a crisis in the age of Trump? A crisis is one that might help his re-election. He doesn’t seem to care about anything else. That’s one reason his campaign stinks like month-old fish and he’s out for some big-time distraction.

Portland has its troubles, but it’s hard to find the emergency that prompted the federal government to take over the city’s response to the prolonged demonstrations there against alleged police brutality and the death of George Floyd.

If you look at a calendar, the reason for the “intervention” is apparent enough, the election is November 3, and our President is running scared.

President Trump tends to try to prove everyone’s worst fears about him again and again as if he seeks to frighten as much or more than he seeks to actually lead. I see a man shouting to his world, “look at me, see how tough I am! I am a killer,” just like my Dad wanted me to be!”

As he moves farther and farther to the edge of reason and democracy, he is telling us almost daily now, “see, everything you all feared about me is true.”

Look, he says, if I can totally screw up Portland, just wait until I get to New York and Chicago.

Except he really isn’t very tough, and he’s really bad at tyranny. He’s a scared little kid living inside of a big white house.

The President seems to relish his outlandish positions, and he no longers cares if it is a rational position or a legal position.

He just cares that it will offend and frighten people, that is his disorder, his own idea of power, and the reason he will not succeed.

I am not a constitutional scholar, but his new and most desperate iteration is that of an authoritarian and anti-democratic leader. He has taken the meaning and tone of the election to an entirely different level.

Demagogues feed off of crisis, and Trump needs a crisis to try to prove he is handling one and is necessary.

But he’s blowing it, from Tulsa to Lafayette Square to Portland.

Trump is not saving his hide; he is creating one of the great backlashes in political history and too messed up to see it.

His base is just as unmoored as he is right now; both are lurching desperately from one new and hysterical narrative to another.

And by the way, those moms are kicking his ass.

You don’t need to be a constitutional scholar to know that Chad Wolf is not serving illegally.  Federal statutes impost strict limits on who may serve as acting federal officials and for how long.

An acting official may not serve for more than “210 days beginning on the date the vacancy occurs.”

The vacancy in Homeland Security occurred when Kirstjen Nielsen resigned on April 10, 2019. You can do the math.

The law means that the position of Secretary of Homeland Security could not be filled by an acting official after November 6, 2019.

In political terms, there are almost two many ironies to stomach.

For generations, the conservative political movement and the Republican Party have claimed the rise of the federal bureaucracy has threatened state and local autonomy and would one day be a threat to the nation.

Conservatives and Republicans have fought for years to pare down the size and scope of the federal government. One day, they warned, we would regret it getting so big.

How about today?

Just when they are proven right, they are too afraid of their leader to speak out. Donald  Trump’s enablers are knee-deep in shame, and a lot of people mean to see that isn’t forgotten.

Democrats, almost always quick to expand the size, cost, and scope of government to take on and solve social programs, have supported dramatic federal expansions like the Department of Homeland Security, which now has more than 240,000 employees.

There were all kinds of warnings about taking all those law enforcement agencies and fusing them under one roof.

Under Trump, the department has just transformed itself into an unaccountable and quite possibly unconstitutional personal police force of the President.

This is both dangerous and short-sighted. Wait until budget time next year.

The newly re-cast Trump conservatives are cheering what many scholars claim is an alarming overreach by federal police, most of whom never even existed a generation or two ago.

The idea of a  militarized federal police, reporting only to a President seeking re-election is, without a doubt, among the worst fears of the Founding Fathers: a private army answering to a king, not a nation.

During the initial protests about the death of George Floyd, Trump tried to enlist the Army in his effort to quell the mostly, but not entirely peaceful protests in Washington, D.C.

The Pentagon and the Army balked – openly and decisively – against being used against domestic protesters, so Trump turned to his very loyal new Acting Homeland Security Head to gather elite units from the Border Patrol, DEA,  ICE, the Federal Protective Service,  and even the U.S. Park Service.

Finally, he has an army to do his bidding.

Nobody – not Trump or his acting director – talks to Congress, to the mayors, the governors, or the people of Portland to see if they are needed or if their intrusion is welcome. And the conservatives are cheering in the streets and all over TV and the Internet.

Wow.

The roving bands of genuine anarchists protesting and smashing winds- small in number but large in creating damage – was the opening they needed.

Nothing terrifies white and rural Trump supporters more than people causing trouble in cities that are far away, especially if they are black,  brown, young, or yellow.

The Republican Party has used this delusion for years, often with great success. Since most of them don’t around or with “anarchists” or immigrants or dread liberals or people of color, they have no idea what they are like and can be easily manipulated into fearing them.

Before these militarized federal police forces existed – and we see they have been beefing themselves up with camo, tear gas, fancy guns and rifles,  and all the trappings of professional soldiers – there were no such federal agencies to send soldiers into cities and towns to tell them how they must live.

The Army was off-limits. People governed themselves, for better or worse.

The head of the agency is an acting head, like so many of Trump’s appointees.  The President knows he can’t get many of his fanatically loyal but poorly qualified candidates past even his Republican Senate, so has used a loophole – acting appointees – to skip this process.

Chad Wolf is one of the most conspicuous and also the most arrogant of the acting officials who now litter the government.

Wolf, this fierce defender of law and order, is breaking the law every day.

He has not been confirmed by the President, has never been questioned or examined by Congress, and thus has loyalty only to the President, not the Constitution.

If you step back a bit, it’s nothing short of astonishing that an acting federal cabinet-level official responsible for fighting terrorism and known for his incompetence would be lecturing a state governor and a local mayor on how to govern their state and city.

Every single preceding head of Homeland Security – and a busload of constitutional scholars – has said the federal intervention into Portland is unprecedented and far beyond the scope of the agency or the intention of Congress.

That’s where we are in the political campaign, with a President who has deteriorating mental health and too much power to abuse.

Is it scary? Sure.

Will it work? I don’t think so.

I’ve written many times about the need to be calm and keep perspective.

Media feeds on fear and hysteria. So do demagogues.

Of course, Trump and his army of grumpy white men will fight hard to stay in power.

For me, the Portland invasion is another disaster, and of course, the conservative media will support it. Like Trump, they lurch from one hysteria to the other. Time is running out.

My sense is that most people are sick of it, they’ve seen it for four years now, and their ears ache. People now mistrust Trump, even if they like him.

Wolf and Trump have two huge problems, neither one foresaw and both of which will make this soon- to -be -notorious abuse of power difficult, if not impossible, to maintain.

One is the pandemic.

The other is the moms, who have ignited a movement a lot more frightening to Trump and his Homeland Security adviser than a bunch of young anarchists from Portland.

The mothers have changed the narrative.

I don’t care how Trump and Chad Wolf cast it, images of those moms standing in front of their sons and daughters, the husbands and fathers marching behind them with leaf blowers to push back the tear gas, is much more potent than any of Trump or Wolf’s angry ranting.

What Trump has done is dangerous, although typically, he doesn’t seem to grasp it.

You have scores of heavily combat armed federal police, almost none of whom have been trained for urban riot or population control, with weapons of war. Because of the clumsy and imperious way, they were introduced, and their arrogance when they showed up, they find themselves in a civil war, not a cleanup.

They are facing off against thousands of civilians who now see them, rather than one another, as the enemy. You don’t win friends by driving around a city in unmarked cars and pulling suspects – some of whom are innocent – off of the streets.

The protest was sputtering until Chad Wolf arrived to reinvigorate it and quadruple the number of people who want to tear the federal courthouse down.

Is that the lesson Chad Wolf came to Portland to teach? Make it worse?

Trump has united a divided community, although not in the way he imagined.

Some of the protesters really are threatening and dangerous, throwing rocks and bricks and fireworks at the federal agents, whom the city has now come to hate and fear.

They see them as an occupying Army because that is how they look and act. Do we ever learn? Chad Wolf has just spawned a guerrilla army fighting on its own turf.

When the President vows to “go in and clean up the mess” because the mayor and governor won’t or can’t, he is seizing power from an elected civil leadership that has not sought his help and doesn’t want it.

I can’t say if it’s unconstitutional, I don’t know. I can say it’s one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen.

Now, Trump and his appointed Patton have also ignited a civilian citizen uprising against a heavily armed paramilitary force. That is truly dangerous; it is an irresponsible and poorly thought out confrontation that is very likely to get people seriously injured or even killed.

If the first fatalities come about because Trump sent in those soldiers -that’s what heavily armed people with guns are – he will damage himself even more.

If he stays much longer or expands this detested practice into other cities, he significantly increases the odds he will get people killed and endanger those soldiers as well as civilians.

And steer a lot of voters to Joe Biden at the worst possible time for him.

We already know from his response to the pandemic that he doesn’t care if his policies endanger or kill people.

Still, if the pandemic should have taught him anything, it’s that the American people do care if people get killed due to misguided government policies or the lack of government policies.

They care about the insertion of federal soldiers into a complex civil conflict that was being brought under control and no longer is.

Every day he behaves in this out-of-control, chaotic and disturbing way, he strengthens the image of Joe Biden as a rational, reasonable, and empathetic leader.

The coronavirus challenges him to do something he simply can’t do – organize, direct and explain a coherent federal response to a disease that is wreaking havoc with ordinary people, the elderly,  businesses, his re-election,  and his economy, the only real accomplishment of his Presidency.

Sorry to dampen hysteria or outrage, but without controlling the pandemic, he cannot win the November election, not even if he invades every Democratic city in the country with his new and militarized federal police squads.

This kind of operation goes against the grain of almost every American’s ideas about America.

The same gene that has the anti-maskers showing up at statehouses with rifles and moms with gas masks will spark a revulsion and social revolution that will dwarf his uninvited excursions into American cities with Democratic mayors.

It reminds me to listen more closely to genuine conservatives when they warn of runaway federal growth.

Even some leading white nationalists have balked at the idea of sending federal soldiers into a community that has not asked for them to quell a dangerous riot that is not perilous at all, at least not until it is turned into one.

This is even more foolish for the President when you throw in the imagery and verve of the mothers, all of whom are a lot braver and tougher than he is.

He can call the moms thugs and anarchists all he wants, it won’t go well.

We are in a war to see who blinks first – Trump’s slavish acolyte, Chad Wolf, and his master, or the moms.

I’m with the moms.

In just a few days, they have stymied the big men in the camo clothes and boots with their big guns and tear gas canisters.

The image of those women standing up to the big men with guns and masks is iconic; it is right up there with the lone Chinese protestor who stood in front of those tanks in Tiananmen Square.

They brought the federal police force to a standstill, ran them off of the streets of Portland, protected their sons and daughters from being grabbed and thrown into vans, chased them behind fences, and have cornered them like rats.

Once or twice a night, they rush out of hiding and fire some tear gas cannisters and run back inside. It doesn’t look like the insurgency has been vanquished, there were 2,000 protesters out last night in Portland, more than any other night since the protests started.

Like the brave man in Tiananmen Square, they stood off the vans.

I don’t know what goes on in Donald Trump’s head; I can’t claim to know his motives. He might well be hoping for a takeover of our country or even the November election.

Watching his bloodless and pointless pandemic press conference Tuesday evening, in which he pushed aside all of the doctor’s people wanted to hear to mumble insincere platitudes about what a great job he was doing, this is what I thought:

This sorry man is too pathetic and clumsy to take over anything, let alone a country crammed with millions of people eager and willing to stand up to him.

He started out as a fiery meteor, he is turning into an empty shell. This is a leader who has no idea what he is doing.

It’s too late for him. He waited too long. He doesn’t have the moves. The pandemic is kicking his butt. The moms are exposing his weakness and dysfunction, just as the Tik-Tok kids did.

One of the many beautiful things I love about our country is that somebody always comes out and stands up for the rest of us when we most need them. That doesn’t happen in China.

 

 

“Wear none of thine own chains; but keep free, whilst thou art free.” – William, Penn, 1693.

But William,  what if freedom for others means chains for you, who was never free?

It’s fitting; I suppose that the beautiful play Hamilton was finally available to all of us on the Disney Channel on July Fourth, the same day as President Trump’s speech at Mt. Rushmore.

This was a holiday when culture, race, and politics all collided in a rich and laden cultural mash.

Hamilton, written by Lin-Manuel Miranda, opened on Broadway in 2015. It has earned more than a billion dollars, won 11 Tony Awards, and a Pulitzer Prize.

It is the most successful  Broadway production of my lifetime. But when I watched it last night, I saw it very differently than I did just a few years ago.

The story about Hamilton and also about our President’s behavior this weekend is about moral failings, new realities, and lost opportunities.

Both are, in a sense, lessons in the painful struggle of white people to come to consciousness about race in a country founded on lies and distortions, a heralded experiment in freedom while caving into slavery and denying it for centuries.

Last week I learned that  Black Lives Matter had become the largest social movement in American History. That is change. Across the country, in the far West, Donald  Trump was living in an altered reality.

I learned again – this is happening a lot lately –  that I need to understand race in a completely different way if I’m supposed to grasp it.

I can thank Donald Trump and Lin-Manuel Miranda for this weekend lesson.

We are in a new dimension.

Friday and Saturday, the President decided to energize his re-election campaign, re-igniting the deep and disturbing fear many white people in America have of black Americans and “outsiders” and “leftists.”

At the same time, a brilliant singer and playwright released his stunning and racially charged portrayal of the American Revolution on  Disney, one of the most iconic American corporations.

Finally, all Americans could afford to see it, including black people.

The new Disney + channel movie version of the play was released on Friday.  Americans got to see the play for just over $6; Broadway tickets ran up to $1,500 at times.

It was a surreal joy to see this play, a surging, beautifully written and sung and choreographed production.

The play was a masterpiece, a  radical portrayal and re-imagining of the birth of America, and of Alexander Hamilton’s life during and after the American Revolution.

Miranda’s stroke of genius was to use actors of color to portray Hamilton and other prominent figures in the American Revolution; all of them were white. This was taken to be a powerful statement about diversity, and it was.

But just a few years later, those same actors conveyed a completely different image and idea: why do we keep celebrating and honoring the people who brought us and fought for slavery?

The weekend was very much about heroes.

Hamilton was about the heroes of the American Revolution.

Trump promised a National Garden Of Heroes at Mt. Rushmore. He wants to honor Evangelical Leader Billy Graham (who would have despised Trump’s message that day, Graham was a real Christian, not a pretender) and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the brilliant and extremely conservative justice.

There were African-Americans on Trump’s hero list, including Martin Luther King and Harriet Tubman, whose image the President has kept off of our currency people of color on Trump’s heroes list; no one outside of his insular and angry world was asked for nominations.

I don’t have any doubt about how Dr. King or Harriet Tubman would react to Trump’s speeches over the holiday weekend.

So this weekend was very much about heroes. How should we feel about the ones we – white we, that is – were taught all of our loves to honor?

Should we give up on the heroes we’ve been celebrating since the first Fourth of July, or should we see them in a different light, and re-consider them, even take their statues away and their names off of buildings?

Both events surprised me.

One – the Rushmore trip –  repelled me. A gathering of musty old white men, living and dead.

The other got me to thinking.

Much as I loved Hamilton, I felt almost from the beginning that something was wrong as I watched it.

What seemed so well-meaning and noble in 2015 seemed morally scrambled and off-kilter to me in 2020.

I’m not into knee-jerk politics, left or write.  I want to think for myself.

I don’t care to join the progressive confessionals, the hand-wringing, and self-flagellation, all the things that annoy people about liberals. I’m less interested in denouncing racism than I am in understanding it.

I’d like to find a way to love my country again. I’d like for other people to come to love it too.

The play was terrific and deserved all the praise it got.

But I see now that it also laid bare our now nakedly exposed inability to take responsibility for what our country did, and how it was conceived. We haven’t been telling the truth. We just don’t seem able to stay with it.

Those men and women so creatively portrayed in Hamilton all worked together to make a deal with the Devil. They were indeed brave and surely brilliant. But they acquiesced to great evil.

They agreed to a new country in exchange for decades of slavery and tens of thousands of death and countless misery.

Tom Paine got it, he wrote slavery was “so monstrous is the making and keeping of slaves at all..and the many evils attending the practice, such as selling husbands away from wives, children from parents and each other, in violation of sacred and natural ties; and opening the way for adulteries, incests and many shocking consequences, for which the guilty masters must answer to the final judge..”

Not one of the heroes in Hamilton joined his abolitionist group, the first in America. And nobody answered to God or anybody else.

But we have changed a lot in a short time. That is good news.

A play that uses black and yellow and brown actors to glorify the American Revolution seems suddenly confused now, thanks to George Floyd and Black Lives Matter.

As the country is being aggressively challenged to come to terms with the awful echoes of slavery, we are learning that the slave trade was entangled with the founding of our country.

Wait a minute; I thought as I watched.

Aren’t these slave owners these actors are portraying?

Aren’t these the people whose statues are being pulled down all over the country? Aren’t these the ones who used slavery as a bargaining chip to protect money and property?

The short answer is yes.

Why, I wondered,  was slavery mentioned only twice in the play, and why wasn’t there a single actor playing the role of slaves?

Shouldn’t it have been mentioned that the price paid for our new country was slavery? The South would never have joined the union if the constitutional delegates hadn’t gone along.

I know from my readings that a number of our Founding Fathers and supporters objected to slavery.

John Adams considered it an abomination,  Jefferson whined about it but kept his slaves, Tom Paine founded the first abolitionist group in America.

But nobody thought abolishing slavery was worth angering the South, disrupting commerce, or breaking up the union. They had their chance, they ran from it.

I don’t fault Miranda for any of this. Like me, he was living in a different time, in a different head, with altered consciousness.

Nobody saw these submerged issues in his play when it came out.

In late May, Miranda and the show’s producer, Jeffrey Seller, conceded that they were guilty of a “moral failure” in not supporting the George Floyd protests.

But how could they?

Hamilton, the play is a brilliant, spirited quicksand bog when it comes to justice and slavery.

Much of the play centers around Hamilton’s marriage to Elizabeth Schuyler, whose father was a prominent American General.

The play never mentioned that the Schuylers were one of the most notorious and cruel slave-owning families. Last month, the mayor of Albany ordered the removal of a statue honoring Gen. Philip Schuyler, Hamilton’s father-in-law.

But then, I didn’t notice it either when I first saw the play. I took it as a beautiful and hopeful idea.

The show was an immense smash, but I remember seeing the photographs of the politicians and celebrities who somehow got their hands on those thousand dollar tickets.

Almost all of them were white. And nearly all of the ticket goers were white. Not too many black kids in New York City get to go or want to go to Broadway shows or can afford those tickets.

How telling that very few would see a play like this with its groundbreaking cast of people of color of them while white people came from all over the country.

It was almost eerie that Trump and Hamilton performed on the same day.

Trump, as he did in 2016, is playing on the long-standing fear of many white people that the colored hordes of the world are coming to take their jobs and communities away, or worse.

For a President, this kind of speech on Independence Day is a kind of social treason, a rejection of the country’s fading idealism and moral grounding. One of the most elemental responsibilities of a President is to unify the country, to help mend and heal the ugly scars of democracy.

The people who support Trump must agree with him when it comes down to this xenophobic ranting. It is painful for me to see, but I need to accept it. We all have to look in the mirror each morning and like what we see.

Both the play and Trump’s speech were moral failings, each from different ends of this charged spectrum. But both were instructive. One was accidental, the other deliberate.

To accept the President’s remarks, or embrace them, one had to deny the reality and History of millions of people who tell a profoundly different story.

Consciously or not, Hamilton is another cultural creation that appears to celebrate black people, but it ends up being about getting white people to buy tickets for $1,500 and feel uplifted and affirmed in their own vision of the world.

This is why my black novelist friend tells me he is sick of white people telling him they are or are not racists.  He’ll care when things change, he says.

I know Miranda and the producers gave a lot of tickets away to poor and minority children, but still, this was a play meant to glorify the white and slave-owning fathers of our country without ever acknowledging the hypocrisy and pretense of the revolution itself.

Imagine what would have happened if Adams and Hamilton and Washington had rejected the Southern States’ insistence on keeping slavery? What if they let the Southern states form their union?

And our Republic was slave free? Our country would be very different today.

Then, all of those declarations and flowery self-righteous inscriptions on marble buildings would have been true.  We would all have a different view of our country today.

I wonder what I am supposed to do these days besides pretend I’m not a racist or confess that I am?  I need to see things differently and change what’s in my head.

As with the left and the right, the challenge is to start talking to one another and listening.

But I can’t pretend, even in the interest of balance, to support what Donald Trump did or said on the Fourth of July.

Given a choice, I would prefer not to be racist in my thinking of writing.

Donald Trump has a choice; he wants to be a racist.

His racism is calculating and deliberate and right out in the open.

He wants people to see it; he is betting his re-election on it. At the moment, he is offering us nothing else.

That is a new low in the history of American presidential politics.

People who support this kind of blatant exploitation and bigotry are not just wrong. They are complicit.

This weekend, Trump stood in front of those giant Mussolini-sized flags at Mt. Rushmore and told his fellow Americans on the Fourth of July that many of them are the enemy now, his people, our neighbors, and friends, not just immigrants from other places.

“Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe our History, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children…Angry mobs are trying to tear down  statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials, and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities.”

People who aren’t troubled by these words are beyond the reach of someone like me. Troubled people don’t need me to tell them what is wrong, even evil, about them.

On both ends of the racial divide  –   Black Lives Matter and President Trump – racism is now a major issue for the Presidential campaign, second only to the pandemic. Sadly, we have not seen the last video of brutality.

Race joins the coronavirus as a defining moment for the presidency, race relations, and the country.

The President believes he can exploit racial tensions and win re-election in that way.

Black Lives Matter, now a mainstream political movement, believes that white Americans are finally ready to move the needle in this long and intractable struggle.

Someone wrote to me yesterday to demand to know if I was aware that two of the founding people of Black Lives Matter were “trained Marxists,” as if I would swoon

Yes, I did know of it, I wrote back, Trump tweets about it almost daily.

I asked the message writer if she was a “trained Trump supporter,” and I said the Marxists had done a great job. Black Lives Matter is changing America when everyone else has failed for centuries.

The training must have been good.

But both of these visions can’t win in November. The President has done us great harm, and it will take a long time to heal those wounds, on both sides.

“Our unalterable resolution should be to be free.” – Sam  Adams, 1776.

I always loved Sam Adams’s peaceful resolution about freedom; I always thought it was stirring.

But what would I have thought about it if I were in chains and enslaved and if my family has just been taken from me and sent away, and I would never see them again?

Looked at in that way, Adams stirring quote seems a little different to me, perhaps a little staged and narcissistic. Maybe even a lie.

I dislike the term white privilege; it smells of cliche and cant and political correctness, even if I am coming to see the meaning of it, and how it might apply to me.

I believe the President has misjudged and underestimated the rest of us and desecrated the flag he presumes to love but does not ever seem to understand.

I don’t believe most Americans want to accept his dark and unforgiving vision of America. Trump makes Ronald Reagan and his shining city look like the Muppet Show.

Being an American is not about never protesting; it is all about protesting.

To call African-Americans savage mob for protesting the killing of George Floyd is no better than calling Jews greedy and cunning.

I believe many Americans want to find our better angels and feel genuinely proud of their country again. I think most of us want a kinder nation.

We want to be just and equal, even if we are not there yet. I feel the promise of our revolution is still within our grasp if we can face the truth and learn from it.

Everywhere I look, I see that is beginning to happen.

Our election, now just a few months away, is full of meaning and promise now. We get to find out who we are.

 

 

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