Search Results for: I Saw An Angel Last Night

(This is the last appearance of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, the logo on much of my political writing, until the midterm elections. He needs a rest, and so do I).

“Doing nothing is sometimes one of the highest of the duties of man.” – G.K. Chesterton.

Many people in America are furious with the Republican Party for winking and hiding as the worst attack on our democratic processes in our country’s history raged under their very noses.

I have a special gripe with them, apart from the obvious. Their behavior bordered on the treasonous, and I don’t think people will soon forget it.

They are cruel. Trump is a sadist.

I learned first hand this summer just how frightened many good people were of them and our President. He seemed to hate more than half of his people and gave them the finger every chance he had. The Republican Party enabled this cruelty., but he absolutely wallowed in it.

The GOP didn’t care that Trump frightened people. They didn’t care at all.

Joe Biden was officially elected President today, and Congress will ratify him in the next month. The iron wall of rage and denial is starting to crack.

We need some time off from fear and anger; I know I do. Having read your e-mails all summer, I  think many of you think so too. And many of you aren’t ready to let go of it.

I was surprised to read my friend Eve Marko’s blog post today in which she sounded gloomy and angry about where the country has been and where it is heading.

“What pisses me off in Joe Biden,” she wrote, ” is that he’s too nice in the face of this unfolding disaster—and yes, even though he’ll win, this is a disaster, and it continues to unfold, openly and actively; it ain’t going anywhere. People have learned and are learning that there are ways to discredit or go around elections and that you can do it at no cost. No one is pointing the finger at you; no one is castigating your name for the ages. I don’t think this is just Biden’s persona; it’s also a strategy for how he wishes to move forward.”

It is a great gift to be Eve’s friend. She is an intellectual in the strat of Hannah Arendt; her mind along is a great gift to me of friends. She is a Zen master and teacher, and Eve is rarely angry or gloomy.

But I’m not pissed at Joe Biden. When he first declared he was running, I thought he was a joke,  our own Don Quixote, a three-time loser. And an old man past his prime.

I don’t think any of those things anymore.

The Zen spirit appeals to the American mind, says the Lion’s Roar blog; it is a “stripped-down, determined, uncompromising, cut-to-the-chase, meditation-based Buddhism that takes no interest in doctrinal refinements. Not relying on scripture, doctrine, or ritual, Zen is verified by personal experience and is passed on from master to disciple, hand to hand, ineffably, through hard, intimate training.”

Sounds mesmerizing.

But you don’t have to be a saint to be a Zen Master any more than you have to be a saint to do good. She does an awful lot of good. Sometimes, you have to get pissed.

In her post, Eve reveals much foreboding about the future.

“Ahead of us is one of those highway crashes that end holiday hopes for many people. If not in 2020 or 2021, then in 2024 or 2028, but not too far in the future. You have to be blind not to see it. Maybe we need that crash, I think to myself in despondent moments. Maybe that’s the only way we’ll get rid of an Electoral College system that had its origins in racism and protecting slavery.”

I seldom disagree with Eve Marko; she is a lot smarter than I am and a lot wiser. I listen to what she says.

But we’re not on the same page tonight. I don’t see the future the way she does. In fact, I don’t really see the future at all. I don’t believe I can ever define the future by the present; it rarely happens.

I think in her pique at the Republican’s outrageous sedition; she looks away from the idea that Donald Trump may have done almost as much good as harm. Black Lives Matter would be almost nothing without him. The millions of suburban women who brought him down in Georgia and elsewhere would not be paying so much attention to politics; Me Too would have been “what, who?” without his inspiration.

As a political writer, one of the big lessons I learned was that in politics, the future is never – absolutely never – what people expected of it.  Nobody can predict the future, or ever has, not reliably.

In the years leading up to World War II, Congress and the American people were almost violently opposed to joining that conflict.

A year or so later, four million soldiers were in uniform and built a tank every other minute. No one foresaw that, just as no one foresaw Trump.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I need a break from worry and anger. It’s not human nature to stay angry and aggrieved day after day, year after year.

I believe the Republicans will pay for what I can only describe as perfidy and sedition. They have taken a sledgehammer to the idea that they can govern responsibly. They have lost the trust and faith of the people in the middle.

The first sign of change is the suggestion that an awful lot of people in Georgia are shocked by what they have seen unfold in their own state – leaders being ridiculed, gangs of thugs in trucks riding around threatening poll counters, thousands of death threats via e-mail, the President coming unhinged on TV every day.

As he so repeatedly and foolishly is wont to do, the very time he needs the Governor of Georgia the most, he trashes him as a fraud and a loser. Let’s see if that works for him.

I think The Republicans will be held accountable for this treachery by history, surely not by me, sooner rather than later.

Ever since he declared for President, Biden has been scolded for his passivity, his focus on real issues, and his gentleness in the midst of so much savagery. They laughed at him for staying in the basement; they goaded him to get nasty during the debates. They don’t understand why he doesn’t take every piece of bait tossed his way.

To me, he is doing just what he should be doing – making Trump and his Republican fellators look bad without saying a word about them. Let Trump get his own headlines.

While Trump fiddles on Yahoo, Biden is focused on vaccines – precisely where he is doing just what he should be doing. Raging at Trump is like throwing peas at an elephant. That’s what he wants, not what he fears.

If Biden gets those 100 million vaccines out to 100 million Americans in the first 100 days of office, as he has promised to do, he will be off to a great start, possibly reminding a lot of frustrated and alienated voters that government is still good for something. Yelling at Trump and his followers has accomplished nothing in four years except make Trump stronger and more powerful.

Trump has cast a spell on millions of people, and it may take another witch before the spell can be undone.

Attention and disruption is his oxygen. If nobody pays attention, he will shrivel up and blow away, like the leaves on an oak tree.

I don’t believe most of his followers are lost to democracy; I believe they are disappointed by it and feel abandoned by a corrupt and old political system. People want something different. Decency is different than Trump.

Nobody knows what will happen if that ethos really changes, instead of just faking it, as Democrats have been doing for generations now.

The Republican Party stinks pretty badly right now. Their challenge is to show the country that they are capable of governing as well as disrupting government. I’m eager to see what Georgia tells us about that.

I hope Biden stays off Donald Trump’s Crazy Train and ignores the one-note critics, whose only message is to fight. Am I the only one who thinks this hasn’t worked out for his party?

This pressure to get tough goes nowhere except to feed Donald Trump’s battered soul. If Dracula can’t live without blood, then Trump can’t live without attention.

I’m retiring the Screamer after this post, he’s done us proud, but it’s time to cool down, even if it’s just for a few days.

The Republicans cannot take over our country, even if they can slow it down and stymy our better angels. Our country is big, big enough for aroused women, fired-up kids, determined Black Americans, Latinos, and those suburban wives we’ve heard so much about.

They aren’t going anywhere.

They couldn’t stop them in Georgia; they can’t stop them everywhere else.  Their universe is changing.

All summer, I quarreled with the worriers, even accusing them of being the new bed-wetters. I apologized for that; I hadn’t yet grasped how much fear and unease Trump called in people.

It is both traumatic and counter-productive. And addicting. Believe me, some parts of you will miss the daily fix of outrage.

I don’t see it the way Eve sees it and the way so many others see it.

Losing is not the same as winning.

Trump lost the election, and he lost the fight to overturn the election even more badly.  He didn’t even get to finish his precious wall, and Mexico didn’t pay for a dollar of it.

His incompetence and missteps over the virus will haunt him throughout history, as will the ghosts of the many people his vanity and stupidity ended up killing.

He made his cause a laughing stock; he made the once-proud Republican party into an extremist crackpot fringe. Republican and conservative judges worldwide – including on his precious Supreme Court – spanked him and spanked him.

The message of the election to the Democrats was to stay in the center, don’t get pushed too far to the left. And what was the message to the Republican Party: thanks for being closer to the center, we want you right there.

But they aren’t right there. They have veered much farther to the right than the Democrats ever thought of veering to the left. They’ve tilted right off of the cliff with their fraud claims. Trump-inspired millions of more people to hate him than to love him. That is no formula for success.

My sense of what is coming:  Because of Trump’s fumbling and bumbling, the Democrats now have a good shot at winning the Georgia Primary. That would well be his legacy.

If the candidates can shut their mouths about defunding the police, they are in a good position to send a message to Trump and his Republican allies.

Biden has persuaded me to trust him, not second guess him.

While 300,000 Americans have no died from the coronavirus, Biden talks mostly about distributing vaccines, firing up the economy again, and reversing some of Trump’s most grievous sins against human beings and Mother Earth.

Trump will suggest he has future political ambitions but will not pursue them. He will be gone on January 20, loudly but clearly. He doesn’t have the balls to stage a coo.

This is Trump’s twisted genius – always getting other people to bail him out, never being held responsible for what he does. He’s doing nothing now but tweet, and he’s getting the reward by hundreds of millions to do it.

Why would he want to give actually to work for it?

Biden seems to have acquired some genius too. He just isn’t biting.

I can’t say our future is rosy and pain-free. I relish the idea of someone other than Trump occupying the White House. I will relish it if it lasts a month, a year, or four. I am getting off the Trump Crazy Train. No worry, not gloom for me.

They have to earn their way back into my heart; I’m not letting them in again for free.

And I can’t resist quoting the Buddha. He doesn’t do much gloom. “No one can escape death and unhappiness,” he wrote. “If people expect only happiness in life, they will be disappointed.”

Things are not always the way we want them to be, but we can learn to understand them.

I’m rarely on the good side of power, but I see the headlines and big stories quite differently than most of our media, left or right or middle.

The headline for me this week is that democracy works; it is a beautiful thing to see. If you follow our mass media, digital, cable, or print, the big story is that democracy is under attack and is being damaged beyond repair.

As a dyslexic, I often see things backwords, especially words, so beware of my beliefs.

Even as I see the country beginning to come together, some can only see it coming apart. Today, I saw this headline in the New York Times digital edition: “After Trump Meeting, Michigan Lawmakers Say They’ll Honor State’s Vote.”

I wanted to cry. My headline is: “How Beautiful To See Democracy Work.”

Soon enough, we’ll return to the divisions, the refusal to negotiate, the lack of co-operating, the paralysis of government. “Democracy,” said H.L. Mencken, “is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.”

Maybe so, but at least we can come together to protect the American experiment – the dream of free and equal people.

We aren’t there, we have never been there, we may never get there. But it’s a wonderful goal, and it lives in many hearts and dreams.

President Trump suffered yet another devastating blow to his effort to steal the November election when a delegation of Michigan Lawmakers, after a long meeting with the President at the White House, said that they would “follow the normal process” in certifying the vote results and honor the outcome.

The legislative leaders, all Republicans and strong supports of Donald Trump, said in a joint statement that they had not been made aware of any information that would change the election outcome.

In plain English, they called the leader of the party a liar and refused to participate in his brazen and wicked scheme.

I did close my eyes and give thanks. It takes a strong legislator to sit in the White House for hours being slobbered over by a President and walk away and do the right thing.

How sick they make our Republican lawmakers look; they shamed the cowards and the sunshine soldiers. The legislators from Michigan stood up for us.

Earlier in the day, the Republican governor of Georgia, another strong supporter of Mr. Trump,  certified that Joe Biden won the election in that state. Figures don’t lie, said the secretary of state.

Before that, a string of judges from every part of the country drew a line and said flagrant lies don’t work either, not in our legal system. You can’t s steal elections, not even in such partisan times.

People who have worried and suffered and ached about what was happening in our country might consider pausing, as I did tonight, and giving silent thanks for our democracy, which President Trump has taught me to cherish more than I ever had.

Democracy is fighting back, it is holding steady. Politics is war without bloodshed, says the old saying, while war is politics with bloodshed.

We have been at war and won. No bloodshed.

I appreciate what a gift democracy is, and I will not ignore it or walk away from it again. Neither, I suspect, will anybody reading this.

How humiliating and painful a day and week for Donald Trump, who hates losing more than anything other than the truth.

He has lost more this week than in all of his previous life combined, suffering defeat after defeat from both Republican and Democratic judges.

As his niece Mary prophesied in her book, Trump is a mess; he is no seer, prophet, or competent dictator.   Up (or down) wherever he is, Chairman Mao must be rolling his eyes.

In 1927, Mao wrote this about revolution: “A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”

Revolution is not a tweet.

I confess to smiling at the thought that Mao would ever go to war with Rudy Guiliana as his General with his shiny World Series ring flashing in the lights.

And what, exactly, was Trump’s revolution about? It wasn’t about overturning the wealthy class, quite the opposite.

It wasn’t about overthrowing the powerful; he fights for both, not for the common folk.

His fatal flaw turned out to be his greatest if fleeting, strength: he dazzled and danced, but it was all about him, his family, and his money.

Trump was the Rainmaker, selling miracle juice to needy people. Like all the Rainmakers in American history, a lot of people bought his potion. They all eventually wanted their money back, but when the Rainmaker returned, they bought more potions.

Trump divided us, and enraged us, and seduced tens of millions of us.

But it turned out that democracy, America’s imperfect gift to the world, was and is a lot bigger than him and his message of grievance and hatred and greed.

The center held, Trump is shrinking before our eyes, he will soon be the size of a snail, another voice railing in the wind.

One has to be a very selfish and lazy American to love what this man has done to our country; yes, some things really are bigger than a good economy.

Still, it was almost miraculous to see judge after judge, governor after governor, secretary of state after secretary of state, legislator after legislator stands up for our country and its better angels.

The headline is that democracy is winning and will win.

When I think of democracy this week, I think of those hundreds of blacks in Detroit who took to Zoom to fight for their right to vote and beat back the craven politicians who wanted to steal it from them.

This was the power of the people, they make every revolution work.

If their victory didn’t stir the heart, democracy has no meaning for you, the lamp has gone out.

That was the beginning of the great turnaround, the roar from people fighting for democracy, an old idea given new life.

Trump proved himself to be ignorant of us as well as contemptuous. He doesn’t really know how to do anything but lie and think of himself.

“It is well known that when you do anything, ” wrote Chairman Mao in 1937,” unless you understand its actual circumstances, its nature and its relations to other things, you will not know the laws governing it, or know how to do it, or be able to do it well.”

How fitting that Mao wrote an obituary for Donald Trump’s war on democracy in 2020. This emperor had no clothes.

What Mao wrote is well known to any political philosopher or true revolutionary. It wasn’t well known to him, a man who has, say his biographers, never read a book in his life.

Trump had evil in mind, but his mad ambitions never meshed with his fractured self; broken men don’t lead successful revolutions.

Trump never understood his actual circumstances, the nature of a democracy, its relation to other things in the world, or the laws of governing.

He staged the most bumbling and pathetic coup in the history of coups and brought upon himself the thing he most dreads: failure and rejection. he didn’t do his homework or even understand the monster he has created.

And you may remember the story of Frankenstein. Monsters always turn on their creators.

Mao could have told him you have to do more than tweet and lie from your golf course and bedroom to stage a true revolution. You actually have to do something.

Trump has transformed and energized our sagging democracy in a hundred ways.

Women, African-Americans, trans and gay people, refugees and immigrants, working people, people who wish to fight for Mother Earth, the young, union people see the world differently after four years of Trump.

Black and brown and yellow girls will see their faces in their new vice-president.

This week, our better angels emerged and just said no.

To me, this was a coming together, a victory for the middle, not the edges.  The left couldn’t do it alone, neither could the right.

We can work together; we do have common values; we appreciate our democracy; men and women will risk their careers to do the right thing.

This week, I believe hatred is in retreat if by no means defeated.

I haven’t gotten a death threat all week. The self-righteous conspiracy peddlers and white nationalists who have been messaging me angrily for months seem to have fled back into the shadows.

May they wither and die there.

Donald Trump has taught us many things. We are not as great as we thought we were; we somehow have let an enormous chunk of our country to slip away and left them behind.

But tonight, I’m thinking of small things, things he grievously misread or misjudged.

The Dreamers can stay in the home of their birth. The tired and poor can come here again, to the flaming torch. The parks and birds and animals will be spared bulldozers and greedy companies again.

Native-Americans can protect their sacred land again. Instead of hiding from climate change, good jobs and new ideas will heal our broken planet.

Nurses and health care workers may soon get the tools and support they need to fend off this awful virus and save some lives, rather than abandon them to their own fate.

It is almost an article of faith in politics that nobody ever wins fights with the media, once called the press. Reporters are smart, determined, devious, and nasty. At first, Trump paralyzed them with venom.

Once they got over their awe of themselves, they started to fight back, and for a lot of the country, there was no safe space for him to be. Those politicians were right.

It would be smart to be realistic – we are battered and, in some ways, a broken country. But somehow, and against all odds and likelihood, Trump is raising the specter of healing.

In his desperation, he has gone from bombast to pure evil. We are responding by going from shock and helplessness to imagining good once again.

Truth and facts made a big comeback this week. No, you cannot simply lie your way to power. Tweeting is not really connecting; it is not really communicating.

Look how many things Donald Trump misjudged this week: Like his Federalist judges, who, it turns out, really don’t like big governments that steal authority and people’s rights.

I think tonight of the many humble Republican and Democratic clerks and vote-counters who stood their ground, even in the face of awful pressure and threats.

Joe Biden, who didn’t take the bait.

The power of democracy, which, when all was said and done, brought a divided country together for a common purpose. It is possible. No one can predict the future, but hope shines bright.

I don’t know how much humiliation and defeat our sociopathic President can endure, but I see that it is healing and uplifting and unifying.

Soon, we can all wake up without dreading what our President has said and done to us today. That will be a miracle in itself. He will go where losers go, the dustbin of people who failed.

When all is said and done, Trump was not nearly as big as he pretended to be. He thought too small, like the frog at the bottom of the well. If he had ever come up for air and surfaced, he would have seen the world in an entirely different way.

I have so far underestimated Joe Biden; I was never a big fan, who was?

But he is wise and patient to move forward and stay focused on the work that needs to be done, especially as the death toll mounts and our President can do nothing but play golf and fight for his own ass.

Biden is pulling the country along with him. Sometimes less is more, quiet better than noise Right now, he is good for the idea of democracy.

But Mao, the master of revolution,  gets the last word: “The people, and the people alone, are the motive force in the making of world history.”

 

“It’s the power to believe that you can see that you visualize that sense of community, that sense of family, that sense of one house.” – John Lewis.

John Lewis said he was working all of his life to helping us become one family and live in one house. Donald Trump has been living his whole life for all of us to live in his house and divide ours.

I suppose it is true that we should pray for him, but not for the reasons his blinded followers demand.

To me, there is only one thing lower than a hypocrite, and that is a hypocrite that whines. Trump is both, and when I think of praying for him, it is about praying for help in forgiving him, not in his getting well.

When Donald Trump ignited his angry populist movement, I frequently wrote about the very legitimate grievances of the battered working-class people who flocked to him.

They had been ignored and lied to and left behind for decades, and it was only a matter of time before a charismatic demagogue popped up to set them on fire.

For two days now, people have been angrily e-mailing me, complaining that I am not praying for Donald Trump to get well. That, they tell me, is shameful.

Such hypocrisy, I think, too much for me to bear.

My responsibility as a human being is not to pray when ordered, but to honor truth and compassion. And who would I pray to? I have no idea who God is, or why he might have put us all in this position.

Trump should be on his knees when he can get there, and pray for the souls of the many people who have suffered and died for his selfishness and ignorance.

A hypocrite is a person who pretends to have virtues, moral or religious beliefs, principles, etc., that he or she does not actually possess, especially a person whose actions belie stated beliefs.

In one sense, it is too late to pray for a hypocrite or be persuaded by one; in a moral or human sense, a part of them is already dead. I admit to being flawed, but will never knowingly be a hypocrite. That’s why I can’t pray for Trump.

In the past couple of years, the Trumpism movement has changed radically and, led by our President; it whines rather than speaks to persuade.

Imagine a child who does that.

Everyone is picking on them, nobody understands them, every outrage against love and compassion, every lie is justified, glorified, and deserved. Another injury, another grievance/

His movement is now, and sadly,  mostly about the hypocrisy of grievance.

As a result, his followers are at risk of losing the ability to be taken seriously and keeping their important movement alive.  Hate is not inspiring.

No movement can succeed if no one else can join or is welcome to join. Everyone else becomes the enemy. The point isn’t that Trump will do us all good; the point is that he will keep us angry, frightened, and discouraged. That will never happen.

The point of his presidency is to keep some people hating him to love him all the more.

I think I’ll pray for us tonight, not our broken President. When I read messages from people telling me how to pray and who to pray for, my mind keeps going to John Lewis and his fight for his Beloved Community, including everyone.

Imagine a world in which he was our leader today.

Trump speaks the language of the wronged, even as he leads his movement of wrong, and hides behind his false embrace and corruption of Christianity.

True Christianity is not about hating people, hurting people, hating the poor, or banning people or breaking up people’s families. It’s not about greed and sex parties.

John Lewis and his life were all about true Christianity.

And Lewis had far better reasons for grievance than Trump.

“We say we are a believing nation,” wrote Lewis, “yet when we are wronged, the people demand revenge. If we truly believe, then what is the role of forgiveness, mercy, and compassion in public life?”

What a wonderful question for a President to be asking.

I could sure pray for that.

Christianity’s work for eons has been to seek deliverance from evil, seek light in the darkness, and establish justice amid injustice.

Human souls dwell in what St. Augustine called the “City of Man, and they live in the hope of bringing about the “City Of God,” what Lewis called the “Beloved Community,” Jesus Christ’s long-awaited “Kingdom of God.”

Love and hate are both choices. Trump is a hater. History tells us love wins out in the end. Lewis and his movement won.

When I think of Donald Trump in the hospital, struggling to breathe easily, I feel for him. I’ve been there. What an awful feeling. But my mind often goes to Lewis in recent days, as our country fights for its soul.

He was our better angel. Our Presidents calls out the worst in us.

Lewis’s faith brought him to join a movement based on love and never vengeance or grievance.

What did Donald Trump’s faith lead him to do?

“When we were sitting in, it was love in action,” Lewis told a reporter.
“When we went on the freedom ride, it was love in action. The march from Selma to Montgomery was love in action. We do it not simply because it’s the right thing to do, but it’s love in action. That we love our country, we love a democratic society, and so we have to move our feet.”

Think about what Lewis did for his people, and for our national souls. Look at what Trump has done to us. His proud legacy is to divide our courts in the same way he has divided our people.

John Lewis was beaten, kicked, stabbed with lit cigarettes, clubbed a dozen times into concussions, arrested scores of times, jailed, and threatened. But he was never humiliated. He wouldn’t permit it.

Lewis suffered more abuse in the 1960s then Donald Trump has suffered in his life. You will never find one word of complaint in the record of his life.

Nowhere has he whined, been violent, or failed to respect the dignity of every human being who tormented him.

The only President he couldn’t respect was Donald Trump. Lewis knows a hater when he sees one; he’s seen them all of his life.

I prayed for him when he got sick; I pray for him still.

I am not yet so pure than I can see what John Lewis himself saw – that he and Trump are both human beings and deserve our love.

I want to get there. I’m not there.

That is why John Lewis is a true saint, and I will never be one.

“.. attending church and Sunday school, reading the Bible,” said Lewis, “the teaching of the great teacher, and being deeply influenced by what I saw all around me, it was this belief that somehow and someway things were going to get better, that you have this sense of hope, a sense of optimism and have faith. And people would say to me; my mother would repeatedly say, “Work hard.”

He never once lied, was cruel to another human, committed an act of violence,  stole or misled, or complained about his brutal mistreatment.

During this last week’s debate, I saw a human being seething with hatred and cruelty. He endangered trusting people who came to support him and who trusted him. It was a grotesque and revealing betrayal.

And it was unforgivable.

I can pray for those people, but not for him. In a few days, his fancy doctors will send him home to brag about how loved, strong he is, and how this awful plague is no big deal. Maybe it isn’t if you have a whole hospital waiting to help you.

This is a free country; anybody should pray for him if they wish.

I can pray for the poor people who trust and love him, but not for him.

What I wonder, gives anyone the right to demand my goodwill and prayer of me and everyone else?

John Lewis never demanded that anyone pray for him, and he prayed for everyone else every day.

For now, I can pray for truth and compassion. But not for him.

As Lewis and the civil rights movement showed us, love is the most powerful force in the political universe; it wins every time. Just ask Dr. King, Gandhi, and Mandela. Trumpism is rotting away, nibbled to pieces by grievance and hypocrisy.

The moral philosopher Hannah Arendt might have had Trump and his movement in mind when she wrote about hypocrisy after she fled Nazism and came to America.

“The hypocrite’s crime is that he bears false witness against himself,” she wrote. “What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.”

I can pray for authenticity, not for false witness.

I can’t bow to the demand that I pray for this privileged and amoral man who was so irresponsible that he has nearly killed himself and his trusted aides and friends and threatened the lives of countless people.

Those he hasn’t lied to or threatened he has frightened, even terrified.

I can pray for them, but not for him.

My apologies to Jesus; I’m not there.

 ^“Be ready!” says the Bible (Ephesians 6:10-20). “Let the truth be like a belt around your waist, and let God’s justice protect you like armor.  Your desire to tell the good news about peace should be like shoes on your feet.”

No one can love him enough, so too many people now love him too much.

I wrote about Trump this week and my own struggle to feel sorry for him as he tested positive for the coronavirus, a Biblical turn if ever there was one.

Like most other people, I don’t wish death on anyone; he’s my President too, God help me.

But I wasn’t as empathetic on his behalf as I wished to be. I’m not as good as I want to be.

I wish I could lie about it, as some people are demanding that I do. But I can’t.

I hope he suffers some to understand how much suffering and pain he has caused so many other people and how indifferent he has been to that suffering.

He makes no pretense of caring for the welfare of anyone but himself, but he and his followers are outraged that more people are not caring for him. But wait, he is already pretending that everyone cares about him.

Hatred is a poison; it will rot the spirit. I don’t hate him; I don’t pity him.  The prophets say hatred will always turn on the haters, turn their souls, and into the burnt soup.

When he does something stupid, outrageous, or blatantly reckless, the first thing that happens is that his ardent followers look for something to complain about.

The idea is simple and obvious: it draws attention from what he has done and puts his critics defensive.

Until this year, it was working.

After the pandemic, not so much.

This man knew well before it was announced that he had been exposed to the virus. He tried to hide it and lie about it. As a result, many people who support him and care about him the most are sick or at risk and for no reason.

Yesterday, some of my messages were almost all the same verbatim, which suggests they were not spontaneous. “Shame on you. You should be praying for our president, not criticizing him.”

If you can’t respect him, they seem to be saying; you can at least feel sorry for him.

A lot of people are struggling over how to respond to so selfish and dangerous a man. I will not pray for him; that would defile my idea of justice and truth. And it would make me a hypocrite just like the people trying to shame me for being honest.

I understand this is not what Jesus would do, but then again, I am no Jesus.

Donald Trump deserves our good wishes and hopes for recovery.

Does he deserve the prayers of people whose religions call for love and mercy, since he is incapable of showing either? That seems like blasphemy to me.

I’ve seen and learned of too many victims of his awful regime – children separated from their parents, people dying from the pandemic because their government won’t protect them, immigrants dying in their apartments because they fear going to the hospital where Trump’s private police squads are waiting in hiding to grab them in their hospital beds and send them off to immigrant jail;  poor and dying health care aides, service workers with no health insurance,  school children with no federal food programs so they can eat one healthy meal a day.

The suffering of the undocumenteds, living in terror, afraid to drive, shop, or see a doctor, is a crime against humanity.

Best wishes to you, President Trump. I sincerely hope you recover and return home to face the humiliation and rejection you so richly deserve and seem unable to bear.

I am praying for that.

Standing in Selma in 2020, commemorating his famous march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama 50 years ago, Lewis thanked the people who have prayed for him all of his life:

“We took a little walk,” he said, “to try to dramatize the need for the rights of all of our people to be able to participate in the democratic process. In an orderly, peaceful, non-violent fashion, we were walking, not saying a word. We were beaten. Tear-gassed. Bullwhipped. On this bridge, some of us gave a little blood to help redeem the soul of America. Our country is better, we are better people, but we still have a distance to travel, to go, before we get there.”

Tonight, as Trump is given medical treatment few Americans can get or pay for, I will ask these questions when people demand that I pray for Donald Trump.

What cause has he marched for? What sacrifices has he made? How can we love him when his soul is full of hate, not love?

“Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity, and change. Courage starts with showing up and letting ourselves be seen.” – Brene Brown.

When I watch President Trump, I always, somewhat narcissistically, think the same thing. He was never permitted and never permitted himself to be vulnerable.

I am learning to do that.

Learning to be vulnerable and share my vulnerability brought me to my good life and saved it.

Donald Trump is afraid of being vulnerable. He can’t see that he would not have to steal an election to win one if he permitted himself to show vulnerability.

He could do all of the things he wants to do and be as loved as he needs and demands to be.

In needing always to appear strong and right, he never gives himself the gift of being wrong and humble. That is what connects us to people. And disconnects him.

Those are the leaders’ people truly love, rather than just cheer and worship.

For me – who could never be elected President of anything – vulnerability seems like truth and feels like courage. Neither of those things is comfortable, but they never feel like weakness.

Trump, for example, has hidden the truth about his taxes for years. He can’t bear to be seen as a man who sometimes failed, who owes a lot of money, like the rest of us. He needs to be invulnerable.

I understand this. When I was broke and owed a lot of money, it was a dread secret that I hid from everyone. I could not bear to be seen that way.

Years later, when Maria and I were forced into bankruptcy, the first thing I did was write about it on my blog. It was as if a thousand pounds of concrete were lifted off of my soul.

When I broke down, I wrote about it every day.

The world did not come to an end.

Strangely, a man so tough and smart as to get to be President of the United States has not learned that vulnerability is an asset. Neither, sadly, do most men in power.

All he had to do was say he owed a lot of money and will need a good long time to pay it back, and think of how much lighter his spirit could have been. It is frightening to lie all the time, it is so hard to keep them all in your head.

There is more than one part of Trump in me, and in many of us – the broken childhood, the cold and critical father, the dread of being seen and known, the horror of appearing vulnerable, the block against listening.

Every time I tried being vulnerable as a child, I regretted it, sometimes profoundly. I paid dearly for it. Men fear it and ridicule it. Young boys laugh at it. My friends ran from it.

Vulnerability matters. Hiding it has consequences. It can even kill.

People who wear masks are thus sissies compared to real men, who take their chances. This is the image of himself that Donald Trump loves the most, the man who is too tough to die.

Life always gets a chuckle out of that.

The real man’s hallmark, the ticket into the club,  is that he is never, ever,  willing to seem vulnerable.

Like President Trump, I learned to put on the mask of invulnerability, but unlike him, I learned what we all must learn at some point in our lives, that when the mask comes off, there are far worse things than being vulnerable.

The most interesting thing about the debate Monday came from watching Trump’s real mask, his face – the powerful man, the righteous man, the angry man.

Not once, at any point, did he permit himself to be unsure, empathetic, wrong, open – all things that to him seem to be symbols of weakness.

Because he can’t imagine vulnerability, he can’t imagine failure.

When he left the debate, it is said, he was jubilant. It wasn’t until the next morning, watching cable TV, that he learned the truth.

Joseph Biden, Jr., a truly humble and aging man, was vulnerable almost every moment. He showed fear, confusion, uncertainty, pain, and when he could, he tried to show empathy.

His “tough” opponent laughed at him, right away, like a schoolboy who wet himself in the schoolyard. But today, when the dust clears, who is stronger?

A very conservative friend called me last night to talk about the debate, and he said, “don’t you think, Katz, that Biden just looked like an old man, somewhat frail and uncertain?”

Yes, absolutely, I said, that is what people like and about him. Like us, he is uncertain and confused and frightened. Someone to trust.

I learned to love and be loved when I allowed my most vulnerable and powerful self to be deeply seen and known. I learned to honor the spiritual connection that grows from living a life of trust, respect, kindness, and affection.

I don’t know if Donald Trump can authentically feel those things; I do know that he doesn’t dare to show them.

He has the gift – if you want to call it that – of making other people feel vulnerable. When he talks about the election and makes it clear he will attempt to win it by any means, he makes people feel vulnerable.

But we are learning that there is no virtue in scaring or taunting people. It is just cruel and small.

To me,  Donald Trump is the farthest thing from scary. He is unauthentic, and thus alarming, but never frightening.  He is a bully. He never seems real to me, even though his power is real.

I never feel vulnerable listening to him or watching him, because I can’t locate his authenticity, his core. I think it was broken a long time ago, damaged perhaps beyond repair.

He is incapable of sincerity.

The person inside that shell is missing.

He is, in this way, not alive to me.

When I was a child, I thought I would grow up and not be vulnerable anymore. But I learned that becoming an adult is about being vulnerable to many more things than a child can imagine.

Vulnerability is a great and wise teacher.

To be alive is to be vulnerable. In this way, Donald Trump is not alive for me; he has become a cartoon character playing a powerful role, he lives more in the realm of Game Of Thrones or a video game – Mortal Kombat comes to mind –  than ruling in modern America.

He can’t love us, his people, and we can’t love him.

And boy, is Donald Trump vulnerable.

This, from Nate Silver’s FiveTwentyEight today: “President Trump’s quest to win a second term is not in good shape.” Biden, the site reports, now has an 80 out of 100 chance of winning the November election.

This doesn’t mean he can’t win, but it is getting less and less likely by the day.

He entered Tuesday night’s debate with roughly a 7- or 8-point deficit in national polls, putting him further behind at this stage of the race than any other candidate since Bob Dole in 1996.

When you love someone, you lay your heart open to them. Joseph Biden, flawed as he is, does this naturally and authentically. Life has made him vulnerable.

I don’t know if he can run a country or not, but if I ever have to have open heart surgery again, I’d love to call him up and talk to him before the operation.

Because he is old and frail and empathetic,  it is possible for people to love him, and he can be loved.

Both men are archetypes – an idea, symbol, character type, an element in a story that repeatedly appears in stories, and that symbolizes something universal in the human experience.

One is terrified of vulnerability; the other wears it like an old shoe.

The author Paulo Coelho wrote that the strongest love is the love that can demonstrate its fragility.

When I was young, I was fragile as a chicken egg; I never accepted my vulnerability.  I never showed it to anyone.

When I understood that being authentic was the path to humanity and acceptance, I was no longer fragile; I learned to be strong.

Life teaches us these lessons one way or another – failure, cancer, the death of a loved one, the loss of work and security, accidents, fires, even the death of dogs. Or a pandemic and the loss of an election, a very public rejection, and humiliation.

Small wonder he would do anything to stop it.

Life opens the door to vulnerability and sets it free.

I watch Donald  Trump’s face more than I listen to his words because our faces and eyes and expressions tell the truth about us, even when our words don’t. A human being is a person made of material things, easily torn and hard to mend.

Mostly I see fear and falseness. He has yet to set himself free; he is an avatar, a version of what other people need him to be and insist that he is. His shell is fragile, like a chickens.

At the debate, I saw it crack.

“Vulnerability,” writes Renee Brown, “is the birthplace of love…It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity. If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path.”

Vulnerability is the only authentic state. Be vulnerable. Bow to it and dance for it. It is my greatest gift to myself, the new goodness that is slowly coming to me.

Why I wondered, can’t I be afraid of Donald Trump, like so many others?

One reason, I think, is that he is so afraid of me.

 

 

 

“Donald Trump does not want to be a dictator,” said one of the most respected scholars in the world on TV the other day, “he just wants to play one on TV.”

These are perhaps the wisest words yet spoken about our roller coaster, the sometimes terrifying upcoming election, and the leader of the Free World.

Harvard Philosophy Professor Michael Mandel, a long-time online lecture  and academic star, has written a new book called “Does Meritocracy Destroy The Common Good?”

In it, he joins the growing and frustrated list of writers and thinkers (me too) who think it is more important to explain and understand Trump than take his bait, play his game,  and rage on and on about him.

Hating him is simply not useful, especially now. Understanding his appeal is the very key to defeating him. He’s trying out the next version of his hit reality show: “Do You Want To Be A Dictator?”

In Mandel’s book, he argues that the growing economic and cultural divide between winners and losers in America poisons our politics and pulls us apart. And it gives rise to demagogues like our President.

There is no common sense of good any longer, he claims, just elites at the top and angry, aggrieved, and humiliated people at the bottom. And it isn’t just about money. It’s very much about pride and hope.

Our culture has come to define money as the very and only definition of success, and money makes the people who have it feel superior; their success is morally justified.

The people who don’t have it, and in fact, have less and less all the time, feel left behind and despised.

This widening divide has, at least since the ’90s, created a country of increasingly unequal people.

Many were quite ripe for a Donald Trump to come along and speak to them, and for four years, humiliate and enrage the elites who they believe have been looking down on them for years.

He turned the tables on the people they see as their tormentors.

For generations, American family farmers were considered the country’s most valued citizens.

People without property couldn’t even vote in early America.

There are hardly any family farmers, and the farmers who are hanging on are at the bottom of the social pecking order left to fail slowly and die out.

Mandel agrees with me about one thing: there is a lot of truth behind the rage and frustration driving the loyal followers of Donald Trump, something very few progressives have been willing to accept or understand or work to fix.

One of the fascinating things about the election to me is that Joseph Biden Jr., who I would not put up on the same thoughtful plane with Mandel, gets it.

He is not taking the bait. He is campaigning on his narrative, not on Donald Trump’s preferred narrative.

Biden is simply offering a better agenda, focusing on issues people care about,  something that Hilary Clinton, the media, and the Democratic party have not consistently do.

Clinton had a million new plans, but nobody knew what they were, and too many people disliked her and thought she was contemptuous of them.

Biden’s vibe is just the opposite. He seems to care about everybody. Trump, as we clearly see, is madly in love with Trump.

The President has a genius for pulling his enemies off their enraged pedestals and sucking them into his one never-changing plan: grievance. No conversation doesn’t begin and end with him.

The more we hate him, the more they love him for it. If we hate him, he must be all right. If he loves them, he must respect them and care for them.

Liberals and progressives are the enemy, the snobs, socialists, and betrayers. The party of Franklin Roosevelt seeks, they believe,  to take away the crumbs they have been left and give their taxes to immigrants and people of color.

This isn’t just about money; it’s about pride and value.

This is how far the progressive ideal has drifted from the very people it is supposed to help. It will take a much smarter person than me to say precisely how this happened.

I am working on it. There are clues.

Interestingly, in this turn,  this Supreme Court fight offers us the very first opportunity to see what happens when the resistance doesn’t take the bait and play Donald’s Trump game.

So far, it’s working, and it is making him crazy.

Trump has become the world’s leading whineass, singing the song millions of people have been waiting to hear, his true campaign slogan: they’ve screwed us. He has come to their rescue. He alone hears and sees them. He even blamed Biden for being a shortage of masks; he hasn’t been in office for four years.

All those snoots and ivy leaguers and entrenched bureaucrats and reporters can all go and fuck themselves.  They are the true enemies of the people. Never mind, Putin.

No demagogue I can find in the history books has ever exploited the anger of the people on the bottom better, so much so that they can’t yet see that he is the problem, not the solution.

And they don’t believe any of the people telling them otherwise.

The Republicans decided in the 1950s that farmers and the white working-class were no longer efficient in the new economy.

Then they persuaded white workers without college degrees that it was all the fault of Blacks and immigrants like Mexicans that their jobs were gone.

In the ’80s and ’90s, the Democrats promised them the global trade agreements would be good for everybody. It wasn’t, it was great for billionaires and CEO’s and corporations, and just about every small town in America was emptied, along with everybody’s jobs.

In this period, a college degree offered the foundation of a new cultural divide. College degrees got graduates into those well-paying jobs in cities, and those graduates became winners, believing they had earned their success through their own talent and hard work.

Mandel says he saw that happening in his Harvard classrooms. The new elite was coming up right under his nose.

Everybody else was a worker bee; they lost their status as their jobs migrated worldwide, and the party of Franklin Roosevelt did this with great enthusiasm and little thought.

The legacy of these often mindless and brutal policies is shorter life spans, the highest unemployment, no health care or hospital care, epidemic drug use and alcoholism, horrendous schools, and vacant Main Streets.

Yes, other minorities suffer greatly in our country, but does it have to be a contest to see who suffers the most?

I’ve heard what my neighbors say about  San Francisco, New York, Seattle,  Los Angeles, Austin, where modest homes cost millions, and tens of thousands of people sleep on the streets and defecate there.

The well-educated elites have never done better, even during the pandemic. The poor and the “lower classes” have never done worse or worked harder for less.

I heard a young man in my town said his great hope was for an Amazon warehouse to come near so his children could have health care. Imagine praying for a job when you have to keep moving every minute, or a computer attached to your waist will turn you in and get you fired.

“People use drugs, legal and illegal because their lives are intolerably painful or dull,” wrote Wendell Berry in The Art Of The Commonplace.

“They hate their work and find no rest in their leisure. They are estranged from their families and their neighbors. It should tell us something that drug use is celebrative, convivial, and occasional in healthy societies, whereas, among us, it is lonely, shameful, and addictive. We need drugs, apparently, because we have lost each other.”

In one sense, Donald Trump is a drug. They love him because they hate their lives. They are estranged from their own country and the people who run it.

Biden grasps this; he is chipping away, perhaps because he knows what it is like to be peed on by the elitists and the rich.

When Hilary Clinton dropped a line about Trump’s “deplorables,” she condemned herself and many of us to four years of chaos.

That is precisely what white working-class people all over American thought the people on top of the pile – me and many of the people reading this –  thought of them and say about them all the time.

That is going to take a lot of hard work, much listening, and real change.

Trump took Clinton’s affirmation and ran with it all the way to the top.

One of the richest and most arrogantly elitist snobs in our country – he won’t even physically touch a real working person for fear of germs – is now our leader and has become the new Woody Guthrie of Washington.

I guess you have to either love politics or hate politics. There is really no middle right now, or maybe never.

In recent years, argues Mandel, money has come to define “good” and merit, and most of that money has flowed into our major cities while rural America, bleeding and abandoned, has been drained of work, money, and most important, politically, self-esteem.

This sense of grievance – against the media, the highly educated, the Democratic Party, immigrants, refugees, African-Americas, all of whom they see as getting better treatment than them –  has been the Republican Party’s main political strategy years.

It is one of the many reasons the party and this President – and all those aggrieved people –  have fused almost seamlessly.

For the first time in my memory, this strategy is not working as planned. Working-class whites are much more worried about the pandemic than Mexican “rapists” or Blacks storming their suburbs.

Yet old and bad habits die hard.

The Democrats could blow it all by obsessing on the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court today. Like Trump himself, Democrats and progressives have always been skilled at defeating themselves.

This Supreme Court fight is pointless. Mitch McConnell has already won.

The fix is already in.

The Republicans have the votes and support to nominate Judge Barrett and appoint her to the Supreme Court. I’ve been reading up on her. She is said to be brilliant, deeply religious, reliably conservative, and personally kind and generous.

It is almost certain she will help shred abortion rights, favor discrimination against gay and transgender people on the grounds of religious freedom, try to strangle Biden’s agenda, help Trump ignore the pandemic, and possibly destroy Obamacare.

To progressives, liberals, Democrats, many women, this is a catastrophe. And that is true.

Maybe it will be as awful as feared, maybe not. I have little respect for hysteria.

Nobody really knows what justices will do when they get on the Supreme Court – look at Neal Gorsuch and John Roberts. The coverage demonizing her seems near or over the top to me.

Her students love and respect her.

In any case, and the short term, there is little point in turning the campaign upside down to try to deny the appointment.

It won’t happen. The savage attacks on her, if they occur in public hearings, will inflame Trump’s supporters and, as he has inflamed Democratic women after the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Call it a draw. If you care about the Supreme Court, shut up about it.

I think that the wiser heads are learning what Trump knows:  that most voters don’t care about the things the so-called “elitists” care about the most. The progressive agenda is not the same as the working-class agenda.

We saw their agenda changing in the 2018 election, and so did Nancy Pelosi. Voters were interested in health care, good jobs, and the widening income gap between the very rich and everybody else. Women wanted a kinder nation.

And women beat up on the Republicans and helped take control of the House of Representatives.

Today, the focus is also clear: the pandemic and health care. Many people say they think the President should have waited to appoint a new justice until a new President was chosen.

It’s not a time for panic, but calm and focus. Stay strong. Stay calm.

Going after Justice Barrett will not drive undecided voters to vote for Joseph Biden in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and Florida. To his credit, Biden seemed to grasp this from the beginning.

He stayed cool all summer and permitted Trump to crap on himself, something he is quite good at doing when he runs his mouth.

. Now Biden is talking about new manufacturing jobs,  health care, and Trump’s handling of the pandemic, all broken promises or weaknesses of the President.

Biden is not talking about the Supreme Court much.

I think Joseph Biden is correct in steer progressive people and Democrats away from hyperbole and hysteria.

Things are bad enough without a pointless meltdown and enabling the distraction Trump so badly wants, and that has always worked for him.

People with progressive ideals and progressive politicians have to learn how to talk once again to the disenchanted and diminished working-class and the rural Americans who flocked to Trump as if he was the Messiah. To many of them, he is.

No one ever changed anybody’s mind by calling them stupid and ridiculing them. They must be offered something tangible and something better.

In July, Biden offered a $2 trillion energy plan in Ohio, a clean energy plan that is still drawing praise from organizations that work with coal communities on economic transition.

Coal executives were wary.

The platform frames decarbonizing the economy as a jobs creator. Of note, the plan calls for a carbon-free power sector by 2035, upgrading 4 million buildings and weatherproofing 2 million homes, and boosting investment in zero-emissions transportation.

The plan also explicitly mentions a commitment to invest in coal country and workers who may be displaced by a shift away from fossil fuels.

This is just what the Democrats didn’t do in the ’80s. Labor organizations and coal workers are still talking about the jobs Biden dangled in front of them. During this speech, he never mentioned Trump.

Trump has shown us that his followers have felt their dignity has been taken from them.

Living in the country, I see they have a point. I have heard too many smart people refer to rural people as bigoted and dumb. That is also what urban people say about Trump, and the more people say it, the more he is loved.

There are lessons for everyone in the rise and looming fall of Donald Trump.

I agree that Trump doesn’t want to be a dictator and couldn’t handle being one. He wants to be seen as the John Wayne of the working men, their hero rushing to rescue the natives from their increasingly dreary lives at the bottom of the pile.

In a world with San Francisco, New York City, Boston, Austin, Charlotte, and Miami, life can look pretty harsh in the country’s middle.  There are very few pockets of wealth.

The fact that Biden seems to get this has put him in the lead for months now. The best polls say he has a 77 percent chance in 100 of winning close to the election date.

What do we expect in a country where one percent of the people control nearly half of the wealth?

And where thousands of communities have no jobs, no health care, no Main Streets, no pride. Black Lives matter more than ever. So do other lives.

I put my faith in the very polished and persuasive data I read and the things that I see.

Trump will defeat Trump, not Biden. Biden will make it easier. The challenge is too not help the President to win by doing his dance with him.

Once again, Trump has chosen to build his campaign around the idea that he can use the most aggrieved and humiliated Americans to humiliate and denigrate everybody on the other side.

He seems to have absolutely no vision beyond that, but to many Americans, that is more than enough.

The debates will be important. Trump is good at dominating and being loud, confused, and provocative, but Bide (mostly) good at being calm when his family isn’t being attacked, comes off as decent, and with an increasingly clear vision for dealing with the problems many people in the middle actually care about.

We know Trump will turn the election into a bitter and prolonged nightmare.

He will almost certainly be the first President not to leave office gracefully.

I have not seen anything that persuades me to believe he can overturn the election and seize power. The media is delighted with this rating grabber. They are doing everything possible to promote more panic.

I have to be honest and say there is absolutely nothing in Judge Barrett’s background. I have seen to suggest she would acquiesce in a political coup d’etat like the media keeps talking about, one that would destroy our democracy.

Agree with her or not, there is nothing in her life or work to support that idea.  She is a lifelong conservative, not a fascist or a Nazi. Truth is truth, and it doesn’t make sense to condemn Trump as a liar while lying to do so.

Trump is not strong enough or focused enough to take over a country; it would be ungovernable for many years, if ever. If he really tried to do it,  it would destroy him, along with many other things.

He is not a strong man; he is a weak and fearful and insecure man.

With just a few weeks to go in the campaign, none of his histrionics, lies, or brazen maneuvers suggest there is a Hitler or Mussolini or Ceaser in his broken psyche.

Mandel was spot on. President Trump doesn’t want to be a dictator; he wants the starring role once more in the new TV Reality show. He’ll jump off the island if he even gets close.

If Biden wins, his hard work – and ours – really begins. He will have a tough time persuading nearly half the country – especially when they just lost their last hope –  that they can share equally in the new and very lopsided American Dream.