Trump: One and Done

On Saturday, the 7th of November, at 11:25 AM, the nation's major television networks called the election. Trump was done. For the majority of Americans, the national nightmare had ended. Following his 306 electoral votes over Hillary in 2016, Trump declared that his margin of victory was "one of the greatest in U.S. history." That he is on course to lose 306 electoral votes to Biden thus must saddle his fragile ego with "one of the greatest" defeats. Trump, they call that "karma."

Trump boasts of his many accomplishments in office. What did he do? That is hard to say. He passed the massive tax cut that most agree served to enrich the rich while ballooning the national debt for which our children and grandchildren will pay. He cut environmental standards, unleashing pollutants that will afflict our offspring long after he is gone.  

He certainly stacked the Supreme Court with an unprecedented three justices in a single four-year term. But, that has more to do with the ambidextrous Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell who stole one of those justices from Obama, and another from Biden. 

Trump also did something that was rather unique: Garnered a love from his supporters unseen in American presidential history. It borders on cultism. Many of his followers rationalize: "It is because he loves us." No, Trump loves Trump; Trump loves you loving Trump. That's all.  

Trump loves what benefits him. He wraps himself in the American flag - literally huge it. Yet, when it came time to fight for that flag, Trump went to his doctor to get an excuse. He similarly fondles the Bible. Trump's former chief of staff, Gen. John Kelly, called Trump "the most flawed man I've ever met." His former secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, simply called him "an idiot."

Trump entertained America for four years. We have never seen the likes. He became this larger-than-life caricature - a carnival barker one moment, a tyrant the next. He was cruel, insensitive; driven by spite. And, then, such a child that he endeared himself to much of the country, even as he lied with abandon, and bullied with the best of them. He cowed the members of his own Republican party until they were reduced to tip-toeing about him as though on eggshells.  

Arizona senator, Martha McSally, during the senatorial debate with the astronaut, Mark Kelly, was asked about her close ties to Trump. There on stage, she denied such ties three times. No doubt, the ever-beset Trump saw in her parallels with the biblical Peter who, before the cock crowed thrice, denied Jesus.  

More crusader than a politician, Trump mounted the shoulders of America's evangelicals and truly imagined his quest to be one of good versus evil. Perhaps it was, though not the way he envisioned it.  

Dumb, or Dumber?

This election is not about Trump; neither is it about Biden. Trump can do whatever he wants:  Tell a hundred lies, demean, distract; violate every accepted norm. And Biden can sit at home, and hope and pray that this presidency falls into his lap. It doesn't matter. All that matters is:  How stupid is the American voter?

Granted, they haven't been given much to choose from. (I'm sure much of America is saying to itself: "How did this happen again? Last time, it was Trump or Hilary. We did not want either. Now, it is Trump or Biden. How did this happen again?) 

Well, it happened, again. Now, America must prove if it is dumb, or dumber.  

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With 7,000,000 COVID cases, and 200,000 deaths, what will it take for Americans to take COVID seriously? How about a boil, or some such manifestation upon our pretty faces? Every last one of us, then, would be ready to shoot the first person who comes within six feet. Vanity will do it.

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Biden is white bread. Trump is crass; he is ignorant; he is a boor. But, he is not white bread.  

The Affirmative Action Vice-President (In the Age of Obama?)

Could this be Biden’s biggest gaffe? In the age of Obama, with a megaphone in hand, he declares that sex and race will be the criteria by which he will choose his vice-president. Then, he does it. He chooses Kamela Harris, and African-American women from the state of California to be his running mate. Could he not have chosen her without making a show of the color of her skin?

John McCain did not say, “I’m going to pick a white woman to run alongside me.” During his primary, George McGovern did not say, “I’m going to pick an Italian-American woman…” They each made their picks after looking over the entire field. There is something unseemly about Joe’s technique, as though done by someone who wants before he does it, and then again after it is done.

 

To be fair, Joe did not outright say that he was going to pick an African-American; he simply said, “woman.” Then, the events of the time, like a tsunami, lifted and carried him helplessly to where a bevy of black women – Harris, Rice, Bass, Abrams, et al – waited. He had foolishly opened his mouth and left himself stranded. 

 

Imagine, Kamela Harris could have been chosen over the likes of Rahm Emmanuel, shining star of the Democratic House before President Obama picked him to be his Chief of Staff; or Andrew Cuomo, the New York governor who stared down COVID. Except, Joe disqualified such competition right out of the box. Cuomo and Emmanuel were, by their sex and by their ethnicity, ineligible for the ticket, as were thousands of other qualified Americans who just happened to be of the wrong color. Think how much more satisfying Harris’ pick would have been to people of color across this nation – to Harris, herself – had she been chosen from the bountiful field which is America’s to offer.

 

We might want to question the true character of Joe’s altruism as he made that fated proclamation. It came at a time when Bernie Sanders was giving him hell in the polls, right before they were about to enter the southern primaries where a wide swath of African-America was waiting to vote. I do not know Bernie, but I wonder that he might have been a bit more of a gentleman than to have made such a cynical gesture toward the African-American community.

 

Joe’s veiled offer to preserve the vice-presidential spot for a black woman is like the coach of a football team saying that only black athletes need try out for quarterback. That certainly makes it easier for the black athlete, but it does not make the team better. I wonder that even the black athlete, himself, might feel slighted, as though limiting the competition to other black athletes is the only way he has a chance of winning the job. 

 

Do you think Harris might feel a bit slighted that her actual competition was limited to other black women? I think she might (without saying so). We must admit that there is something amiss; something inherently unfair about how Harris became this “historic candidate” – the first black woman in American history to appear on a major party presidential ticket, (when only black women were truly eligible to compete).

 

We black folks cannot do this – complain about not getting a fair shake because of the color of our skin, and then celebrate achieving the second-highest post in the land by explicitly denying others – like Elizabeth Warren, arguably the brightest of all the Democratic primary challengers – a fair chance because of the color of their skin.

 

Look, while folks’ rights are not my priority. I marched, I engaged in sit-ins, I literally fought for the civil rights of my own people during the ’60s and ’70s. But, I do believe in all folks’ right to be treated fairly. 

 

This episode in American presidential history shall carry a taint about it. Young people, with their hopes and high ideals, are particularly sensitive to perceived wrongs, especially as they see themselves rise up against the racial inequities confounding America. Joe Biden’s uncalled-for chicanery adds to the confusion.  

COVID-19: Bad Karma, or an Existential Opportunity

This coronavirus is quite a phenomenon. How we are handling it is becoming a phenomenon, in itself. The Trump administration is thoroughly committed to blaming China for the pandemic, calling it the “Wuhan Virus”, among other selectively ethnic labels. Other nations seem less interested in affixing blame, and more intent on managing this global scourge. In so focusing their energies, they all appear to be doing a better job than America is doing. 

This government and the American people are, for the most part, handing COVID badly. When you blame others, this is what happens:  You take no responsibility for the problem, and you accept no responsibility for fixing it. You end up waiting for change – perhaps waiting for a “vanishing” (of the virus), as Trump supposes. Change will come; it always comes. But, when you sit back and wait for a change, it comes as a toss-up: for better or for worse. (Some crow, “We’ve fast-tracked the search for a vaccine.” Yes, and what Trump and many Americans like most about this “warp-speed” search is the prospect that it might save them from having to make any sacrifices. Just throw some billions at it, and go about your freedoms. They still don’t get it. COVID laughs at America’s money, and then takes more American lives – lately, from 7-21 to 7-25, a thousand American deaths a day.”
 
That we are quick to blame, yet slow to accept responsibility reflects poor leadership: Trump accepts credit, never blame. (He is everything we teach our children not to be.)
 
Perhaps we are all to blame – not for electing Trump president – for living our lives on this planet in such an all-consuming manner. Look at it this way: If I take from my neighbor, I must give something back. Yet, we take from our neighbors the beasts of the forest (who have families of their own) endlessly and give nothing in return. Perhaps a portion of the bill is due. Consider Newton’s principle: “For every action, there is an opposite and equal reaction.” I’m not saying this is what is happening. I’m saying, if this is not what is happening, then what will happen – the reaction – is coming.
 
We push nature to the brink without imagining nature pushing back. If we were willing to consider such an existential possibility – and more importantly, take responsibility on an existential scale for the petulance and our plundering – such an acknowledgment might instill in us the resolve to responsibly face down COVID. 
 
That may sound a bit provincial, even eccentric, but it is how real people in Hometown, America begin to thing when all of the responses to their questions begin with, “We don’t know…” These people have fundamental bread & butter wonderings. Today, I wonder with the best of them – the mother who, for the first time in her life wonders whether to send her children to school; the father, who wonders whether it is riskier to his family to go to work or stay home and subsist on a diet of chicken backs. 
 
We are in a place where ego and bad management has sent our COVID-19 fatalities skyrocketing – where bravery has become more important than saving lives. Who would have thought that we would be here at this predictable place? 
 
President Trump’s incompetence at handling the coronavirus has cost this nation thousands of lives, (and that’s being gentle). We can blame China, if we wish; we can blame Europe, wherefrom the strain that first infected the U.S. came. Or we can blame I on American arrogance – the notion that our system of government is so great that anyone can be president, even a morally bankrupt reality show star. Failing to expect an adverse reaction from our action at the polls is like putting a child behind the wheel of a moving vehicle, and not expecting that vehicle to careen out of control.  It is no coincidence that America has sustained far more fatalities from COVID-19 than any other nation on Earth. (The toddler behind the wheel has something to do with that.) We have played “footsies with a virus that is as opportunistic as the wind. Leave a door open, and it’s coming in. 
 
What if this pandemic is just getting started? What if it harbors a virulence we are yet to see? How much more of this before we are pushed to the brink? We appear to be frightfully ill-equipped to deal with the inconvenience. How would we pampered people deal with true desperation? If our current behavior is any indication, it does not look good.
 
Our karma-esque experience with COVID fits a narrative that permeates the universe. With its reciprocal “What goes around comes around” nature, we find ourselves caught in its vortex, and we flail like a fish in an invisible net. 
 
Yet, despite the tribulations, this is a good time for the people of this country to bask in a new introspection. Survival is not enough. We must confront ourselves – we must come out of this nightmare with humility, and with an appreciation for what we have learned, and what we have salvaged. If we cannot do that, then it will all be for naught. We will bemoan our losses, instead, and repeat this moment with more dreadful results.  

A Nation of Brats for the World to See

The U.S, while comprising 6% of the world’s population, has 25% of the world’s COVID-19 deaths. (Interestingly, we also comprise 25% of the world’s imprisoned people.) Coincidence, or could it be the Fates’ curious way of exposing a flaw in this nation’s character?

Perhaps it has nothing to do with the Fates, the Moiras, or the Furies. Perhaps it has more to do with a people who are not so "exceptional” as we claim to be, but who are prone to excesses – to being more emotional than the rest of the world, i.e., more spoiled, and more undisciplined. We like to talk about heroes here in America, but lately, we sound (more importantly, behave) like a nation of victims – people who complain that their lives have been upended; who pout that they have to wear masks every time they go out.

COVID-19 cases are trending down, and staying down in many countries around the world – China, Germany, Italy, Spain, Taiwan, South Korea, etc. That has nothing to do with the Fates. It has to do with people who have decided to suck it up – to put on a mask and keep it on. In Singapore, 95% of the people wear masks when they go out. They are not exceptional people; they are reasonable people. They are responsible. The irresponsible ones are in America – the ones who refuse to sacrifice their vanity for the common good. 

The Pouter-in-Chief boasts that if not for his leadership, millions of Americans would probably be dead from the Coronavirus. They would suggest that millions of nations with lesser leaders have already died. The opposite is true. COVID-19 has killed a half million people worldwide, and no single nation is close to having the 130,000 fatalities the U.S. has already sustained.

Nothing is so easy to understand as a simple graph. Put a graph of America’s experience with COVID-19 alongside that of other nations’, and one must wonder how the richest, most technologically advanced nation on Earth can be doing so much more badly than the rest of the world when it comes to COVID. Take China, for example:  It has four times the number of citizens as the U.S. – 1.3 billion people. Yet, they have sustained a quarter of the deaths from COVID that America has. 

Instead of being world leaders, the U.S. appears to be a nation of brats. And the world can see.  

As Young People Rise, Slavery's Champions Go Down

There are young folks going around this country tearing down Confederate statues. Some older folks do not like it, and they further complain when these young people, from time to time, knock down statues of the “good guys”, too. (They seem to suggest that these young people are meddling in grown-up affairs.)

First, this is the young folks’ affair. Second, let’s call the felling of some of the supposed “good guys” statues – the Washingtons and Roosevelts and Columbuses – “collateral damage.” (It is what happens to “good guys” when they stand too close to the fire.)

The conservative media would cloud the public’s perception of what these young people are doing. For instance, there is a statue of Lincoln standing over a bowed slave that they religiously hold up as a target of the statue-smashing protestors. Be not confused:  The legions of Confederate statues strung across our southern landscape is the motivating factor behind these undaunted youth. 

Such change as we see happening in America today cannot always be clean and concise. It is like the Civil War, itself. Do you think every citizen in the antebellum South was a white supremacist? They weren’t. Some of those southern whites were appalled at the idea of slavery. Still, when the North invaded the South during the war, those good southerners had to suffer alongside those champions of slavery who had brought this nation to such a sad state.

America’s young people should never have been put into a position where they are the ones who have to tear down those monuments to traitors. We should have torn them down long ago. Now, the "adults" complain that the young people are despoiling America’s heritage (when the symbol of that "heritage" is a veritable stain on America’s face.) 

The purpose of putting people on pedestals is so future generations will look up to them. Why should young Americans today have to look up to white men who fought with all of their hearts to keep black men, black women, and black children enslaved? Why should their communities, and their children, have to dignify the champions of slavery - men who repeatedly committed heinous acts against helpless black women and children, the likes of which men are known to commit against those whom they hold in bondage? What kind of “great” nation would even allow such a travesty to be perpetrated against its young people, and then threaten those same young people with prison when they declare, “Enough is enough!”

For every statue that comes down, a statue of one of these young people should go up. They are the true heroes. God bless 'em.   

Have You Lost Your Ever-Loving Mind?

At Joel Osteen’s megachurch, rap artist, Kanye West, declared that he, “the greatest artist God ever created,” was dedicating his gifts to the service of God. “Greatest artist ever created…”? Kanye, you ever heard of Leonardo da Vinci, or Michelangelo? How about Bach, Beethoven, or Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart?

You would place your works above Shakespeare, who once wrote: “There is a tide in the affairs of men when taken at its flood leads on to fortune. Omitted, all his life is bound in the shallows.” You, Kanye, could not deliver such profundity if God gifted you with a thousand years.

But, let's not go there. Let’s narrow this strange debate down to America – more specifically to African-Americans. Kanye speaks as though the only artists who matter are those who performed during his brief stint of cognizance – as though God’s work was middlin’ up until then. I must ask: “Kanye, are you crazy?”

You would casually pass over Marvin Gaye, who iconic “What’s Going On?” challenged billions worldwide to think about what we are doing to ourselves and our planet. Ever hear of Ray Charles, Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald? How about Sam Cooke, Dinah Washington, Curtis Mayfield, and Michael Jackson? And what artists have dug grooves so deep as Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charlie “Bird” Parker, and Louis Armstrong? When Aretha Franklin sang “Respect”, you must have been asleep. How else could you discount her artistic excellence, as well as the heights achieved by Dionne Warwick, and Diana Ross? Hey, ever hear of James Brown?

These people were imbued with a thing we called “soul”. It ran like a river through the black community. Long a hallmark of the African-American experience, this sublime spirit became the thoroughfare by which the passion African-America was unleashed. It was especially evident in the music and dance of black folk throughout the 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s. That precious commodity began to wane in the 80s and 90s. It, perhaps reared its head one last time on the shoulders of Whitney Houston. With her demise, it settled into the moribund state that characterizes “soul” in the black community today. This new bread of African-American artists, lacking the soul of their predecessors, now load up on whatever they think will sell. They do a lot of sellin’, but it sho’ ain’t soul.

The hip-hop artists of Kanye’s ilk are not such great artists as they are revolutionaries. They have influenced young African-America to make a severe left turn, and speed down a highway devoid of the sense of history that fostered its soul – that sense that had made African-America a great and viable community. These rap artists reflect a vanity that is terribly self-destructive – that has replaced “rhythms and blues” with “nigguhs” and “bitches.” They think they have arrived. They are very proud. 

Some may say I over-reacted to Kanye’s controversial remarks. Perhaps, except that would suggest that Kanye was merely speaking in jest. That would also lead one to imagine that Joel Osteen had brought Kanye before his church to crack jokes. Joel is a serious man; Kanye is delusional. Delusional men do not crack jokes, they believe.