The Sky

Imagine that there's a large nation in West Asia ruled by El Supremo, an authoritarian decision-maker. Everyone obeys him (for now). Or at least it looks--from a distance--as if everyone obeys him. 

El Supremo's qualification for holding a position of central importance for 8o million people is that he's the world's leading expert on an imaginary friend in the sky. This spirit in the sky apparently cares deeply about what humans eat and how they have intercourse and how many times each day they face the east and how they comb their hair. (Not even El Supremo can say why. ) 

The Biden Meritocracy

I don't know any Bidens, and I don't care to meet one, but I do want to know what laws Hunter Biden has broken. As far as I can tell, he has not been charged with anything illegal in Ukraine.  

Bob Barr, tRump's furtive anus-sniffer, has an army of attorneys at his disposal, but he has yet to charge Hunter Biden with a crime in America. The topic never comes up.  

It's fair to suspect that Hunter Biden is sleazy in the sense that he is a coddled prince of the oligarchy, but so are a million others. It's legal. It's part of a worldwide meritocratic system, in which merit consists of being born to privilege.

Why We Need More Aircraft Carriers

As of this writing, the United States owns 24 aircraft carriers and helicopter docks. China owns one. It might seem to you that China, a new world power, is catching up. But we have the John F. Kennedy under construction at a cost of less than 17 billion dollars.  Soon it will be 25 carriers to 1. 

You might wonder why China lags behind with only one aircraft carrier. The answer is that China is a young nation that hasn't figured out war yet. In an age of intercontinental missiles and drones flown from couches in Kansas, China has neglected the building of really expensive, big fat target-boxes that float on water and can race away to safety at 35 mph. 


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The Fate of Pompeo the Coward

According to Herodotus, when Xerxes and his army failed in their attempt to cross the strait between Europe and Turkey, Xerxes ordered his inept bridge builders beheaded and then had red-hot irons heated and used them to brand the incoming tide. 

Today President Heelspurs stands ankle deep in an impeachment tide. He's screaming at aides like Pompeo the Coward, because Pompeo can't stop the waters creeping up his boss's swollen legs. 

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Those Crazy Democrats

Recently former President Obama frowned darkly on about half of the Democratic coalition. Obama said:

“The average American doesn't think we have to completely tear down the system and remake it. And I think it's important for us not to lose sight of that,” Obama said. “There are a lot of persuadable voters and there are a lot of Democrats out there who just want to see things make sense. They just don't want to see crazy stuff. They want to see things a little more fair, they want to see things a little more just. And how we approach that I think will be important.”

I'm struck by the idea of the average American. That person would be a middle-aged woman of mixed race in her second marriage (in my opinion). She voted twice for Obama. 

Perhaps President Obama hopes to unite the Democratic coalition (right wing Democrats, centrists, left wing Democrats, progressive independents, women, youth, minorities, organized labor) behind a slogan like "Make things a little more fair." But will that ignite the voting base and increase turnout? Or might Obama hurt this effort by calling the positions of social democrats like AOC "crazy stuff"? She doesn't seem all that crazy to me. I like her. 

Why Smear Yovanovitch?

Why did tRump smear Ambassador Yovanovitch? He had the power to replace her at any time and without explanation. The smearing was unnecessary and seemingly pointless. But not, I think, for tRump. His motivation isn't simply that he's grifter. There's a second key: he savors the cruelty. That's half of every decision he makes. It must be cruel.

The White Country

In October's HARPERS, Lionel Shriver pointed out that the claim that the United States has always been a melting pot is a myth. The idea was that almost anyone could move to this country and fit in. That seldom actually happened unless you came from Europe.

I don't have the exact figures, but 80 years ago, about 85% of Americans were white people of European extraction. More than 10% of us were black; the rest were Asians, Latinos and Amerindians in small numbers. 

Today the percentage of white people in America has dropped about 25  points to around 60%.

Global warming is driving people of color into the northern nations. Most of them would rather stay home, but they move to survive. North America and Europe are finally becoming cultural and racial melting pots, and angry resistance to newcomers is one reason tRump got elected. Something big has changed. Diversity is no longer a pretense. 

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Kiev and Liev

A few years back I set out to locate the village from which my wife's father's family had emigrated. The story was that they had come from Teteeve in Russia. After much looking and a lot of luck I discovered Tetiev in Ukraine, an appropriately Jewish town, famous in a way for having been destroyed in a pogrom.

If Tetiev is pronounced "Teteeve", then (I reasoned) Kiev is pronounced "Keeve." Today this deduction was confirmed on television by various ambassadors to Ukraine.

Last night Stephen Colbert discussed with actor Liev Schreiber (of Ukrainian extraction) how to pronounce "Liev." The actor gave a two-syllable pronunciation, perhaps because he was born in California.

The Disaffected Versus the Democrats

In 2016 almost twice as many citizens did not vote at all as did vote for Hillary Clinton. In that sense the popular vote (or non-vote) was won by the disaffected by a margin of about 45 to 27. Ex-President tRump ran third and was installed in office by our electoral college.

We like to think of ourselves as a democracy.

Who are the disaffected? What do we know about the 45% of our citizenry that does not vote at all? Not much beyond some guesses. 

Maybe 5% of the population was too drunk or crazy to lurch to the polls. Another 5% was too ill, too old or too cold. 

The remaining 35% who did not vote probably believed (on one level or another) that our governance system has been so corrupted by grifters, corporations and billionaires that it cannot possibly represent ordinary people at all. Non-voters likely feel absolutely no connection to Washington. It's nothing to them.

If you have ever written or phoned your congressional representative and gotten back a canned letter from a computer, you probably understand why the disaffected outnumber the Democrats.

This has been going on for a long time. How do we get the disaffected non-voter interested in participating in an election?  Is it by nominating a centrist? Is that the key move that the disaffected have been waiting for? 

Harriet

At some level, probably very minor, there seems to be a fragmenting going on inside the American Black community. A Nigerian-made film with excellent reviews has been blocked from a foreign Academy Award nomination because it is in English (apparently a common language in Nigeria). A group has formed for people of color whose ancestors were enslaved--the group excludes people of color without an enslaved background. There have been complaints that Harriet Tubman (in the current movie HARRIET) was played by a British subject. My guess is that unity is what matters and will mostly prevail.

My wife and I saw HARRIET last night. I suppose it is a standard Hollywood biopic about an astounding life. The critics gave it a 72%. The audiences gave it a 97%.

We found the film moving, suspenseful and informative. It conveys the horror that was slavery and the spirit that fought it.  I understand better why Tubman should be on our currency--she set an impossibly high standard--and why Andrew Jackson should not. 

Too Hip

In the political left there are many claimants to the hipmost position. I'm unsure how to rate leftness. Where on the chart do you put anarchists?  To the left of social democrats? To the right or left of Marxists?  How would you rate a union business agent?

Terry Southern wrote a short story about a white guy so deeply into jazz that black musicians couldn't stand him: the man was too hip.

Thaddeus Stevens

In high school long ago, I learned that Thaddeus Stevens was one of America's worst political villains, a "Radical Republican," which meant, I think, that he was supposedly a vindictive winner of the Civil War, a man who wanted revenge against the white secessionists instead of a peaceful binding up of the unfortunate wounds. Translation: Stevens argued that black men should have the same rights as white men. So he was hated.

He told Congress, "If you and your compeers can fling away ambition and realize that every human being, no matter how lowly born or degraded by fortune, is your equal, that every inalienable right which belongs to you belongs also to him, truth and righteousness will spread over the land."

He would have understood Bernie Sanders.

Stevens died shortly after that speech in the house he shared with a free black woman. Many visitors tried to visit him on his death bed, but he admitted only two, both black preachers, and he thanked them for coming. 

Leaving Clothes at the Door

Mom always said to leave your clothes at the door--and for a good reason. Otherwise you risk damaging your chairs, couches, rugs, carpets and bedding by bringing in bacteria and toxins. 

Even if your shirts and pants look clean, they're probably coated with more debris than you realize. This can lead to additional dusting, mopping, washing, wiping and dry cleaning. 

If you want your couches, tables, countertops, beds, rugs and so forth to last,  you should contact them only with your own oily skin. Otherwise fibers may break down prematurely. 

Your clothes are expert at picking up microscopic toxins. And they linger. Things like motor oil, pesticides, antifreeze and e-coli  may be present in your shorts. Do the right thing. Leave your clothes at the door. 

Common Sense

The first Presidential impeachment trial in American history, that of Andrew Johnson, a white supremacist, raised familiar issues. 

The defenders of Johnson tried to claim that a President could be impeached only if he had committed a serious crime. That rejected claim is today being advanced by the grifters defending Gen. Heelspurs. They are arguing that, yes, Heelspurs behaved badly but what he did was legal.

Thaddeus Stevens,  a famously anti-racist member of congress, presented another view in the tenth article of  Johnson impeachment. Stevens argued that Johnson had disgraced the office of the President when he had made crude speeches and threatened members of congress. In an eleventh article Stevens charged Johnson with obstruction of justice etc.  At the time, Wendell Phillips wrote that “Impeachment is the refuge of the common sense of the nation” when dealing with someone unfit for the office.

Democracy

You can't have a genuine democracy in a town where one voter has ten billion dollars and another voter has nothing. Money is power.

Harry Reid

I've been too hard on Nancy Pelosi. I'll put it this way. She's not a leader, unless what you seek from a leader is half-a-loaf. But she is an effective organizer and vote counter. She's famous for explaining her method: it's someone like "You wait until you have enough votes and then you call for a vote." She's not FDR or even LBJ. She's ObamaCare rather than single payer. But a little something is better than nothing, sometimes. 

Harry Reid, now, he was a leader. He was the dude who realized that if Hillary became the Democratic candidate for President, the Republicans would win. So he recruited Barack Obama to run in the primaries.