Don’t Let Anybody Whitewash COVID and 2020

“Are you better off than you were four years ago?” , they ask.

March 15, 2020: The country officially goes into lockdown.

80 people had died of COVID.  Within a month, that number would be 30,000.  More than 1 million Americans have died, and, as analysis shows, most of them unnecessarily, because of the bungled and too-long-delayed federal government response to the epidemic. We have lost almost as many lives to COVID as we have in all the wars the U.S. has fought.

Businesses began shuttering.  Approximately 1.4 million jobs were lost in March, and the unemployment rate rose to 4.4 percent.  Within a month, another 20 million jobs would be lost, and the unemployment rate was above 14 percent.

Disrupted supply chains created scarcities, including food.  Prices rose: beef went up nearly 10 percent; poultry up nearly 6 percent; dairy and eggs up more than 4 percent.

Grocery store shelves were empty.  You couldn’t find toilet paper, paper towels, or cleaning supplies.

NYT, March 15^th, 2020: “The Coronavirus Swamps Local Health Departments, Already Crippled by Cuts.”

Medical equipment like surgical masks, gloves, gowns (nurses were wearing trash bags), respirators, and face shields were nowhere to be found.  FEMA was confiscating supplies, and some states were hiding stockpiles.

Washington Post, March 24th, 2020: “Scramble for medical equipment descends into chaos as U.S. states and hospitals compete for rare supplies”

Freezer trucks were being used for mobile morgues.

The Angry Inch, after disbanding the pandemic response unit in 2018, first scoffed at COVID, saying it would be gone soon, that we should just stop counting deaths, while admitting to the Post’s Bob Woodward, “It’s also more deadly than your – you know, your – even your strenuous flus.”

His son-in-law suggested doing nothing, on the assumption COVID would kill more people in blue states.

Then The Inch suggested injecting disinfectant.  Later, he pushed ivermectim, a horse de-wormer. He refused to wear a mask, saying it would make him look “weak,” and the MAGATs followed suit.

Damn right, we’re better off than we were four years ago.

Later,

Voter Suppression, Not Polls, Should be Our Concern

Too many people got their shorts in a knot over the NYT poll showing Biden losing to The Angry Inch, but the same newspaper that has pounded on the issue of Biden’s age—with the not-so-subtle implication that he’s somehow mentally unfit for the job of President—for months also published, to much less fanfare, a solidly reported piece on Republican’s organized and concerted efforts to harass voters and prevent them from exercising their rights.

The poll story—which, of course, ran wild across the media landscape—was the second high-profile cheap shot the Times has taken at Biden in recent weeks (“cheap” in the moral sense; that poll must have cost a pretty penny).  They earlier ignored 300 pages of exonerating report on Biden’s handling of classified documents to focus on a comment by the highly partisan right-wing author about Biden’s mental state, including devoting most of their op-ed pages to going after him.

Among the people crying foul was their former public editor (the paper has since eliminated that post) Margaret Sullivan.

When faced with criticism over their gross over-reaction, publisher A.G. Sulzberger responded with the paper’s trademark dismissive condescension:

“We are going to continue to report fully and fairly, not just on Donald Trump but also on President Joe Biden. He is a historically unpopular incumbent and the oldest man to ever hold this office. We’ve reported on both of those realities extensively, and the White House has been extremely upset about it.”

I’ll just leave it there.  I’ve written several times about the media’s obsession with The Inch and their unfair treatment of Joe Biden.  I’ll also postpone a commentary on what I suspect is the racist underpinning to the attention paid to Biden’s age and the un-stated fear/hatred of Kamala Harris becoming president.  I need to get to the business at-hand.

“I don’t want everybody to vote. . . . As a matter of fact, our leverage in the election quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

― Paul Weyrich

Republicans have been waging a multi-pronged attack on voting ever since the early 1960s, when they decided that appealing to white racism was their ticket to future electoral success.

That campaign was given new vigor after George Bush the Younger took office. One of his henchmen, Karl Rove, went to work making (non-existent) vote fraud an issue, and John Roberts, who played a behind-the-scenes role in the legal battle over the Florida recount that made Bush the winner and was rewarded with the Chief Justice’s chair, dutifully eviscerated the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder.

Shelby County released a wave of voter suppression laws across red states, clearly aimed at Democratic voters, especially Black voters.

These various efforts have been working.  For example, the Brennan Center just the other day released a study showing the gap between Black and White voter turnout has grown larger.  The authors posited that, “In 2020, if the gap had not existed, 9 million more ballots would have been cast.”

Right-wingers didn’t stop at legislation.  They started in with character assassination and threats of violence.

In 2016, The Inch urged his followers to go “watch other communities.” One MAGAT was quoted:

“I’ll look for . . . well, it’s called racial profiling. Mexicans. Syrians. People who can’t speak American,” he said. “I’m going to go right up behind them. I’ll do everything legally. I want to see if they are accountable. I’m not going to do anything illegal. I’m going to make them a little bit nervous.”

In the chaos after the 2020 election, The Inch’s consigliere, Rudy Guiliani, sicced the hounds of hell on two Georgia election workers, lying that they had cheated and scanned ballots several times to help Biden.  Those claims were proven false, and Guiliani ended up on the losing end of a defamation lawsuit to the tune of $148 million.  But the two election workers endured years of harassment, including death threats, and other workers across the country have reported similar threats against them.

Now, eight months before an election that may decide the fate of our representative democracy, a well-organized network of right-wingers is kicking it into high gear.

The Times piece (any bets it doesn’t run on A1?) describes in detail how these self-described “election investigators” are pushing local officials in Georgia, Michigan, and Nevada to purge voting rolls.

Repeating a truth we’ve known for years, the writers state that claims of fraud have “no grounding in fact . . . Investigations into voter fraud have found that it is exceedingly rare and that when it occurs, it is typically isolated or even accidental.  Elections officials say that there is no reason to think that the systems in place for keeping voter lists up-to-date are failing.”  (They don’t get into the fact that the majority of fraud that does occur seems to be perpetrated by Republicans.)

But even if the challenges fail, they help accomplish a larger purpose: they disenfranchise voters.

“In some states, a challenge alone is enough to limit a voter’s access to a mail ballot, or to require additional documentation at the polls. Privately, activists have said they consider that a victory.”

These challenges also lay the groundwork for another round of lawsuits like the ones we saw in 2020.  FOX and the other right-wing propaganda outlets trumpet even the suggestion of fraud essentially as fact, eroding faith in the system and whipping up the MAGATs further.  This, in turn, casts a pall over the results before the voting has even started.

Even the unctuous Mitch McConnell, hardly democracy’s friend warned about these consequences when members of his caucus were considering challenging the results of the 2020 election:

“If this election were overturned by mere allegations from the losing side, our democracy would enter a death spiral. We’d never see the whole nation accept the election again,” McConnell said.

The right is clearly and unalterably committed to jimmying the vote, however they might be able.  They see the opportunity they’ve been working towards for decades—the establishment of what amounts to a dictatorship, no matter how you want to characterize it—within their reach.  They’ve seized the media narrative on Biden himself, wounding him and driving down his polls, just as they did with Hillary Clinton.  They will be flooding the process with perhaps billions of dollars (another John Roberts legacy).  And, by God, if they can, they’re going to disrupt the vote, deny people their franchise where they can, and create chaos if they again come up on the losing end.

Later,

A Century Ago Tonight, Gershwin’s Masterpiece Premiered at Aeolian Hall in New York

He was on piano.

No Time for Journalists to Wear Blinders

I almost gave the New York Times’ Peter Baker’s recent exercise in furrowed-brow journalism a pass, as it really said nothing new, but on second thought, I decided that was actually the problem, and so figured it was worth a reaction.

Dan Froomkin, one of our best media critics, dissected Baker’s column itself, particularly Baker’s treating Biden and the individual I refer to as The Angry Inch as essentially co-incumbents, but I want to approach it from another angle.

In a nutshell, I am increasingly convinced that political journalists in this country have convinced themselves that Republicans represent “real America” and frame their reporting around that belief.  Don’t think so?  How many stories have you seen where Biden voters are interviewed in diners?

Further, they myopically report on the political divide as though it were some kind of organic, grassroots occurrence instead of being the product of decades of divisive messaging by the right.  From Roger Ailes to Lee Atwater to Rush Limbaugh to Newt Gingrich to Rupert Murdoch, white America has been bombarded for more than half a century by messaging aimed at stoking resentment.

When I say Baker’s piece, “The Looming Contest Between Two Presidents and Two Americas,” says nothing new, I mean that two ways.  First, writing about America’s social and political divisions has a long history; even though the danger looms larger, it’s a matter of degree.  One might say David Brooks’ 2001 Atlantic piece, “One Nation, Slightly Divisible,”was a watershed moment for this kind of thing.  Second, these kinds of pieces all have a serious blind spot, born of the need to be “objective” to the point of missing (or ignoring) the reason for these divisions.

The running premise is that the divide between Republican/conservative America and Democratic/liberal America has grown into a chasm, with worrying implications for democracy.  The subtext—sometimes stated, sometimes implied—is that this is somehow Democrats’ fault, that they have become the party of elites (a slippery term, depending on who’s throwing it around) who have lost touch with, and support of, ordinary Americans, who in turn have long been in the mood to get even.

This view took particular hold at Baker’s paper and among the Amtrak-corridor media generally (talk about “elites”) after the 2016 election.  More than a few high-level journalists agreed that they, like Democrats, had failed to recognize the anger of millions of “forgotten” Americans, rooted in economic anxiety.

Baker checks this box in his piece:

“Mr. Trump has transformed the G.O.P. into the party of the white working class, rooted strongly in rural communities and resentful of globalization, while Mr. Biden’s Democrats have increasingly become the part of the more highly educated and economically better off, who have thrived in the information age.”

Let’s start with that last point.  A handful of economic elites have indeed thrived in the information age; in fact, they essentially control it.  They became mind-bogglingly wealthy, and some of their most visible colleagues are generous, vocally and financially, in their support for Republicans.  The rest of us buy our smart phones and laptops and find ourselves as dependent and vulnerable as we are liberated by technology.  We aren’t necessarily getting rich, either.

As for Democratic voters tending to be more educated, on the face of it, that’s correct.  I remember, growing up in the 50s and 60s, that education was thought of as a desirable goal.  The National Defense Education Act of 1958, born after the Russians launched the first Sputnik satellite, helped make a college education accessible, even commonplace.  Education was a good thing; it better-prepared you for an increasingly complex world.  However, it also opened the door to broader, more tolerant thinking, which is why the Rs are hell-bent on destroying it.  

Baker is correct when he describes Republicans as “the party of the white working class,” but that is not rooted in economic anxiety.  It is rooted in racism.  I have touched on that particular point at greater length before, so let me just repeat one fundamental element: the Republican party in 1963 saw the growing backlash in white America to the Civil Rights movement and decided to make appealing to racism a core principle of their political strategy.  The Party of Lincoln did a 180 and became the Party of Jefferson Davis.

It works.  Friend of mine was helping with a union organizing drive down south a few years ago.  One white guy asked her, “Is this going to help the ______s?”  Trying to roll with it, she said it would help everybody.  Guy snorted, “Then I don’t want it.”

As for the working class more generally, it is growing more diverse, and, if you define it as people making less than $50,000 a year, Joe Biden won 57 percent of that vote in 2020.  (Hillary Clinton won it more narrowly in 2016.)  Biden also won the next income cohort, $50,000 to $99,999, by 56 percent.  Guess who won a majority of “economically better off” voters last time.

Beyond this kind of mis-characterization—and Baker is hardly the sole practitioner—there is often an added level of false equivalence that suggests that both political parties have moved a more-or-less equal distance from the American mainstream.  Given the broad support for many fundamental Democratic policies in areas like gun control, abortion, taxing the wealthy, protecting Social Security, and voting rights, it’s patently obvious much of their program is in step with what most Americans want.  One of the major Democratic successes of the last 25 years is the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare.  Passing that cost Democrats dearly in the 2010 elections, but the program itself has proven popular, with enrollment surging in the past year, particularly in red states.

One outlier is that polling often shows people believe Republicans are better at managing the economy, which always has me scratching my head, since, going back to Eisenhower, data clearly shows Democrats excel in promoting growth and economic stability.  They’re better at bringing down the debt, as well.  (Baker and his colleagues might want to reflect on how their reporting on the economy, which consistently has downplayed Democrats’ recent success, may have contributed to that.)

Meanwhile, Republicans have gone way out into the wilderness of the lunatic fringe, with serious, even potentially fatal, consequences.

We’re not just talking about superficial journalism, here, which would be bad enough.  This is an abdication of basic professional standards and responsibility.  It blurs the stakes, as Jay Rosen points out, and, this time, those stakes are more serious than any time in my life, and I was born during the Truman administration.  Yes, journalism should be objective, but the concept of objectivity is not served by ignoring the truth.  The truth is not just that there are two parties with wildly different plans for running the country.  The truth is that one of those parties pits Americans against one another and advocates for oppression and violence, and its leader is very clear about his intention to be an authoritarian.

I don’t know how things are going to turn out in November.  Anyone who says they do is conning you.  But I know that how our media frames its reporting, the language and emphasis it uses, the stories it selects to run, will have a serious impact.  This is no time for journalists to put on the blinders.

Later.

For the Fourth Estate, Neutrality = Complicity

“I think what no one in this room wants to admit is that Trump has helped all of you. He couldn’t sell steaks or vodka or water or college or ties or Eric, but he has helped you.  He’s helped you sell your papers and your books and your TV.  You helped create this monster, and now you’re profiting off of him.”

    Michelle Wolf, mc’ing the White House Correspondents’ dinner, April 28, 2018

Ms. Wolf got excoriated for that appearance, doubtless because she cut right to the bone, and the assembled Amtrak-corridor journalists, not surprisingly, couldn’t handle it and took great umbrage.

But what she said was right then and remains true.

The first step in fixing a problem is acknowledging the problem, taking responsibility for how it came about, and for solving it.  I don’t see American media ever getting over its obsession with the individual I call The Angry Inch, and so will never admit the problem that creates for informing the public, much less that it has any responsibility for fixing it.

Money’s part of it.  Nearly eight years ago, in the early days of the 2016 campaign, then-CBS head honcho Les Moonves stepped right out and said it:

“It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS . . . The money’s rolling in and this is fun . . . I’ve never seen anything like this, and this is going to be a very good year for us.  Sorry, it’s a terrible thing to say.  But, bring it on, Donald.  Keep going.”

So is the media’s need to be entertained.  Even after two years of this rolling train wreck, NPR reporter Jim Zarroli in 2019 tweeted:

“I know a lot of people may have trouble understanding this, but no reporter was crying when Trump won.  Whatever journalists think of him as citizens, he is a great story. It’s actually been, well, fun covering him.

After the 2020 election, Ben White, then of Politico, came clean, as well:

“Deep down in places you don’t talk about at cocktail parties you want him tweeting those tweets. You miss him tweeting those tweet . . . . And the sweet rush of outrage that followed. If you say you don’t you are lying.”

So, for the Fourth Estate, documenting the freak show boils down to making their jobs easy, “fun,” and cost-effective.

Even the spectre of something far worse than the first Angry Inch administration on the horizon has largely failed to move our media to change its ways.

Back in mid-December, the revelation that a folder with “highly sensitive intelligence” about Russian interference in the 2016 election “went missing” after the individual I refer to as The Angry Inch left the White House.  After about a day, the story disappeared.  Fifty years ago, Watergate-era reporters would have been all over that.  Today, meh . . . . 

Likewise, reporting on remarks by The Inch about illegal immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country,” which could have been culled directly from Hitler’s playbook, disappeared in short order.

Then everyone’s cage got briefly rattled during closing arguments before the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals hearing on The Inch’s claims of immunity for any and all acts related to the January 6 attempted coup.  The Inch’s attorney, John Sauer (formerly notable being part of the team that sued to overturn the 2020 election results), responded to a question from Judge Florence Pan, who asked whether a president would be immune from prosecution if he did something like, say, ordering Seal Team 6 to assassinate political rivals.

With his client sitting nearby, Sauer replied, “He would have to be impeached and convicted, first.”

In other words, an ex-president is beyond the reach of the law for anything he did while he was still in office.

The initial shock of that remark once again passed in due course.

The central question of this year’s presidential election is whether The Inch will somehow manage to return to the White House.  Those of us tuned in already are flooded with news stories and social media posts from writers who’ve been examining entrails and polling (at this point, both have about the same predictive power), looking for signs on which they can base their arguments about the likely outcome.  The general assumption is that the race will be “close,” though probably not in the overall vote count—The Inch has never won the popular vote—but in a handful of states that will make the difference in the Electoral College, most likely Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, with Arizona and Georgia (who surprisingly went to Biden last time) as possible additions.

The Inch and Republicans in general have made it clear they will do anything to win, even as they acknowledge that they have next-to-nothing to run on in terms of accomplishments.  They will spin all manner of lies and conspiracy theories; they’ll go in for threats of violence; they will work overtime to stop people from voting; they will attempt to clog the courts with challenges; and more than a few of them who are members of the House have said they will not vote to certify the election unless The Inch wins.

Moreover, they have made it clear what they intend to do if they win.

Republicans hold several advantages, including being able to count on billions of dollars in campaign funding from America’s wealthiest people, who are savoring the notion of establishing an oligarchy; a propaganda network with a broad reach; a potent appeal to racism in the immigration “issue,” and the support of tens of millions of voters who nurture a searing hate going back decades.

Democrats, meanwhile, continue on their traditional path of passing legislation and believing the public will wake up to all the good things they have done and reward them for it.  On paper, they hold some reasonable cards: a good economy with strong job and wage growth combined with moderating inflation.  These conditions could certainly change by Election Day, of course.

What won’t change, and what is one of their strongest suits, is abortion.  Pundits and reporters keep expecting that to fade away, but it hasn’t, and it won’t.

Meanwhile, Dems have enjoyed a pretty good recent track record at the polls.  After the shock of 2016, they rallied and took back the House in 2018.  Two years later, Joe Biden, campaigning largely from his basement, beat The Inch by more than 7 million votes and won 306 electoral votes, including those from Georgia and Arizona, normally welcome territory for the Rs.  Then, in 2022, a year in which the Rs were widely expected to re-take Congress, Dems held the Senate and barely lost the House.  More recently, they’ve notched a series of victories down ballot, including flipping state legislative seats and, very importantly, the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

But add, in the Rs’ column, a mainstream media routinely giving Der Leader a pass by insisting on treating him as an ordinary candidate.  The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin, for one, dissected this situation well, pointing out there is no shortage of expert analysis available to journalists who might wish to report on the threat The Inch represents. 

Our media has shown little interest.  Just the opposite, in fact.  Beyond a handful of journalists who’re performing Sisyphusian labor trying to make clear that the dismantling of our democracy could be right around the corner, political reporting instead ignores who he is—a corrupt, completely unscrupulous megalomaniac—but tends to cast him as a challenger of norms, a tester of limits, making him sound audacious, almost heroic.

As one example, a New York Times story about the New Hampshire primary, which The Inch won by a modest margin, credited him, in some purplish prose, with driving traffic to the polls:

“The exceptionally high turnout on Tuesday underscores the electrifying effect Mr. Trump has on the electorate, driving loyal supporters and determined opposition to the polls as his divisive style of politics both inspires and revolts.”

When they do this, the scribes serve his purpose.

Ms. Rubin’s paper ran a piece about The Inch’s more recent public rants, which have grown more unhinged and threatening than usual, but it was cast in terms of how they might affect public perception and the election:

“But the display also suggests that one of Trump’s most distinct advantages in the general election might not hold up so well over time: perceived mental sharpness.”

This is an individual who has long had difficulty stringing coherent sentences together, but while Biden’s every slip on the podium over the last three years was read as a possible indicator of him lacking “mental sharpness”—typified by the Post headline last fall: “Anxiety ripples through Democratic Party over Biden”—The Inch is only now coming under what is, so far, light scrutiny.

Perhaps what irritates me as much as anything is the condescension of the media coupled with the refusal to acknowledge that their work affects people’s perceptions and attitudes.  “No, no, you don’t understand our work; we report and let people decide.”  Bollocks.  The framing and tone of the reporting shapes public opinion, and denying that is pathetically dishonest and cowardly.

As I’m writing, it’s been three years since Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were sworn into office, two weeks after the failure of an attempted coup.  In fewer than 300 days, we will hold another presidential election, and a year from now, there will be another inauguration.  That could result in a renewed effort to recover from the interregnum of 2017 to 2021, or it could be the end of our representative democracy.

One of the philosopher Elie Wiesel’s most familiar observations includes this line: “Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.” Newspeople stress they must be neutral and objective in their work. But avoiding writing accurately about what’s in front of your face is not neutrality; it’s complicity, and doing so to preserve the perception of your objectivity is shameful.

Later,

“A Promise We Must Renew and Defend Every Day”

Twenty-nine years ago, I was a legislative assistant and speechwriter for Sen. Russ Feingold, the progressive Democrat from Wisconsin and one of the smartest, bravest, most principled people I’ve ever met. He was invited to speak at an MLK Day event, and I wrote this for him:

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would have been 66 years old this month.

Throughout his life, he spoke of love, of brotherhood, of equality.  But he also spoke of economic justice and its natural connection to civil rights.

In his last speech as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in August, 1967, he went so far as to call for a national guaranteed income.  When he was cut down in April, 1968, he was working in support of a garbage workers’ strike in Memphis.

His loss still hurts 27 years later.  Perhaps more tragically, the wounds he hoped to bind remain open.  The divisions he hoped to mend are still separating us.  The need for justice he saw so clearly has not been met.

Dr. King knew it was not enough to stop the lynchings, to extend the right to vote, or even to defeat segregation.  Without justice, he knew, there is no peace.

Not only justice in legal terms, but in moral and economic terms as well.  So long as a nation allows poverty, hunger, sickness, ignorance, and desperation to exist, the potential for division and violence will always be present and will always be ripe for exploitation by unprincipled opportunists.

You may remember news reports late last year that Americans are growing less tolerant, less concerned about equality, and more suspicious of institutions like their government.

Some of us heard those reports and felt concern.  We saw a challenge to re-kindle the faith, the optimism, and the sense of justice that are essential to progress.

Others heard these same reports and saw an opening.  There are reactionary voices in America who have locked themselves into the past and fought progressive change tooth and nail.

These voices have sought to encourage the cynicism, the divisions, the fear and pronounce a cure: turn back the clock to a time when large parts of our society were essentially second-class citizens, people for whom the promise of America was, in Dr. King’s famous words, “a bad check, a check which has come back marked, ‘insufficient funds.’ “

But retreat is not the answer.  As Dr. King also said, “We refuse to believe that they bank of justice is bankrupt.”

Indeed, it is not, and we hold the key to the vault.

The principle of justice must always be the basis for our actions.

Our sense of justice forbids us from allowing poverty, hunger, ignorance, sickness, and desperation.  For we do “allow” these to exist if we fail to exercise our power to correct these conditions.  And make no mistake, it is within our power to do this.

To claim we have no such power is to ignore our basic responsibility as citizens.

There are those who believe otherwise, who argue that we must make so-called “tough choices” to save some and to cast others adrift.

Those are not “tough choices;” they are wrong choices.

When faced with these conditions, our sense of justice requires us to act inclusively, not exclusively.

When we come upon someone wrapped up in newspapers, sleeping on a park bench, we must act.

When we hear the cries of children as they bury their brothers and sisters killed in street violence, we must act.

When we see the weary eyes of workers who’ve lost their work and risk losing hope because they cannot find new jobs, we must act.

When we observe the bent hand of an old woman who must sell her possessions and sink into poverty to obtain medical care, we must act.

When we see families and businesses denied credit or insurance of similar necessities of modern life for no other reason than their race or economic station, then we must act.

When we see the statistics and hear the stories telling us many people are working harder for smaller rewards, that their children face more uncertain futures, that they are losing ground while a few expand their estates, becoming further isolated from their neighbors, we must act.

When we hear and see racism and bigotry, even as they are dressed up in new rhetorical clothes, we must act.

It is fashionable in some circles to sneer at the prospect of action.  Stop whining, we are told; we cannot solve every problem.  Life is hard; life is unfair; and those are immutable laws of nature.

Nonsense.  We can decide how hard, how unfair, life can be.

We must reject callousness and negativity.  We must reject is as an abdication of our responsibilities towards one another as neighbors.

We must reject it as fundamentally un-American.

Our Constitution asserts we created our government “to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, and promote the general welfare.”

That assertion places upon us the responsibility to act individually and collectively, and that’s sometimes means acting through government.

Government must step in when it would be futile for individuals to act alone, or when other cultural forces refuse to act against the interests of the common good.

We must act to defend the principle that we are one nation, indivisible, that we draw our strength collectively and so must use it for the benefit of all.

In defending that principle, we must not find ourselves defending ideas and programs which have worn out their usefulness.  We must not lose sight of our goal in order to cling to our method.

That said, however, we must not allow flaws in that method to be the focal point of a wholesale attack on the goals.  We cannot right the ship of state by throwing people over the side.

We are a large, wealthy, and diverse nation about to enter a new century.  None of us succeeds alone.  We depend on upon one another, and, therefore, we have an obligation to one another.

We have not merely the obligation to be civil, but to be active.

Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams recognized this obligation as they were helping bring this country into being.  They urged the adoption of our national motto, “E Pluribus Unum,” “Out of many, one.”

There are those who would replace that  motto.  They would perhaps substitute something like, “Many are called, but few are chosen.”

They would have the country organized not as a democracy but as some kind of exclusive club, and those who cannot afford the membership fee or who do not pass muster with those already safely inside need not apply, but must sit by the front gate.

The justification for this anti-democratic attitude?  Anger.

We hear often that Americans are angry, that last November’s elections were a revolution of anger.  I am not convinced that is true, at least not in the way we are told.

To whatever extent that anger drives politics, we must replace it with reason.

Anger gets us nowhere.  It leads to rash actions, even violence, and then attempts to serve as its own defense.

Anger is a poor foundation for building, maintaining, and governing a society.

We do not need to be trading blows; we need to be joining hands.  Our means, Dr. King reminded us often, should not be to humiliate our opponents, but to win them over.

It won’t be easy.  But we begin by seeing to it that all voices are acknowledged, so that one one needs to shout.

There is already shouting enough.

You can hear it in the gloating of activists on the right, from talk-show millionaires to freshman legislators, all claiming that the nation has somehow been “taken back” and that individual liberty will be restored by the simple expedient of cutting taxes and spending.

That will free us from the onerous burden of government, they say, forgetting for the moment that our government was not constructed merely to exercise power but to provide a forum for justice, to give all Americans a place to go to petition for relief.

Yes, government lays taxes and spends money, but it also provides services, and it protects citizens from fraud, discrimination, harassment, and violence, and where it cannot protect, it can at least prosecute.

This is a part of government we must not ignore.

Government is not working better if our country continues to drift into factions of have and have not.

Government is not more efficient if it cuts taxes on the wealthy and shifts the burden of paying for public services to the middle class.

It is not improved if its protections for the vulnerable are withdrawn.

For my part, I am introducing various bills in the Senate to cut spending and make government work for efficiently.

But I am also introducing legislation to improve and guarantee long-term care for the elderly and disabled.

I am introducing legislation to prevent insurance companies from practicing economic racism by redlining.

I am introduction legislation to clean up the system for financing political campaigns and reduce the influence of moneyed interests in Congress.

I am doing these things because I believe it is not enough to run a government more smoothly or less expensively.  It is equally important to government represent and serve us all.

When I hear the right revel in its power and claim it has, at last, through enough sand against the seas to stop the tides of progress, I wonder . . . .

If this were 1965 and not 1995, what would they be saying about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.?

Would they lend their strength to the courageous struggle for justice he helped lead, or would they join the reactionary forces who fought against the inevitable wave of the future and who gave comfort to those who reacted with violence and bloodshed?

Would they side with Dr. King and his movement, or would they hide behind the smokescreen of “states’ rights,” which cloaked institutional racism?

Where would they be?  On which side would they fight?

That is, I believe, a reliable litmus test for judging their credibility.

When you listen to political debates and pundits, you often hear references to “the mainstream,” the source of communal values and ideals.

Well, that mainstream is a broad and deep river, not a narrow, winding creek.  It’s character is fed by tributaries from all directions.

Like most Americans, my ancestors came here on a boat.  Our forebears came from all points on the compass.  Some arrived comfortably; many others came with little more than their clothes.  Some arrived in chains.

The great promise of America is that all of them are now free, now equal, and that none can lose rights, dignity, or opportunity because of their race, religion, or station.

It is a promise we must renew and defend every day.

January 14th, 1964

Sixty years ago today, Norman Rockwell’s iconic cover, “The Problem We All Live With,” was published by Look magazine.

January 10th, 1964. Introducing . . . The Beatles.

So long ago, in so many ways.

As Jerry Garcia Once Said, “Here’s the One It’s All About”

January 6th, 1958. St. Louis’ own Charles Edward Anderson Berry goes into the Chess Studios and lays down “Johnny B. Goode.” Though not his biggest hit, chart-wise, the song (the B side was another cookin’ unit, “Around and Around”), as Mr. Garcia noted, defined rock ‘n’ roll. Everyone from the Chipmunks to The Sex Pistols has covered it (if you haven’t, are you really playing rock ‘n’ roll?). Six years and a day later, four lads from Liverpool cut their version. Carl Sagan sent it into the deepest reaches of the universe on the Voyager satellite (imagine the Vulcans’ reaction when they hear it). It is, truly, “the one it’s all about.”

Later,

It’s My Tradition to Mark the Passing of a Year with Dooley Wilson.

Peace, All.