The Casual Blog

Tag: antifa

March 7, 2021

Ospreys, crock potting, and the Trumpist campaign against fair elections

Osprey at Jordan Lake in late afternoon

When I went out to Jordan Lake late Wednesday afternoon, I saw my first osprey of the year perched in a pine across the river.  I put my camera on the tripod and waited for it to fly before dark, but it didn’t.  However, when I went back on Friday afternoon, there were a couple of them patrolling, and in the last patch of sunset on the river, I caught one catching a fish.  I also saw many great blue herons, and one young bald eagle.  

I’ve been learning to cook with an old school crock pot, which has generally worked out fine, though this week I had a near disaster.  I tried to adapt a recipe for spinach lentil soup with lemon.  Crock potting is a good style for me.  It gets to the point without much fuss, but allows for improvisation, and after a long simmer, the result is usually surprisingly good.  

But I was well into adding a lot of chopped vegetables before I realized there wasn’t room in our crock pot for everything, and I had to start subtracting.  The lentils came along much slower than expected, and were not nearly ready by dinner time.  So we ordered  takeout falafel.  We had the lentil soup the next night, and it wasn’t bad.  In fact, Sally said she really liked it.    

Speaking of disappointments, I was hoping the Trump Show was over, but unfortunately, it’s not.  Since 2015, our Disgraced Former President (DFP) has taken up way too much of my brain space!  Whatever you think about the DFP, you have to admit, he is not a quitter.  Last weekend he recycled his patented mix of pomposity, ignorance, and fear mongering to a gathering of Republican leaders in Florida, and guess what?  They cheered him on.

It’s no surprise that the DFP won’t shut up (has he ever?), but I was surprised that the Republican establishment wouldn’t seize the opportunity to change course and dump him.  Surely most of them know perfectly well that his election fraud claims are absurd and despicable lies.  Don’t they?  Is it possible that these accomplished and privileged people have been infected by a mass delusion?

If so, it would not be a first.  Starting in the eighteenth century, American political movements were built on and amplified hysterical fears of Native Americans, Germans, Mexicans, Asians, Irish, Italians, Greeks, Poles, Croats, and the list goes on.  Not to mention movements against Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Mormons, and other non-mainstream religions.  And of course, witches.  Last and also first, there was and is the hateful ideology of white supremacy used to justify enslavement of Black people, and their continuing oppression.

Each of those sad chapters was partially driven by ignorance and fear, but there were also political opportunists who exploited such fears.  The current Republican leaders mostly look like opportunists.  Some of those now cheering the DFP truthfully acknowledged his leadership of the January 6 insurrection just weeks ago.  Last week they were not only supporting the outrageous lie of a stolen election, but were joining the attempt to blame the Trumpist insurrection on antifa and left wingers.  Have they no shame?

Apparently not, and so we’ve got some hard work ahead of us, with the next elections not far ahead.  The reliably incisive Charles Blow recently reported on work by the Brennan Center for Justice finding that state lawmakers have legislation in the works to restrict voting access — meaning suppressing voting by minorities to maintain power by mostly white elites — in 43 states    That’s a lot of states — 86 percent!  As Blow notes, similar voter suppression happened after the Civil War, and subverted democracy.  The current Republicans appear to have decided there is only one way for them to win a fair election:  not to have it.

Fortunately, their efforts to further unlevel the elections playing field are now out in the open, and defensive measures are in process.  The House has passed H.R. 1 with much needed election reform going in the fairness direction, and it is conceivable that the Senate will modify the filibuster and do likewise.  Maybe someday we’ll go further with a commitment to fair elections by simplifying the process and incentivizing participation with paid leave and cash.  

Along with the big challenge of having fairer elections, we also have the separate challenge of how to fashion a government that better serves ordinary people, rather than tilting in favor of corporations and plutocratic elites.  This week I heard a podcast introduction to the proposal of Helen Landemore, a political scientist at Yale.  She sounded brilliant and unafraid to experiment with new ideas for practical improvements to democracy.  

Landemore proposes setting up counsels of randomly selected ordinary citizens to work on important problems.  In an interview by Ezra Klein, Landemore explained that even at its best, our existing system systematically excludes minority and other voices, and that including these voices would improve decision making.  Landemore had some real world examples suggesting how to move forward along this line, including experiments in Iceland, France, and Switzerland.  I’ve got a bit of a reading log jam at the moment, but I’m thinking her book, Open Democracy, could be worth reading.  

September 13, 2020

Our Cape May getaway, and Trump’s fiddling while the West Coast burns

Cape May lighthouse

Last week Sally and I had a beach getaway to Cape May, New Jersey.  We met up with Jocelyn and our new son-in-law Kyle at an Airbnb house, which was charming and comfortable.  Jocelyn and Kyle had, while in New York City, had Covid-19, which in their case was no fun but well short of fatal, and we all thought it likely that they were immune and not infectious.  So we enjoyed cocktails and meals together, slow bike rides, and reading on the beach.  There were dolphins playing just offshore, and several species of seagulls.  

Cape May has a lot of charming Victorian gingerbread-type houses and beautiful gardens.  It also is a prime transit point for birds migrating along the East Coast.  Sally and I went out in the mornings and found some birds we weren’t familiar with, including a few warblers and large flocks of tree swallows.  There were very lush areas near the beach, with lots of wildflowers.  There were also mosquitoes, but no ticks, at least ones that found us.  

We tried to take a break from the news cycle, including the never ending Trump Show, but didn’t succeed entirely.  I found myself cycling between hope that sanity and good sense would ultimately prevail in the next election, and dread of the opposite.  

Trump didn’t seem to have any new ideas, but his old ideas, including trying to scare white people with the thought that Black people were coming to their neighborhoods, had worked for past American presidents, to our national shame.  When fear kicks in, the possibility of either compassion or logical thought is over, which is why he employs it.

But at least for now, judging from recent polling, his fear mongering calls for law and order don’t seem to be convincing anyone who he wasn’t pretty scared already.  Unfortunately, some of those are all in, including so-called patriot militias with guns and QAnon believers.  

One of Trump’s new favorite big lies is that antifa is a terrorist organization responsible for widespread violence.  This lie has been pressed into service to explain the West Coast wildfires, which in the last few days have become catastrophic.  In Trumpworld, the fires were set by antifa, rather than the lightning strikes that were in fact mostly responsible.  Sadly, some folks with flames bearing down on their houses believed that antifa was both responsible and planning to loot their neighborhoods.  Refusing orders to evacuate, they felt they needed to stay to defend their property.

As of this writing, Trump’s response to the West Coast wildfires has resembled his response to the coronavirus, which is to do nothing except emit hot air intended to distract attention from the disaster.  For any other president, this would be a career-ending scandal, an unbelievable dereliction of duty, but for Trump, it’s just a normal week.  

It did seem that Trump was causing some indigestion in the right wing from his derogatory comments about dead American soldiers being suckers and losers.  This is definitely appalling, though not especially surprising.  We’ve seen enough of Trump to know he is a deeply flawed person, with perhaps his most important flaw being an inability to care about anyone other than himself.  He just can’t process empathy and compassion, and therefore thinks they’re for suckers.  

His indifference is, for those whose lives might have been saved by federal action from wildfires, pandemics, and other human derived disasters, a disaster.  For many, including untold numbers of wild animals, this is the end.  For those of us still here, though, Trump’s ultra-selfishness and egomania can serve as a kind of negative example.  

That is, Trump embodies the most extreme version of capitalist amorality, in which greed is good and every other consideration is for losers.  His example of extreme individualism shows that such an ethos works poorly for everyone — even for the uber capitalist, whose appetites are relentless and never satisfied.  The mind set of greedy no-holds-barred individualism is ultimately self destructive, as shown by Trump himself, a sad figure who can barely be said to have a self that is self-aware.  

The opposite orientation — that is, prioritizing the concerns of others, expressing generosity, cultivating compassion — is in some ways more difficult.  But it increases the chances of social harmony and personal fulfillment.  As far as I know, we don’t have a political party organized around unselfishness and related values, but maybe someone will start one — though please, not till after November.   As we start to see the light at the end of the Trump tunnel, it’s a good time to start planning for change.