Author: orantoday

It looks like the best candidate for president to come along in my lifetime will not get the nomination. Baring a miracle Super Tuesday performance, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren will go back to her seat in the Senate, where she’ll remain the bane of rogue bankers, payday lenders and all of those who prey upon the weak and try to equate democracy with capitalism.

It’s a shame. Warren showed up ready to govern. A law professor whose landmark study of bankruptcy taught us that most personal financial crises aren’t caused by irresponsibility but by sudden expenses for which people caught in wage stagnation, crippling health care costs, spiraling housing prices and unaffordable education simply cannot prepare themselves. Warren sees the threat to the working class trickle down economics has created the past 40 years, but what’s more, she sees the threat to the nation the impending crisis presents. As the Wall Street Journal has noted, Warren comes not to attack capitalism, but to save it.

She’s prepared. Her ideas are laid out on her website and if you wish, she’ll text them to you. She’s got more energy than a puppy on a sugar rush. She’s the best I’ve ever seen at explaining complex ideas, a skill that comes with being a great teacher. And she never had a chance running a Democrat.

There’s a cute saying, “Democrats want to fall in love and Republicans fall in line.” That’s not why Senator Professor Warrent (h/t Charles Pierce) won’t get the nomination though. She won’t get the nomination because Democrats are voting for who they think is the best candidate and Republicans are voting for who they think will be the best president. Say what you want about trump, he’s stupid, he’s a con man, he’s a screaming racist, he’s a thief. All of that is true. And Republicans don’t care because he’s doing the job they wanted him to do. He’s making it harder to be brown, to be poor and to speak out in this country. He’s given them tax cuts and judges who would vote to uphold the
Dred Scott decision. They didn’t nominate him because they thought he would be a strong candidate against Hillary Clinton. The nominated him because he is what they want in a president.

Not Ds. Nope. The Ds are going to vote for who they think will make the best candidate. And they are spectacularly bad at it. Warren is exhibit A. The vast majority of my trump-hating friends were fully on board with Warren as long as the stories were about her plans, her energy and her background. It wasn’t until the press started questioning her electability that they started wavering. Once that happened, Warren dropped like a name on the Dick Cavett Show.

The GOP doesn’t do this because they don’t trust the press. When the press told them trump wasn’t electable, the reaction was “fuck you, get a real job you lying sacks of shit.” But when the press told Ds Warren wasn’t electable because she’s too shrill, not likeable, doesn’t have energy they acted like NFL scouts at the combine. Did they look at the tape and see if any of that bullshit was true? Nope, they went running for a safe white man. Democratic voters will complain about the horse race coverage, but they are reacting to it. They are informed by it and they vote based on what the insider press does.

And here’s the bad news. Voters aren’t who the political press is writing for. The political press, other than the occasional Cletus Safari, doesn’t have the first clue what voters want. They talk to political insiders. Their coverage is framed through the lens of electability, because their sources are people who get people elected for a living. Jay Rosen of NYU has suggested a new model for political coverage(and my alma mater, The Facts newspaper of Brazoria County seems to be paying attention). Rosen calls for reporters to listen to the voters. It sounds obvious, but it’s actually revolutionary. You go out and you talk to people about what they care about and the questions they have. You convene focus groups. You work the streets. You bother people at the mall until you can speak for your community. Then you ask those questions. And if a candidate dodges them, you point that out and ask it again. Stop interviewing the campaign staff. It’s really hard. And it doesn’t get you invited to the church of the savvy.  But that’s what the job is.

Republicans understand this about the press. D’s don’t. Instead, they try to follow the press and ape their lens. But voters don’t have the time to do it right (and it can’t be done right anyway). So they come up with bullshit reasons not to vote their conscience. So I’ve got to vote for a 37-year-old who can’t get elected in Indiana and was the mayor of a town the size of Beaumont. Or a nobody midwestern senator. Or Joe Biden. All of these people make more attractive candidates than Warren, when viewed from the pews of the church of the savvy. But we’re not electing a candidate. We’re electing a fucking president.

Who do you want to go to war with? Biden, a man who voted yes twice for Gulf wars. Bernie, who might have us helping rebels in Angola (ok, cheap shot). If Elizabeth Warren tells us we need to go war, you know damn well she’s right because she’s put a lot of thought in it and you know she’s done everything she can to avoid it. It won’t be for ideology and it won’t be for expediency. If Warren tells you Medicaid for All is too expensive, or isn’t the right plan or can’t be shoved through Congress, you know its because she’s done her homework. Warren isn’t looking to pass something, she’s looking to help people. She’s the only candidate in the field who isn’t running because it’s a promotion, other than Sanders. She doesn’t want to wield power. She didn’t want to run for Senate. She didn’t want to run for president. But she looked around and came to the same conclusion I did. She’s the best person for the job.

 

I’ve been listening to Mike Duncan’s Revolutions podcast lately. I even read his book “The Storm Before The Storm” about the fall of the Roman Republic. This comes on the heels of reading a book about the 1850s that I can’t remember but will update as soon as I lead the beach. I’ve still got “The Road to Disunion”‘s two volumes on the stack. The thing that has hit me hardest in this spree is everything changes during the revolution. No matter how it comes out, everything changes.

Name a single national political figure from 1858 who was still a national political figure in 1968? Sumner? Stevens? I’d argue they weren’t really powerful figures before the war. Visionaries, the antebellum Howard Beales pehaps, but not really players. Robspierre, my man Danton, Marat, none of the were anything before the French Revolution and none of them survived it. Even the restored monarchy was vastly different than la ancien régime. Like the French Revolution, the English Revolution ended with a restoration, but it was a very different world.

We’re undergoing a counterrevolution right now in this country. It’s my fervent belief/hope that we’re seeing white supremacy’s dying convulsions as the president*(tm Charles P. Pierce) uncorks two generations of white backlash. I believe/hope that Tucker Carlson and Patrick Crusius are the dry heaves of white resentment of the Civil Rights Movement. It’s my belief/hope that trump will get rolled in the next election and those who gleefully jumped on the hate train will get rolled with him. It’s my belief/hope that the evangelicals will separate from the prosperity gospelers who have hitched a ride in their backwards wagon and the former will fade back into the world Flannery O’Connor knew so well and later will actually find Jesus (perhaps Matthew 25:35 would be a good place to look).

But we’re not going back to 2008. As William Strauss and Neil Howe noted in their epochal Generations, America goes through a crisis every 80 years or so and emerges much different, even though the good guys have won all the battles so far. But the country that emerged from the Revolutionary War, the Civil War and World War II was a very different nation than the one that entered each of those. President Warren/Biden/Buttigieg/Whoever will wield power in a very different way than presidents have since Roosevelt. The broken norms are Humpty-Dumpty. We aren’t going back. (If trump remains president*, it might be the last election of my lifetime).

Joaquin Castro outed trump donors in San Antonio. That was wrong. Not because we shouldn’t know who’s funding our leaders. We should. We all have civic duty to go to Open Secrets and look it up. Every newspaper should run the lists, not just of the president, but of donors to congresspeople, state reps, county commissioners and school board members. I did a story on money in a Brazoria County sheriff’s race. It was not only instructive from a horse race perspective (votes followed the money, even switching sides during the runnoff) it was a look into how people use money in a democracy.

But a politician outing donors of his opponent is somehow different. Especially since his focus isn’t on illuminating who the politician owes, but on illuminating who supports the politician, and thus, his policies. It’s not dangerous, but it’s distasteful. It’s a little creepy. But it’s not going to be the last time. And I understand why he did it. The San Antonio Express-News hasn’t done it. If you’re going to support evil, people should know. I’m sure there are people who voted for Hitler because of economic anxiety. They’re still Nazis. The Miami Dolphins owner has a foundation dedicated to ending racism in sports. But he gives money to trump and raises a lot more for him. That’s something we should know.

If the Ds win in 2020, if they take back the Senate and the White House, they will toss the rulebook. As a Burkean conservative, that bothers me. I really think change should happen within existing institutions and respect the rule of law. I hope one of the changes we’re going to see is greater respect for the rule of law. But you can bet the Ds will pack the Supreme Court and the federal benches. If they have the numbers, they’ll start impeaching judges. Speech codes are a distinct possibility. Ideally, every state will adopt the Wisconsin Model for education (did you know the libraries at UW are open to all state residents?) and we’ll finally see infrastructure week and a tax code that rewards labor as much as investment and encourages saving as much as spending.

But there’s going to be a dark side to this too. Some things will go too far (did I mention speech codes?). The people who got us into this mess, Biden, Clinton, McConnell, the Bushes, will be gone — swept away by the Ocasio-Cortezes, Omars, Hegars and O’Rourkes and whatever more radical things come next. That will be the thing to look for. When those we consider radical are suddenly denounced by Gen Z as reactionary, we’re too far down the road to turn back. For better or worse, this will be a very different country and a very different world in just 10 years.

I’ve come to believe we can only purge the sins of the last generations by burning them out. The sooner we deal with income inequality, the better and if those who have hoarded wealth the last 40 years don’t want to come along willingly, we’ll have to drag them for their own good. If those who benefitted from 400 years of institutionalized racism won’t acknowledge it, they’ll have to deal with the consequences. It’s time to burn the racism that is America’s original sin out and move on to what the next bad thing is. Because if we don’t those coming behind us will just take it. Right now we’re seeing the violence from the reactionaries trying to hold on to what they’ve had. But if they keep denying everyone else a chance, everyone else will eventually rise and take it. And they won’t stop at income. I believe/hope trump and his ilk are Sulla, the Roman counsel who overwhelmed the opposition and established what he thought was the traditional balance of power. But it wasn’t the norm, it was a 100-year blip he was trying to re-establish. His reforms didn’t last a single generation before Caesar came along.

America’s greatness is an ideal for which we’ve strived. Our exceptionalism is in the striving, not the achievement. Slavery, imperialism, Darwinistic capitalism are all roadblocks to achieving the ideal. But the history of the country has been a history of striving down that path. Taking three steps forward and two back. And every time we’re rocked back, the path ahead of us changes a little bit, or a lot. We’re rocked back now. What’s the path going to look like going forward?

In the confirmation class I taught last year, we read Letter from a Birmingham Jail, the MLK treatise that white people tend to trample on in their rush to talk about the content of their character. King’s target isn’t the hooded Klansman tossing a bomb into a church or the vile police commissioner siccing dogs on children as they march for freedom on Easter Sunday. It’s the moderate clergy who hide behind their affinity for order over love. I wonder what he would have made of the pastor of Lumberton, Tex.’s Infant Jesus Catholic Church when Father Andrew R. Moore posted the picture of a rosary made partially of bullets on Facebook. I wonder what Dr. King would have thought about the idea of praying for God to deliver us from evil while fondling an object whose only purpose is to kill? For that matter, I wonder what Jesus would have thought of saying the words He taught us, using a bullet as a talisman. I wonder what the Holy Mother would have thought about someone describing a rosary as a “weapon,” one to be wielded “against the world and the flesh” as well as Satan.

Christianity has become cheap these days. Too many people equate it with temporal power, the power to bend other men to your will, whether it’s to tell them who they can sleep with, who they can love or who they can vote for. Too many people equate it with money, with success and they equate their monetary success with rightousness. This turns Christianity into political party. It’s turns Christianity not into quest for truth and a path to make this a better world, but into a quest for dominance.

There can be nothing clearer than the Bullet Rosary. We are supposed to ask God to help us forgive those who have done us wrong, to supplicate ourselves at His feet and the feet of those we have offended. A bullet isn’t an instrument of supplication. Christianity isn’t about power, it’s about humility. This isn’t a lesson in which the Catholic Church as immersed itself over the millenia but there is a reason Jesus didn’t wallow in politics. It wasn’t because politics was dirty or too secular. It’s because politics is coercive. Government is inherently limiting of free will. Jesus showed us the path, but he didn’t shove us down it. Without free will there is no virtue and without virtue there is no sin.

The Bullet Rosary isn’t about free will, it’s not about humbling yourself so you may serve others. It’s about strengthening yourself so that you my dominate them. It’s perfectly symbolic of the white supremacy I hope is making its final stand in the United States. It’s a symbol of God’s love, but remember, at the heart of it is a bullet with your name on it if you don’t do what we tell you.

The top post on Father Moore’s Facebook page is a sign in front of his church asking, “Lord please heal our nation.” Immediately under that is a schedule. Penance is 4 p.m. Saturday.

Lake Conroe isn’t spectacular. There are no stunning views. The water is gray, crowded with boats and the houses on shore sit closely together. The houses are nice, modern and airy and there are, with lots of green between the porch and the water. There is less green between the homes themselves.

It was the closeness of the neighbors’ that made me check he distance from my brother-in-law’s house to Galveston when we gathered the Saturday before Memorial Day. We were celebrating my mother-in-law’s approaching 90th birthday. It was a surprise party. My wife and her sister decorated the house in Braves gear. Friends came from across the state. Her octogenerian sisters flew in from Bogotá with their families to complete the surprise. That’s why I checked the distance to the coast. If it was more than 100 miles, ICE would have to get a warrant to come on the property. I looked at Elisa, the two-year-old daughter of Pam’s cousin. She ordered everyone around, tolerated no dissent and proclaimed her righteousness. In Spanish. Most of the conversations were in Spanish. My mother-in-law, long a United States citizen is still more comfortable in her native language, so that’s what her children speak to her. About half the people there were either fluent or native speakers and some of the rest of us were trying to get by.

I sat in the backyard, watched the kids frolic on the grass, in the water and on the inner-tube behind the boat. Fear nudged me, softly, like breeze coming off the Lake. What if the neighbors, overhearing the Spanish from the new guy’s yard, called ICE? Did the Colombians leave their passports at my mother-in-law’s? What about my kids. They don’t have licenses and we didn’t bring their passports from Austin. Other than my wretched Spanish, I had no way to prove my citizenship. We’d have to write Nashville for my birth certificate. My family was in Texas before there was United States, but I’m not 100 percent sure we’ll be able to stay.

This is America now.

It’s not a long jump from taking children from parents because the parents seek asylum here. The next step has already been made. The administration wants to cull some naturalized citizens from the rolls. If my mother-in-law loses her passport, will they take my wife’s? Her father died before her mother became a citizen. Will there be a move to require both parents be citizens for the child to be a citizen? Will it be retroactive? It sounds crazy. A lot of things sounded crazy 513 days ago.

This is America now.

It’s a country where you have to worry about family members being ripped from you because someone wants to make a point or needs leverage. It’s a country where the leaders justify unspeakable cruelty to children by pointing to scripture. But never to this one. It’s a country where people call you out for not supporting a leader doing things that make you physically ill.

I’ve never been one of those people who believe it can’t happen here. I’ve read my Baldwin. I listen, actually listen, to East Texas. I’ve known it’s been there, just below the surface all this time. I’ve read enough history to know how this country was built. I’ve known it could happen, because I know it’s happened before. But I’m shocked at how quickly it’s happened. I’m shocked at how easily it’s happened. I’m shocked by how people I thought I knew revel in it.

I’ve thought about that a lot since Memorial Day weekend. I don’t know if these angry people are the dying gasp of America’s dark side, or if they’re going to gut everything we thought this country meant and paint their faces in the blood. Because they don’t seek truth. They seek comfort. They fear a changing world because they fear they won’t survive on their merits if they can’t rig the game.

Many of these people are strangers, friends of a friend who ended up on the same facebook post. But others were friends. People to whom I’ve been close. In at least one case, someone I considered family. What they’ve shown me is the lie. They were my friends as long as we agreed. They were there when the times were good. But if it ever goes bad, they’ll take the easy way out.

That’s the worst part of this. Not that it’s already happening to America, horrible though that is, but that the neighbor who calls ICE might be the neighbor I’ve known all along.

This is America today.

Fellow Beaumont expat Franny Oxford blessed us with her thoughts today:

Some friends have been saying, this week, that they’re depressed, or over it, or somehow losing heart due to “everything that’s going on.” This is on both sides of the political experience.

I’m tired tonight. I’ve always been a news junkie, but now the habit is overwhelming. I’ve OD’d and I still feel like I’m missing everything. There is too much coming too fast. And none of it is good.

I’m scared. I don’t like a lot of what I’m doing. I’m not crazy about constantly fighting on facebook with people I know. I’m not proud of some of the things I’ve said. And I’m not sure that any of it is getting through to anybody. I’m not a politician, I’m not a reporter anymore. I don’t have any special skills or great ideas to pull this country back from the abyss. All I can do is bear witness. All I can do is say what I see and what I think. All I can do is try to listen.

“And as for you, brothers and sisters, never tire of doing what is good.”

I want to crawl into a bubble. I want to have soothing platitudes read to me by people who agree with everything I say. I don’t want to be challenged and I don’t want to hear from people who say I’m wrong and that I’m what’s wrong with the country. I don’t want my moral underpinnings and my comfort to be threatened, even as I don’t want my comfort to be my moral underpinning.

I’m disappointed in some people. I’m disappointed they believe what they believe, but I’m more disappointed in those who will not, who cannot actually listen to another person. I’m disappointed in those who seek comfort in homogeneity of thought, of belief  and who find comfort in conformity, even as I wish I could allow myself to wallow in that conformity, even for a day.

Mostly I’m disappointed in myself, that I’ve not been able to transcend our times, to make a difference, to change minds. I’m disappointed that I haven’t been able to hear, to really hear more of those people and to understand what drives them. I’m seeking that understanding. I find myself more comforted by religious texts than ever before. I am, for once, nestled snugly in the bosom of Mother Church. But that’s just Francis edging the church toward my bubble. I don’t feel any closer to or more distant from God. But the church agrees with me on the pressing issues of the day and we can ignore our differences.

All I can do is bear witness, so I will keep on bearing witness. I will keep on striving to listen and I will keep on failing. I hope it’s enough.

For many of us, the election is more baffling than calculus in sanskrit. The one thing you can say about Trump is, while he lies to make himself look better, he always tells the truth when telling us how he’s going to implement his dystopian vision of America. I, personally, cannot fathom how anyone who reads, who has a modicum of intelligence and who considers him or herself even nominal Christian can elect Trump.

I’ve been fighting my battle on Facebook, for better or worse. It’s been the only platform I have. A few people have unfriended me. A few more have horribly disappointed me. I’ve been called a cop killer, a traitor and a heretic and I’m sure I’ve given more offense than I’ve gotten. All I’ve learned was the depth and the width of the divide in this country.

Then, in the midst of a fairly bitter debate over healthcare (with an old friend who supports repeal despite the fact it means he won’t be able to get health insurance), I got a message from another old friend, one who is deeply, sincerely religious and for whom I have a great deal of respect and affection.

She was an “abused, divorced woman with no job and two children” and she was denied the help she needed. Over an eight-month period of time her benefits totaled $1,000.

“Thank you. Thank you that the system is so screwed up that the person who has paid into the system since I was 15 could not get the help needed because of my puny level of education, BFA only, the color of my skin, which is white; I was shown the door. Oh you’ll be fine. I’m here to tell you all that the entire system, EVERYTHING is screwed up and I’m an angry, educated, middle class, single, working mom and my government failed me. FAILED ME. I would have BEEN ON THE STREETS with two little girls if not for my family who IS wealthy. Overhaul it all. Count yourselves blessed. You argue over something that doesn’t truly affect you in your station in life. Lose your job, your home, your second bread winner and ALL of your money because of an abusive relationship or whatever and then I might listen to your arguments. I’ve been there. Scared, helpless, thrown away. Where was MY help … Sorry, but I needed help and y’all don’t and you are arguing. Poor and uneducated got it made kid. Not me. I suffered. The mentally ill suffer. Poor and rich are doing great … I’m pissed.”

The Democratic failure is the failure to realize visceral fears sometimes outweigh ideals. When you feel survival is at stake, when you need help to feed your kids and protect yourself, Jefferson’s words don’t mean shit. Survival is the first order. And when you come through it, you’re going to remember who helped you and who didn’t. Even if that memory isn’t rationale. It doesn’t matter that the fear is irrational, especially if you do nothing rationale to address that fear. “My government failed me.” The Ds utterly ignored that and the nation is jeopardy because of it.

People need help. Even those who don’t are scared they might and that it won’t be there. That’s why we see the political commons breaking down. We see a great many officials bragging about the number of people who have gained insurance under the ACA. But we see very little about the people who had insurance and saw their rates rise. Or the people who didn’t and were forced to buy it but didn’t qualify for subsidies. That they are better off with insurance, that the cost of insurance has nothing to do with Obamacare means nothing to people who feel they are in jeopardy. And being told it’s for society in general does nothing but make it worse. No one wants to be sacrificed for the greater good. The Ds need to explain why it’s better for them. They need to explain why healthcare costs are going up. And they need to quit pussyfooting around single-payer.

My friend’s problems weren’t caused by other people who got benefits. She wasn’t the victim of disparate treatment from the government. She was just failed by the government. The reasons why don’t matter. When the Democrats insist in that system is working, when they simply blow her off as racist, when they ignore her concerns, real or not, they lose. They allow Trump to swoop in and tap that anger (I don’t know who my friend voted for, for the record) and offer an outlet for that anger. Trump, more than anything else, is the candidate of rage. And the D’s allow that rage to flow unabated.

If we’re not going to drown in a wave of anger, ideals have to be communicated and rage has to be addressed. That doesn’t mean pandered to, but explained. The anger needs to be met head on, not dismissed as a mere character flaw. Most importantly, the Democrats have to listen, not, as the Facebook meme goes, to reply, but listen to understand. You need to see what people are really scared of. It’s not government’s job to give us what we want, but to protect us from what we fear.

There are people who are just never going to get it. There are people who support the racism and xenophobia that is the mother’s milk of Trump’s electoral success. They are a lost cause. But my friend isn’t. Her anger needs to be listened to. She needs to hear a party talking to her and when she’s pissed and no one wants to deal with her, she’s going to listen to the guy who’s pissed too.

“My government failed me.” Nothing the GOP is doing will make that better. That makes it more important than ever for the Democrats to meet that head on. The GOP wants government to fail. That anger will not away. That anger is what will lead to revolution.

 

I could not agree more. Never have I wanted to crash a system if such a system exists. This man is a maniac.

If my family were immigrating in 2017, we would’ve been separated. We came in parts because refugees don’t have the luxury of flying the entire family at once. My dad made the decision at 25-years-old to split us up and come here. He wanted a better life for his family that didn’t involve checkpoints at gunpoint.

I was too young to register the anxiety my parents had, and I only faintly remember my excitement about being reunited. I practiced for weeks on end the only English I knew, “One cup of juice please,” and I said it to the flight attendant with the pride that only a four-year-old can have. I remember sitting in that chair and being transported to this new world where my dad existed beyond a picture and a cologne insert in a magazine — he still wears Polo. But I remember feeling whole. I cannot imagine seeking refuge now, only to find out after years apart, that you’d be detained in an airport and sent back.

From a Muslim friend:

Here’s a moment from last night. We went to a Persian restaurant for dinner. It was packed, every brown ethnicity that you could think of that God created. The food was perfect. The decor was tacky and wonderful. A family finished eating and as they left, one of their kids let the door slam behind them. Everyone, including the wait staff, jumped and ducked.

Even though we told ourselves all is well, deep down we know it isn’t. It’s so so sad. It really is. Everyone tried to laugh about it after. All the men, in different languages — Farsi, Arabic, Spanish, Mandarin — just started talking to each other and laughing. The women just kind of nodded their heads along. I think it will be a while before I go to an ethnic restaurant.