This is one of those weeks that tend to reaffirm my stubborn refusal to give up being a registered blank, even after my retirement from journalism, and enroll in a party. Between Republican voter suppression, especially in Georgia, and Democratic helplessness, especially in the Senate, I'm going to stay a blank for a while yet.
The situation in Georgia positively stinks of Jim Crow. It's a more technological version of asking potential African-American voters impossible questions, such as how many jellybeans are in a jar or how many bubbles a bar of soap can produce. That kind of poll test was just one way that white supremacists in the South managed to keep African-American citizens from voting in the past. Today's version includes the voter ID scam: It starts with the false notion that millions of sneaky voters are out there, just dying to vote twice, or without being registered. That leads to passage of ID requirements that are either too expensive or too logistically difficult for too many people of limited means. Now, in Georgia, the Republicans have a breathtaking new way of disenfranchising voters of color: Their candidate for governor, Brian Kemp, is also the secretary of state. That job gives him significant control over elections. And boy, is Secretary of State Kemp using it to help gubernatorial candidate Kemp. For years, Kemp has been pruning the voter rolls, removing large numbers of African-American voters. This year, he's holding up 53,000 new registrations, mostly by people of color, with the help of an "exact match" requirement that enables him to invalidate a registration for the tiniest, most nanoscale problems, such as a dropped hyphen in a last name. His opponent in this race is Stacey Abrams, who just happens to be a highly accomplished African-American woman with a real chance of beating him—unless his voter-suppression tactics cripple her campaign. Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times spells it out in infuriating detail in this column. And the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law offers this analysis of voter suppression in Georgia, including Kemp's five-year battle with a civic group that Abrams founded, a battle that disrupted the group's voter registration efforts. The only honorable options for Kemp would be to resign as secretary of state or recuse himself from controlling the voting process in this cycle. But he's one of the Trumpkins, and honorable is a word that doesn't appear in their dictionary. The "president" himself demonstrated that lack of honor when Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes asked him about his public mocking of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who accused now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh of sexually abusing her years ago. “It doesn’t matter,” President Spanky said. “We won.” So much for honorable. As to winning, that's something that Senate Democrats seem almost purposely to avoid. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York agreed to a bizarre, lopsided deal with wily, conscience-free Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky: The Democrats would allow McConnell to rush 15 right-wing judges to confirmation, and the Democrats would get (drum roll) the ability to head back to their home states in October and campaign for re-election. But this week, the Republicans pulled yet another fast one: a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on six more right-wing judicial candidates. Even a former Schumer aide, Brian Fallon, executive director of Demand Justice, expressed outrage. "To me, it's a sign that they didn't just get stuffed in a locker here; they had their lunch money taken," Fallon said, in an article on Common Dreams, a progressive online publication. "If the Democrats were going to fast-track all those Trump judges to get out of town for the rest of October, the least they could have gotten for their trouble was a commitment from McConnell to not still hold hearings while the Senate was adjourned." But no. Even though the Senate is technically in recess, the committee hearing rolled on, minus any participation by Democrats. Maybe Schumer is too tired from all those dopey Sunday press conferences he stages, to get a few lines of coverage on some tiny issue. Or maybe he's just not up to the job. Either way, it looks as if the Senate Democrats are unable to cope with the win-at-all-costs cynicism of the Republicans. Though I'll be voting for Democrats on November 6, out of a sense of outrage at the 24/7 nastiness of Republicans, it's the tactical ineptitude of the Democrats that will keep me a registered blank.
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OK, nobody is going to remove the current name from the Russell Senate Office Building and rename it after a presidential assassin. But now that I have your attention, think of where we have arrived in our nation's history:
The building is currently named for Sen. Richard B. Russell Jr. (D-Georgia), a leading opponent of civil rights for decades. Now Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) wants to rename it for Sen. John McCain (D-Arizona). This proposed honor comes during a week of endless praise for McCain. Even I, no admirer of McCain, would have to admit that his name would be less offensive on that building than the name of a diehard segregationist like Russell. But McCain's record is not unblemished. He did oppose a holiday for Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. And his horrific experience in captivity led him to use racist language about the Vietnamese, studied at length in a book by Irwin Tang called Gook: John McCain's Racism and Why it Matters. That was the war we remember him for, but McCain never saw a war he didn't like: wars that had happened, wars that were about to happen, and an imagined war that he sang about. In 2007, in the fledgling stages of his 2008 presidential campaign, someone asked McCain about military action in Iran. In response, he briefly sang his version of a parody of the song, "Barbara Ann." It went like this: "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran." In Vietnam, we all know the suffering he endured after his A-4 Skyhawk was shot down in 1967. But it's useful to recall that he hadn't been dropping leaflets on Hanoi. He was there to bomb a thermal power plant right in the center of the city, which may have accounted for the rude reception he received when he splashed down in a center-city lake. There's a lot to dislike about McCain, though you'd never know it this week. The often-cited redemptive moment came during his 2008 presidential campaign against Illinois Sen. Barack Obama. In one campaign appearance, McCain pushed back against a woman who called Obama "an Arab." No, McCain said, he's a decent family man and a citizen. (If you are of Arab extraction, you might have wondered whether McCain's denial that Obama was an Arab was also a backhanded way of saying that Arabs can't be decent family men and citizens.) McCain's career is a series of contradictions and paradoxes, ups and downs: from his time as a near-the-bottom-of-his-class midshipman at the Naval Academy, to his constant warmongering, to his criticizing the current "president," while voting with him more than 80 percent of the time. Here's an article that delves into those paradoxes and ups and downs. To get back to the Russell Building, I'd have to admit that we could do a lot worse than naming it for McCain. The worst choice might be Sen. Theodore Bilbo (D-Mississippi), a shameless racist who vigorously opposed anti-lynching laws, worked hard to keep African-Americans from voting in the District of Columbia, and admired the Nazis. Yes, his name would really stain that building. So, of course, would Lee Harvey Oswald's. But no senator has proposed that. A long, well written article by Stephanie McCrummen in the Washington Post offers a chilling insight into the way the members of one Alabama Baptist church have persuaded themselves that the current flawed and decidedly unBaptist "president" is actually doing God's work.
Perhaps the most distressing part of the article was a conversation with Sheila, a Sunday school teacher at the church, who offered a jaw-droppingly narrow definition of some core Christian teaching: "Love thy neighbor, she said, meant 'love thy American neighbor.' "Welcome the stranger, she said, meant the 'legal immigrant stranger.'" In the story, Sheila discussed the admonition by Jesus in Matthew 25:36-41 that we should all care for "the least of these" among us. Sheila's version: "But the least of these are Americans, not the ones crossing the border." With Sunday school teachers like that turned loose on the unsuspecting youth of Alabama, with weird biblical interpretations of who is a neighbor and who is worthy of our care, no wonder 81 percent of evangelicals supported this multiply divorced, crotch-grabbing, Playboy bunny-loving "president." God help us all. In our sports-bar culture, the way too many people show their loyalty to country is to shout "USA! USA!" and proclaim that this is the best nation on the planet—like rabid fans rooting for a football team. But when it comes to proving that loyalty by actually voting in elections and having a say in our future, far too many people just don't bother.
A new report from the Center for American Progress lays out the grim details: In 2016, the presidential election that gave us Donald Trump as president, almost 92 million Americans who were eligible to vote simply did not. In the midterm election year of 2014, the number of eligible voters who chose not to exercise that right was 143 million. That was the lowest voter participation in 72 years. But the report, by Danielle Root and Liz Kennedy, does more than record the grim story of people choosing not to vote. It lays out practical ways to increase the number of people who care enough to cast a ballot. Its title is Increasing Voter Participation in America: Policies to Drive Participation and Make Voting More Convenient. A lot of the voter apathy comes from general disenchantment with our political system and the feeling that it doesn't much matter who gets elected, because all politicians are venal and dishonest anyway. But the election of 2000 proved that theory wrong. George W. Bush managed to eke out a 537-vote victory in the state of Florida, with a helping hand from the Supreme Court of the United States and state election authorities, who had purged thousands of voters from the rolls. That narrow "win" in Florida gave Bush the presidency. He used its power to invade Iraq, a nation that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. That invasion led to the deaths of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Had Al Gore won the presidency, there is little doubt that he would not have invaded Iraq, and all those deaths could have been avoided. In addition to voter apathy, the report points out, there are plenty of structural reasons why voting is much harder than it should be. Other nations do a much better job of getting their citizens to vote than America does. On that measure, our nation is far from number one, despite all the sports-bar-like chants of "USA! USA!" The report goes beyond simply presenting a group of suggested structural changes to increase voting. It uses deep research to estimate how much of a voting increase these reforms could bring about. This is a smart, necessary piece of work. Let's hope that state legislatures pay attention and do what they can to make sure that more Americans actually vote. This is not about God. It's about Theo Epstein. But if the Mets somehow manage to hire Theo away from the Cubs when his current contract expires, that would feel like divine intervention.
Though the Mets organization is notable for its inability to plan ahead, they should all be thinking right now about Theo and 2021. Once Sandy Alderson had to step aside to struggle with cancer, the Mets made the non-decision to put the future of the franchise in the hands of three men and let them decide among themselves. That flies in the face of the most basic principle of management: Fix responsibility. If three guys are responsible, then nobody is responsible. It's not that I dislike or disrespect any of the three members of this Minaya à trois, as WFAN's Chris Carlin dubbed them. That Francophone nickname works because one of the trio is Omar Minaya. I have always been a fan of Omar, and I'm happy he's back with the team, primarily to find good players in Latin America. John Ricco and J.P. Ricciardi are also professional baseball men with excellent resumes. The problem is that they're already with the organization. They're not bringing fresh eyes to this abominable situation, which finds the Mets dueling daily with the Marlins for last place in the National League East. What the Mets really need is an outsider with a stellar record of turning bad teams into good ones—in big, baseball-besotted cities. That's where Theo comes in. He has already worked two baseball miracles: turning baseball dross into World Series gold in both Boston and Chicago. If he were to perform the same miracle in the greatest city in the world and make the Mets into champions, he would be assured of a place in Valhalla, the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. The problem with that dream is the Cubs. At the end of 2016, they signed Theo to a five-year contract extension. So he won't be available to anyone else until the end of 2021—unless, of course, the Cubs revert to form and start losing as regularly as, say, the Mets. But that's not going to happen. So Mets ownership needs to begin planning for 2021. The first step they should take is this: Whoever ends up as the next GM, whether it's one of the Minaya à trois or someone from outside, they must sign him (or her) to a contract that expires no later than the end of 2021. That would give them at least a chance at signing Theo. That one signing alone would do more to excite the team's fan base than almost anything else they could do. If the team continues to play the way it has, large numbers of fans are likely to show up disguised as empty seats. Of course, the Mets get so much of their revenue from television that declining attendance is not as pivotal as it was a few decades ago. Still, an empty stadium is not pretty. So, come on, Fred and Jeff Wilpon, give us some reason to hope. Study some Theo-logy and figure out a way. There's so much to dislike about Rep. Lee Zeldin, the conservative Republican congressman from New York's CD1, who "represents" me in the House of Representatives. He's my congressman, but he certainly doesn't represent my views.
One distasteful trait is his fawning Trumpishness, most recently displayed in a photo on his Facebook page: himself, the "president," and a folded flag. Then there are the two former denizens of the current White House, headlining a Zeldin fund-raiser in Smithtown. Zeldin would argue that he has pushed back occasionally against the current occupant of the Oval Office. But on balance, he's totally on board with this "president." Then there's his voting record. In his current term, to cite just two examples, he has cast a vote that allowed people to hunt hibernating bears and one that did away with a rule protecting streams from the debris of mountaintop-removal coal mining—without really understanding either issue. Now, another awful vote: a yea on the Agriculture and Nutrition Act of 2018, which imposes new work requirements on food stamp recipients. In this Washington Post column, E.J. Dionne explains why that bill is so heartless. The final vote was 213-211. So Zeldin's vote really meant something. Oh, and by the way, do you think there are any poor people in Zeldin's district, including its heartland, Mastic-Shirley? The bill was so bad that even Pete King voted nay. Then there's Sen. AWOL, Tom Croci. Twice now, Croci has gone AWOL, leaving behind an elected office and the people who elected him, in order to be reunited with his first love, the United States Navy. In the first case, he was serving as supervisor of the Town of Islip, but took a leave from that job to return to active duty in Afghanistan. While he was away, the news broke that someone had been illegally dumping toxic materials in Roberto Clemente Park in Brentwood, which had to be closed for three years during the cleanup. The question is: Did Croci tap the Navy on the shoulder and ask for active duty, or did the Navy reach out to him? Will Van Sant of Newsday dug into that issue with this excellent article. You can read it and decide for yourself, but to me, it looks as if Croci just wanted to get out of town. Why? Was it political squabbles? Did he know something about the toxic dumping before the story broke? (Lower-level town officials, it turned out, had been warned.) Or was it simply that his longing to be in uniform outweighed his duty to the people of Islip? Unclear. But this much is crystal clear: Croci's time in Afghanistan did not bring that endless war to a conclusion. It went on without him, went on with him, then continued when he returned to Islip. One thing Croci should have learned from the military is this axiom: The commander is responsible for everything the unit does or fails to do. As the "commander" of Islip, one can argue, he was responsible for the dumping that took place on his watch. But when the news of the scandal broke in May 2014, Croci was on active duty, on the other side of the pond. The scandal didn't help the candidate the Republicans chose to run for the Senate seat that Zeldin held before running for Congress. Councilman Anthony Senft served as the town council's liaison to the parks department. Oops! The whiff of the dumping ultimately led Senft to drop out. Croci, who was AWOL from the town when the scandal broke, came home from not ending the war, just in time to run in Senft's place and win a Senate seat. As if going AWOL from one job were not sufficient, Croci helped tie the New York State Senate in knots by disappearing at the end of this session, the worst possible time, in order to return to active duty—again. What are the chances that his latest tour of duty will be any more successful at ending the war than his last one was? Slim? Infinitesimal? None? Zeldin and Croci—and Senft, for that matter—have something in common: They can lay legitimate claim to being a military veteran. And Zeldin was not shy about spreading "Vote for a Vet" signs around his district during his last campaign. But their time in politics is evidence that being a veteran, all by itself, does not guarantee that someone will do the right thing in office. Other veterans who spring to mind are Lee Harvey Oswald (presidential assassin), Timothy McVeigh (Oklahoma City bomber), Jeffrey Dahmer (serial-killing cannibal), Benedict Arnold (traitor). And the list goes on. No, I'm not saying that either Zeldin or Croci has been even remotely as heinous as that parade of horribles. I simply argue that, when a candidate seems to be claiming that his or her time in the military should be a golden ticket to public office, voters should ask: "Fine. But what else do you have to offer?" In the case of Zeldin and Croci, not much. Our glorious "president," perhaps under the influence of Melania (who turns out to have a heart), said he'll "sign something" to fix the horror he has created on the border, then signed an executive order that may or may not clean up the disaster. As a public service, let me suggest something else for him to sign: his acceptance of Stephen Miller's resignation.
This obscene family separation on the border is the brainchild of the child brain of Miller, a "senior adviser" to the "president." Miller is a thirty-something whiz kid, but in his brain, he is still a high school senior (hence the "senior adviser"), delighting in trolling everyone around him. This piece in the New York Times lays out how Miller and Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III are having the time of their lives creating this cruel chaos. Miller is no more than a high school prankster stalking the halls of the White House. He should use that brain of his to reflect on how his great-grandparents came here from Belarus, to flee anti-Semitic pogroms. As my friend Sol Wachtler points out, in writing about Miller, a pogrom is a particularly virulent form of gang violence, and gang violence in their home countries is exactly what the parents of these children have been fleeing. But Miller and Sessions no longer consider escaping from gang violence a valid reason for seeking asylum. Miller and the "president" want immigrants to have high levels of skill. If that were the rule when his great-grandparents wanted to come here, with little money and no discernible eminence, they'd have been stuck in Belarus and in great peril. If Melania is truly influencing her husband, the "president," she should be whispering in his ear that it's time for Miller to return to his first love: unemployment. Any Mets fan worthy of the name remembers the thuggish slide by Chase F. Utley of the Los Angeles Dodgers that seriously injured Ruben Tejada, the Mets' shortstop. In the years before that ugly event, Utley had truly earned his F. It's the same middle initial assigned to Chipper F. Jones and Freddie F. Freeman, to name just two in a long line of Mets-killers who earned that F. (No need to spell out what it stands for. You get the idea.)
As a member of the Phillies, Utley had been a stone-faced assassin for many years. Efficiently and expressionlessly, he had murdered the Mets on too many occasions to count. Yes, he has a charity for dogs, but no true Mets fan is charmed or fooled. He's still a killer. Then he slid into Tejada in the 2015 National League Division Series between the Mets and Dodgers, ending Tejada's season. Here's what that felonious slide looked like. A few months later, in May 2016, Noah Syndergaard zipped a fastball behind Utley's butt, and the home plate umpire promptly threw him out of the game. This really ticked off Terry Collins, the manager. Now we have video of that event, complete with the uncensored dialogue between Collins and the umpires. In the grander scheme of things, what does this all mean? My theology of baseball: Yes, we are called to forgive those who trespass against us, and we try. But that's in life, not in baseball. Once you have earned your F, you're stuck with it. And Utley will carry that initial to the grave. Until then, we can daydream about throngs of Mets fans attending his funeral. As his body is lowered into the ground, they'll unanimously boo. Seoul is still in my heart. It's been a little more than fifty years since I first set foot on Korean soil, on a snowy day in January 1968. In the thirteen months that followed, I developed a love for the Korean people—not to mention for their delightfully spicy national treasure, kimchi. I taught an English conversation course at the radio station in Chunchon and made some good friends. So I am pleased that, for the moment, they don't face an imminent bombardment of Seoul, even if it means a false glow of unearned triumph for Cadet Bone Spurs, our "president." Last year, we were treated to the potentially planet-ending, omnicidal spectacle of a long-distance insult contest between two crazy supreme leaders, both with bad hair and nukes. So, this latest spectacle, two crazy supreme leaders with bad hair and nukes in a made-for-TV lovefest, was far less unnerving. The early judgment on the Singapore summit, like this Nicholas Kristof column, seems to be that the American supreme leader gave up far more than he got, while the North Korean got the long-sought meeting with an American "president." Kim Jong-un didn't even seem to mind that the "president" he got to meet actually lost the popular vote—a humiliation that Kim can't even imagine. One of the items that the American "president" promised was a cessation of "war games," the joint military exercises involving American and South Korean forces. This concession appears to have caught the Pentagon by surprise. In due course, the generals and the admirals will have to figure out what their commander-in-chief actually meant and how they can obey. As to the nearly 30,000 American troops remaining in Korea, the question arises: What real protection they are providing to the people? Back in 2005, Camp Page, the military installation in Chunchon where I lived and worked for thirteen months, closed. At the time, one city official said that the base had "hampered the development of the city." Talks between the the United States and the Republic of Korea had also scheduled other bases to be returned to Korean civilian control. In the years since Camp Page closed, I hope the city of Chunchon is flourishing. Here's a photo of me with some of my friends at the radio station in 1968. The question remains: How much does South Korea really need the remaining Americans? Setting aside the question of nukes for the moment, it's no secret that North Korea has an overwhelming force of conventional artillery that could rain down death on Seoul in a matter of moments. Those rounds would simply fly over the heads of American troops and land with devastating effect on the huge, vibrant city of Seoul.
So, if this summit did anything to lower the likelihood of conflict between North Korea and its neighbor, it was worth the trip. But the American "president" should not be too quick to boast about his accomplishment. Will the North Koreans move toward total "denuclearization" on the Korean peninsula, as he appears to believe? Or will Kim weasel out of the vague terms of the brief document that emerged from the meeting? We simply don't know. Meanwhile, as our "president" is fond of saying, "We'll see what happens." Among the many questions swirling around us in this troubling time, here are two especially puzzling ones: What were the evangelicals thinking when they supported—and continue to support—the current "president"? Why do so many evangelicals seem to be on the wrong side of the gun control issue? A new book by an evangelical minister sheds some much-needed light.
The book is Costly Grace: An Evangelical Minister's Rediscovery of Faith, Hope, and Love. The minister is Rob Schenck, who became famous as a ferocious opponent of abortion, but turned his attention in recent years to gun violence and the evangelical community's embrace of the gun culture. The title echoes The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian executed by the Nazis, whose theology powerfully influenced Schenck. In that book, Bonhoeffer wrote about "cheap grace" and "costly grace." In this blog post, Schenck discusses at length how his "bromance" with Bonhoeffer has shaped his own thinking. His story is becoming more widely known. First, Abigail Disney captured the arc of his life in an award-winning documentary, The Armor of Light. Now the book lets him tell his own story. It earned a starred review in Publishers Weekly, and Schenck is the subject of this interview about his journey in Mother Jones. Read about the book now, then read the book itself. Costly Grace deserves a wide and receptive audience. |
AuthorFirst in my class in Officer Candidate School. Late to the conclusion that our attitude toward the military is idolatrous. Archives
February 2022
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