Is it really a good week for the president when the highlight is that he's been acquitted by the Senate on an impeachment charge? And then he does his best impression of a the Night of the Long Knives on Friday, purging the members of his administration who saw what he was doing with Ukraine and though it wrong. The bar is lying on the ground, my friends.
But just in case you thought that the president could rise above the petty politics he practices and appeal to a wider swath of Americans, along comes a proposal that is truly frightening and perhaps more devastating to our way of life. That's right; I'm talking about the proposed Executive Order that would establish a classical architectural style as the default for all new government buildings. Inspired by Greek and Roman styles, these buildings would not just be confined to Washington, but would apply to federal buildings throughout the country.
And who would be one of the arbiters? Mr. Architecture himself, the president.
It's bad enough that he uses vile language and demeans people with offensive nicknames. Now he wants the Trump aesthetic to be the defining artistic movement of the 2020s. Can you say shortsighted with a straight face? I'm sure we all know about regimes that attempt to define what is art and language and who belongs to appropriate ethnicities and how to think and what to write. Are we headed in that direction?
We're already in the car and on the road.
I can understand that many people in the United States have trouble with some modern art because some of it is not outwardly aesthetically pleasing. It's there to make us think. To consider our definitions of beauty and form and structure and why we would use certain materials to express ourselves. But to say that it's all ugly and confusing and that a nice Roman or Greek column would look better in front of every government building is the very definition of small-mindedness, anti-intellectualism, ethnocentrism, and fear of the unknown.
Yes, we have more pressing problems, but this is one that can grow into something far bigger.
For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives or Twitter @rigrundfest
Sunday, February 9, 2020
Sunday, February 2, 2020
Please Excuse Our Appearance While We Renovate Our Democracy
I'm sure you caught Alan Dershowitz eviscerating the constitution last Wednesday, but in case you missed it, here's the money shot:
“Every public official that I know believes that his election is in the public interest,” Mr. Dershowitz, a celebrity defense attorney and member of Mr. Trump’s legal team, said on the floor of the Senate.
He added: “And if a president does something which he believes will help him get elected, in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.”
I hope Mr. Dershowitz has a towel absorbent enough to get all the junk off his face.
We knew that the Republicans would do anything to move this trial along, and quite honestly, the Democrats in the House did not help themselves or the case against the president by punting on issuing subpoenas and fighting the denials in the courts. This gave the Senate majority the excuse to consider only the narrow evidence from the House and to reject new witnesses. John Bolton could have testified in the House, but decided to get cute, or maybe stall until his manuscript was safely in the White House on December 30, so his offer to spill it all in the Senate rings a bit hollow. Not that I agree with much of anything John Bolton believes, including taking the US out of the UN, but it seems that he has a few vertebrae which sets him apart from the slithery amphibians who inhabit the New Swamp.
And Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee is the first runner up to Dershowitz, saying that the president was guilty of what the House charged him with but, well, we can't throw him out because that would be too, you know, incendiary. And besides, we have an election coming up so we'll let the people decide. This kind of reasoning makes Mitt Romney, who did have the backbone to vote to hear witnesses, the conscience of the Republican Party.
Strange days indeed.
For a political organization that's won the national popular vote ONCE since 1992, the Republicans sure like to throw the dice on elections, once for a Supreme Court seat in 2016 and the other this fall. They won the first. Let's hope they lose the bet this November.
And speaking of, with Iowans caucusing and generally making mayhem on Monday night, I certainly hope that the more moderate candidates win or hang in the top three until more representative states can vote in their primaries. I am not a fan of Bernie Sanders and believe that he is a McGovern/Mondale landslide waiting to happen. I like Elizabeth Warren a bit more, but again, I don't see her ideas winning the states she would need to defeat the president.
I'm going to nail my tent spikes for any of Joe Biden, Michael Bloomberg, Amy Klobuchar or Mayor Pete because I truly believe that they can win in November. We are deep in a conservative era now and absent an economic disaster, which I certainly don't want to happen, I don't see the country swinging back to the farther left in a few months.
What the Democrats need to do is give those people who voted for Obama, then Trump, a reason to come back. The focus should be on health care, jobs, the environment and a more common sense approach to immigration and foreign policy. These are the winning issues. I have no doubt that more will come out about the president's destructive policies in Ukraine and other spots around the world, so even without an impeachment inquiry, he is eminently vulnerable to someone who can make the argument that we need a more practical approach to policy.
I could be wrong, but I think that beneath the seeming intransigence of people's political views, or at least what the media is telling us about that, is a recognition among many Americans that we can do better than the minute-to-minute tweetfest that we're currently engaged in, and that we can elect a chief executive who can speak about our aspirations and promise rather than appeal to our darkest fears.
Sunday, January 19, 2020
Gains and Losses on Equality
For all of the terrible news coming out of this administration, there is some good long-terms news on race and equity this Martin Luther King Day.
It seems that those good old liberal ideas, Affirmative Action and the war on Poverty, have had a positive effect on American society. That's right: the two programs that Republicans have been running against since 1964 have, to a large degree, been working. There's no long-terms evidence that whites and men have born the brunt of the laws, nor have they been wastes of time, effort and money. In fact, the United States is a more integrated society because of these laws and they continue to contradict the utter helplessness of the Trump administration's efforts to use race so that whining conservatives have something to talk about on TV and the radio.
The key, it seems, is that corporate America has bought into the truth that diversity in the workplace makes us a more tolerant society and yields more productive and creative experiences. Of course, their concern is profit, but as far as I can see, profits have not suffered as these companies have become more representative of the country. I will also give credit to the major sports leagues and arts organizations, who have used pressure on recalcitrant state and local governments when they attempt to impose discriminatory laws to satisfy those people who are not enlightened.
Despite all of this, we have a long way to go before we have a truly equal society. Discrimination and racism are still rampant in many industries and the wealth gap between African-Americans and whites is as wide and deep as the Grand Canyon. And as long as the president continues to stoke the racial divide and betray an attitude towards women and the LGBTQ community that makes Neanderthals look progressive, we will continue to suffer from a problem that should have been solved long ago.
We have spent four decades under the influence of trickle-down economics and calls for smaller government. The effects of these are, and were, predictable. The gap between the wealthy and everyone else has yawned. Spending on absolute necessities such as schools, drug treatment, family leave laws, tuition subsidies, infrastructure, transportation that doesn't include cars, job retraining, and health care has been cut back or nonexistent. Many of these deficiencies have fallen hardest on the minority community and women, who bear the responsibility for working and caring for children, and face the brunt of criticism when the lack of programs force them to make choices that whiter, wealthier people see as threatening to American culture. Whatever that has become.
On this Martin Luther King holiday, let's continue to work for a more inclusive society, and let's work to make sure that one year from now, we are preparing for the inauguration of a president who values diversity, inclusion, educational equity, and exhibits a vocabulary of healing and justice.
Dreams are great, but reality is much better.
For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives or Twitter @rigrundfest
It seems that those good old liberal ideas, Affirmative Action and the war on Poverty, have had a positive effect on American society. That's right: the two programs that Republicans have been running against since 1964 have, to a large degree, been working. There's no long-terms evidence that whites and men have born the brunt of the laws, nor have they been wastes of time, effort and money. In fact, the United States is a more integrated society because of these laws and they continue to contradict the utter helplessness of the Trump administration's efforts to use race so that whining conservatives have something to talk about on TV and the radio.
The key, it seems, is that corporate America has bought into the truth that diversity in the workplace makes us a more tolerant society and yields more productive and creative experiences. Of course, their concern is profit, but as far as I can see, profits have not suffered as these companies have become more representative of the country. I will also give credit to the major sports leagues and arts organizations, who have used pressure on recalcitrant state and local governments when they attempt to impose discriminatory laws to satisfy those people who are not enlightened.
Despite all of this, we have a long way to go before we have a truly equal society. Discrimination and racism are still rampant in many industries and the wealth gap between African-Americans and whites is as wide and deep as the Grand Canyon. And as long as the president continues to stoke the racial divide and betray an attitude towards women and the LGBTQ community that makes Neanderthals look progressive, we will continue to suffer from a problem that should have been solved long ago.
We have spent four decades under the influence of trickle-down economics and calls for smaller government. The effects of these are, and were, predictable. The gap between the wealthy and everyone else has yawned. Spending on absolute necessities such as schools, drug treatment, family leave laws, tuition subsidies, infrastructure, transportation that doesn't include cars, job retraining, and health care has been cut back or nonexistent. Many of these deficiencies have fallen hardest on the minority community and women, who bear the responsibility for working and caring for children, and face the brunt of criticism when the lack of programs force them to make choices that whiter, wealthier people see as threatening to American culture. Whatever that has become.
On this Martin Luther King holiday, let's continue to work for a more inclusive society, and let's work to make sure that one year from now, we are preparing for the inauguration of a president who values diversity, inclusion, educational equity, and exhibits a vocabulary of healing and justice.
Dreams are great, but reality is much better.
For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives or Twitter @rigrundfest
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