Starting today, the daylight will begin to lengthen here in the Northern Hemisphere. Climatologist Brian Brettschneider offers a wonderful collection of maps of the light as it strikes us. Follow the link to explore. Here's a sample. I love maps.
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In this moment when we're forced to watch the laughably undemocratic (small "d") U.S. Senate thwart the will of a sizable majority of us, it's worth recalling that the democratic impulse is astonishingly resilient -- and on the move in unlikely places.
Honduras: In 2009, the U.S.-backed a military coup ousted the more or less legitimate government of President Manuel Zelaya. That unfortunate country has been governed (and misgoverned) by a series of unpopular violent kleptocrats ever since. At times, narco traffickers seemed to own the state. The 2017 election was a violent mess; 23 people died and protesters filled the streets, protesting electoral manipulation which kept the ruling party in power. Even the Organization of American States called that "election" a fraud.
SANTIAGO, Chile — Gabriel Boric, a tattooed 35-year-old former student leader from the far south of Patagonia, has secured a crushing victory to become Chile’s president-elect.Chile was Latin America's most stable democracy until the U.S.-backed a coup in 973 overthrew its elected socialist government. U.S. rightwing economists used the unfortunate country as a playground for trying out their exploitative theories. Chile then suffered under a vicious fascist military dictatorship until 1990. It seemed to have established a viable constitutional system including peaceful transitions of power, but popular fury over remnants of the dictatorship and economic inequity has been rising.
This is the hardest part. Sebastian Haffner recounts how life under the victorious Nazis overwhelmed his moral instincts and hopes -- and those of everyone around him. (Part one of my series on Defying Hitler: a memoir; there's a part two here: "how could the Nazis seize power".)
For all the upheaval in German society subsequent to the Great War, the arrival of a barbaric governing force that respected no civilized norms found Haffner and his peers utterly unprepared. Everything they had ever known couldn't be collapsing, could it?
I had already lived through a fair number of “historical events.” All Europeans of the present generation can make that claim, and none more so than the Germans. Those events have naturally left their mark on me, as on all my compatriots. If one fails to appreciate this, one will not be able to understand what happened later.
There is, however, an important difference between what happened before 1933 and what came afterward. We watched the earlier events unfold. They occupied and excited us, sometimes they even killed one or another of us or ruined him; but they did not confront us with ultimate decisions of conscience. Our innermost being remained untouched. We gained experience, acquired convictions, but remained basically the same people. However, no one who has, willingly or reluctantly, been caught up in the machine of the Third Reich can honestly say that of himself.This unpreparedness was as much personal as societal.
... I can only smile ruefully when I consider how prepared I was for the adventure that awaited me. I was not prepared at all. I had no skills in boxing or jujitsu, not to mention smuggling, crossing borders illegally, using secret codes, and so on; skills that would have stood me in good stead in the coming years.
My spiritual preparation for what was ahead was almost equally inadequate. Is it not said that in peacetime the chiefs of staff always prepare their armies as well as possible — for the previous war? I cannot judge the truth of that, but it is certainly true that conscientious parents always educate their sons for the era that is just over. I had all the intellectual endowments to play a decent part in the bourgeois world of the period before 1914. I had an uneasy feeling, based on what I had experienced, that it would not be much help to me. That was all. At best I smelled a warning whiff of what was about to confront me, but I did not have an intellectual system that would help me deal with it.Like most people everywhere, politics was just background noise to Haffner, more unpleasant static than a vital interest. He didn't have to define himself in relation to this country's political currents -- and he didn't.
At that time I had no strong political views. I even found it difficult to decide whether I was “right” or “left,” ...
At about five o’clock the evening papers arrived: “Cabinet of National Unity Formed — Hitler Reichschancellor.” I do not know what the general reaction was. For about a minute, mine was completely correct: icy horror. Certainly this had been a possibility for a long time. You had to reckon with it. Nevertheless it was so bizarre, so incredible, to read it now in black on white. Hitler Reichschancellor ... for a moment I physically sensed the man’s odor of blood and filth, the nauseating approach of a man-eating animal — its foul, sharp claws in my face. Then I shook the sensation off, tried to smile, started to consider, and found many reasons for reassurance.It was just too much of a break from the world that he had known to take in. But very quickly, he began to hear dire stories. This was a world before the internet, so rumors of the worst atrocities passed from mouth to mouth. Massacres in working class neighborhoods; Jewish professionals beaten and dragged into the streets. But the Nazi-controlled media -- that was all mainstream media -- also frequently trumpeted horror stories of terror, naming them victories for the purity of the fatherland.
In 1933 the terror was practiced by a real bloodthirsty mass (namely the SA — the SS did not play a part until later), but this mass acted as “auxiliary police,” without any emotion or spontaneity, and without any risk to themselves. Rather, they acted from a position of complete security, under orders and with strict discipline. The external picture was one of revolutionary terror: a wild, unkempt mob breaking into homes at night and dragging defenseless victims to the torture chambers. The internal process was repressive terror: cold, calculated, official orders, directed by the state and carried out under the full protection of the police and the armed forces.Yet he had to keep on living. People do.
Daily life also made it difficult to see the situation clearly. Life went on as before, though it had now definitely become ghostly and unreal, and was daily mocked by the events that served as its background.
Strangely enough, it was just this automatic continuation of ordinary life that hindered any lively, forceful reaction against the horror. I have described how the treachery and cowardice of the leaders of the opposition prevented their organizations from being used against the Nazis or offering any resistance. That still leaves the question why no individuals ever spontaneously opposed some particular injustice or iniquity they experienced, even if they did not act against the whole. (I am not blind to the fact that this charge applies to me as much as to anyone else.) It was hindered by the mechanical continuation of normal daily life.Haffner was a law student, cramming for an approaching exam which would entitle him to a career in the courts -- and justify all the money his father had paid for his education. He spent his days reading alongside a roomful of students much like him -- a room from which all the Jewish students quickly disappeared. One day, S.A. thugs came in to inspect who was left ...
... a brown shirt approached me and took up position in front of my worktable. “Are you Aryan?” Before I had a chance to think, I said, “Yes.” He took a close look at my nose — and retired. The blood shot to my face. A moment too late I felt the shame, the defeat. I had said “Yes”! Well, in God’s name, I was indeed an “Aryan.” I had not lied, I had allowed something much worse to happen. What a humiliation, to have answered the unjustified question as to whether I was “Aryan” so easily, even if the fact was of no importance to me! What a disgrace to buy, with a reply, the right to stay with my documents in peace! I had been caught unawares, even now. I had failed my very first test. I could have slapped myself.Shamed as he felt, the temptation was always to go along and keep his head down.
The plight of non-Nazi Germans in the summer of 1933 was certainly one of the most difficult a person can find himself in: a condition in which one is hopelessly, utterly overwhelmed, accompanied by the shock of having been caught completely off balance. We were in the Nazis’ hands for good or ill. All lines of defense had fallen, any collective resistance had become impossible. Individual resistance was only a form of suicide. We were pursued into the farthest corners of our private lives; in all areas of life there was rout, panic, and flight. No one could tell where it would end.
At the same time we were called upon, not to surrender, but to renege. Just a little pact with the devil — and you were no longer one of the captured quarry. Instead you were one of the victorious hunters. That was the simplest and crudest temptation. Many succumbed to it. Later they often found that the price to be paid was higher than they had thought and that they were no match for the real Nazis.Under the pressure of circumstances, the instinct is to deform your own being in an illusory escape.
You do not want to let yourself be morally corrupted by hate and suffering, you want to remain good-natured, peaceful, amiable, and “nice.” But how to avoid hate and suffering if you are daily bombarded with things that cause them? You must ignore everything, look away, block your ears, seal yourself off. ...
... So it is no wonder that the opposition has never developed any goals, methods, plans, or expectations. Most of its members spend their time bemoaning the atrocities. The dreadful things that are happening have become essential to their spiritual well-being. Their only remaining dark pleasure is to luxuriate in the description of gruesome deeds, and it is impossible to have a conversation with them on any other topic. ...
... However far one retreated, everywhere one was confronted with the very thing one had been fleeing from. I discovered that the Nazi revolution had abolished the old distinction between politics and private life, and that it was quite impossible to treat it merely as a “political event.” It took place not only in the sphere of politics, but also in each individual private life; it seeped through the walls like a poison gas. If you wanted to evade the gas there was only one option: to remove yourself physically — emigration. Emigration: that meant saying goodbye to the country of one’s birth, language, and education and severing all patriotic ties.Emigration was the personal solution that Haffner was fortunate to be able to accomplish in 1938. Shortly after, he began writing the manuscript that became this book. He abandoned the project when the shooting war began in August 1939. During the war, he made a living in journalism, first writing in German and then in English while living in Britain. In the 1950s, he left Britain to return to Germany where he became an esteemed political commentator over several decades. His son found the manuscript of Defying Hitler after his father's death.
• • •
Coda: on The Bulwark Podcast, Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff, a leader in the Congressional effort to impeach Donald Trump -- twice -- was asked what it was like to see Republican colleagues he had long known absorbed by an authoritarian cult: ".. what I learned all too painfully was, it happens one day at a time, one small concession at a time in the beginning, one small lie, followed by a demand for a bigger lie and a bigger concession, a bigger moral lapse, followed by another until you know, these folks that I admired and respected, because I believe that they believe what they were saying, had given themselves up so completely to Donald Trump and his immorality."
• • •
Postlude: G. Elliot Morris is a young and upcoming data nerd for The Economist. He has looked at what he's finding and concluded:
"Democratic decline starts when one party refuses to play by the agreed-upon rules. Accelerating downturn ends either when forces for good reform institutions and cut off illiberalism at its roots, or when authoritarians succeed in overthrowing the government without the consent of all the nation’s people. America has begun its decline. The people must now choose the ending...."
We've been warned.
There are legions of historians, sociologists, and economists who have devoted lives to that question. Sebastian Haffner lived it and provides the observations of a sensitive eyewitness in Defying Hitler: a Memoir, written in 1939 from exile from Germany when he could not know where all this might lead. (Part one of my series on this book is here.)
From 1914 to 1918 a generation of German schoolboys daily experienced war as a great, thrilling, enthralling game between nations, which provided far more excitement and emotional satisfaction than anything peace could offer; and that has now become the underlying vision of Nazism.He has nothing much to say in favor of the political upheavals in the German state after that war and the deposition of the German Kaiser, the last Hohenzollern monarch. The chaotic birth of the Weimar Republic did not inspire.
As middle-class boys, who moreover had only just been roughly jolted out of a four-year-long patriotic intoxication with war, we were naturally against the Red revolutionaries; against Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, and their Spartacus League. Although we only vaguely knew that they would “rob us of everything,” probably liquidate those of our parents who were well-off, and altogether make life frightful and “Russian,” we had thus to be in favor of Ebert and Noske and their Free Corps. But, alas, it was impossible to work up any enthusiasm for these figures. The spectacle they offered was too obviously repellent, the stench of treachery that clung to them was too pervasive; it was plain even to the nose of an eleven-year-old boy.Things didn't get much better over the decade of the 1920s, though the young Haffner wasn't personally discomfited by the ongoing instability of the German state. The highpoint of Weimar democracy according to historians came under the leadership of the Jewish industrialist and politician Walter Rathenau who was assassinated by gangsters of the extreme right.
What the short-lived Rathenau epoch left behind was the confirmation of the lesson already learned in the years 1918 and 1919: nothing the left did ever came off.By 1932, the unstable Weimar Republic was being torn apart by worker discontent on the left and right-wing demagoguery that blamed democracy itself for the state's failures. The Nazis deftly navigated this fractious stew, placing their leader Hitler in power. The old political class of the center -- Haffner's class of educated professionals -- did not hold.
It was strange to observe how the behavior of each side reinforced that of the other: the savage impudence that gradually made it possible for the unpleasant little apostle of hate to assume the proportions of a demon; the bafflement of his tamers, who always realized just too late exactly what it was he was up to — namely, when he capped it with something even more outrageous and monstrous; then, also, the hypnotic trance into which his public fell, succumbing with less and less resistance to the glamour of depravity and the ecstasy of evil.
... The mind-set of “appeasement” was also apparent. Powerful groups were in favor of rendering Hitler “harmless” by giving him “responsibility.” There were constant political arguments, fruitless and bitter, in cafés and bars, in shops, schools, and in family homes. ... The Nazis constantly gained ground. What was no longer to be found was pleasure in life, amiability, fun, understanding, goodwill, generosity, and a sense of humor. There were few good books being published anymore, and certainly no readers. The air in Germany had rapidly become suffocating.With terrible foreboding, Haffner watched the the Nazis march to power in the national elections of 1933.
It started with a huge victory celebration before the elections on March 4 — ”Tag der nationalen Erhebung” (Day of National Rising). There were mass parades, fireworks, drums, bands, and flags all over Germany, Hitler’s voice over thousands of loudspeakers, oaths and vows — and all before it was even certain that the elections might not be a setback for the Nazis, which indeed they were.
These elections, the last that were ever held in prewar Germany, brought the Nazis only 44 percent of the votes (in the previous elections they had achieved 37 percent). The majority was still against the Nazis. If you consider that terror was in full swing, that the parties of the left had been prohibited from all public activity in the decisive final week before the elections, you have to admit that the German people as a whole had behaved quite decently.
However, it made no difference at all. The defeat was celebrated like a victory, the terror intensified, the celebrations multiplied. Flags never left the windows for a whole fortnight.And then he watched the collapse of nominal opposition to Nazism.
Hundreds of thousands, who had up until then been opponents, joined the Nazi Party in March 1933. ... In each individual case the process of becoming a Nazi showed the unmistakable symptoms of nervous collapse. The simplest and, if you looked deeper, nearly always the most basic reason, was fear. Join the thugs to avoid being beaten up. Less clear was a kind of exhilaration, the intoxication of unity, the magnetism of the masses.
Many also felt a need for revenge against those who had abandoned them. Then there was a peculiarly German line of thought: “All the predictions of the opponents of the Nazis have not come true. They said the Nazis could not win. Now they have won. Therefore the opponents were wrong. So the Nazis must be right.”He watched the Nazis begin to manipulate public understanding to mount their campaign against Jewish Germans.
Apart from the terror, the unsettling and depressing aspect of this first murderous declaration of intent was that it triggered a flood of arguments and discussions all over Germany, not about anti-Semitism but about the “Jewish question.” This is a trick the Nazis have since successfully repeated many times on other “questions” and in international affairs. By publicly threatening a person, an ethnic group, a nation, or a region with death and destruction, they provoke a general discussion not about their own existence, but about the right of their victims to exist. In this way that right is put in question.Though most everyone Haffner knew understood that something poisonous had taken over their country, there was little resistance once Hitler controlled the power of the state and the allegiance of a populist, murderous gang.
One temptation, often favored by older people, was withdrawal into an illusion: preferably the illusion of superiority. Those that surrendered to this clung to the amateurish, dilettantish aspects that Nazi politics undoubtedly exhibited at first. Every day they tried to convince themselves and others that this could not continue for long, and maintained an attitude of amused criticism. They spared themselves the perception of the fiendishness of Nazism by concentrating on its childishness, and misrepresented their position of complete, powerless subjugation as that of superior, unconcerned onlookers.Wistfully, writing in 1939, he concluded that
Germany did not remain Germany. The German nationalists themselves destroyed it. ... The real conflict beneath the surface, hidden by the common clichés and platitudes, was between nationalism and keeping faith with one’s country.By that he meant that the militaristic, aggressive, racist nationalism of the Nazis had supplanted any love of county which could countenance peace or harmony among peoples and nations.
• • •
Postlude. Let's go with the modern English lyrics sung to the tune of Jean Sibelius' Finlandia:
This is my song, O God of all the nations
A song of peace, for lands afar and mine
This is my home, the country where my heart is
Hear are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine
But other hearts in other lands are beating
With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine
My country's skies are bluer than the ocean
And sunlight beams on clover leaf and pine
But other lands have sunlight too, and clover
And skies are everywhere as blue as mine
Oh hear my song, thou God of all the nations
A song of peace for their land and for mine.
... the book offers direct answers to two questions that Germans of my generation had been asking their parents since the war: “How were the Nazis possible?” and “Why didn’t you stop them?” The usual replies had been evasive. Frequently those questioned declared that they had known nothing until it was too late. My father’s vivid account makes the rise of the Nazis psychologically comprehensible, and it shows how difficult resistance was, but it also demonstrates that it was plain from the outset what they stood for.This compelling memoir of Haffner's life under the Nazis was never finished. He emigrated (illegally) to Britain in 1938 and through various twists and turns learned to write English so well that he edited major English newspapers, returning to Germany only in the 1950s. He then became a well-known political commentator. This memoir only came to light after his death. On publication in 2001, it became a bestseller in Germany.
My father, Sebastian Haffner, might not have been pleased to see this book published. He died in 1999 at the age of ninety-one, a celebrated German author and historical journalist with a reputation for books containing highly original, coolly and lucidly argued insights into the history of Germany in the twentieth century. This book, the first political book he wrote, was started in exile in England early in 1939. Abandoned in the autumn of that year, it may be original and lucid, but it is not cool. It is the passionate outburst of a young man whose career has been cut off and whose life has been turned inside out by his own countrymen, following a leader and an ideology he views only with contempt and disgust.
... With the outbreak of the war, understanding why the Germans had become Nazis became a somewhat academic question.But what it is like to have the political system and aspirations of one's country overturned by empowered thugs cannot today, in the United States, be an academic concern.
Political activist Brian Beutler: The only nice thing about staring doom in the face is it focuses the mind.
I wouldn't be paying any attention to this except that a good friend with whom I worked for months to elect Joe Biden found herself stuck in The Villages this year. She was attending to the affairs of a diseased relative.
She reports that you can't go anywhere in the famously conservative Florida retirement community without having to listen to "outside music" -- oldies interspersed with rightwing news. (The only place I've run across this was the hotel complex adjacent to Disneyland's Magic Kingdom in Anaheim. The apparent sprinkler heads spoke.)
Guess what? The Villages has proved to be a hotbed of (alleged) voter fraud -- Republican voter fraud.
SUMTER COUNTY, Fla. – Three residents of The Villages have recently been arrested as part of an ongoing investigation into voter fraud, court records show.
Jay Ketcik, Joan Halstead and John Rider are each charged with casting more than one ballot in an election, a third-degree felony punishable by up to five years in prison. . . .
Ketcik, 63, is accused of voting by mail in Florida in October 2020 while also casting an absentee ballot in his original home state of Michigan, court records show.
Halstead, 71, voted in-person in Florida but also cast an absentee ballot in New York, prosecutors allege. . . .
Rider, 61, was arrested by Brevard County deputies at the Royal Caribbean cruise ship terminal at Port Canaveral on Dec. 3, according to court records. Details of the accusations against him were not immediately available, but prosecutors indicated he also cast ballots both out-of-state and in Florida. . . .
All three are registered as Republicans in Florida, voter registration records show.
Maybe they thought they were playing a game. Just tweaking the libs. Or raising their ratings by inflaming the suckers who trust them. And then things got all too real.
If you’re going to cast doubt on our elections as an organizing and galvanizing tool, you probably shouldn’t be surprised when people decide they must act on those lies.
... But to these Fox hosts, graphic depictions of that true intent — embodied in the rioters’ feral hunt for lawmakers to violently disrupt the election’s official conclusion — are just a bit too revelatory.
... Lying about our elections isn’t tantamount to endorsing violence in response. But telling people they’re being tyrannized by an all-powerful, multi-tentacled leftist enemy that wields our democratic processes as illegitimate instruments of subjugation can lead quickly to the thought that the only recourse is to take matters into one’s own hands, outside those processes.
The Washington Post's Aaron Blake shares some of their pleas.
Fox host Laura Ingraham to [White House Chief of Staff Mark] Meadows: “Hey Mark, the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy.”
I wish the Wapo had had the decency not to call the texts "juicy." That headline is soul curdling if you think elections matter. The investigation isn't a thrilling game of gotcha. We are living amid a life and death struggle over the continuation of a mostly honest, almost majority-rule, democratic polity.
• • •
While releasing some of the insurrection commission's findings yesterday, Liz Cheney described Donald Trump's actions that terrible day as "dereliction of duty," a crime in the military, though not perhaps in civilian life. After sifting through the growing evidence that Trump delighted in the mob violence he'd incited to overthrow the election, the Post's Phillip Bump concludes:
... The Jan. 6 committee is unmasking the effort. But then what?
• • •
Anne Applebaum's book about how previously conventional rightwing opportunists became active fascists is illuminating here. The enablers have made choice after choice to morph into the malevolent anti-democratic force they have become.
Reading this article -- As U.S. Nears 800,000 Virus Deaths, 1 of Every 100 Older Americans Has Perished-- I found myself wishing, as I do frequently, that Ronni Bennett was still among us to talk about it. But I'll try my own inadequate observations.
Yes -- the headline is just weird. I wish headline writers would work harder to be clear about statistics. Old people die from all causes in large numbers. We know that. What I am doing below is pulling out numerical excerpts which draw the picture of how COVID has struck among U.S. old people -- that means age 65 and up, I assume, although this long article does not explicitly define its age parameters.
Seventy-five percent of people who have died of the virus in the United States — or about 600,000 of the nearly 800,000 who have perished so far — have been 65 or older. One in 100 older Americans has died from the virus. For people younger than 65, that ratio is closer to 1 in 1,400.... Since vaccines first became available a year ago, older Americans have been vaccinated at a much higher rate than younger age groups and yet the brutal toll on them has persisted. The share of younger people among all virus deaths in the United States increased this year, but, in the last two months, the portion of older people has risen once again, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More than 1,200 people in the United States are dying from Covid-19 each day, most of them 65 or older.
... By now, Covid-19 has become the third leading cause of death among Americans 65 and older, after heart disease and cancer. It is responsible for about 13 percent of all deaths in that age group since the beginning of 2020, more than diabetes, accidents, Alzheimer’s disease or dementia.
... The virus deaths of older people have sometimes been dismissed as losses that might have occurred anyway, from other causes, but analyses of “excess deaths” challenge that suggestion. Eighteen percent more older people died of all causes in 2020 than would have died in an ordinary year, according to data from the C.D.C.Perhaps this presentation of the statistical evidence seems so disjointed because it wasn't really the authors' main interest. Interspersed with the stats they offer anecdotes about how old people are weathering the pandemic. Guess what? We elders come in all kinds and our experiences have been very individual. Some have hunkered down and ended up feeling unhappily isolated --while others rather enjoyed the quiet. Some have greatly restricted their activities; others refused to cut back on their lives despite public health warnings. Elders come in all sorts.
• • •
It never hurts to learn more about how other elders are managing (or not). For the heck of it, I'll tell a bit about the evolution of my personal responses to the pandemic in my age-70s -- please add your story in the comments if interested.
When COVID first came among us in March 2020, I was badly scared. It was described as a respiratory virus and I have learned painfully that my body is not good at clearing viral infections in the sinuses and lungs. Big trouble. We had one of the earliest and more restrictive lockdowns here in San Francisco. I found I didn't mind such adaptations as staying home, ordering groceries, and seeing only a very few other people. I found I could make myself useful by doing no-contact food deliveries to shut-ins through a Mission community organization. And I never stopped Walking San Francisco, a fascinating exercise in uniquely car-free streets.
In the fall of 2020, I was frustrated by not being able to join Democratic election work in Nevada as planned, but taught myself to contribute via national union phone banks. And I had always hated phoning! Hey, we even kept on going to help elect the two Democratic Senators from Georgia on January 5, 2021.
When the vaccines arrived, I was fortunate to figure out how to be close to first-in-line for shots among the healthy old people cohort.
And once vaccinated, this city's life and most of my activities have resumed. Our church finally resumed in-person worship. By fall 2021, I felt I could get on buses again. Despite the transit system still being under a continued mask mandate, this nevertheless makes me nervous. In September we flew to a delayed memorial service on the other side of the country. Nobody got sick. Though I've been resistant to online meetings and classes, I now participate in two regular ones.
Folks I know got boosted promptly. Some much older (age mid-90s) friends are still staying more strictly away from group contact. But mostly people I know are acting as if the pandemic was under control. This area is extremely well vaccinated. Omicron may prove our hopes wrong. Or not. We're somewhat inured to chances and changes.
• • •
Again, any elders wanting to describe how the pandemic has struck them, do add your story in comments. We're all different.
Some of the many images I've collected in the city of St. Francis:
Way back in late October, I wrote that I did not expect that Kyle Rittenhouse would be convicted for his killings in Kenosha. Bias in favor of white men with guns and the murky circumstances prevailing in civil disturbances made it likely that the young man would walk. And so events played out.
But I wondered what Rittenhouse might do after acquittal:
... will Rittenhouse lend his celebrity as an acquitted killer to the white nationalists who have defended him? Or might he have the decency to slink off and do some growing up in obscurity? If the judicial process is unable to name the reality of what went down, that's the best we can hope for.
I am more than a little shocked to learn that, despite a turn on Tucker Carlson's Fox News hate-fest and a visit to Mar-a-Lago, Rittenhouse seems to have been freed by the verdict to express remorse. On the podcast “You Are Here” on the right-wing network the Blaze, Rittenhouse had this exchange:
“Congratulations,” [host Sydney] Watson said Monday to Rittenhouse. “Good job, you.”
Rittenhouse, 18, responded that the killings were “nothing to be congratulated about.”
“Like, if I could go back, I wish I would never have had to take somebody’s life,” he said.
“Well, hindsight being 20/20, probably not the best idea to go down there,” Rittenhouse said. “Can’t change that. But I defended myself and that’s what happened.”
... Responding a listener’s question, Rittenhouse also said on the podcast that he plans to destroy the rifle he used in Kenosha.
“You’re not going to, like, sell it?” Watson asked, suggesting to Rittenhouse that he could make a lot of money.
“We’re just having it destroyed,” Rittenhouse reiterated. “I think that’s the best thing, and that’s what I want to do with it.”
He's obviously been well coached that, even though he has been acquitted, he must continue to claim he fired his AR-15 in self-defense. But it seems just possible that he'd like to retreat out of the glare of publicity and just have a life. That's no comfort to people who cared about the two men dead and one maimed. Maybe he's conning us all ... but maybe it shows more moral and intellectual balance than I expected.
• • •
Note to San Franciscans -- it was great to see that the byline on this story from the Washington Post credited Julian Mark, until recently a stalwart reporter at Mission Local. Good move for Mr. Mark.
After being shut down for nearly two years by the pandemic and then for remodeling, story hour at the Mission Branch of the San Francisco Public Library is underway again. When I dropped by the door to pick up a book on hold. this was the scene.
One of the librarians gushed, "We've missed them so much."
Guess the drought has at least one benefit ... The remodeling is expected to go on for another 18 months at least.
A US federal agency is denying humanitarian parole to Afghan refugees ... and apparently running up a tidy profit on their applications.
This week, the U.S. government began denying humanitarian parole applications and dashing the hopes of thousands of Afghans awaiting rescue.
Since [August], thousands of Afghans in communities across the U.S. have been desperate to rescue their loved ones who were left behind. The only legal channel available to most has been the dim hope of humanitarian parole. After months of inaction on these urgent petitions, this week, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) began denying them and extinguishing any chance of rescue.
... USCIS finally [has] began processing these cases – only to deny them.
The wave of denial letters received by immigration advocates across the U.S. this week articulate—for the first time—a set of stringent new criteria that will exclude the vast majority of Afghan humanitarian parole applicants from eligibility. According to JFCS East Bay Director of Immigration Legal Services, Kyra S. Lilien, “Redacted copies of these denial letters began popping up on listservs from immigration attorneys across the U.S. this week. No one has reported receiving a ‘request for evidence,’ as is the norm before USCIS denies a case. Instead, we all got these flat denials.”
... USCIS reports that it has received more than 30,000 such applications. At $575 per person, USCIS has likely taken in about $17,250,000 in application fees from these filings, making this process look like a classic “bait and switch” scam.
What does USCIS ask of applicants? “Documentation from a credible third-party source specifically naming the beneficiary and outlining the serious harm they face and the imminence of the harm in the location where the beneficiary is located.”
JFCS likens this to asking for "a notarized statement from their persecutor."
We know the Biden administration is running scared about immigration. They are terrified of taking political hits for admitting brown people to the country. And the Know-Nothing MAGA faction won't let up on the scare stories.
But show a little guts, Joe!
Biden did demonstrate some courage by pulling out of Afghanistan. The politically easy play would have been to do what both Obama and Trump did: bluster a bit and try to sweep the failed two-decade war out of view.
But there remain human beings, many of whom thought they might have U.S. protection, who've been left behind to be raped, tortured, and slaughtered. And now some bureaucrats will be allowed to deny them for improper paperwork? This is shameful if not criminal.
Michael Tomasky of The New Republic noted a data point that I found fascinating; apparently doctors have switched sides in the contentious U.S. political landscape.
Historically, doctors as a group have been far more Republican than Democratic. But bless you, Google, because I learned something researching this column. A survey came out in 2019 showing that doctors were, for I believe the first time, more Democratic than Republican: 36 percent independent, 35 percent Democrat, 27 percent GOP. Among the reasons cited is the fact that the vast changes in the business of health care have made more doctors employees of large organizations rather than self-employed small-business people.
I [Tomasky] don’t doubt that that’s true, but I feel pretty confident that the change also has to do with the fact that the Republican Party is full of people who think man walked with dinosaurs and who have spent the last 20-odd months in the embrace of a death cult. ...
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| This smiling image of a generic doctor is what Kaiser Permanente presents when you are waiting for a telemedicine appointment. |
Female doctors make less than their male counterparts starting from their very first days on the job, according to a large new study. Over the course of a 40-year-career, researchers estimated, this pay gap adds up to at least $2 million. ... Comparing wages between men and women with the same amount of experience, the researchers estimated that, over a simulated 40-year career, male physicians earned an average of $8.3 million while women made roughly $6.3 million — a nearly 25 percent difference. ... Even within specialties, the calculated wage gaps were sizable: highest among surgeons, at around $2.5 million, and lowest among primary care physicians, at nearly $920,000.
... While roughly the same number of women graduate from medical school as men, women make up only 36 percent of working physicians. ... Offering more paid family leave and more flexible scheduling, [Christopher Whaley, a health economist at the RAND Corporation] said, or making salaries more transparent, could help women earn their fair share.In a system where the generic doctor is a woman, the pandemic played hell with the lives of all women health care workers, from the top medical echelon through the nurses, orderlies and janitors. Alongside male colleagues, those caring for COVID patients feared infecting their families. Burnout struck many. Some women doctors were cooped up with small children while trying to do their jobs from home. All these women medical professionals were probably being paid less than male colleagues. No wonder many leave all that training and hard won expertise behind in exchange for saner lives.
I particularly noticed in this telling who the MAGAs with guns seem to be: angry, hurt, middle-aged and older white men who live in proximity with growing populations of neighbors of color. Sure sounds like too many of the men I used to work adjacent to when I worked in construction.
It's not easy to see what most individuals can do beyond the obvious: help win fair elections for candidates who support democracy and combine with like-minded others to defend them. Before the 2020 vote, organized labor and community groups developed a plan to defend the vote. Good. We can be there as needed.
But there are more angles to understanding our danger than Gellman's alert reaches. I want to highlight two such.
In the Washington Monthly (no pay wall), David Atkins reminds democracy defenders that we are the majority.
Democracy’s defenders have an advantage: They do, in fact, represent the majority of America and are also the main drivers of the country’s culture and economy. Blue counties produce more than 70 percent of America’s GDP. U.S. cities—overwhelmingly blue—are responsible for the vast majority of the country’s cultural and economic output. Blue states are overwhelmingly donors to the states that despise them and seek to disenfranchise them. The nation’s most successful companies are typically located in ultra-liberal areas. And the country is becoming more diverse and more urban every day. Americans under 40 are overwhelmingly progressive. This is the present and future of America.
Successful fascist movements and authoritarian coups generally require not only a fervent base of cruel, fundamentalist backers. They also need the support, cooperation, and acquiescence of social elites. Most of all, they need the public to roll over and go along with it.
If the Republican Party decides to declare victory by selecting conservative electors even when they lose, change the rules to ensure that they never lose again per the Hungarian model, and allow a Republican president unchecked dictatorial powers—all of which are not only possible but, in fact, likely outcomes within just the next few years—it will actually be doing so from a position of weakness.
That intuition of their own weakness is part of what the MAGAs are so mad about.
And wisewoman Rebecca Solnit reminds at least half the population that, in a sense which is heightened by the Supreme Court's assault on legal abortions, we've been here before if we choose to notice.
Appeasement didn’t work in the 1930s and it won’t work now. That doesn’t mean that people have to be angry or hate back or hostile, but it does mean they have to stand on principle and defend what’s under attack. There are situations in which there is no common ground worth standing on, let alone hiking over to. If Nazis wanted to reach out and find common ground and understand us, they probably would not have had that tiki-torch parade full of white men bellowing “Jews will not replace us” and, also, they would not be Nazis. Being Nazis, white supremacists, misogynists, transphobes is all part of a project of refusing to understand as part of refusing to respect. ...
... What do you do with people who think they matter more than other people? Catering to them reinforces that belief, that they are central to the nation’s life, they are more important, and their views must prevail. Deference to intolerance feeds intolerance.
... This is what marriages were before feminism, with the abused wife urged to placate and soothe the furious husband. Feminism is good for everything, and it’s a good model for seeing that this is both outrageous and a recipe for failure. It didn’t work in marriages, and it never was the abused partner’s job to prevent the abuse by surrendering ground and rights and voice. It is not working as national policy either. Now is an excellent time to stand on principle and defend what we value, and I believe it’s a winning strategy too, or at least brings us closer to winning than surrender does. Also, it’s worth repeating, we won, and being gracious in victory is still being victorious.
"Being gracious in victory" is indeed of required of us should that option be available. How wearing, but true.
George Takei, the character Hikaru Kato Sulu on original Star Trek, and a "resistance fighter" by his own declaration, has shared what was wrong with hiding from children the hard truths of their own history and the history of their country. He learned the hard way.
These days, a premium is being placed on whether white kids might feel bad about their own heritage after learning about things like American genocide, slavery or internment. But no one asks what it’s like for minority kids to learn about these things.When I was growing up inside internment camps, my parents tried to shield me from the horror of what was happening. I even recited the Pledge of Allegiance daily from a classroom inside the barbed wire. “With liberty and justice for all,” I said, not grasping the irony.
It wasn’t until I was older that I began to question what had happened. It made me very angry, not only at the country that did this to us without cause, but against my own father. “You led us like sheep to slaughter!” I cried. He was silent. “Maybe we did,” was all he said.
That tore at my family. No one wanted to talk about how painful those years had been, not in our household, not in most Japanese American households. To do so was to relive that very real pain. But the truth has a way of pulling you back into it.
I spent the latter half of my life telling our truth, however painful it was. The truth matters because without it we cannot ever truly heal. Without it, we cannot ever learn from our horrific mistakes. To avoid the truth is to avoid our sacred obligation.
When the right tells white parents that their children are being made to feel bad about our history, remember first that this isn’t just about white children. It is about all of us. Japanese American children, Black, Native and Latino children. We owe them the truth, too.
We need to reframe the current debate around truth, not around kids’ assumed fragility. I lived through years of internment and still didn’t know the truth until I came to ask the right questions. Our experience should be more than a thrown away paragraph in a history book.
Without a full accounting of our true history, we cannot ever break the cycle of denial and recurrence. The same system that produced the horrors of the past cannot be reformed without painful examination under the lens of truth. That is what we must demand and teach.
Photo from California Museum in Sacramento.
This morning in church on the second Sunday in Advent, the Christian season of waiting in joyful hope for the divine child, one of our prayers asked: "may every heart prepare you room." The "you" in the prayer refers to Emanuel, God-with-us.
Living as we are in a skeptical world, the journey back toward enchantment starts with a disenchantment about our disenchantment, cultivating a disillusionment with our doubts. ... if your entire life has been devoted to putting question marks next to everything—especially the things you hold most sacred—is it any wonder we’re all feeling a bit fragile and anxious? I think it’s time to question some of those question marks.He urges first that we'd be more grounded, and more amenable to encountering Something More, if we could acquire/reconnect with a more child-like delight in response to the world around us. From there, the book dances lightly through the value of Christian seasonal liturgy and ceremonies, pantheism, Celtic spirituality, contemplative practices, mysticism and fairy stores. It's a broad and, for a quasi-evangelical Christian, quite broad-minded survey of a wide landscape of spirituality.
• • •
According to Historic UK the magic eels of Beck's title are reputed to dwell in the convent which the Welsh St. Dwynwen established on the island of Llanddwyn.
... a well named after her became a place of pilgrimage after her death in 465AD. Visitors to the well believed that the sacred fish or eels that lived in the well could foretell whether or not their relationship would be happy and whether love and happiness would be theirs. Remains of Dwynwen’s church can still be seen today.St. Dwynwen seems to be a sort of Welsh St. Valentine -- a patroness of lovers.
Hanging this book on the story of Dwynwen's well reminded me of the temple of the Bhutanese Buddhist "mad monk" Lhakhang where couples come to ask for fertility. Somehow, I don't think Mr. Beck would be comfortable with the iconography of that potently magic place. Here's a photo that shouldn't get my post categorized as pornographic.
I don't usually look to Twitter for ethical instruction. But this, from The Rude Pundit, brought me up short.
What the kid did at Oxford High School is horrific. He should be punished. He should not be charged as an adult.
His parents, though, should be imprisoned in a hole under the jail.
Every once in a while, I see just how much liberalism has changed. It used to not even be a question on the left that it’s wrong to charge kids as adults and to do so is just part of this country’s wrongheaded approach to “justice.” But, from the responses, I guess no more.
He's right (the RP's Twitter pic is of a "he"). This particular crime feels so egregious, it was easy for me to forget that I've campaigned against the death penalty and excessive sentences for people who were under 18 when they were guilty of crimes. We know teenage brains have not yet developed all the connections fully formed in adult brains. (Some parental brains may be just as disconnected, but what to do with those people is different problem.) What the kid did is bad enough. We don't raise the level of civilization by pretending this was an adult shooter.
One of the tweet comments captures where I sit on this:
My head agrees with you. My gut does not.
Here's the shooter's mug shot:
• • •
And while we are at it, here are the names of the victims who died:
Hana St. Juliana, 14; Madisyn Baldwin, 17; Tate Myre, 16; and Justin Shilling, 17
More teens.
There are plenty of opinions, some conflicting.
This may not be the most judicious take on why food and gas prices are rising, but it is a certainly part of the story. Big businesses are raising prices because they know they can. Pandemic battered consumers find no alternative but to pay up.
Business leaders are admitting that corporations are using the narrative of hyperinflation as an excuse to raise prices on you and increase profits for themselves. ... The largest corporations in America have never made more money. ... Corporations are seizing the opportunity to engage in massive profiteering because they can.The Republican Party is there for the one class it always coddles: plutocrats.
Christopher Ingraham of The Why Axis thinks he knows what these high profits should mean:
What it says to me is that firms have plenty of wiggle room to create better conditions for their employees — they can clearly afford the higher pay, more generous benefits and more flexible arrangements that workers are increasingly demanding.
The Washington Post's super smart (really, pay attention to her), plain-speaking business columnist Catherine Rampell believes she knows how to describe the current inflation:
The main reason price growth is up has to do with constrained supply not keeping up with booming demand. That is, the pandemic has resulted in worker shortages, supply-chain disruptions and other bottlenecks in the United States and abroad. These problems are happening at the exact same time that cooped-up consumers are eager to buy even more stuff than they did pre-pandemic.
... Arguably, recent U.S. fiscal policy may have exacerbated this dynamic: Biden and the Democrats enacted stimulus payments and other government transfers earlier this year, which gave consumers more cash to spend. Now consumers are spending that cash.
...Aside from some vague rhetoric about Democrats’ “big spending” habits, though, those checks are not really what Republican politicians are criticizing Biden for. Perhaps with good reason: The spring stimulus checks were extremely popular, including among Republican voters. ... So they’re peddling “war on Halloween” hokum instead.The chair of the Republican National Senatorial Committee (the fundraising arm of GOPer campaigns) Florida Senator Rick Scott announced to the Wall Street Journal: "This is a gold mine for us."
You can always be sure -- the current Republican Party doesn't care who gets hurt, as long as they hold power.
Stevie Jo Payne writes on Twitter: "I've been given a second chance. When I was a young man I didn't do enough to voice my convictions because I was a coward."
According to his bio, he was "United States Navy 1961-1965. I am a high school dropout who finished high school post navy, started college at 29, graduated at 57. No sense of humor."
I can't agree with that last.
The tweet is wildly popular. It should be.
I have no idea if I would warm to Stevie if I met him, but you gotta like his spirit.
Here's Anat Shenker-Osorio, a progressive Democratic political consultant, opining on Twitter:
GOP learned two lessons from 2020: it was too easy for people of color to vote and too hard for them to sabotage the election. They’ve taken concrete steps to “fix” both and we are still pretending they’re a political party.From the other end of some spectrum, here's Charlie Sykes, the longtime conservative Wisconsin talkshow host who now helms the Never-Trumper publication the Bulwark:
"If people believe there is an existential threat to democracy, then they should act like it. The Justice Dept. should act like it, the Congress should act like it, the administration should act like it, and to date I don't think that they have."
It was good to see the Washington Post taking seriously the ground level efforts of Republicans to corrupt and take over the local machinery of elections in contested states: Trump allies work to place supporters in key election posts across the country, spurring fears about future vote challenges.
And in Colorado, 2020 doubters are urging their followers on conservative social media platforms to apply for jobs in election offices.
A year after local and state election officials came under immense pressure from Trump to subvert the results of the 2020 White House race, he and his supporters are pushing an ambitious plan to place Trump loyalists in key positions across the administration of U.S. elections.
Heather Cox Richardson offers a clear summary of the Freedom to Vote Act now hanging fire in the Senate.
The Freedom to Vote Act would standardize elections and make it easier to register and vote, and it would overturn the laws passed since January 2020 by Republican-dominated legislatures to replace nonpartisan election officials with partisans. It would also end partisan gerrymandering, stopping the extraordinary maps Republican-dominated states are creating to give themselves commanding majorities of their states’ legislatures and Congressional delegations regardless of what the voters want.
Protection of our elections is imperative as Trump and the Republican radicals in Republican-dominated states are cementing their hold on election systems, making it virtually impossible for Democrats to win.
The Constitution gives Congress the power to regulate federal elections, overriding state election laws. Congress can do this. Even West Virginia's erratic Senator Joe Manchin is more or less on board with this; he negotiated it. The lone holdout, who must vote for it to enable the Democrats in the Senate to pass it, is Arizona's Kyrsten Sinema who seems to have sold her soul to conservative donors. Her devotion to maintaining the undemocratic filibuster rule which clogs up the Senate could doom our democracy.
Experience in working elections has shown me that determined people can overcome a lot of election hurdles to get out to vote. It was inspiring to speak with Georgians while phone banking last December in the run-off races which gave the Democrats their razor thin majority in the Senate. These elderly African American women (the people who answered the phones were mostly women) knew they were going to vote come Hell or High Water. Turning them out was only the easiest part of our mission: we worked to turn them into organizers who would make sure every member of their families was going to the polls. Obstacles like long lines and bans on handing out water to the voters waiting in those lines weren't going to stop them. They expected the system to try to keep them from voting and they weren't about to be stopped by any interference.
But if the systems that administer and tally votes are corrupted, it won't matter who got the most votes. Helping people find their way to the polls won't matter. That's the shape of the GOPers' slow motion coup: they can't win a nationwide majority contest when people are paying attention. Contemporary Republicans cower in fear of an aggressive racist demagogue who thrives on division and hate and wants to use the U.S. government to enrich himself and his family. Many GOPers have become imitators. If U.S. democracy goes down this way, it will be a sad and even globally disastrous end.
