This is a reblog from a Fandango “Provocative President” post some months back. As we get closer to the election, Pete Buttigieg has moved to the forefront as a potential candidate. Thus I’m running this again and I think it deserves to be run again. Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg?
From Fandango:
“For those of you who may not follow American politics, let me introduce to you Pete Buttigieg. “Mayor Pete,” as he is known, is seeking the Democratic nomination to run for President of the United States. He is a graduate of Harvard University, a Rhodes Scholar, a Navy veteran who served in Afghanistan. He is currently the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana. And as a bonus — he’s white and Christian. The perfect candidate, right?
He’s ranking third or fourth (out of 20) in the early political polls and is getting a lot of attention and positive press.
He’s also gay and married to his husband, Chasten. Wait! What?”
So here is the question:
“Do you think America is ready for an openly gay person to be elected to the office of President of the United States? Explain your opinion.”
I first would like to point out that “gay” used to mean happy and carefree … and America is 100% ready for that! I can’t think of anything we need more than a spirit of joy and freedom.
As for the more modern meaning of “gay,” my answer is a solid “I don’t know.”
I would, given the negative ionization of the air over America for the past two and something years, would be inclined to say no. Except that I would also have been sure we would not have a black president — twice — and we could never have such a current lowlife elected to the presidency, either.
Each was impossible and both were elected.
Pete Buttigieg – Photo: ABC News
So I don’t know. Our political pendulum swings wildly from side to side, kind of “The Pit and the Pendulum” of American politics. It isn’t unusual for us to go from very liberal to very conservative presidents and we’ve done it any number of times. Can we do it this time?
I really don’t know. There’s a lot of “playing out” of our political spider web still to be done. It’s not impossible and it also isn’t likely. Which is to say it’s neither probable nor outlandish.
I would hope the qualities of the man will be the point on which judgments are made, not to whom he is married. Hey, at least he is married and not a serial philanderer. Or a sociopathic liar. Or a self-promoting moron.
But who knows? Maybe America is not ready for a sane president yet. Maybe we need to roll around in the sty with the pigs for another term of office before we get our fill of this particular nightmare.
And maybe the world will never be the way it was after this presidency. There are too many questions without answers, so, in my opinion, it is also too early to gauge for whom we might vote.
We have miles to go in that snowy woods. What I do know is that the Democrats have yet to even make it clear for what they stand. Until they get their heads wrapped around their position, you can’t know where the voters stand.
We are having our national moment. Well, really, it’s more than a moment. The past three years have been one, long tormented “moment.”
As someone who loves history, it has forced me to go back and look at our history and realize that this catastrophe in which we are engulfed didn’t just “sort of show up” in 2016. It didn’t drop by without giving us plenty of warning that this calamity was lurking.
We’ve been building towards this calamity for our entire history.
American has done great things. We have also done horrendous and unspeakable things. We allowed slavery as a start — and we’ve never recovered from that. We slaughtered the Natives who lived here — and we pretend we didn’t.
We have, as all countries do, glossed over the most awful parts of our history and focused on greatness. We have — and we are by no means alone in this — pretended our failures never happened or really weren’t that bad. We have held ourselves up as a beacon of light to other countries. And thus we failed to accept responsibility for the bad stuff and never grew up.
One of the many important things Obama said his final lecture was because we made progress, we assumed this progress meant that we had left “the bad stuff” behind and moved on.
But that isn’t what happened. Briefly, our better selves dominated but the bad stuff was stuck where it has always been. We fought our Civil War more than 150 years ago and it’s not over. The war will never end because we never accepted racial equality, no matter how many laws we’ve passed.
Despite the obvious that this entire country — unless you are Native American — is built on immigration, we have lost ourselves. We’ve forgotten where we come from and where we drew our energy, drive, and willingness to “go the distance” that gave the United States its vitality.
We also forgot that we got our huge emergence of industrial power from the decimation of Europe following two devastating wars. Sure, we fought in the wars, but the fighting was not here. Never on our shores.
Pause briefly and think about Pearl Harbor and 9/11. Imagine how different this country would be if both world wars had been fought in this country, on this continent. Who would be the great industrial power then? It would not have been us.
We never had to rebuild our entire infrastructure from the rubble upwards. We’ve elected fools to run our government. Not just now, but in many earlier years when we elected immoral, mentally challenged morons as leaders.
It matters more today because our executive branch has gotten so much more powerful than it was supposed to be. It was supposed to be one-third of a balanced government. Instead, it manages everything. News and events have increased to the speed of light. We don’t wait for news anymore. Everything is instant.
We didn’t become this disaster accidentally or through one bad election. We never demanded citizens vote or get a decent education. We never required our people to act like grownups. Why should we be surprised we find ourselves in this unreal and terrifying scenario?
Map of Nazi conquest of Europe as of 1940
This is our time to consider who we want to be.
Do we want to be the perpetual international fools? Do we want to pretend that all the really important things — decency, morality, safety, protection, equality, liberty and fair government — are trivial? That the only thing that matters is greed? As long as someone promises to lower the taxes of the rich, nothing else matters?
We are going to be lost to history, a blip on the timeline. We are not an island, nor do we exist alone and separate on this planet.
No Man is an Island – John Donne
No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man’s death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
MEDITATION XVII Devotions upon Emergent Occasions John Donne
I know last night’s debate was a mess in a lot of ways. Too many potential (and unrealistic) candidates and a really annoying and abrasive set of television hosts who refused to ever let anyone actually SAY something that might be important. I think it was Colbert who said it was just as well these guys weren’t moderating Lincoln-Douglas because no one would have gotten a word in, edgewise or otherwise.
Round two of four – Detroit
I also agree with Garry that they need to sit down in a big, comfortable room with plenty of coffee and other drinks, pizza, sandwiches, and dessert. Then, point out to the people who are not going to really run for president (because they don’t have the money, backing, or support to do it) that there are other important jobs to do.
A classic moment
Senators. Governors. Mayors. Judges, who run for offices in many areas. The people who aren’t going to make the final cut need to make their moves on other Democratic platforms.
Marianne Williamson had a positive response. Good ideas. I don’t think she has a snowball’s chance in hell of winning, but some good points made
They all had something to say — and some of it was reasonably intelligent, too — but they have to find another place to say it. There’s only one president, but we need a lot of senators.
As far as the actual debate went, there were too many people. The moderators were intrusive, mindlessly controlling and apparently not listening — and I was ready to whack them. I understand they were trying to maintain control, but some commonsense in letting people make a point before cutting them off would not have gone amiss. Thirty seconds is NOT enough time for anyone to say something sensible.
Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren – You could actually see the friendship behind the political push to win
All this being said, I was overjoyed with a sense of optimism this morning and it was the first in a long time.
Optimism? Yes. Really. Because mostly, they agreed with each other and didn’t spend all their time trying to chop each other down. They talked about what needed doing. The didn’t agree with exactly how, but they agreed on what was important. It was the first positive feeling I’ve felt to date.
I needed that. Maybe I wasn’t overjoyed … but I felt better. A little less glum. A little less angry and depressed.
A lot of my post this morning are quotes from “The Washington Post.”
Why, you might ask, since I’m a born and bred New Yorker living in New England and Boston for more than 30 years, would I read “The Post” rather than “The NY Times” or “Boston Globe”? Because both of these two papers — run by the same company, by the way — charge nearly $30/month for an online edition. In other words, $60/month if in my madness, I subscribed to both.
I like the Times and the Globe. I would prefer to read local news and not just national news. But their prices make that impossible. If the Times/Globe organization wants to get a bump upward in their readership, they should reconsider their pricing. Even if they were delivering the paper to my door (physically, the actual newspaper), I still could not afford those prices.
The “Squad” in U.S. Congress on television yesterday evening
I understand that it’s hard times for the press these days, but raising prices so that the very people who might actually read them can’t do it is stupid in every possible way. If you drive away your only readership, you are driving yourselves out of business as so many others already have done.
I pay $10/month for “The Washington Post” and anyone can get a trial of their paper for a month for $1. They also have “cheat sheet” online papers that come out many times a day to update you on issues that are actively progressing, as well as summaries of current issues on any number of subjects from sports to politics to humor.
I would quote other newspapers too, but anything worth reading is a “pay to read”paper. I’m out of money.
It is ironic that “The Boston Herald,” which was Boston’s “other” newspaper — the right-leaning one — was bought up by the Trumpist Sinclair Group and now, you can get whatever crap they print for free. They aren’t worrying about circulation. They own more than half the papers and TV stations in the country and can (and do) say whatever they feel like saying. It doesn’t need to have even a scrap of truth in it. They say march and anyone who wants to keep his or her job, marches.
Back to the subject of escape.
As the holder of two legal passports, one from Israel and the other (obviously) U.S.A., I always had the thought in my mind that if things turned pear-shaped in this country, I had someplace to go. It never crossed my mind that both countries would go fruity together. I cannot tell you how sad this makes me. Israel has always been a country with a lively internal war going on inside it, but it was a war of words, thoughts, and ideas.
Since I left and came home in late 1987, Israel changed. The children who grew following the 1967 and 1973 wars are more hawkish than were their parents. More hard-nosed “hold the liners” and less inclined to reason and discussion.
Photo: Washington Post
I saw this beginning to happen when I was there. I saw the country taking a sharp right turn. Arabs blame Israelis for this, but they can also blame themselves. Whenever Israel tried to find any road to peace, Arab “neighbors” shattered it with bombs.
Why? I don’t think most Arab-Israelis want a war any more than most Americans want a war … but the driving force for war is never a nation’s citizens, but its politicians and generals. War makes those people powerful and rich. If it kills off the population? So? They are not in the rank and file these days and probably their children are not, either.
If the Arabs ever wanted peace — something I often question — they had many opportunities make a deal to forget everyone’s past and start from NOW. Build peace on today. Build peace on what we need to move ahead into a better future and LET THE PAST GO. I know it’s not easy, but that’s what has to happen and if no one can do it, there will never be peace in this or any future generation.
Which brings me back to the good old U.S.A.
Did I always know this was a deeply flawed country that liked pretending our past didn’t count and we are/were/will be a nation of equals? Sure I knew that. Did I believe we could turn around and become the people we fought against or think we could stir up the type of hatred which brought on the Civil War — in 2019?
No, really, I didn’t believe it. I knew it wasn’t impossible because I read history. I know nothing is impossible. I just thought it very unlikely. And yet, here we are, at the front door, fingers on the doorbell of hatred and despair.
From this morning’s “Washington Post,” a few thoughts to ponder. If we can’t escape — almost none of us can because we have nowhere to go or where we could go doesn’t want us and maybe, we don’t want them, either.
1) Trump’s rhetoric is creating a more dangerous climate and corroding the public discourse.
House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) asked the Capitol Police last night to provide extra protection for the four lawmakers, citing a growing threat profile, per Fox News.
There are also longer-term impacts to consider. For better or worse, the president is a role model. Modeling bad behavior sends signals to young people just as much as good behavior.
Conservative columnist George Will argues that this is why Trump is worse than Richard Nixon. “I believe that what this president has done to our culture, to our civic discourse, you cannot unring those bells and you cannot unsay what he has said, and you cannot change that he has now in a very short time made it seem normal for schoolboy taunts and obvious lies to be spun out in a constant stream,” the consistent Trump critic said on a New York Times Book Review podcast last week. “This will do more lasting damage than Richard Nixon’s surreptitious burglaries did.”
2) Trump’s “go back” rhetoric is consistent not only with his own long history of attacks on people he perceives as the other but also the nation’s oscillating attitudes toward immigration throughout its history.
Marc Fisher traces the etymology: “The Know-Nothings wanted German and Irish immigrants to get out because they were allegedly subversive and diseased people who were stealing American jobs. White preachers and politicians of the 1820s urged freed blacks to move to West Africa, supposedly for their own good. From that drive to encourage blacks to go back where they came from to waves of nativist attacks on Catholics, Jews, Asians and Hispanics in nearly every generation that followed, ‘go home’ rhetoric is as American as immigration itself. ( … )
“There is hardly any ethnic or racial group in the country that hasn’t been told to go back where they came from. In collections of voices from the Japanese American internment camps of the World War II era, in diaries of the earliest Italian and Irish immigrants, in Jewish novels and memoirs from the turn of the 20th century, the slur is a mainstay. … From Calvin Coolidge’s warnings in the 1920s that the country was becoming ‘a dumping ground’ and that ‘America must remain American’ to the ‘America: Love it or leave it’ rhetoric that surrounded Richard Nixon’s presidency, the nation’s leaders have struggled for two centuries with a central ambivalence about its core identity as a magnet for immigrants.”
— Conservative lawyer George Conway, the husband of counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway, explains in an op-ed for The Post why this episode caused him to conclude that Trump is a racist – after years of giving him the benefit of the doubt. ( … )
3) White identity politics is driving Trump as 2020 approaches, and the Republican Party that he’s remaking in his image. Trump is making clear that his reelection campaign will feature the same explosive mix of white grievance and anti-immigrant nativism that helped elect him.
Michael Scherer explains: “Trump’s combustible formula of white identity politics has already reshaped the Republican Party, sidelining, silencing or converting nearly anyone who dares to challenge the racial insensitivity of his utterances. It also has pushed Democratic presidential candidates sharply to the left on issues such as immigration and civil rights, as they respond to the liberal backlash against him. Unknown is whether the president is now on the verge of more permanently reshaping the nation’s political balance — at least until long-term demographic changes take hold to make nonwhite residents a majority of the country around 2050. ( … )
4) “Trump is proposing a giant swap: Republicans can no longer count on suburban women and we will continue to lose college-educated men and women.
“While increasingly picking up working white Americans without college degrees,” said Ari Fleischer, who was a White House press secretary for President George W. Bush and who has spoken with Trump campaign advisers about their strategy for increasing turnout. “Nobody knows who will come out ahead in the swap,” he told Scherer. “That’s what the campaign will tell us.”
There is no escape for me or at least none I’m likely to take … and probably none for you. The younger people who will still be alive in 30 years? This is your fight. This is your world war. Your final battle to live in a decent nation.
If you have a conscience and you vote for it this coming election in 2020, we may survive this crisis. Maybe. If you don’t vote. If you shrug your collective shoulders and mutter “This has nothing to do with me,” you will ultimately discover that it has everything to do with you and worse, it has, even more, to do with the children who are yet unborn.
This is not a battle for today. It’s a battle to have a future worth living — for any of us still alive and for our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.
Will the nations of the world utimately “come around”? Assuming, of course, Planet Earth doesn’t decide it no longer wants human beings living on it? Sure it will.
But historically, that could easily take a few hundred or a thousand years. If you’d like to see this country remain a place we and our descendants can live in safety and hope, do something positive. Vote. Talk to your official representatives. Clean up the garbage along the rivers and roads. Fight for clean air and water.
Decide what you want and stop brooding about how the world isn’t what you expected. The world was never what anyone expected.
I have personal taste that tends toward humor and wit and some things that I find funny aren’t really funny, but I find them hilarious. I tend to overvalue wit and cleverness and at least a hint of humor.
I like what I like and often write about movies and books I enjoy. I love it when I help someone discover books or a movie they might like.
I also don’t mind if you don’t like what I like.
The last Session
Some people talk about how they believe everyone is entitled to believe what they want … but I actually mean it. There are things — news and political things — that I feel are completely wrong and while I would never force you or try to force you to believe as I do, I reserve the right to not talk to you about beliefs I feel are wrong … or evil.
I do believe in right and wrong. I don’t believe in a particular God or gods, but I think the devil is lurking behind every closed door. In fact, I think his hoofprints are all over this world and a lot of people have sold their souls to him. I think most of our senators and certainly our so-called president have sold their souls to him. It’s the only way I can explain their behavior.
But as for taste? If you read serious books you couldn’t pay me to open, that’s okay. Just don’t try to force me to read it. If I like bizarre British science fiction and it goes right over your head? That’s okay. You aren’t required to love it just because I do. You don’t need to like the same television shows, movies, books, or poetry.
I don’t care if you are a Republican as long as you innoculate your children and don’t try to convert me.
The elephant in the room
Okay, that’s not true. I have trouble coping with anyone who thinks caging children is okay because they have brown skins and don’t speak English. My heart bleeds for those people and there is no way I can reconcile myself to people who don’t care and feel the value of everything can be reckoned using dollar signs.
I guess that’s where I draw the line — my line between good and evil.
I got to thinking about what my world would look like if I (personally) got rid of everyone who isn’t white enough for this current America. I would have to remove my husband — and all my friends. And my entire family. After which I’d have to go, too. I may be white, but Jewish isn’t really white.
Not merely is this a bad idea, it is impossible. People love to talk about this country as if we are (kind of) akin to Germany, and SCROTUS is (kind of) a version of Hitler. Except … in Germany, the different people were a relatively small number in a country where most people were the same. It was a homogeneous country. Which made it easy to pick out the ones who were different.
That was true all over Europe. It was easy to figure out who were the “different” ones. In most European countries, it’s still true.
Germany in the 1920s and 1930s was nothing like this country.
SCROTUS isn’t Hitler. The United States isn’t Germany.
The number of not-white people in this country is larger than the number of whites. Yes, you heard me correctly. If you are one of the people who believe that facts mean anything, take a look at the numbers.
This is just the beginning. Not only do we have a lot of non-white citizens from everywhere in the world, but people marry each other. They will continue to marry, have children and eventually, the current madness will vanish and never come back.
None of this means anything. It’s nonsense. Utter crap. The world is full of hate but in the end, haters are losers.
Eventually, we will all be some shade of slightly off-white, medium tan, or terribly freckled. We aren’t getting rid of most of our population. Really.
The battle over immigration is going all over the world. It is uglier and crueler here than elsewhere but make no mistake. European countries are turning away immigrants as energetically as we are — just without the cages for children. Their reasons are the same. There are so many immigrants and they need so much help, no country wants to be responsible for their welfare. Or pay their tab.
Is the U.S. being especially cruel and lacking in compassion? Yes, but I’m not sure how much worse we are than any other country doing the same thing. It’s just they aren’t jailing children.
There are a lot of countries at war, in the process of “ethnically cleansing” their population, or rife with drug cartels slaughtering whoever they feel like slaughtering. It’s going on in all continents throughout the world.
We may well be a particularly disgusting example of refugee rejection, but we are hardly alone. Until the international community gets together and fixes the problems that are driving people out of their native lands seeking refuge anywhere, no matter how improbable the likelihood of their succeeding, it will never end. Are we, as a nation, being less compassionate and meaner-spirited than other nations?
Refugees no one wants
Probably. I am pretty sure we are the only country jailing children.
It’s a matter of degree. Moreover, we seem to be the only place in the western hemisphere to which the refugees are headed. Where is Canada? Where are the other countries in South America? Where are the Europeans, Asians, and everyone else? Are they opening their borders?
I know we have a hateful, bigoted president who should never have been elected and I’m proud to say I didn’t vote for him, would never vote for him or anyone like him. But this current frenzy didn’t start because Trump is the president. It has been building for years and no one has had any idea how to fix it.
The bottom line is making the countries from which all these people are fleeing habitable and safe for them. Until we can make that happen, the problem will persist without remission. Maybe our next president won’t jail children, but he won’t be inviting the refugees into this country either.
The triangle of desperation
Obama deported many immigrants. Millions of them. He was just a nicer guy than Donzo. But he didn’t want them either. No one at the helm of this country — or any country — will allow millions of destitute refugees into their country.
They may be nicer about how they say no, but they will say no.
To participate in the Ragtag Daily Prompt, create a Pingback to your post, or copy and paste the link to your post into the comments. And while you’re there, why not check out some of the other posts too!
