Alacrity of Autocracy

 We are at a symbolic tipping point: Trump firing the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because he believed Friday’s jobs report was manipulated “to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad,” as he wrote on social media.

A classic autocratic (and Pavlovian) response—no evidence, no careful review of the data, just his self-proclaimed genius “gut” instinct.

The report followed closely on the heels of the Federal Reserve’s decision to hold interest rates steady. No doubt Fed Chairman Jerome Powell will be blamed, although he has repeatedly stated that the Fed’s decisions are driven by data. A rate cut is reportedly likely next month -- whether Powell can endure the constant onslaught from Trump and his acolytes until then remains to be seen. (It is evidence of dear leader’s lack of understanding that lowering short term rates – the only rate over which the Fed has direct control – would have little immediate impact on the national debt, which his One Big Beautiful Bill exacerbates.) 

Powell has also been waiting for the chaos surrounding tariffs to settle—if it ever will. These tariffs are designed to feed the narrative that the U.S. has been treated unfairly by its trading partners. Facts don’t matter. Only the story—and Trump’s self-imagined Superman persona rectifying it.

There is no opposition from Congress, and the glacial pace of a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., in deciding the legality of those tariffs—imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act—only adds to the chaos. Even if the court ultimately agrees with the lower courts that Trump lacked authority under the IEEPA, the case will likely land before the Supreme Court—already stacked in his favor.

The point of this brief entry is captured in a quote from 1984 by George Orwell:

“And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth.” The Party’s slogan was: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

In summarily firing the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Party has spoken.  Our Four Freedoms further fade, as captured above by the award-winning editorial cartoonist for the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Mike Luckovich  

 

A Published Memoir Makes the Dream Real

 

Yes, I’ve gone and done it—I’ve published a memoir: Explaining It: A Life Between the Lines. One can find all the relevant information on Amazon

 Quick summary: paperback, 6x9 inches, 420 pages, 97 illustrations, $19.95.

 A word (okay, maybe more than one) about the title and subtitle. This completes what I informally call the “Explaining It” trilogy—though no cataloger will find such a bibliographic designation in the Library of Congress where all three of my books now reside. The first two volumes are:

 - Waiting for Someone to Explain It: The Rise of Contempt and Decline of Sense (2019) – a political meditation born of frustration and disillusionment.

- Explaining It to Someone: Learning from the Arts (2020) – a love letter to literature, music, and theater.

 This third installment, the memoir, turns the gaze more inward. I’ve always been a planner, someone who tries—despite the universe’s best camouflaging effort —to understand the forces that shape a life. The main title, Explaining It, reflects that tendency. The subtitle, A Life Between the Lines, is both a nod to my publishing career and an invitation to look beneath the surface—for the gaps and glimmers that define a life.

 The content outlines family history, much about my best friend and wife (Ann), the significant influence of mentors, the evolution of a professional life, and the adventures of boating, including living on a boat. It also explores my efforts as an octogenarian to navigate an increasingly unfamiliar world, finding solace in the arts.

 It even includes five short stories of mine. There was once a day when there were two distinct sections in a public library: fiction and non-fiction (including reference books): simple and direct.  We all knew what those terms meant. The Dewey Decimal System made it seem that life could easily be classified, organized, understood.   Now we live in a world where fiction masquerades as fact and fiction is becoming realized (especially if it is of dystopian nature). These short stories are not literal autobiography. But they carry the “redolence” of things I’ve seen, understood, or imagined and thus provide another dimension.

 Here’s the Table of Contents for the curious:

 

Now, let’s address the elephant in the bookshop: why write a memoir—and moreover, why publish it?

To the first question: if 90% of success is just showing up (thanks, Woody Allen), then perhaps writing a memoir is just what happens if you live long enough and still like putting metaphoric pen to paper. I quoted James Salter in my last book and again in this memoir: “There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real.”

So yes, I believe in writing things down. It's a form of accountability. It can give life to distant memories.

Memoir is not just a collection of dates and facts. It’s storytelling—sometimes exactly as remembered, often shaped by time, bias, or selective memory (sometimes mercifully so). Editing this book, I kept asking: why did I include that, and not this? Why that photo, and not another? The selection process was often, in a word (or two), serendipitous or even capricious, not unlike many decisions during one’s lifetime.

As to the second question—why publish it? I’m not under the illusion that there will be many sales.  I’m not “pushing” the book, no speaking engagements.  No signings at bookstores.  I'm not a household name and have never aspired to the status of “influencer.” (Who would have thought such a profession could exist?).  Friends and family will be curious and will no doubt comprise the main market.  Nonetheless, to me, not publishing this would be an “incomplete” grade from the University of Life.  After all, my profession was publishing and not to formally publish this would feel like leaving a job unfinished.

A few months from now a Kindle e-book edition will be available at a lower price for those now allergic to the printed book (or to the impact of inflation on the costs of creating a physical book).

From another publisher’s memoir, Robert Gottlieb’s The Avid Reader: “I attempt not to think about death, but there’s no avoiding the fact that we are all the pre-dead.” A cheerfully sobering phrase. Like Gottlieb, I try to stay forward-looking, doing the things I love with the people who matter. That’s the real subject of this memoir: not endings, but continuities.

After Explaining It To Someone: Learning from the Arts was published five years ago I wrote: “This might be the last book I write or the penultimate one, as I am thinking more about fiction and memoir perhaps in a couple of years if time and health are good to me…”

Well, here it is. Three years late, perhaps, but better that than never. Last or penultimate? Time will tell.

 

“Hitch”

 

From the Booknook Web Site

Is it possible to grow close to a person while never having met her, or even spoken to her? 

Yes, I had that kind of relationship with Kimberly Hitchens, the proprietor of Booknook.biz, a digital book conversion company, one she developed over the years. 

She (and her staff) was the midwife to my three books, which I am informally calling the “Explaining It” trilogy.  My final book is now being readied for printing, with an eBook to follow a few months later.  It is a memoir, Explaining It; A Life Between the Lines.  Details will follow in these pages soon.

Tragically, “Hitch” passed away while we were working on this project.

She felt like a best friend, despite the fact that we hadn't met.  Both of us were from the production side of publishing, but from different eras and our extensive emails over the years mused about the business.

Our digital epistolary relationship revealed her to be smart, idiosyncratic, and professional, dedicated as much to her staff as to her clients.  She knew her stuff and her enthusiasm for all aspects of pre-press production was clearly abundant.  Hitch was a joy to work with.

Ironically, the only time our relationship hit a speed bump was concerning this memoir.  Their new system was different than the one when I published Explaining It to Someone; Learning from the Arts five years earlier.

I don’t easily adapt to change and I incorrectly attributed my difficulty to perhaps they were using AI.  Hitch really took me to the woodshed on that.  Mea culpa I cried!

Although she did say AI technology might account for some increase in the volume of projects they were handling and they were slammed with work at the same time my book was submitted.  As a peace offering I said my project was not urgent so if she had to put it in a lower priority queue, I’d understand.

Her reply was long and detailed mostly about the ton of imaging and digital conversion software and AI’s impact there, revealing an instinctive deep knowledge about each, a foreign language to me.  But then, as far as my offer was concerned, here’s Hitch-speak at its finest:

In a billion years, Robert, I would NOT move you back in the queue! NONE of our repeat, much-loved real clients go there. NOPE, not happening. That's the very last thing I'd do.

All our repeat, solid, trade-pubbed clients are where they should be, queue-wise. Not to be a writing snob (moi?! NEVAH!), but our real author clients go where they should, and if I'm moving anybody down the queue--which I do, truly, try not to ever do; I do try to remain FIFO--it's the AI clients.

BUT, that's not to say that I don't truly appreciate your sentiment. I do. It's greatly appreciated.

Have a nice Mother's Day!  I mean...well, you know what I mean.

        H

That was the day before Mother’s Day, less than a month before she died.  I knew she had some health issues, but “NEVAH” anything life threatening.

So on Mother’s Day I replied:

Hitch.  That’s one hell of an email.  I used to have an employee, Carolyn, who started as my secretary but as soon as I got my hands on an Apple II in 1979 (and could do my own typing -80 WPM BTW-via a primitive word processor) I made her my administrative assistant.  Frankly, she tried to outwork me, always to the point of exhaustion— this is how the story relates to you.  I saw a cartoon in the New Yorker which I had framed to hang over her desk.  It pictured a young woman draped over her typewriter, clearly exhausted, with the caption “God, I love this job.”

Hitch, you protest too much.  You love your work.  It doesn’t get much better than that.

Remind me to buy a copy of YOUR memoir.  You are a spontaneous writer and the stories you could tell.

In any case, indeed Happy Mother’s Day.  Yours, Bob

Where she found the time for our personal, behind the scenes email, I have no idea.  There were so many over the years that did not necessarily relate to my projects.

Her last email to me was in reply:

Mon, May 12 at 11:02 AM

LOL...Bob:

Well, there are days when, yes, I do love my job--but there are the others, too.  Thanks for the kind words.

Ye Gods, the Apple II.  We started out a) Heathkit! (yowzers) and then b) the 8080 (which was really the 8088).  Yup, ye olden IBM 8088 which was...when, '81? Yes, I think that's right.

My Bob--My Robert, to whom I am wed--built our first few computers and that was the take-off for us. It helped me conquer the pink ghetto, in those early years. I was the only one that knew how to use the then-word-processor, which was WordStar and then CPM whatsits and I was the QUEEN of the first Lotus 123, which allowed some of us to conquer the world. Ah, the good old days.  Computers, in many ways, allowed women to break out.

LOL

Hitch

The reflective and self-congratulatory tone (albeit well deserved), was unusual for Hitch.  I replied, trying to do her one better, with my early knowledge of Visicalc (the precursor of Lotus 123) as well as PFS software which was an early word processing / data base software, each of these requiring dual floppy disk drives on the Apple II, and then my pride about being involved in the precursor of the Web, The Source, dialing up at 300 baud.   

I thought for sure she would laugh at that, but, uncharacteristically, I heard nothing.  I was stunned to learn that she passed away after a brief hospitalization on June 7.   

RIP Dear Hitch

 

 

The Beautiful Bill That Isn't

 

Once, it felt like “This land was made for you and me,” as the Woody Guthrie song goes.

Never before have I felt so disenfranchised. America may have always fallen short of being a “perfect union,” but over my lifetime, racial, gender, and economic equality grew, and the “American Dream” became more tangible. That is, until Donald Trump purloined the Republican Party.

Between the Texas flood tragedy and the passage of the “One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB),” I was hardly in the mood to “celebrate” July 4, as our unalienable rights seem to be dwindling and American institutions are being dismantled, one by one. January 6, 2021 should have put an end to it all, but DJT has proven himself an escape artist extraordinaire, and the beneficiary of extraordinary luck.

I daresay I am not alone in lamenting what we have lost and what we are becoming. As former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers wrote in a recent New York Times Op-Ed, Lawrence Summers: This Law Made Me Ashamed of My Country  Everything that’s wrong seems to coalesce in the OBBB—not only in its substance but in how it will be cynically implemented. The tax “benefits” arrive just in time for the 2026 midterms, while the real pain—cuts to Medicare, food aid, clean energy, student loan programs, affordable housing, and rural hospitals—hits afterward. The political calculation is as cunning as it is cruel.

Until now, I felt our country stood for assimilating generations of immigrants fleeing persecution or simply seeking a better life. (“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” as Emma Lazarus’ poem on Lady Liberty’s pedestal proclaims.) Now, empathy has vanished—replaced by false narratives portraying undocumented immigrants as the primary source of crime. While some do commit offenses, studies show they do so at lower rates than native-born citizens. Now, with the OBBB’s massive funds for ICE and deportation centers, MAGA lawmakers gleefully cheered, thinking anyone trying to escape “Alligator Alcatraz” would be torn apart by the Everglades wildlife. Reportedly, when the President toured the facility with Governor DeSantis and ICE Barbi Kristi Noem, he supposedly said, “Biden wanted me in here, that son of a bitch.”

The OBBB reallocates resources, shifting funding from social safety nets and clean energy to tax cuts, immigration enforcement, and national defense. But the math doesn’t add up, and the bill is estimated to add more than $3.3 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.

Here’s another reason to feel disenfranchised: While the OBBB was being formulated, what is an ordinary citizen to do? I wrote letters to my Senators, Rick Scott and Ashley Moody, as well as to my representative, Brian Mast. I even called. All are MAGA Republicans, but I felt I had to make my arguments against passing the OBBB, particularly focusing on the unsustainability of the deficit. Except for Brian Mast, I received brief formula responses that extolled how hard they were working for Floridians and how much they “appreciated” my views.

Representative Brian Mast did not reply until after the OBBB was signed into law. His was a detailed (but formula) response which is below in a four-part screenshot.

He employed classic Gish Gallop tactics: a flood of loosely connected talking points, misleading statistics, and emotionally appealing claims, all designed to overwhelm rather than address the fiscal irresponsibility and unsustainable deficit implications of the OBBB. I randomly checked one of the many footnotes; it was cherry-picked to substantiate a point he made, but ignored what the same footnote said about the whole, much of it negative. As I lack the time and expertise to read this 1,000-page bill, in full disclosure, I requested the assistance of AI, asking it to turn to public data and nonpartisan fiscal analysis. This is what that query revealed:

Claim: “This bill secures the border, reins in wasteful spending, and reignites economic growth.”
Reality: This is a vague and unsubstantiated assertion. The bill’s core function is massive tax reduction, not meaningful deficit reduction or targeted infrastructure investment.

Claim: “Extends the 2017 tax cuts that unleashed our economy.”
Reality: The 2017 tax cuts provided short-term growth but not enough to offset revenue loss. The national debt increased by over $2 trillion post-enactment, even before COVID.

Claim: “Across every income level, Americans got a break…”
Reality: While marginal tax rates decreased, the effective tax relief was minimal and temporary for most. The wealthy received permanent, far larger benefits.

Claim: “Increases the child tax credit from $2,000 to $2,200.”
Reality: This $200 increase does not compare to the temporary 2021 expansion that lifted millions out of poverty. Many low-income families remain excluded due to refundability limits.

Claim: “Cuts taxes on tips, overtime, and Social Security.”
Reality: These cuts offer modest benefits and are not offset. Cutting Social Security taxes may actually weaken the trust fund’s solvency over time.

Claim: “Fully funds Trump’s border wall… hires more border patrol… empowers Coast Guard.”
Reality: Border wall funding is a separate issue and cannot justify multi-trillion-dollar tax cuts. These provisions serve as emotional appeals, not fiscal justification.

Claim: “Increases Social Security payments by creating a $6,000 tax deduction.”
Reality: This is misleading. It doesn’t increase benefit payments—just allows some recipients to reduce taxable income, with limited real impact.

Claim: “Strengthens Medicaid by eliminating fraud and abuse.”
Reality: Fraud should be addressed, but even perfect fraud elimination does not offset the massive cost of the tax cuts. This is a political talking point, not a fiscal plan.

Claim: “Work requirements apply only to able-bodied adults without dependents.”
Reality: These requirements often create administrative burdens that remove eligible people. The cost savings are limited, and the societal harms can be significant. The bill's changes to work requirements and funding could result in nearly 12 million people losing health coverage.

Claim: “This bill empowers individuals to live the American Dream.”
Reality: The bill’s structure overwhelmingly favors the wealthy and deepens the deficit. Real empowerment comes from opportunity, fairness, and sustainability—not debt-financed tax cuts.
 

Note: This analysis and rebuttal were drafted with the assistance of ChatGPT, a language model developed by Open AI, to help ensure clarity, factual grounding, and accessibility.  The conclusions drawn are my own.    

Looking ahead, I fear the OBBB will cause massive dislocations in our society: deepening inequality, increasing cruelty toward law-abiding, tax-paying migrants, and continuing the decimation of core American institutions—health, education, and justice. Even more concerning, it undermines the very idea of America as a nation others can trust. The long-term economic, political, and social consequences are staggering—and potentially irreversible.