Is Anybody There? The Systematic Dismantling of the Midterms

 

 

The New York Times recently published several unsettling reports concerning the upcoming Midterms, including "Republican Cash Edge Threatens to Swamp Democrats" and "House Passes Strict Voter ID Bill."   

 

Relying on the Midterms as the last bastion against autocracy may be chimerical, given what this administration is doing on its way to destroying our institutions, culture, and global agreements. The third article in the NYT yesterday underscores just how hopeless it might be to rely on those elections to bring us back from total oblivion: "Trump’s Director of Election Security Is an Election Denier; Even in a government full of conspiracists, Kurt Olsen stands out."

 

Appointing Kurt Olsen as the Director of Election Security and Integrity is the ultimate "fox in the henhouse" scenario. The administration hasn’t just invited the fox inside to guard the coop; they’ve given him a badge, a flashlight, and the authority to decide which hens are "legally" allowed to lay eggs. Putting a man sanctioned for spreading election falsehoods in charge of "integrity" feels like a satirical plot point a novelist would reject as too preposterous.

 

According to the New York Times, here are the major points of the investigation into Olsen's new role:

     He now has the authority to refer criminal investigations to the federal government—a power he has already used to catalyze a recent FBI probe into the 2020 election results in Fulton County, Georgia.

 

    Following the 2020 election, Olsen worked "round the clock" on a Supreme Court case seeking to reverse Trump’s defeat and pressured the Justice Department to take up similar suits.

 

    He has a long history of collaborating with conspiracy theorists such as Mike Lindell of PillowGuy fame and representing figures like Kari Lake in unsuccessful legal challenges.

 

    He was previously sanctioned in federal court for making "false, misleading, and unsupported factual assertions" during election litigation in Arizona.

 

    His appointment is part of an apparent "multipronged approach" to challenge state power over elections as the administration begins to cast doubt on the upcoming Midterms.

 

This is all happening before our eyes, just as the January 6th insurrection did. The records from the House Select Committee explicitly link Olsen to the strategies surrounding that day; while he was a private attorney then, his actions were deeply integrated with the White House’s response to the certification process.

 

This administration has long defended its most outrageous actions by laughably citing "transparency" as "proof" of validity. So, there it is—the fox in the henhouse. Thankfully, the "Fourth Estate" still has a pulse after the diminishment of the Washington Post to point this out.

 

"Is anybody there? Does anybody care? Does anybody see what I see?"

Five Years After the Day That Changed Everything

 

 

Out of necessity—primarily my own mental health—I just can’t write much more about that day that will live in infamy: five years ago, Jan. 6.

 

We all saw it with our own eyes, and no matter how it is spun by the nihilism of the right, it was not only an impeachable offense but the beginning of a lawlessness in this country that now, on a daily basis, reaches new lows—while trampling international law as well.

 

Mike Luckovich, our nation turns its lonely eyes to you for an explanation of what, exactly, is going on.

 

In the wake of Jan. 6, I wrote this entry, but Heather Cox Richardson today provides a thorough explanation with five years of hindsight and her command of history. 

There was once a time I would be writing our representatives. But Congress, as well as SCOTUS, has made it pretty clear that we are on our own. That leaves the midterm elections this year as our only hope. And that assumes the very kind of election interference Trump et al. have gaslighted accusations about is not turned on by them in this crucial election.

 

Between gerrymandering and Republican control of both the narrative and the election rules themselves, we should be concerned. And will the Democrats have the good sense to run moderate candidates—ones Republicans fed up with Trump can at least hold their noses and come out to vote for?

 

I can go on. To what end?

 

Totally changing the subject, as I need to turn to something hopeful: our community has a local art show, and I entered two photographic pieces. Here is the proud “artist” with his contributions.

 

The top photograph was taken at the J.P. Morgan Library’s Jane Austen exhibit this past summer. I titled the photograph “Deliberations.” It captures a museumgoer admiring Amy Sherald’s oil painting, A Single Man in Possession of a Good Fortune (2019). The title, of course, comes from Pride and Prejudice. Sherald composes striking, dignified portraits of people of color.

 

The second photograph I titled “Waiting in Casablanca,” taken quietly with a telephoto lens so as not to disturb the subject, who sat alone in his chair for some time.  

 

To me, candid portraits and composition are what make photographs interesting and potential works of art.

 

 

Postmortem of the Postmortem or Welcome to ‘Moolah Lago’

 

The post election implications have been explained to death and besides my despondency I should have little to add.  But this blog has been more about my personal slant, so why stop now?

 

Talk about being a Pollyanna:  I had said to a friend immediately after the election that I was hoping to be surprised by a Trump 2.0.  Being the contrarian that he is (and that’s putting it mildly), he has an opportunity to rise like a phoenix from the ashes of his own dystopian landscape and surprise us all by putting together a government with some thread (slight though it may be) of normalcy, choosing notability over bottomless infamy.  I was trying to think out-of-the-box.  Instead, I was out-of-my-mind.  I guess hope never dies.

 

His appalling Cabinet selections of the inexperienced, hopeless conspiracy theorists and 2020 election and Jan. 6 deniers (with a few accused sexual predators thrown in) will cement his reputation as being the ultimate saboteur of normalcy.  The best summation is by David Remnick of ‘The New Yorker’ who notes the picks “is a trolling beyond mischief. All these appointees are meant to bolster Trump’s effort to lay waste to the officials and the institutions that he has come to despise or regard as threats to his power or person. These appointees are not intended to be his advisers. They are his shock troops. Or could it be that the President-elect is out to reduce the country to the status of a global laughingstock?”

 

There is so much election blame to go around but I’ll mention some that stick in my craw.  

 

Trump’s instincts to merge entertainment into the political landscape resulted in a lethal online gaslighting campaign.  After all, the former is what he instinctively understands.  The Democrats thought issues were more important than bizarre behavior and side show antics: how out of touch and antediluvian.

 

At his side was his fellow plutocrat, Elon Musk.  Together, and with the help of Musk’s social media firm Twitter (X), they effectively reached disenfranchised voters, mostly white but from all ethnicities, who choose the price of gasoline and the joys of trolling over the moral character of the Presidency.  Or, maybe more precise, choose lack of character as a middle finger to those they view as a libtard (essentially, anyone not a Trumpublican).  One has to wonder whether Musk’s overpaying for Twitter was all part of a larger game plan as he stands mightily to benefit from deregulation and his government contracts for SpaceX.   

 

And the Democrats’ progressive agenda was viewed negatively by average Americans.  How many times did we hear accusations that Harris supported government funded sex changes for prisoners, especially “dangerous undocumented immigrants?”  In our post-truth world just the inference with the appearance of truth will suffice.

 

 

 As usual, a picture is worth a thousand words, and this picture is a political cartoon which captures the essence of what happened.  We now have a full fledged plutocracy.  I love the new moniker for Trump’s residency, “Moolah Lago,” by Politico’s editorial cartoonist Matt Wuerker. His Politico profile says that he “lives in Washington, D.C., in close proximity to the National Zoo and the Swiss Embassy. Depending how bad things get, he hopes to find asylum in one or the other.”  Perhaps he is packing his bags as this political cartoon says it all about the nature of the election, how those who will not benefit were maneuvered to support a rule by the wealthy, or the crazy, or the corrupt, whatever. 

 

They croon lovingly and nostalgically about the time there were only tariffs and no income tax – the Gilded Age, controlled by the barons of big oil and the railroads.  The question now is how quickly the incoming administration, with its Wall Street / tech / crypto barons, morphs into a full blown autocracy.

 

Trump could have (no should have) been stopped not long after Jan 6, 2021.  But the Justice system moves glacially and the accident of Merrick Garland as an AG who is no ball buster was the final topping.  He would have made a good Supreme Court Justice; we have Mitch McConnell to thank for that not happening. 

 

I don’t pretend to know about the intricacies of the Justice system but I think it is fair to ask why after four years there was no accountability for Trump’s participation in the events of that day.  We all witnessed it with our own eyes.  Except for his slavish followers, we all know that he is more than in part responsible. 

 

At that time I wrote “Criminal, inciting sedition.  This by a sitting President.  Unthinkable.  Punishable, impeachable,” That event alone should have disqualified him from ever running for public office again.

 

Four years, a 2^nd failed impeachment, and multiple trials later, including being convicted of 34 counts of felonies in New York State, we have our mobster president back, older but wiser as to how to do end runs around the system and reward loyalty to him. 

 

Now he has all levers of government at his disposal, including his subservient Supreme Court.  Will a few Republican Senators and/or members of the House of Representatives not rubber stamp ALL White House proposed appointments and legislation?  Otherwise our last hope is the 4^th Estate, that Freedom of the Press will endure, and the nation can hang on until the midterm elections.

 

In 1956 Nikita Khrushchev said: “We will take America without firing a shot. We do not have to invade the U.S. We will destroy you from within”.

 

Indeed, the election results are starting to feel like a national suicide.

 

 

A Ground Hog Day New Year

Happy New Year. One feels apologetic after addressing someone with that greeting, now needing to qualify it, saying this New Year has to be better than the last.  In the spirit of self analysis, or criticism, I once again look at my writings over the past years.  I’ve always said that writing this blog is not an act of self promotion, there is no advertising, no dialogue invitation (other than my email address if one wants to write me).  It is an exercise in accountability and remembrance.  I’ve joked with friends that it provides an alternative memory bank, particularly when it comes to books, cultural events, and travel destinations, the details of which are too easily forgotten as time inextricably moves on.  

We all have our opinions and our passions.  For nearly 15 years I’ve guardedly worn my heart and mind on my sleeve, and while looking back there are things I regret saying, but for the most part I’m satisfied.  Sometimes, I’ve even been prophetic, and now I’m alarmed by some of the things I write and think, those going to a dark, dark place.  Perhaps that direction is to be expected as I age, and feel its physical and psychological impact. 

However, most of all I fear that the “American Experiment” is beginning to look like the creation of Victor Frankenstein as we slip from democracy, to anacrocy, to oligarchy, destination autocracy.  We have abandoned the concept of “the common good” and are in a civil war, the polarization of just about every major issue.  This has been mostly played out in a grand political charade but incidents such as Charlottesville, and the attack on Congress last January 6 foreshadows where this might go as a hot war.  The proliferation of guns almost ensures some kind of armed conflict, most likely that very kind of guerrilla warfare.

We can’t even see eye to eye about COVID, extremists exploiting the issue as one of individual freedom.  I have written about this and our ex-President; the thought of his being the leader of our country could have been the punch line of a joke not very long ago.  His popular support ironically is not what he’s done for his followers but instead his giving voice to his follower’s hatred of the virtues of where we thought we were moving, into a more tolerant, ethnically diverse, educated society. 

It is bad enough if we only had to be concerned about the Trumpublicans mastery of propaganda and Gaslighting.  The liberal press writes much about the evils of Gerrymandering and I agree.  But, worse than Gerrymandering is the recent attempts to appoint local election officials, or representatives to the out dated, unnecessary, democracy-threatening Electoral College who are “sympathetic” to Trumpublican causes.

This sets up the real possibility that fair elections can be overturned as being illegitimate.  Then we will be a banana republic.  If election fraud does not work there are always guns.  Is it no wonder I am in a dark place?

At least a cultural light was on in this blog for a long time, but with COVID, many of the theatre and the musical performances which we used to attend in the past, and I enthusiastically wrote about, have been discontinued or migrated to Zoom (not the same).

My reading life has been disrupted by the chaos of our times and although I still try to escape in reading, I find myself less motivated to write about what I read.   Similarly, the piano: still working on improving my skills, but writing about it right now is a different matter.  (Stephen Sondheim’s death in 2021 was a shock and I will write about Sondheim eventually; what he has meant to me musically and personally).

Travel has been shut down, or dangerous, as the civil war plays out, the unvaccinated, the unmasked, claiming their “freedom” transcends everyone else’s. Thus trips I might have written about are no longer to be experienced.

As a society we’ve politicized everything and consequently progress with managing COVID has been disrupted. Years ago we were able to eliminate most smoking in public places which is clearly a danger to the non-smoker, but that took decades for “freedom-loving” smokers to accept, and the Covid issue is even more volatile and equally consequential. 

They accept the licensing of motor vehicles, but not of guns, again equally dangerous if in the wrong hands, or being military grade. I have written more than 30 entries over the years on the need for sensible control of automatic weapons, and covering incidents such as the recent Kyle Rittenhouse murders as examples of the consequences of no congressional action.  Even since the horror of murders of children at Sandy Hook in Newtown, CT, now almost ten years ago, we’ve done nothing other than recite the hollow words, “thoughts and prayers.”

It’s open shooting season on the soil of our once sacred nation, each and every one of them intolerable, destroying spirit.  I’ve written to our so called elected representatives who answer with form letters or emails extolling “freedom and the sacredness of the 2^nd amendment” as if it was handed down from heaven.

I am getting to my point.  Every year I seem to write less.  The definition of “banging one’s head against the wall” is “to attempt continuously and fruitlessly to accomplish some task or achieve some goal that is or seems ultimately hopeless.”  Yes that is where I am at with “freedom lovers” be they of guns, ignoring science, pursuing conspiracy theories, or undermining the very essence of our laws.

Ah, laws.  Another bête noire.  Here we are at the 1^st anniversary of one of the ugliest days in American history, and our Justice System moves in glacial slow motion.  Of course we must be thorough, but at the expense of never bringing the masterminds who are responsible to Justice? 

When I wrote my 100^th entry in this blog I posted a playful entry “How is my driving?”  Now that I;m posting my 726^th entry, I no longer ask that question.  A better one would be, “why am I driving?” I am struck by my first entry from last year ironically beginning “Could we have a worse start to a year that follows the worst year in memory?”  Talk about déjà vous.  I include that entry below as the same themes reverberate:

Saturday, January 9, 2021

The Revoltingly Horrid Year Continues….

 

Could we have a worse start to a year that follows the worst year in memory?

 

A quote President unquote, whose name I cannot even speak, continues behaving like an unhinged mobster boss.  His attempts to coerce the Georgia Secretary of State to throw their lawful election is just one more manifestation of his never-ending quest not to be labeled a loser, which he is and has always been.  His behavior then was criminal, impeachable.

 

But wait, that has been forgotten now as this deranged man stood safely behind a bullet proof shield and urged his slavish rabble to storm Congress just as it was ratifying the Electoral College Vote to name Joseph Biden the next President.  He yelled, Stop the Steal!  He promised he’ll be there with them every step along the way.  He didn’t clarify that he meant that metaphorically, as neither he nor his followers know the meaning of the word.  Instead he retired to the security of his White House Media Room with family members and sycophants to enjoy the siege of his insurrectionists in what we would consider a coup attempt if we were watching a 3rd world government.  It was like a Super Bowl party to them as they watched his minions do his dirty work.

 

Criminal, inciting sedition.  This by a sitting President.  Unthinkable.  Punishable, impeachable,

 

So his job of demolishing the last vestiges of democracy and decency is complete.  He is a deluded anarchist and by pandering to that base he has created a populist persona with a dedicated following, ready to die for him.  It could have been a greater loss of life during the siege had those pipe bombs and Molotov cocktails been detonated.  Perhaps the deep rumble of explosions and their accompanying terrifying bright lights was what he was waiting for.

 

We’ve all seen this coming and with every despicable act we (and many elected representatives) have given him more and more latitude.  After all it has been reasoned, he doesn’t understand the consequences.  He doesn’t understand how government really works….

 

How easily the behavior of one tragically flawed person can obfuscate so many serious issues which are tossed by the wayside, the pandemic and distribution of the vaccines, the climate, racial issues, gun control, voter suppression, and a national debt from which the nation might not recover.  Meanwhile Bitcoins and the stock market rage on while the nation burns, and we wake up each morning, fearing the next disaster du jour.

 

Good riddance to our Mobster President who, unfortunately, will still be part of the cancer that erodes our society from within, no matter the degree of his exile.  Mar a Lago may be his Elba.