Month: August 2015

At the opening of William Shakespeare’s peerless study of malevolence, Richard III, the protagonist initiates his soliloquy with the seven words that focus the entire play –  Now is the winter of our discontent. To Richard the seeming stability enjoyed by the elites is about  to see the havoc of the discontented, from unpredictable and opaque directions, until the world experiences the reordering that will upturn the status quo. In more down to earth terms, the whole miserable truth is, that the joke is on them.

Such is our current season of discontent.  The polls suggest that the position of chief executive of the most powerful country on earth may come down to a choice between a bombastic clown and a truth-addled crook.  In Great Britain, there is a groundswell in the Labour Party to select as leader, Jeremy Corbyn, a man who would make Karl Marx blush regarding his proletariat uber-sympathies.  In France, the leading candidate for the Presidency of France is forced to evict her father from his own party for saying out loud the prejudices upon which the party was founded.

The discontent crosses philosophies and principles.  The unifying force is the discontent itself.  Legions of people who feel their particular issues have been stomped in the dust by the elites who set the rules that the rest must live by, and the elites blithely ignore.  To the discontented, it is refreshing for a Donald Trump to admit what they always suspected – that patronage is purchased, and the entire governing body is in on it.   He does what they wish they could do, act out,  and call people out, without recriminations.  The rule of law has crumbled behind the ever shifting sands of lawyerisms, so why not suggest extra-legislative means harshly correcting the inequities?  For the discontented, Trump doesn’t have core beliefs, just the cojones to do something to restore their voice.

Trump is pitted against Clinton, the poster child of name calling and victimhood.  She stands for the nihilist principle – Let me do what I want, and you get to do what you want.  She might be the first candidate in history to whom the candidate who presumptively will run against her, proudly admits to having previously bought her patronage. Yet even Clinton stands vulnerable to attacks from even farther out on the anarchist fringe from a progressively popular Bernie Sanders, who wants to take the ‘us versus them’ to a celestial level.  The toxic stew stands to drowned out any deliberative debate as to the country’s problems, as the emotional discontent gains further traction.

The discontent in Great Britain threatens the status quo, with competing nationalisms driving progressive unprincipled extremism, from the ‘throw the rascals out until it looks like England again’  mentality of UKIP, to the ‘drain the capitalists of their money and power’ invectives of Corbyn the rest of the Labour party seems helpless to thwart.  Tony Blair stands aghast at the unleashing of Corbynmania but seems clueless as to how his peculiar brand of elitism helped to create the monster.  The European Union, and by proxy the dominant German backers, cling to their bureaucratic dictums that demand the obedience of all under its puritan reach, yet are progressively alarmed at the increasingly nationalistic populations that thumb their nose and suggest that if they are to be ruled by a bastard elite, better a bastard elite they recognize and to which they can relate .

The discontent surges not knowing necessarily what it wants, only sure it doesn’t want the status quo.  Why have a constitution if no one follows it?  Why follow the rules if the elite tell you that those that don’t follow the rules, will receive an equal if not greater piece of the pie?  We are deep into our winter of discontent, and the former balancing forces of a stable society maybe unable to restore the accepted order, or the predictable outcomes.  For Richard III, when the tidal forces he unshackled came back upon him, he temporarily sought refuge from the progressive calamity, willing to give up “A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse!”  When Catesby urges him to withdraw from battle, achieve the steed, and therefore safety he requested, Richard III knows his destiny is the calamity he has unleashed, responding, “Slave, I have set my life upon the cast, and I will stand the hazard of a die!”  

It is the mystery of our time to see whether our current protagonists will have Richard’s courage to see their role in stoking the darker shades of our nature, to destiny’s fitting conclusion.

 

President Obama has been firm with concept that America’s heavy footprint in the Middle East is partially responsible for stoking the intense violence of the region and that our withdrawal will reduce the nidus for the conflict.  He has been adament that the descriptiion of the violence as a premeditated goal of a radicalized Islam is our contribution to the seeds of that violence, and has no place in American thinking.  His view has led to the conceptualization of the Major Hassan as “workplace violence”, the Tsarnaev Boston bombing as “lone wolf” actions, and the recent Chattanooga recruiting station attack as a problem of “mental illness”.

Specific to the Chattanooga attack of July 16th, 2015, five unarmed military personnel were murdered by a Palestinian American named Mohammed Youssef Abdulazeez, whose parents left the middle east in 1996, and accepted American citizenship, but never left their fundamental Islamist beliefs behind.   Abdulazeez, pummeled by a life of drug abuse, poor personal discipline costing him stable employment, and consumed by the internal rage of arab youth felt denied their position as the superior race, attained an AK 47 automatic assault rifle and unloaded 100 rounds into people who could not defend themselves, until he was  put down by police fire.

On August 15th, 2015, the military finally secured a combined service for the five servicemen and their families, a month past the point where the rest of the country has already put the event behind them and moved on to other things.  In a country anxious to avert its eyes to the growing threat of radicalized Islam, assisted by the Averter in Chief, the individual loss of soldiers does not take hold.  After all, the country lives through assaults every week in its major cities as part of routine urban violence and does nothing but salute the occasional thug that determined to strike back against the police.  The shared sacrifice idealization of a soldier defending their country no longer secures an emotional response among a population where the great majority of the population no longer serves, or knows someone who has.

The Vice President of this country is thankfully different, and eloquently expressed what is rarely expressed anymore by those in power.  Vice President Biden has reason to connect with loss of loved ones; in 1972 he lost his daughter and wife in a car accident in which his two sons, Beau and Hunter were seriously injured.  This summer he lost his son Beau, Delaware’s attorney general, to brain cancer.  Beau, the Biden hope for the future, a major in the Army Reserve who served in Iraq, and assumed next governor of Delaware, was taken from the Vice President with a vicious cancer  that has clearly and deeply affected the Vice President’s views on life, sacrifice, and loss.  There is likely no loss as personal as a child to a parent, and places Biden in direct sympathy with those military families who must face their overwhelming loss in silence from a country that prefers not to know.

Vice Presidents do funerals, and perform eulogies.  But there was something very special about the eulogy Vice President Biden gave yesterday.  Something so heartfelt and direct, only someone who has lost, could understand.  With his eulogy, Biden showed great clarity in what it means to serve and defend the ramparts, what it means to sacrifice, and what it means to be an American.  Sometimes the most unpredictable events elevate a person and make them worthy of our attention.  In an election season where the presumptive republican front runner clowns his way through policy discussion, and the presumptive democratic front runner has shown herself to be laden with corruption and indiscipline, Vice President Biden may have just set himself apart, and shown the world that there is still a place for someone who gets it.

Watch the speech in its entirety, and you will get it, too.

On Thursday evening, August 6th,2015, an estimated 24 million Americans tuned in to watch the national broadcast of a debate of republican presidential aspirants. With such an audience, the standard was set for the highest rated non sports related telecast in cable network history.  I’m fairly confident this huge audience didn’t tune in to see Rand Paul articulate libertarianism, judge what Megyn Kelly was wearing, or query whether Jeb Bush would respond to the name Jeb Bush.  No, the great majority tuned in, I believe, to be potential witnesses to a real time train wreck.  On June 16th, the Donald Trump train left the station with his announcement that he was running for the Presidency, and has been teetering on the rails ever since.  A nation’s audience reveled in the chance he just might in front of everybody swerve completely off the rails and self destruct.

Donald Trump is the triumphant example of the progressive superficial vacuousness that has overcome the nation’s political discourse.  The Trump agenda for the country is essentially bluster.  Were it not for bluster, he would have no program at all.  But to Trump, what ails the country is not the lack of formative ideas to solve the nation’s challenges, it is the lack of politicians  being willing to lay it on the line, and tell it like it is.  Or at least tell it as Trump think it is to be told.   He sees the world not in layers of complex historical trends, intellectual assessments, and strategic insights, only as groups of winners and losers.  If you win you are “wonderful”.  If you fail, you are “terrible” and a “loser”.  In 1987, Donald Trump burst upon the national consciousness authoring a best seller called “Art of the Deal”, in which he relayed his recipe for success.  Among its breakthrough concepts, Think Big and Get the Word Out.  As Trump tells it, ” I like to think big. If you going to be thinking anything, you might as well think big.”  The Donald starred in his own television show in which he identified “losers” and “fired” them.  He states he would bringing this cutting edge management style to the executive branch of the nation’s government.

Is it feasible that 25% of the nation’s voting public, as currently reflected in the polls, sees Trump’s  political core thought as innovative and worthy of the nation’s highest office?  I suspect not, but there has been a progressive tendency to look for leaders that elicit emotional reaction, rather than measured thought.  Its seen in the tendency to want to look to elect the “first” of something – the “first African American”, the “first Woman”, the “first Other”.   Leaders that stoke victimization seem more caring about individual problems and concerns, rather than promoting challenging processes that might actually solve them.  Politicians also seek to identify the “villains” – the “Rich”, the “Gun Owner”, or the “Christian zealot”.  Trump nestles into the psyche of the average voter that is not entirely willing to investigate why problems exist, but fairly certain they are being at least impersonally screwed by the establishment.  Since Trump sees himself as never being duped, he aligns himself with the voters, who see him as protecting them against unseen forces.

As he is the deliverer of emotional retorts, Trump is under no pressure to secure is the logic or the consistency of his statements.  He has been able to make outrageous and contradictory statements,  because to him, the outrage is not his lack of facts, it is everyone else’s lack of outrage.  As Kevin Williamson in National Review articulates:

Asked to provide evidence for his daft conspiracy theory that our illegal-immigration crisis is a result of the Mexican government’s intentionally flooding the United States with platoons of rapists, Trump’s answer was, essentially, “I heard it from a guy.” Challenged on his support for a Canadian-style single-payer health-care system, Trump described the system of his dreams in one word: “better.” As though nobody had ever thought: “What we need is better policies instead of worse policies.” Trump’s mind is so full of Trump that there isn’t any room for ideas, or even basic knowledge.

Logic like that used to be recognized in American politics as a form of satire.  Pat Paulson, a sketch comedian on the Smothers Brothers television show ran for the Presidency in 1968 and five times thereafter on the Straight Talking American Government(STAG) party

platform, with the healthy comedic cynicism of an observer of body politics’ inherent hypocrisies.  Paulsen, freely willing to be a flip  flopper and double talker regarding  his policy statements, when caught in his incoherence, always responded with the catch phrase “picky, picky, picky!”  His presidential campaign slogan was “I upped my standards, now, up yours!”  Paulsen always secured a certain protest vote, but everybody knew he was in on the joke.

 

In 1992, H Ross Perot, a Texas businessman with a particular hatred for the sitting President George Herbert Walker Bush, set himself as a Trumpian candidate,  and his form of satire was certainly less funny and somewhat more ominous in its success.  He was quoted as saying obtuse policy statements such as, “ If someone as blessed as I am not willing to clean out the barn, who will?”  and  “If you can’t stand a little sacrifice and you can’t  stand a trip across the desert with limited water, we’re never going to straighten this country out.”  Whatever potential policies Perot felt such remarks would evolve into, he never let on, but he translated it into 19% of the national vote in 1992, and although he didn’t win a single state’s electoral vote, Perot managed to take down a sitting President and give us Bill Clinton.

 

Perot’s success set the stage for the current “businessman savior” Trump, who feels his supposed dominance  in the business world would translate into the more arcane and compromise filled world of politics.  Of course such talents never need to show their skill level running for any lower office – the Chief Executive office of the country is fundamentally just big enough for their egos.

The 2016 republican field was felt to be one of the most talented in recent history, with multiple vetted and articulate candidates with willingness to confront one of the more challenging political environments in years.  Into this maelstrom comes the distortion of Trump, who looks to steal the energy and attention of the moment to pump his own ego and potentially upset the applecart.  Trump, the runaway train, threatens to take his circus “Independent” and achieve the same notoriety that propelled Perot, and likely bring another Clinton into the office.  It would suit Trump fine as he believes the office holders are meant to be “managed” for favors, and their policies consumer items for purchase.  It certainly wouldn’t phase him as to which party would be in power, as power comes from the Art of the Deal.   Is the country so gone that it can no longer participate in a real battle of ideas and help mold its destiny?  My gut sense is that the country has had its flirtation with the superficial (see current administration) and will trade it for some serious adults, not the theater of the absurd.  If so, Trump’s train will soon be passenger-less, and its conductor once again reduced to running beauty pageants, wrestling events, and roulette wheels.  I suspect after a period of time in the klieg lights, that will suit the conductor of the crazy train just fine.