Wisdom of the Aged by Craig Hattersley - HTML preview

A quarter of the country

Is one paycheck from the street.

A tenth of the country

Has never had enough to eat.

And one one hundredth of the country

Is strangling all the rest.

And every policeman on the street

Is wearing a bulletproof vest.

—David Baerwald, “Stranger,” from
the 1990 album Bedtime Stories

Probably the signature “accomplishment” of my generation was in ending the Vietnam War, but hey, our asses were literally on the line, right? The other struggles of the era—involving race, gender, and class, in the main (yet all in­ter­woven)—would languish or sputter intermittently until the Black Lives Matter and Me Too movements rekindled agi­ta­tion for reform years later, empowered by the proliferation of cell phones to graphically expose abuse, the prevalence of social me­dia to give voice to concerns, and the ex­as­peration of women fed up with the be­ha­vior of men in pow­er­ful po­si­tions. You couldn’t put the tooth­paste back in the tube, though you could delay the time before posture and pretense had to give way to action.

My own reawakening to sentient political life coincided more or less with a return to an empty-­nester reality, when our laddybuck left home and I emerged from my somnolence. It’s as if I awoke from a bad dream to discover the sham­bles governance had made of every­day life. We had charged into a nonsensical war in the Mid­dle East that would tear up the region for decades (I thought it a dumb-ass move, but what could I do?). Politics had devolved into a full-contact blood sport, courtesy of banty roosters like Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, and a motley collection of right-wing media mouth­pieces (thanks to the repeal of the Fair­ness Doctrine). The Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and succeeding cases had opened up the flood­gates to a mass in­fu­sion of money into the electoral pro­cess, power in the act of cor­rupt­ing absolutely.

Garrison Keillor wrote scathingly about the transmogrification of the Republican party (become ever more prescient in succeeding years, as this predated Citizens United):

Rich ironies abound! Lies pop up like toadstools in the forest! Wild swine crowd round the public trough! Outrageous gerrymandering! Pocket lining on a massive scale! Paid lobbyists sit in committee rooms and write legislation to alleviate the suffering of billionaires! Hypocrisies shine like cat turds in the moonlight! O Mark Twain, where art thou at this hour? Arise and behold the Gilded Age reincarnated gaudier than ever, upholding great wealth as the sure sign of Divine Grace.

Here in 2004, George W. Bush is running for reelection on a platform of tragedy—the single greatest failure of national defense in our history, the attacks of 9/11 in which 19 men with box cutters put this nation into a tailspin, a failure the details of which the White House fought to keep secret even as it ran the country into hock up to the hubcaps, thanks to generous tax cuts for the well-fixed, hoping to lead us into a box canyon of debt that will render government im­po­tent, even as we engage in a war against a small country that was undertaken for the president’s personal satisfaction but sold to the American public on the basis of brazen misinformation, a war whose purpose is to distract us from an enormous transfer of wealth taking place in this country, flowing upward, and the deception is working beautifully.

Since the presidency of genial hack Ronald Reagan, Republican “voodoo” economic policy had been relentlessly plutocratic, cham­pion­ing tax cuts for the rich and benefit cuts for everyone else—though it can be argued the effort began in earnest earlier, in response to FDR’s New Deal.

As I burrowed back into current events (once again a pre­occupation, courtesy of the internet), I came to believe that the great American experiment had gone off the rails, the downtrodden so much flotsam washed up in a flood of vul­ture capi­talism run amok—retirees, minorities, the middle class all low-grade ore mined for money by the ultra-rich and powerful. Small “adjustments” made hither and yon to tax law and jurisprudence over the course of time led in slow motion to a quag of injustice, the death of a thousand tiny cuts.

The facade of Dow Jones buoyancy, so loudly trumpeted by the Donald as a hallmark of prosperity, masks the strug­gle of the average citizen, success in the stock market providing a thin veneer of well-being while mil­lions of Amer­icans remain unemployed or under-­employed. Nearly half of American house­holds own no stock at all, even count­ing pension and 401k plans or IRAs. For Black and His­pa­nic families the numbers are even worse: 69 percent and 72 percent, respectively. Indeed, the wealthiest 10 percent of house­holds own 84 percent of all stock. A RAND study in 2020 de­ter­mined that in the U.S., the top 1 percent has taken $50 trillion from the bottom 90 percent over the past 50 years. From 1975 to 2018, it noted, $2.5 trillion each year was sucked from the bottom 90 percent into the coffers of the wealthiest 1 percent of all Americans.

And pandemic aggravated the plight of American fam­ilies, providing hard lessons for this country—not the least of which is the effect on work­ing people, the com­mon core of society that keeps it func­tion­ing. In Septem­ber 2020 a Census Bureau survey stated that 10.5 percent of adults, some 23 million people, reported house­hold members weren’t getting enough to eat, a sharp increase from the 3.7 percent in a Department of Agriculture survey in 2019. At the same time, food-insecurity estimates for households with children ranged to nearly 30 percent. Yet as an October 2020 Washington Post report noted, of the $4 trillion approved in the pandemic aid relief package (exceeding the cost of the 18-year Afghanistan war), only 20 percent actually went to workers and families, the bulk targeted for businesses and the wealthy. The stock market reached all-time highs, while cars lined up for hours at food banks.

Hopefully this harsh reality will help us emerge from an age where public per­ception replaced know­ledge, goaded on by patriotic slo­gan­eering designed to gloss over the latest political chican­ery, shrouded in concert with a sham religiosity. The real­ity show of the Trump years has exposed those tawdry truths hid­den in plain sight, drowned out by the ministrations of who­ever says the craziest thing or wields the biggest microphone—the top story du jour.

It seemed to me that politics had devolved into a suppurating pustule on the face of that “shining city on a hill” we’ve always fashioned ourselves—while paradoxically of­fer­ing some explanation why so many opted to vote for a to­tal wild card in 2016, the un­poli­tician: an electorate sickened by the business-as-usual approach to governance. But it doesn’t explain why so many still supported such bunco after four years of that ad­min­is­tra­tion, even bol­stered so blatantly by brazen voter suppression and a steady stream of right-wing dis­information.

Now, I’m not deluded into thinking that Democrats stand nobly high above the fray, beholden as they are as well to monied interests to fund campaigns. But at least they exhibit a semblance of care about the plight of the masses, if only in fighting a rear-guard action against plutocratic ­rapacity. (And they did, in fact, introduce an amendment following the election to overturn Citizens United.) Add to that continued Republican efforts to restrict voting through out­rageous gerrymandering and outright sup­pres­sion, including attempts at a massive purging of le­giti­mate (chiefly nonwhite) voters.

After the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, Republican politicians rushed to close nearly 1,700 polling places to make it harder to vote in states previously sub­ject to judicial review (750 in Texas, 320 in Arizona, 214 in Georgia, 126 in Louisiana, 96 in Mississippi, 72 in Alabama, and 29 in North Carolina). During the 2020 election, Republicans filed some 300 lawsuits in 44 states trying to stop the counting of mail-in ballots, as these made it easier for “those” people to vote. Blatant efforts in the 2020 election to suppress voting led critics to label Republicans in Con­gress the Jim Crow caucus.

Because of these and other scabrous acts—all designed to retain power in a foredoomed effort to stem the tide working against a shrinking white demographic—I remain what they call in Texas a “yellow-dog Demo­crat”: I’d vote for a yel­low dog before I’d vote for a Re­pub­li­can. To me, the elections are bi­nary. No Green Party pro­test vote is worth what the 2016 elec­tions foisted off on our country.

Granted, Joe Biden wasn’t my first pick in a crowded field when the 2020 election season got underway, maybe not even in my top five. Yet his selection might have been a foregone conclusion, given the desire of a wide swath of the elec­tor­ate to return to a more placid governance, what passes for nor­mal­ity—and the feeling that he might best garner the needed support. Even so, his win over the mod­ern equiva­lent of a super-sized P. T. Barnum didn’t end up the wholesale tsunami many predicted. But for Trump’s doltish mismanagement of the Covid crisis (fearing as he did its impact on the economy), Biden might well have lost.

In my mind this may be due at least in part to the Dem­ocratic party’s hamhandish response (or lack therof) to Republican branding—saying, for instance, that to “defund the police” meant not to redefine policing and actually lighten the load on cops but to disband them en­tirely and loose chaos on our cities. Shades of the Sixties and Richard Nixon’s crusade for law and order (derided by cartoonist Walt Kelly in “Pogo” as “lawn order”).

And some pundits aver that the “socialist” brand, bogus as it may be, has been affixed to the party through constant Republican iteration—constantly drawing comparisons to poor Ven­e­zuela, a country we’ve strived overtly as well as co­vertly to beat into economic destitution. (One wag has sug­gested that “socialism” is used to describe everything to the left of hunting the homeless for sport.) It should be noted that now­a­days, the label “communism” to tar pro­gres­sive notions has fallen out of fashion in the Republican play­book, given the ascension to power in Russia of Putin and his pet plutocrats (and, as mentioned in a recent post, the fact that there are more Chinese billionaires than any other nationality). It’s all about the benjamins, as in he who has the gold makes the rules.

And in truth, the power and the gold have resided in the grasp of the Republican party. Even with the election of Democrat Joe Biden, we’ve had, in essence, one-party rule for decades—witness, for one, the Republican dominance on the Supreme Court. Including Amy Barrett, the party has picked six of the last ten justices although it has lost the pop­ular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections. With Trump’s third appointment to the court, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell running roughshod over the process, Republican presidents have picked sixteen out of the last twenty justices. Justice Barrett was the first Su­preme Court justice to be confirmed without bipartisan sup­port since 1869.

Even more indicative of this single-party trend in politics, however, is the fact that Republican presidential candidates gained office twice in the last four elections despite losing the popular vote—in 2000 and in 2016—courtesy of the Electoral College. And in 2020, only the margins in a cou­ple “swing” states prevented it from happening again, in an election where Biden claimed the highest percentage of any challenger since FDR in 1932. Biden won the popular vote by seven million, and Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 by three million—yet they won the electoral vote by the same margin.

The Electoral College, an anomaly in “democracies” world­wide, favors land over people. An elector in Wyoming represents around 150,000 voters; a California elector, some 500,000 residents, making their votes over three times more powerful. Voters in Montana rate 31 times the electoral bang for their buck in presidential votes than their counterparts in New York. Those in Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico get zilch.

This wasn’t always the case. As states increased in population, the number of electors did as well. But, as historian Heather Cox Richardson writes:

The 1920 census showed that the weight of the nation’s demographics was moving to cities, which were controlled by Democrats, so the Republicans in control of the House of Representatives refused to reapportion representation after that census. Reapportioning the House would have cost many of them their seats. Rather than permitting the number of representatives to grow along with population, Congress then capped the size of the House at 435. Since then, the average size of a congressional district has tripled. This gives smaller states a huge advantage in the Electoral College, in which each state gets a number of votes equal to the number of its senators and representatives.

These injuries to our system have saddled us with an Electoral College that permits a minority to tyrannize over the majority. That systemic advantage is unsustainable in a democracy. One or the other will have to give.

The winner-take-all approach most states take in allo­cat­ing electoral votes also has the effect of negating the tally for losing candidates therein. More equitable at least would be awarding each candidate an amount proportionate to the number of votes received—given the nigh-impossible alternative of a constitutional amendment changing the system.

This flies in the face of popular opinion: U.S. adults be­lieve, fifty-eight to forty per­cent, that the Constitution should be amended so the presidential candidate who ­receives the most votes na­tio­nwide wins. In one of many history courses I’ve taken in college (my favorite subject), a pro­fessor opined that this was a feature, not a defect, built in by the found­ing fathers. He insisted that their intent is apparent in the chang­ing of those ringing phrases in the ­Declaration of Independence—“life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”—to the magisterial version in the Constitution—“life, liberty, and property.”

This affront to the notion of one-man, one-vote democracy as practiced elsewhere in the world doesn’t represent the extent of the problem. The U.S. Senate, our own House of Lords, reflects this same disparity, giving each state two senators regardless of its size. Once again, land triumphs over people. A voter in Wyoming has seventy times the rep­re­sentation in the Senate as one in California, while once again, citizens in Puerto Rico or Washington, D.C., go without. (As journalist Ari Berman points out, Wyoming, population 578,000, is 92 percent white and has 2 senators. DC, with 705,000 people, is 46% Black and has 0 senators.) In 2013, the New York Times pointed out that the six senators from California, Texas, and New York represented the same number of people as the sixty-two senators from the smallest thirty-one states. Following the 2020 election, the Senate was split evenly, but the 50 Democrats represented some 41.5 million more people than the 50 Republicans represented.

And when a Mitch McConnell wields Senate leadership like a cudgel to maintain power—as seen in denying Ba­rack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court as well as those of more than a hundred federal judges—it only reinforces the perception of one-party rule.

Which seems all too in step with the notion of “original­ism” as relentlessly espoused by conservative members of the Supreme Court following the lead of the late Antonin Scalia. Bill Moyers has noted that this represents the Founding Fathers’ intent at the outset to limit democratic (small “d”) input:

The Senate, with equal votes for every state, large and small, would ensure that citizens of large, populous states had far less influence over legislation and judicial appointments than those in smaller ones. Alexander Hamilton wanted its members to serve lifetime terms, for “nothing but a permanent body can check the imprudence of democracy.” Though he opposed giving each state equal votes, James Madison thought the upper house should serve “as a check on the democracy,” a way to impede the influence of those who “labor under all the hardships of life, and secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings.”

Demographics mitigate against those who might “secretly sigh” for more equity—America’s nonwhite popula­tion, which tends now to live in large or medium-sized states. Less than fifteen percent of citizens (predominantly white) now live in rural counties. And as Republicans gained ascen­dancy in statewide races, redrawing district boun­daries during reapportionment, representation in the House of Representatives became skewed. As the progressive Center for American Progress pointed out, for each of the three elections between 2012 and 2016, fifty-nine seats would have changed hands if the percentage of seats won by a party matched the percentage of votes cast for its candidates: Republicans won nineteen additional seats each election because of districts biased in their favor.

As contrary as this development might seem to our avowed prin­ciples—you know, the much ballyhooed “American exceptionalism” and all that razzmatazz—it extends fur­ther if you consider one of the major grievances (and, indeed, rallying cry) of the revolutionary period: “no taxation without representation.” So who pays the freight nowadays? Where does tax money come from and where does it go?

According to a post-election Brookings Institution study, counties won by Joe Biden make up 70 percent of all U.S. eco­nomic output (gross domestic product, or GDP), while Trump’s counties just 29 percent. Left-leaning economists say blue states essentially subsidize red states, which over­whelm­ingly accept more federal funds compared to what they contribute. According to the Rockefeller Institute, only 8 out of our 50 states send more to the federal government than they receive in return. The top 6 are traditional blue states—New York ($22 billion), New Jersey ($12 billion), Massachusetts ($9 billion), Connecticut ($8 billion), Colorado ($2 billion), and Minnesota ($725 million). The other two are the traditional red states of Utah ($511 million) and Nebraska ($315 million). The bottom ten of “takers,” those who receive more than they give—Virginia, Maryland, Ken­tucky, Alabama, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Ari­zona, Tennessee, Michigan, and Florida—are predominantly red states. But I don’t suppose “originalists” care to hear this kind of argument, though.

What does warrant discussion ultimately, though, is the ut­ter perversion of honor and the rule of law during Trump’s rogue administration. He has blown up every hallowed tradition associated with the office, wielding power as would the don of a crime fam­ily. During his reign, he’s sought only to enrich and ennoble him­self—besides picking at the scabs of racism, nationalism, the sores of the forgotten in our society, to distract by fomenting confusion, division, and an­­ger—cementing his imperial control over party minions with an itchy twitter finger holding them in thrall, his only interest what’s in it for him.

This quid-pro-quo attachment to the office, ignoring con­ven­tion as well as law, revealed itself early when he re­fused to release his taxes or divest himself, raked in emoluments from the time of his very inauguration, hired pro­geny with vaporous credentials, over­riding security con­cerns—lead­ing fi­nally to impeachment, where party lack­eys in the Sen­ate had preordained his innocence. And those subservient toadies proclaimed, “Let the people decide with their votes” in the upcoming election, until the all-powerful Oz declared it rigged and further fouled the process by dragging it on for months with bootless court challenges.

Then, during his bizarre fight to overturn the results, he first called for donations to pursue his bogus claims, just one more egregious example of grift, the flimflam man building up his war chest for the inevita­ble lawsuits to follow his descendancy. Even to the end, he acted the capo di tutti i capi, saying he wanted to see a list of those in Congress who did (or didn’t) sign on to his cause, maniacally trying to maintain his grip on the party. His every action during the denouement of this tragicomedy showed his desire to maintain the power he so savored, seen in his own mind extending beyond a single term.

For that reason, it’s imperative to rip the shroud off the Trump debacle, revealing for all what has been done in—and to—the peo­ple’s name. I only hope to live long enough to see the truth, finally, in the light of day, every detail in each tell-all book from every stooge released from his megalomaniacal grip.

To break his hold, there first must be a careful examination of every norm and convention Trump shat­tered, making explicit in the rule of law what has previously operated un­der an honor system, rendered meaningless by a president who lacks any such fealty to integrity. Two impeachments have done nothing to teach the Donald any lesson, as Maine Senator (and waffle queen) Susan Collins insisted would hap­pen after the first—other than that he could get away with anything. He retained hold on the Republican party af­ter the Capitol riots. Only 7 joined Demo­crats voting to convict in impeachment part deux. (The 57 senators repre­sent 76,000,000 voters more than do the 43 sticking with the boss.)

So on to legal malfeasance. Unseal every indict­ment wait­ing in the wings and prosecute him and his coterie to the fur­thest extent of the law. It will not be easy, given his penchant for dragging every case out till an oppo­nent’s desire to continue flags. But the wheels of justice grind slowly, and even with the $200 million conned out of his devotees in his quest for “election justice,” his means will be bounded. This house of cards can’t stand up to what awaits. Forbes magazine said his debts due over the next four years total more than a billion dollars, so it will soon be time to pay the piper. He may stiff a lawyer or two, but he’s gone to that well too many times to have much access to people’s good will.

Every transaction of the Trump mob needs dissection, from the time well before inauguration to the last dirty pardon given to head off damning testimony (as payback to those who hadn’t ratted him out). No mercy. Rather, the mercy Trump showed infant immigrants torn from their par­ents, those Americans not a lighter shade of pale, the bed­rock citizens of this country struggling during the Covid crisis. Only in this way can the spell be broken, the last fool bending a knee to the swindler up and stealing away, abashed and ashamed to be taken in by such bunkum.

The Trump name must be so tainted that Plas­ticine Prin­cess Ivanka and Donald Amok Jr. won’t care to show their faces in public, let alone run for office, as suggested. Re­publican sycophants turned to dust in the wind—or off to lick some other’s boots. The Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Q-cumbers, and assorted troglodytes slid back under the rocks whence they slithered.

All must be revealed, else some future politician who’s not such a dunderhead and blatant liar and thief could take better ad­van­tage of Trump precedence and make a shambles of re­main­ing democratic norms. This is the one herd immunity that must closely follow that of the Covid virus.