As humans, we have evolved to be wary of change. In a church, you see this all the time. I like to jokingly remind our leaders that if we change brands of toilet paper, someone is liable to leave the church over it.
Welp, this year our theme could be the line from one of our hymns: Don't be afraid of some change. Because whether you were afraid or not, change was here. Time to learn Zoom. And Youtube Premiere. And in non-church life, curbside pickup for everything from dinner to craft supplies.
We changed. We didn't have a choice in the matter. Trust me, if we'd had an actual choice, if the alternative was not literally potential death, we would have held lots of committee meetings, weighed the pros and cons, and decided nope, we were not going to change.
But we did. And now, slowly I hope, because it's the right and healthy and covenantal thing to do ... we will change again. We'll come back to church. Go back to eating dinner inside a restaurant where people put hot plates in front of us and then whisk them away when they're empty. Realize we're out of that one ingredient and run up to the grocery store to grab it.
In some ways, we'll go back to what used to be, but in so many other ways, we can't really go back, and shouldn't. We have learned things. We won't just do things because we've always done them that way, whether it's Thanksgiving at Grandmas, or shaking hands with everyone we meet.
So, again, we are facing change, and doesn't it seem like it's going to take a lot of energy? We may not particularly like our routine now, but after a year, we've gotten it down. It's familiar. And boy, we like familiar. To change now means going back to uncertainty - how will things be different, how will they be the same? We will have to make decisions, choices, again.
In 1816, Lord George Gordon Byron wrote his poem, "Prisoner of Chillon," telling the real-life story of François Bonivard who was imprisoned in the Castle of Chillon for his political activism. Byron imagined himself as Bonivard, telling the tale of despair, and wrote of when men came to set him free: "And thus when they appear'd at last, And all my bonds aside were cast, These heavy walls to me had grown A hermitage—and all my own!"
We have repurposed our homes, making them into offices, daycares, and entertainment venues. We've lived multiple days, never leaving. And we have been shaped by this time. Our relationships have taken on new dimensions through this. In the good moments, it has been a new privilege, to spend so much time with loved ones. In difficult moments, we have learned more about ourselves, and what we need to feel centered and mentally healthy.
Of course, our feelings right now are complicated.
Lord Byron ends the narrative poem with:
My very chains and I grew friends,
So much a long communion tends
To make us what we are:—even I
Regain'd my freedom with a sigh.
We have grown friends with aspects of this lockdown. And it has made us what we now are.
We are hopeful that the end of the pandemic and a return to some of the things we've missed is on the horizon, even if it's a few months away. But we may feel confused at our own feelings of not being happy, or being anxious at the thought of things getting "back to normal."
And then there's the feeling of camaraderie, of sharing an experience with many people.
Going through something difficult together - even if we are in separate houses while doing so - is often a bonding experience. For those of us who have chosen to take the pandemic seriously, even if our individual circumstances have been different, we have still had similar challenges. It has been reassuring, as a parent, to hear that other families have had some of the same frustrations, like when blogger/author Jen Hatmaker shared on Instagram, "I just cannot look at the grades. I can't do it. I can't look at the missing assignments or those that scored under 70%..."
Solidarity, Sister-Parent!
My beloved grandmother, whom we called "Mama Lanie," used to pat my hand when we were doing something ordinary but fun, and say"We're making memories." Well, this year, we've been doing many things, and many of them decidedly NOT FUN, but we have, in point of fact, been making memories. And many of these are shared memories. Years from now, like veterans getting together for a reunion, we will talk about 2020 and 2021 or the Great Pandemic, or whatever the future will name this period. We will swap stories of searching for toilet paper or creating homemade proms and graduations, and there will be threads going through all these stories that link us all. Unlike the veterans, this happened to all of us, all around the world, except you Australia, with your highfalutin mature and responsible government.
The movie The Breakfast Club is about 5 high school students, seemingly very different, who spend a Saturday in detention together and learn things about themselves and each other, and bond. But at the end of the day, one of the kids asks, "What is going to happen to us on Monday? I mean, I consider you guys my friends. I'm not wrong, am I?"
What's going to happen on Monday? This year, we've faced harrowing decisions. There is a deep and soul grief that over 2 million of us have died from this, half a million+ in the United States. Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color, and those with the least financial means have been affected disproportionately, but it has affected all peoples. We haven't all been in the same boat, but we've all been in the same ocean, even rich celebrities.
And there has been some sense of a shared purpose. Of helping each other out. Of getting a vaccine, and getting those shots in arms.
We've lifted up those who have been on the frontlines, our heroes, teachers, grocery store clerks, nurses, and spoken of how they needed to be better compensated, treated with more respect...
What's going to happen on Monday?
We are looking ahead, now, to things getting back to normal after this long, long year of detention, but we wonder: are we going to forget the feelings of having a shared experience? There has been an odd sense of togetherness, ironic considering we were so apart. We laugh at hearing how Prince Philip closes his laptop when he's done with a Zoom call or watch a video of Dolly Parton getting her vaccine.
We have the hope that the covid-19 pandemic's end is in sight ... and it's bringing up a lot of feelings. Not all of them happy.
Many of us are feeling some level of anticipatory anxiety.
The anxiety is rooted in a fear that almost all of us have, in some form or another. The fear that others will make us do something we don't want to do. Whether it is through what can feel like the aggression of "your job depends on this," or the polite friendliness of social obligations, we pre-emptively worry about being dominated.
Look, the pandemic made saying "No" to in-person events super easy. So easy, in fact, that we didn't even have to say no, because no invitations were forthcoming. We didn't have to send regrets, we were all living in a world where responsible people didn't get together. Heck, those of us who before might feel we were being antisocial could now feel self-righteous! A win/win!
I kid, but only a little.
We anticipate that people will have expectations of us. Expectations that we will come into the office building, show up for church, the PTA meeting, family gatherings. Expectations that we'll put on pants.
Combine those anticipated expectations with how we may be feeling, and it all adds up to a heaping serving of anxiety.
We've gotten pretty accustomed to this life we've been living the past year. It may not be fun, per se, but it's familiar. And humans love familiar and fear change.
Shame, too, may be mixed into this. Fear that we didn't "make the most" of the pandemic time. We didn't become buff like Sarah Connor in Terminator 2 or Uncle Iroh in Avatar: The Last Airbender. We didn't learn how to play violin or read A Brief History of Time. Worry that we're going to have to clean the house.
Frankly, a lot of us are softer than we were a year ago, and our minds duller.
Well, duh! We were going through a global pandemic! I mean, who looks back at the people who survived the London Blitz and asks, "Yeah, but how was your yoga routine during all that?"
Give me a break.
Give YOU a break.
The work that is to come will be to separate out the genuine have-tos (like your boss saying you need to come back to the office, or your doctor saying no more tele-health) from the expectations of family and friends. Take it slow with the latter. Make it short social visits to start.
And ask "why?" Why does the PTA meeting need to be in person? Why do I need to work in the office rather than at home? There were assumptions made pre-pandemic that we have proven don't hold true. Ask lots of questions.
And know that you're not alone in this. A lot of us are sharing our anxieties. Let's make it acceptable to say, "I can come over, but just for a little bit. I don't want to get the Covid-Bends."
Biden has not tried to hide the fact that this bill is big: A lot of Americans need help to get through this crisis, and the government is going to give it to them. He’s not pretending that this isn’t the “big government” that Bill Clinton said was over.
The political result of all this will test whether the Reagan Era is finally over.
New Yorker satirist Andy Borowitz: “Rand Paul Saddened to See Government Flagrantly Helping People”.
In closing, Paul castigated his Senate colleagues who voted for the bill, accusing them of “ushering in a dangerous new era of Washington politicians intrusively abetting people’s efforts to survive.”
“You have broken your most solemn oath, which is, ‘First, do no good,’ ” he said.
Instead of printing more money and making believe that this money will retain its value as it is sprinkled across the land, we could remove the government shackles that have caused a depression in the restaurant, retail, and entertainment sectors of our economy.
His op-ed closes with a misappropriation of a famous John Maynard Keynes quote:
The economist John Maynard Keynes famously said that stimulus works in the short run and he didn’t much care about the future because we’d all be dead. I will vote against any more ‘free’ money because I care about my kid’s future and the future of our great country.
Misquotes are often more revealing than quotes. This reading of Keynes has little to do with Keynes, but is the way Keynes is presented in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. (Rand apparently got that interpretation from Hayek.) What Keynes actually meant was that it’s hard to get people to sacrifice for policies that economists think are best “in the long run”, when the imagined benefits are so far in the future that those making the sacrifices won’t live to see them. (“It is not wise to look too far ahead; our powers of prediction are slight, our command over results infinitesimal.”)
Thursday night, which marked both the signing of the bill and the one-year anniversary of WHO declaring a global pandemic, Biden gave a televised address (transcript, video). Maybe the last four years have lowered my standards, but I thought it was masterful.
The speech wove a complex emotional tapestry. It mourned the losses we have all suffered this past year (lost loved ones, lost jobs, lost experiences, lost opportunities), regretted the ways we had been turned against each other (battles over masks, racist reprisals against Asian Americans), pointed to the progress being made (every adult will be vaccine-eligible by the beginning of May, enough vaccine will be available to cover all of us by the end of May, schools will soon be ready to reopen safely), asked for the public’s help (keep wearing your mask, practice social distancing, wash your hands frequently, get vaccinated when you have the chance), envisioned a realistic goal (safe July 4 cook-outs with friends and family), and expressed a high hope (“My fervent prayer for our country is that, after all we have been through, we’ll come together as one people, one nation, one America.”).
Biden lacks the soaring rhetorical ability of Barack Obama, but he has a different set of strengths: He embodies sincerity. He is the guy who will level with you, the guy who has taken on a difficult job and is working hard to do it well. He has suffered with you, and has not lost hope.
Joe Biden has reaped the normal rewards that come from behaving like a normal president — perhaps benefitting more than most due to the contrast with his unhinged predecessor. This has naturally infuriated Republicans, who see Biden’s strategy of reaping positive coverage by acting normal as a form of cheating.
On the other hand, Biden suffers from fact-checkers needing to fill space. Fairly small exaggerations get flagged, while a comparable Trump speech would include so many whopping lies that they couldn’t all be covered.
At this point, a novelist or movie director would make the previous president pop up and say something that underlined the contrast. And so it came to pass. Wednesday, Trump issued a statement emphasizing what is most important to him: getting credit whether he deserves it or not. No one should forget the (completely ridiculous and untrue) fact that without him, vaccines wouldn’t exist for another five years, if ever.
One attempt to manufacture an issue against Biden is his lack of press conferences. David Frum argues that this is good strategy: In the current environment, presidents are polarizing. The more Biden can project the idea that action is being taken by the government rather than the President, the better.
Another advantage is that Biden is not being pressured to take positions on things that are none of his business: Should Andrew Cuomo resign? Is the British royal family racist? And so on. Unlike Trump, Biden doesn’t want to opine on everything under the sun.
and fighting the virus
This week marked a lot of different Covid-19 anniversaries. A year ago, many things started happening quickly: The WHO declared a global pandemic. One of the nation’s top sports events (the “March Madness” NCAA basketball tournament) got cancelled. Schools started going virtual. I remember picking up a friend’s son at a public-transit station. He thought he was coming home for spring break, but he actually wouldn’t return to college until January.
The thing that strikes me looking back at the pandemic restrictions is how few of us knew what we were facing. The initial school closure in my town was for two weeks. Only serious pessimists were saying that we wouldn’t have this figured out by fall.
Steady as she goes: The number of Americans with one vaccine shot (69.8 million) or a complete vaccination (36.2 million) continues to rise. The number of cases (7-day daily average 55K) is still falling, but not very fast. Deaths (1,235) are coming down faster. But we are still at levels that would have been alarming last summer.
Biden’s appointees
Whenever someone gets a raw deal, people hope for them to “get justice” someday. Well, this week Merrick Garland really did get Justice. Three cabinet nominees — Becerra at HHS, Haaland at Interior, Walsh at Labor — still need to be confirmed by the Senate. Neera Tanden’s nomination at OMB was withdrawn; a replacement hasn’t been announced.
and you also might be interested in …
Last week I nudged you to support an Amazon boycott because of the union organization effort in Alabama. Commenters pointed out that the union organizers themselves were not asking for a boycott. Best to let them decide on their own strategy.
So last week, if you didn’t send your money to a rapacious giant that is taking over the world, maybe you should have. Sorry for misleading you.
“Glorious news!” wrote First Parish minister John Gibbons in an email sent to parishioners and volunteers. “This morning, Maria received official confirmation that she has a one-year stay of deportation.”
For our congregation (and the volunteers from other congregations who pitched in), this is a starfish-on-the-beach story. We all knew that the pointless cruelty Trump’s immigration policy dwarfed any response we could muster. But here was one person who needed help. That was something we could do.
Part of me says I already spent too much time on the Dr. Seuss controversy last week. But there are a couple more things worth mentioning. First, the Seussical poem “The Day Children’s Literature Died” is hilarious. Second, PDFs of all six of the books no longer being published are here — mislabeled as “banned” books, but otherwise open to inspection. (Legally? I have no idea. If the link stops working, you’ll know what happened.) If you want to form your own opinions, it helps to see the work in its full context. My opinion: I’d figure out a way to save On Beyond Zebra, which is a cute concept marred by one illustration that should be easy to fix. The others are no big loss.
Talking about things that get too much attention: I stopped caring about the British royal family in 1776, when I was minus-180 years old.
Hard to know how much attention to give to speculation about Trump’s legal problems. Lots of dark clouds are forming around him, but I don’t want to get too excited before any rain falls.
Ditto for Mike Flynn. The Pentagon was investigating him for emoluments-clause violations when that investigation got subsumed by the Mueller investigation that eventually prosecuted him for lying to the FBI. After Trump pardoned him for that crime, the old investigation reopened.
A nasty story has a happy ending. As I mentioned in one of featured posts, an announcer had an open-mic moment during a girls high-school basketball tournament in Oklahoma, racially insulting girls who knelt during the national anthem. Well, Saturday, that team won the state championship.
George Floyd’s family is getting a $27 million settlement from the City of Minneapolis. Someday cities are going to figure out that good policing is cost effective.
I have not seen HBO’s Allen v Farrow, but it’s been intriguing to watch people react to it, like Ginia Bellafante, who published “Why My Teen-Age Self Gave Woody Allen a Pass” in Thursday’s NYT. The comments on that story are mixed: Some clueless older men think Woody has gotten a raw deal; a larger number of commenters of either gender condemn him in a fairly orthodox way; some women recount personal horror stories of exploitation by older men; and a few women still remember their intergenerational relationships fondly.
To me, the interesting issue isn’t what Woody did or didn’t do, how to reevaluate his movies, or who is telling the truth. It’s watching American culture use this case to think through its changing ideas and values.
My opinion: When we raise girls to have Cinderella-like fantasies, where a powerful man swoops out of nowhere and makes her a queen, we’re grooming them for exploitation. OTOH: Protecting young women can sometimes be an excuse for refusing to let them grow up.
Also, age-of-consent (which comes up often in the pro-Allen Bellafante comments) is a blunt instrument doing delicate work. People mature on different schedules, so any one-size-fits-all age is going to throw some young women to the wolves while unjustly telling others that they aren’t wise enough to make their own decisions.
That’s why this issue needs to have a social component in addition to a legal component. Legally, a middle-aged man may be in the clear if he has sex with a young woman on her 16th or 17th or 18th birthday. But the situation may still be creepy enough that the rest of us want to shun him. (OTOH, I have never understood why the law should get involved if a boy who just turned 16 has sex with his two-weeks-younger girlfriend, and she is not complaining about it.)
We’ll never get rid of them, but can we at least process them better?
On this blog I frequently debunk conspiracy theories that spread among conservatives: QAnon, Obama’s birth certificate, Dominion voting machines, Antifa’s role in the Capitol insurrection, and so on. But this week a liberal conspiracy theory kept showing up in my social-media news feeds: The accusations against Andrew Cuomo are part of a scheme to install a Republican as governor of New York, so that he can use his pardon power to protect Donald Trump from New York state prosecutions.
Debunking the Cuomo theory. Before I start using this as an example of a conspiracy theory, though, let’s dismiss it as a sensible interpretation of events: Suppose Cuomo resigns or is impeached. His replacement is the Democratic Lieutenant Governor Kathy Hochul, who has no reason to pardon Trump. Next in the line of succession are the Temporary President of the Senate, the Speaker of the Assembly, and the Attorney General — all Democrats.
Then comes the 2022 election. New York electing a Republican governor is not unheard of: George Pataki served three terms from 1995-2006. But Pataki Republicans are not exactly Trumpists, and in recent cycles Democrats have done quite well in New York. Cuomo won his last election (2018) by 23%. But he doesn’t have some unique ability to pull in votes that puts the governorship in danger if he can’t run. Biden beat Trump in New York in 2020 by 23% as well. Kirsten Gillibrand won the New York senate race in 2018 by 34%. Letitia James won the 2018 Attorney General race by 27%. And the names being discussed as 2022 Republican challengers are not ones that should cause Democrats to quake in fear, particularly if a Trump pardon becomes one of the issues.
In short, raising phony accusations against Cuomo in order to keep Trump out of jail would be a wild scheme that had almost no chance to succeed. Not even Trumpists are crazy enough to invest the kind of resources even a failed attempt would require. And besides, there’s a far more mundane explanation for Cuomo’s problems: Being an asshole finally caught up to him.
My rare attempt at bipartisanship. If conspiracy theories appear in both parties, then sensible people in both parties should want to debunk them. That’s why I was pleased to see someone I rarely agree with, New York Times conservative columnist Ross Douthat, contribute to that effort a little while ago with “A Better Way to Think About Conspiracies“.
He starts with the following observation: The only way to get rid of conspiracy theories completely is to induce everyone to accept the expert consensus on everything. Not only is that never going to happen, it shouldn’t happen, because sometimes the expert consensus is self-serving or corrupt or just wrong in the ordinary people-make-mistakes way. I mean, how many experts told us that Saddam had WMDs, or that Trump couldn’t possibly beat Hillary? Worse, occasionally there are real conspiracies, like Nixon’s Plumbers or the baseball owners’ free-agency collusion.
So if we can’t just deny all conspiracies, or insist that people believe whatever the experts say, what can we do?
If you assume that people will always believe in conspiracies, and that sometimes they should, you can try to give them a tool kit for discriminating among different fringe ideas, so that when they venture into outside-the-consensus territory, they become more reasonable and discerning in the ideas they follow and bring back.
Douthat suggests a few sorting principles that can keep people from falling down the Q-Anon rabbit hole.
Simple theories are better than baroque ones.
Be skeptical of theories that seem tailored to reach a predetermined conclusion.
Take fringe theories more seriously when the mainstream narrative has holes.
Don’t start accepting all fringe theories just because one of them looks right to you.
To illustrate the simple vs. baroque distinction, he contrasts two origin-of-Covid-19 conspiracy theories: One says “it was designed by the Gates Foundation for some sort of world-domination scheme”, and the other that “it was accidentally released by a Chinese virology lab in Wuhan, a disaster that the Beijing government then sought to cover up”. Douthat rejects the former out of hand, but finds the latter plausible — not true, necessarily, but possibly worth investigating further.
The difference is that the Gates theory requires postulating a whole bunch of other stuff not in evidence. (What powers those nano-chips in the vaccine once they get into your bloodstream?) But the lab-accident theory just has one unusual event, after which a lot of people behave the way we know a lot of people behave: They would rather lie than accept blame. [1]
He illustrates the predetermined-conclusion point by looking at Trump’s various stolen-election theories. If you’ve ever argued with a Trumpist about this, you’ve probably observed what Douthat did: When you disprove one election-fraud theory, the Trumpist doesn’t reconsider his position, but just comes back with another election-fraud theory. If Georgia’s hand-recount disproves the corrupted-voting-machine-software theory (it does), then what about Detroit having more votes than voters? After you debunk that, what about dead people voting? And so on. The conclusion (Trump really won) remains fixed; the conspiracy theories are just roads to get there.
That should count against them.
Douthat’s point about holes in the mainstream narrative is similar to Thomas Kuhn’s account of scientific revolutions: Novel theories shouldn’t dislodge an accepted theory unless the accepted theory is having trouble explaining anomalies. As Einstein reflected, “If the Michelson–Morley experiment had not brought us into serious embarrassment, no one would have regarded the relativity theory as a (halfway) redemption.”
The example Douthat gives is Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein’s career is so unlikely that you can hardly blame people for trying to place him in a larger story. I would point to the pee-tape theory of Putin and Trump. There is essentially no evidence of a pee tape, but Trump’s defenders have never offered an alternative explanation of why he was so subservient to Putin. Instead, they just denied what we could all see. If the alternative to the conspiracy theory is believing that the Trump/Putin news conference in Helsinki is perfectly normal behavior for an American president, then I’ll keep looking for a pee tape.
The fourth point ought to go without saying, but there is a strong pull in the opposite direction: Once you leave the mainstream, other outside-the-mainstream folks feel like compatriots. (Once you accept alien visitors, why shouldn’t Atlantis be real?) Douthat makes a good point, though: All the world’s revealed religions have stressed that not every voice that pops into somebody’s head is the voice of God. You have to practice discernment.
I’ll support him by pointing out that even though the experts aren’t always right, they usually are. So when you believe a conspiracy theory, you’re betting on a long shot. Long shots occasionally come in, but no gambler makes a successful career out of betting on one long shot after another.
My additional principles. I agree with all of Douthat’s principles, but I don’t think he goes quite far enough. I want to add some ideas that I can easily imagine him agreeing with. And even if he doesn’t …
You don’t have to accept the convention wisdom, but you should know what it is. If you reject it, you should have a reason. Before you retweet something bizarre, take a moment to google a news story on the topic, or check some reference like Wikipedia. Is there a widely accepted explanation you hadn’t considered? Is there a reason not to accept it? If you have such a reason, fine. But at least consider a non-conspiracy explanation.
Evil people face the same problems you do. Have you ever tried to organize something? It’s hard. It gets harder the more people you need to coordinate, and harder still if it’s something like a surprise party, where it’s supposed to be secret, so you can’t just blast out an announcement.
It’s not any easier to organize something nefarious. If you can’t imagine how a richer, more powerful version of yourself could pull something off, be skeptical that somebody else is managing it.
Who are “they”? One way to avoid realizing just how big and complicated a conspiracy would have to be is to attribute it to a nebulous “them”, as Donald Trump Jr. does in this clip: “There’s no place that they won’t go. This week alone, they canceled Mr. Potato Head, they canceled the Muppets. They’re canceling Dr. Seuss from reading programs.” They who?
Everybody in a conspiracy needs a motive. The reason the baseball-owner-collusion theory was plausible (even before it turned out to be true) was that all 32 owners had the same financial incentive: paying their players less.
Now consider the theory that ICUs are faking the Covid pandemic. Everybody who works there needs to be in on it: nurses, doctors, cleaning staff, and so on. Either they’re not telling their loved ones, or the loved ones are in on it too. What motives could possibly unify all those people?
Very few people are motivated by evil for its own sake. A theory I heard fairly often as same-sex marriage cases were working their way through the courts was that same-sex couples weren’t actually interested in getting married, they were just trying to destroy marriage for the rest of us. We are all occasionally tempted to do something out of spite, but seriously: Would you devote a big chunk of your life to a project that gained you nothing, but just destroyed something for somebody else? Not many people would. [2]
As new information comes in, bad conspiracy theories have to grow. A good conspiracy theory might even shrink. A sure sign of a bad theory is that every objection is met by expanding the conspiracy. “They’re in on it too.”
But if you imagine organizing a conspiracy yourself, you wouldn’t be constantly trying to bring more people in, because each new person is a new risk. Instead, you’d try to identify the smallest possible group that could pull the operation off.
So if you’re on the trail of an actual conspiracy, the more you find out, the closer you should get to understanding the vision of the planner. Rather than “He’s in on it too”, you should start to realize how a small group of people really could do this. [3]
Contrast this with the nanobots-in-the-vaccine theory. Anybody who has access to a Covid vaccine might put it under a microscope and see those bots. Why aren’t they saying anything? They must all be in on it.
[1] My favorite Kennedy-assassination conspiracy theory is similar: After Oswald fires that first non-fatal shot, a Secret Service agent’s gun goes off by mistake, killing JFK. The agent’s superiors then try to cover that up, and things spiral from there.
Having brought up the Kennedy assassination, which educated my whole generation in conspiracy theories, I have to tell this joke: Two authors of JFK-assassination-conspiracy books are sharing a car as they drive to a convention where they’ll both be on a panel. Unfortunately, they are involved in a highway accident and die. But they’re both virtuous people, so they arrive together in the afterlife.
Their introductory tour of Heaven is given by God Himself, and somewhere between the infinite beach and the endless ice cream bar he tells them that there are no secrets in Heaven. “So if you ever want to know anything — about Heaven, about the Earth, about Me — you just have to ask.”
So one of the authors raises the question he’s been wrestling with for years: “Who really did kill Kennedy?”
And God answers, “Oswald, acting alone, pretty much the way the Warren Report says.”
The authors go silent for a while, until eventually one leans over to the other and whispers, “This goes up much higher than we ever imagined.”
[2] This is one reason I suspect that conspiracy theories do better among religious groups that believe in an active Devil. Unlike anybody you actually know, the Devil is motivated by evil for its own sake. And if the Devil has minions, they also are just trying to do harm.
[3] One of my favorite Kennedy-assassination conspiracy books was Best Evidence by David Lifton. (I’m not endorsing his theory, I’m just illustrating a point.) His theory revolves around how investigators think: They trust some kinds of evidence more than others, and they’ll explain away less-trusted evidence if it contradicts more-trusted evidence.
In a murder case, the best evidence is the body; or, after the body is out of reach, the autopsy. So if you could control that evidence, then you wouldn’t need to involve the whole FBI; they would naturally discount eye-witnesses who saw something that the autopsy says didn’t happen.
fail to define what they’re talking about, making me wonder if “cancel culture” is really a thing at all,
use a bunch of imaginary examples that fall apart as soon as you look at them, like the “cancellation” of Mr. Potato Head or Dr. Seuss. [1]
Mostly this is a debate between the Right and the Left, with conservatives prophesying the fall of civilization and liberals wondering what the problem is. But a segment of the mainstream commentariat has tried to stake out a middle position, recognizing that Green Eggs and Ham is in no danger and Pepe Le Pew should have disappeared a long time ago, but still repeating right-wing talking points about the Jacobin nature of the “woke mob”.
Bai and Hennessey. Case in point: Matt Bai, warning in Friday’s Washington Post about the dangers of the ongoing “cultural revolution” (and admitting that he’s invoking Mao intentionally). He brushes off the Fox News freakout about Mr. Potato Head, but then takes aim at people like me. [2]
the overwhelming leftist response to Republican hysteria has been to say that there is no such thing as “cancel culture,” no actual threat to free expression. It’s all just a lot of Trumpian nonsense, propagated by racists and sexists.
This isn’t true, and it isn’t helpful.
You know what would be helpful? If folks like Bai would define their terms and offer actual examples that can be be analyzed and compared, so readers don’t just have to take his word for what is or isn’t true. But instead, he makes this sweeping but totally unsupported claim:
A culture of self-censorship pervades media and the arts — a fear that using the wrong word or recommending the wrong book can derail a career.
We are, in fact, witnessing the most direct assault on free expression in my lifetime, mainly because a loud segment of younger activists view free expression as a convenient excuse for perpetuating oppression.
Despite the once-in-a-lifetime gravity of this situation, Bai does not find it necessary to identify a single career that has actually been derailed for “using the wrong word or recommending the wrong book”.
So what exactly is he talking about? If I don’t already know, he’s not going to tell me.
Most sensible liberals I talk to — in politics, news, entertainment or academia — understand this. But there’s a palpable fear of getting on the wrong side of the woke mob, and it doesn’t seem worth the risk.
Who is in this “woke mob”? He doesn’t say, beyond “younger activists” (which, sad to say, leaves me out as I research my Medicare options). But apparently my advanced age has not made me “sensible”, because I have no idea what he means.
Bai is not an isolated example. One of my unimpeachably liberal Facebook friends linked approvingly to this New York Post article by Matthew Hennessey, which tries to rally Gen-Xers against cancel culture’s “millennial Maoists”. (What is it about Mao?) Predictably, Hennessey also doesn’t define “cancel culture”, and (unlike Bai) recites the right-wing litany of imaginary examples. (The article’s illustrations include images from The Cat in the Hat and Gone With the Wind, both of which remain readily available.) And he perversely advocates fighting back against cancel culture by canceling anti-racists:
We will have to engage in a thousand tiny battles every day and it will be terribly uncomfortable. It’ll be hard standing up to school administrators pushing an ‘anti-racist’ curriculum on your kids.
Yeah, how dare the still-unidentified “woke mob” try to teach your children about slavery or structural racism? You absolutely need to protect freedom of speech by censoring that curriculum before the kids ever learn anything from it.
OK, I’ve got that out of my system now. Let’s see if it’s possible to find something here we can think about with some amount of rigor.
Outlines of a reasonable discussion. I suspect the term “cancel culture” is now poisoned beyond recovery. But let’s see if we can tease some kernel of legitimate concern out of the mass of nonsense. Let’s begin with some ground rules.
The phenomenon we end up discussing can’t have political bias built into it, as “cancel culture” currently does. I’m not willing to adopt a frame in which, by definition, only conservatives can have a grievance. If Gina Carano is a victim of whatever-it-is, then so are Colin Kaepernick and the Dixie Chicks.
Whatever-it-is has something to do with the proper limits of free speech. And that discussion needs to start by acknowledging that some limits, both legal and cultural, are necessary and proper. For example, there is room to argue about whether Trump’s January 6 speech should qualify as an illegal “incitement to riot”. But if he had openly said, “Now go to the Capitol and do whatever you need to do to stop Congress from counting the electoral votes”, he should go to jail. Freedom of speech can’t be absolute.
As for cultural limits, consider the example of an announcer’s I-didn’t-know-the-mic-was-live moment at a girls high-school basketball game in Oklahoma Thursday night. (When some of the student athletes knelt during the national anthem, he commented: “Fucking niggers.” [3]) I don’t think you have to be a Maoist to believe he should be fired for that. Not jailed, not lynched — but there should be consequences when somebody goes that far over the line.
And finally, there’s a difference between tolerating someone’s right to say something and providing them a platform so they can say it again. That’s another aspect of the basketball-announcer example. If a guy sitting in a bar makes the same comment to the TV screen, the people who hear it should give him strange looks, and that might well be the end of it. But should a network keep giving this guy a microphone?
To give another example, The Birth of a Nation is a racist movie from 1915, which you can watch in its entirety on YouTube. I’m fine with that, and I’d also be fine with Google (which owns YouTube) deciding not to host it. I would oppose a law that made distributing or watching the movie illegal.
But providing a public venue to screen the movie is a more complex discussion. If I were part of a university community — as either faculty or student — I’d be fine with an on-campus group showing it as part of a larger conversation about racism in film, one that allowed for discussion of the ways it misrepresents the Reconstruction Era. But I would protest if the movie were brought to campus without any context, in a hey-you-might-like-this way, or in any other way that used the university as a platform to promote the film’s racist point of view. [4]
So: It would be valuable for American culture to have a broad conversation about the proper limits of free speech and the proper ways of responding to offensive speech. A worthy goal would be to develop impartial standards that balance what I can do against what can be done to me, regardless of whether I am liberal or conservative.
Another valuable conversation would involve how we want to look at our history. How should we judge people who lived in other eras, when cultural values were different? What points of view have been systematically excluded from our history, and how does the story change when we let those points of view in?
I’ve heard a lot of people claim that eventually we’ll be renaming the Washington Monument, but I’ve never heard anybody seriously propose that. As in the previous discussion: What are the proper limits? Acknowledging someone’s historical significance is not the same as continuing to celebrate that person. We can leave people in the history books without naming schools after them.
Is anybody having that discussion? Maybe, a little. I’ll point you to a couple of worthwhile recent contributions.
First, Scott Illing’s interview with Jeffrey Sachs at Vox. Sachs has recently written an article at ARC on the bills state legislatures are considering (and even passing) that suppress critical race theory. In the interview, he contrasts the left-wing and right-wing threats to free expression.
I’m not comfortable either saying that one side is more dangerous than the other. What I will say is that the threats from the left tend to involve informal mechanisms of sanction, and they are no less censorious for that informality. They can do enormous damage, and it’s a significant problem that can be addressed if more college and university administrators grow a backbone and stand up to that kind of behavior.
Whereas the censorious instinct on the right is largely coming from off campus, and it involves much quieter tools that escape the notice of many commentators.
“Quieter” mainly because the national media doesn’t cover small-state legislatures like South Dakota, where a bill under consideration would
prohibit the use of any material designed to promote an ideological view of history, but simultaneously Gov. Kristi Noem has proposed or has requested $900,000 to overhaul the state’s history curriculum in order to promote the idea that “the United States of America is the most special nation in the history of the world.”
I hope Sachs eventually tells us specifically about the “enormous damage” to colleges and universities that he sees the Left doing. But the distinction — the Left operating mainly on campus and using social pressure, while the Right uses its political power in red-state legislatures — is useful.
Another worthwhile article is “Cancel Culture is Not a Movement” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells in the New Yorker. Wallace-Wells looks at particular cases and questions whether the “woke mob” operates more as a fear-inducing mirage than as a political force.
To Dr. Seuss Enterprises, it might have seemed possible that a progressive mob was waiting, ready to turn on “McElligot’s Pool” and “Mulberry Street.” But it is also possible—to me, it seems likely—that there was no such consensus at all. …
The college president, the city-council subcommittee, the panel of experts: these figures are often described by their political opponents as if they were as coherent and determined as a closed fist—that there is something cohesive that could be called cancel culture. My own sense is that something close to the opposite is true. The claims of racial justice have upended liberal élites in interesting and profound ways, and left them deeply uncertain: about how much history should be revised, about what kinds of retributive steps should be taken, and, above all, about how many people, really, want radical change.
Just about everyone left of center recognizes that white supremacy persists and is unjust, but “white supremacy” isn’t just a law that can be repealed or a corporate policy the board can change at its next meeting. So the desire to be on the right side of history often runs up against practical uncertainties: What can someone in my position actually do? And how much political capital does the will to change actually have? Will the apparent support for organizational change evaporate if I ask people to commit serious resources or accept significant change in their own lives?
The result can be bold announcements that lack bold follow-through, like Minneapolis City Council members vowing to “end policing as we know it”, but not allowing a police-defunding proposal to go to the voters. Or symbolic actions of little real impact, like San Francisco renaming its schools, or Speaker Pelosi wearing a kente-cloth stole to a demonstration.
College administrators can fire the people at the center of incidents, and sometimes do so too quickly and without due process, because they feel a need to demonstrate that they take the incidents seriously. Tech companies like Facebook and Twitter can boot people off their platforms, but the algorithms that identify such people are often no better than the algorithms that show us so many off-base advertisements. Publishers can decide not to publish objectionable books, either before or after someone objects to them. Stores can pull products off their shelves. Individuals can carry signs at Black Lives Matter demonstrations. Such actions display concern, but how well thought-out are they, and what next steps do they lead to?
The sum total of these actions can create the impression of a vast conspiracy reaching out to change every aspect of our lives, when the reality is quite different: A small group of activists has identified a problem that a much larger group of sympathizers recognizes as legitimate. But the larger group is fumbling to decide both what it can do about it, and how much it is willing to do.
[1] Jeff Tiedrich expressed this point with a little more vigor than I usually do.
[2] I would be amazed if Bai has ever heard of me or this blog, but he’s aiming directly at the arguments I’ve been making here. It’s had not to take it personally.
[3] It’s always a question whether to quote exactly what someone said or alter it in some way, like “f**king ni**ers” or “effing N-words”, or to refer vaguely to “a racial slur”. When I’m tempted to do one of those things, I always ask myself, “Who would I be protecting?” In this case, I think I’d be protecting the announcer, by making his words sound less serious than they actually were, so I repeated the offending phrase as he said it.
This policy is open for discussion. The one caution I would give is: Don’t try to speak for other people. I want to know what offends you, not what you think would offend someone else.
[4] In giving these examples, I’m modeling the kind of conversation I’d like to see. In particular, they make the conversation real in a way that the Bai and Hennessey articles are unreal.
After “Why You Can’t Understand Conservative Rhetoric” and “Silly Season in the Culture Wars“, I figured it was time to let the cancel-culture debate rest for a while. But then Matt Bai wrote a Washington Post column that could have been a direct answer to my posts. (I’m sure it wasn’t. I’ve never seen any indication that Bai is a Sift reader.) And liberal social-media friends who ought to know better started using right-wing-talking-point terms like “woke mob” and linking to New York Post articles making a generational case against the “millennial Maoists”. (I’m nowhere near the millennial generation, but I’m starting to sympathize.)
Possibly unwisely, I took the bait. The result is “Is an Intelligent Cancel-Culture Discussion Possible?”, which is just about done and should be out shortly. In it, I don’t just respond to criticism, but also lay out some ground rules for an intelligent discussion of the issue, and point you to a couple of articles I found helpful.
I refused to let that post delay yet again a post that didn’t get done last week: “What Makes a Good Conspiracy Theory?” Two weeks ago, Ross Douthat wrote a column “A Better Way to Think About Conspiracies“. I almost never get to agree with Ross, so I didn’t want to let this opportunity go by. His “tool kit” for separating plausible theories from crazy ones is pretty good, as far as it goes. So I wanted to review it and add to it. In general, I think we’d do a better job of fighting back against QAnon and other crazy theories if we had a widely acknowledged set of standards, rather than making an ad hoc case against each new theory.
That post should appear maybe around 11 EST.
Then there’s the news of the week. Covid relief really did pass! If it continues to be as popular as it has been so far, it might mark a turning point in the public’s relationship to government. Maybe the Reagan Revolution could finally be over. We marked the one-year anniversary of Covid being declared a pandemic, which led to a lot of retrospectives. Personally, I noticed because I was watching the Big Ten basketball tournament; the same tournament getting abruptly cancelled last year was when I noticed that things had gotten serious. Biden gave a prime-time address. Voting rights legislation continued on its collision course with the filibuster. And a few other things happened. I’ll try to get the weekly summary out by 1.
"Giving it Up for Lent" (March 14, 2021) Worship Service
I am not one for giving up chocolate or ice cream. Those kinds of punishing practices never work for me -- I once "gave up soda" for a week and drank more soda in that week than the previous month. But there are some things I'd like to give up. How about you?
Rev. Vanessa Rush Southern, Senior Minister
Sam King, Worship Associate
Wonder Dave, Annual Operating Fund Campaign
Reiko Oda Lane, organist
Mark Sumner, conductor/pianist
Brielle Marina Neilson, soprano
Leandra Ramm, alto
Ben Rudiak-Gould, tenor
Asher Davison, bass
Eric Shackelford, camera
Joe Chapot, Social Media Chat Support
Alex Darr, Coffee Hour Zoom
Thomas Brown, Sexton
Carrie Steere-Salazar, flowers
Joseph Gonzalez, cover image https://unsplash.com/@miracletwentyone
Jonathan Silk, OOS, Sound, video edits
Rev. Meg Barnhouse's sermon delivered on March 14, 2021. March 15 marks one year since First UU Austin began social distanced worship. Since we've gone inside we have continued to explore, experiment, and expand our understanding of how we exist as a community. We are looking back at this year of rapid learning and seeing how far we have come while honoring the knowledge that we are still in the midst of it all. In this time let us take a moment to observe the world, to feel the wind and the sun, to absorb the promise that there is more good to come. We aren't yet at the end but we are getting there together.
Watch the Service: Download 03-14-21 Full Text To enable YouTube provided closed-captioning while viewing the service, click the “CC” icon on the bottom bar of your YouTube video player.
the address from the Sunday service at Dublin Unitarian Church, Ireland, on 14th March 2021. Rev. Bridget Spain is minister of Dublin Unitarian Church.
a collections of readings, prayers and music from the service of 14th March 2021 at Dublin Unitarian Church, Ireland. Led by Rev Bridget Spain with contributions from Ray Naughton and Josh Johnston
We had a spring teaser day today, with temps in the upper 50s so Margy and I went to Kettle Cove to take in the sun, the breeze, and the sea. We got a special treat when we saw these lovely birds in the water and on the shore. At first I thought they were ducks, because they were that size, but they were also somehow similar to Canada Geese but not quite. When I got home I searched the internet until I found them. They are Brant Geese. The Maine coast is part of their migration route. Here are some of the ones we saw. Margy Dowzer and I shared the camera, so I am not positive which photos are hers and which are mine.
Brant goose swimming in the low tide shallows.
Seven brant geese at Kettle Cove
If you look closely here, the goose in the foreground has plastic netting on its lifted foot–it was limping and we wondered why so we moved closer to see what it was. It was using its beak to try to get the netting off. We had no way to help it, and then they all flew off. So sad. I hope it was able to get free.
Sunshine sparkles on the water as the goose swims calmly.
The principle of needing to name a demon before you can kill it is well enshrined in magical folklore, and I know it particularly because the principle was talked about by the author Terry Pratchett. Naming demons is the first step to slaying them. Names have power. This is magical folklore - that once you name something you have a degree of power over it. You know its truth and that is powerful.
As we mark the one year anniversary of congregations and the UUA shifting to virtual operations, may we remember not just the sorrows, but also the ways we have shown up for each other, for our communities and for our values.
This week everybody was talking about Covid Relief passing the Senate
Biden’s $1.9 trillion Covid relief package passed the Senate Saturday without the $15 minimum wage, but without a lot of other major changes. Because it isn’t exactly what the House had passed, the House needs to pass it again. Democrats hope to do that tomorrow, getting the bill on President Biden’s desk before some previous Covid-related benefits run out on March 14.
At the risk of counting unhatched chickens, I want to point something out: Congress is doing something major, and getting it done on time. No posturing and then pointing fingers at each other about why nothing is happening. No driving up to the cliff, giving yourself an extension, and then driving up to the cliff again. Biden won’t go back and forth on whether to sign this, as Trump did in December. This isn’t a reality-TV show that needs some suspense to boost its ratings, it’s governance.
I think the American people are going to like this: You say something needs to get done, and then you go do it. That’s not what we’re used to out of Congress.
I think people are also going to notice that this passed without a single Republican vote in either house. Republicans are trying to spin that in their favor: When the Republican Senate passed a bill in December, it was bipartisan. But that’s putting lipstick on a pig: The December bill was bipartisan because Republicans didn’t have the votes to pass anything without Democratic help, not even in the Senate. A bunch of their people wouldn’t vote for any Covid relief at all.
Paul Krugman analyzes what’s in the plan, and why he thinks it needs to be this big. Basically, it funds stuff that needs to happen to fight the virus (vaccinations, testing) and get the country back to normal (preparing schools to reopen safely). It helps individuals who are in financial trouble because of the pandemic (unemployment, stimulus checks). And it makes up for state and local tax shortfalls that otherwise would have governments laying people off at the worst possible time. Some people who need help don’t fit into any obvious categories, so they’re hard to target; that’s where the checks-to-almost-everybody feature comes in. That makes the price tag bigger than a perfectly efficient bill would carry, if anybody knew how to design one.
Will the bill overstimulate the economy and produce inflation? Krugman admits he doesn’t know: We’ve never been in this situation before. If it does cause inflation, he foresees more of a one-time pop than the kind of inflationary spiral we saw in the 1970s.
Things are looking good in the battle against the pandemic, but a number of Republican governors are spiking the ball on the five-yard line. They’re acting like the battle is already won and everything can go back to normal right away — repeating the mistake that so many of them made last May, after the March/April surge began to die down.
The good news is that with the third vaccine now available, vaccination rates are soaring. 59 million Americans have gotten at least one shot, and more than 30 million are fully vaccinated. 2.9 million shots were given Saturday, and the 7-day average is up to 2.2 million. This is well past Biden’s post-election pledge of 100 million shots in 100 days. His current projection is that enough vaccine will be produced for every American adult to be vaccinated by the end of May. At some point, the problem will shift from not having enough vaccine to convincing reluctant Americans to get vaccinated.
While the share that is most enthusiastic to get vaccinated increased across racial and ethnic groups, Black and Hispanic adults continue to be more likely than White adults to say they will “wait and see” before getting vaccinated. Nearly four in ten Republicans and three in ten rural residents say they will either “definitely not” get vaccinated or will do so “only if required,” as do one-third (32%) of those who have been deemed essential workers in fields other than health care.
The sort-of-good news is that after hiccuping these last two weeks, the new-case curve looks like it is continuing downward, but at a slower pace than the precipitous fall we saw from mid-January to mid-February. The current daily average of new cases is just under 60K, down from a peak of 250K. But don’t forget: The peak that had us all so rattled last summer was 70K, so it’s not like we’re in a good place yet.
The bad news is that red states — especially Texas — are rolling back their Covid restrictions and canceling their mask mandates. This is the same mistake that many of the same states made last May, leading to the virus’ second wave in the summer.
Meanwhile, there’s actual evidence that mask mandates save lives and indoor dining costs lives. And whatever masking-and-distancing is doing to fight Covid, we can see that it clobbered the flu this year. Chris Hayes says this stat blew his mind: Positive flu specimens in week 7 of flu season were 174K last year and 1.5K this year.
“At least 100” protesters gathered in front of the Idaho state capitol in Boise Saturday. They burned face-masks to dramatize their opposition to government-imposed mask mandates.
Supposedly this has something to do with freedom and limited government, but I don’t get it. Does it violate your freedom when restaurants insist you wear shoes? When stores require pants?
Many Catholic bishops have an issue with the J&J vaccine, because it uses “lab-grown cells that descend from cells taken in the 1980s from the tissue of aborted fetuses”. I’m not a theologian, Catholic or otherwise, but it seems to me that at some point the clock runs out on these kinds of moral considerations. The J&J vaccine will keep people alive, while refusing to take it will not save a single fetus, much less bring back any of the ones aborted in the 1980s.
We use the body parts of organ donors who die by violence or are victims of drunk drivers. Getting some good out of their deaths does not condone the violence or excuse those responsible. So if you hold the un-Biblical belief that fetuses have souls, I think you should say a short prayer of appreciation for their sacrifice, and then roll up your sleeve.
and more legislation in the pipeline
The House has passed the George Floyd Police Reform Act and the For the People Act to protect voting rights and defend democracy. Both face Republican resistance in the Senate, and aren’t amenable to the reconciliation work-around that let Democrats pass Covid relief. The Biden administration is working on its infrastructure proposal, which could go through under reconciliation, but 50th vote Joe Manchin doesn’t want it to. Of course, Manchin still believes that Republican cooperation is possible, so we’ll see what he does when he discovers that it isn’t.
In any case, the filibuster issue is going to come to a head before much longer. Republicans at the state level are doubling down on voter suppression. (The lowlight here is Georgia’s proposal that would make it illegal to give water to someone waiting in line to vote.) They clearly believe that the solution to their problems isn’t to win over more voters, it’s to make sure fewer people vote, and to continue rigging the system so that they can return to power even if a majority votes against them.
It’s going to be a serious crisis for the Democratic Party if they do nothing while their voters are disenfranchised, because they are more loyal to “bipartisanship” or “Senate tradition”.
and you also might be interested in …
Texas consumers were overcharged around $16 billion for electricity during the recent winter-storm crisis, but the Texas Public Utility Commission has decided not to do anything about it. “It’s nearly impossible to unscramble this sort of egg, and the results of going down this path are unknowable.”
To support Amazon workers and let the company know that we do not approve of their union-busting tactics, a one-week boycott of the company has been planned. From Sunday, March 7th to Saturday, March 13th, everyone is being asked to not use Amazon or Amazon Prime and do not stream videos using the Amazon Prime video service.
In case you needed it, here’s more evidence that Trump only cares about Trump: His lawyers sent a cease-and-desist letter to the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee and the National Republican Senatorial Committee. They’ve been using his name and image in fund-raising pitches, and he doesn’t even get a cut!
2022 is going to see some off-the-wall primary campaigns, as Republicans compete to be the most outrageous, Trumpiest candidate. Wisconsin is a swing state, but Missouri is deep red and Ohio is trending that way. But history shows that a wacky enough candidate can blow an election in any state.
The city of Stockton, California, embarked on a bold experiment two years ago: It decided to distribute $500 a month to 125 people for 24 months — with no strings attached and no work requirements. The people were randomly chosen from neighborhoods at or below the city’s median household income, and they were free to spend the money any way they liked. Meanwhile, researchers studied what impact the cash had on their lives.
Conservatives say that if you give people money, they won’t work. Liberals say that no-strings money will help people escape the poverty traps that keep them from working. The Stockton experiment supports the liberal theory.
The most eye-popping finding is that the people who received the cash managed to secure full-time jobs at more than twice the rate of people in a control group, who did not receive cash.Within a year, the proportion of cash recipients who had full-time jobs jumped from 28 percent to 40 percent. The control group saw only a 5 percent jump over the same period.
My theory: Looking for a job is like looking for a date. If you’re too desperate, you’re unattractive.
Jen Psaki continues to be a press secretary worthy of The West Wing.
If the only message you have is to stoke your base’s grievances, occasionally you have to make some up.
This week contained a lot of important news, so you might imagine that conservative news networks would have a lot to talk about. You might even say they had work cut out for them.
President Biden’s $1.9 trillion (with a T) spending bill was being debated in Congress, and the opposition message wasn’t getting through to the American people. In one poll, the proposal won support from 68% of Americans, including 37% of Republicans.
The battle against the Covid pandemic had major developments: Biden announced that enough vaccine for all adult Americans would be available by the end of May, two months earlier than previously thought. Meanwhile, Republican governors in Texas and Mississippi were removing mask mandates and other pandemic-related restrictions from their economies, and others were thinking of following suit — despite the fact that daily case-numbers and death-totals are either worse or not much different than when those restrictions were announced.
The Senate has been holding hearings on the January 6 insurrection, including testimony from the FBI director.
A big-state Democratic governor is battling scandal.
The Senate still has Biden nominees to confirm. Surely one or more of them has done something worth getting upset about.
Biden is planning another trillion-with-a-T infrastructure bill to rebuild America in ways that Trump promised but never delivered on.
Serious stuff. Worth calling viewers’ attention to. Some of it even invites a conservative spin.
But instead, right-wing hosts like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity filled entire segments of their shows with Mr. Potato Head and Dr. Seuss, two purported examples of “cancel culture” that (1) are trivial by comparison to several of the issues I just listed, and (2) don’t stand up to even a small amount of scrutiny.
Let’s examine the reality at the root of these controversies.
Mr. Potato Head. Not quite two weeks ago, Hasbro announced that it was changing how it markets its Mr. Potato Head toys:
Hasbro is officially renaming the MR. POTATO HEAD brand to POTATO HEAD to better reflect the full line.
In other words, Hasbro is de-centering masculinity: Instead of being an “accessory” to her husband, Mrs. Potato Head is now an equal member of the family. Horrors! Your daughter might get the idea that she can find her own place in the world, and doesn’t need a man to define her. And then the Hasbro announcement got even more sinister:
Launching this Fall, the CREATE YOUR POTATO HEAD FAMILY is a celebration of the many faces of families allowing kids to imagine and create their own Potato Head family with 2 large potato bodies, 1 small potato body, and 42 accessories. The possibilities to create your own families are endless with mixing and mashing all the parts and pieces.
So the toy is no longer hetero-normative. If they want, children can build a family with two Mommies or two Daddies. The branding no longer fights that. (Like that matters. I mean, you never cross-dressed Barbie and G. I. Joe, right? Sure. Me neither.) Of course, if you want a Potato Head Family with a Mommy, a Daddy, and a Tater Tot of your own gender, that still works too. (And you can still remove Daddy’s mouth, so he can’t yell at the Tot.) As best I can see, there are no losers here.
In 1993 she founded Dr. Seuss Enterprises, whose stated mission was to “protect the integrity of the Dr. Seuss books while expanding beyond books into ancillary areas.”
Dr. Seuss — who died in 1991 — was one of the top-earning dead celebrities of 2020, with $33 million in total earnings, according to Forbes. That’s up from $9.5 million in 2015. His estate actually earned more than any late celebrity except for Michael Jackson, whose estate earned $48 million.
So maybe they know their business, and their judgement deserves the benefit of the doubt. Tuesday, Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced that six of its more obscure titles would no longer be published.
Dr. Seuss Enterprises, working with a panel of experts, including educators, reviewed our catalog of titles and made the decision last year to cease publication and licensing of the following titles: And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, If I Ran the Zoo, McElligot’s Pool, On Beyond Zebra!, Scrambled Eggs Super!, and The Cat’s Quizzer. These books portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.
“And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street,” one of the six books pulled by the estate, sold about 5,000 copies last year, according to BookScan. “McElligot’s Pool” and “The Cat’s Quizzer” haven’t sold in years through the retailers BookScan tracks.
For comparison, DSE sold over half a million of Oh, the Places You’ll Go!.
So what about these particular six books is “hurtful and wrong”? Unless you have copies lying around — and most people don’t, that’s what it means to be unpopular — it’s hard to judge for yourself. In situations like this, mainstream publications don’t want to call your attention to something just to demonstrate how hurtful it is. (And nether do I, so I’ll provide links you can chase if you’re curious rather than post the images themselves.)
The problem isn’t with the text of the books so much as the illustrations. None of them that I have seen is aggressively racist, like Nazi caricatures of Jews often were, but they contain demeaning stereotypes of Africans and Asians. (The anti-Japanese cartoons Geisel drew after Pearl Harbor, though, are aggressively racist, as many cartoons of the era were. None of them are currently being published by DSE.) You’re not supposed to hate these books’ non-white characters so much as find them different and strange. (The theme of Mulberry Street is that you don’t have to go far to see bizarre things, like “a Chinaman who eats with sticks“.) And a lack of diversity doesn’t help: The monkey-like African natives in If I Ran the Zoo would be less problematic (though still far from acceptable) if they weren’t the book’s only black characters.
(For what it’s worth, I’ll tell a story on myself: When I was three, I had pneumonia and my parents took me to the hospital. In the waiting room, I saw a Black family, maybe the first real-life Black people I had ever noticed. Dark skin was something I only knew from cartoons, when characters fell into mud puddles or got blown up with dynamite. “Mommy!” I announced (or so I’ve been told). “Those people are dirty.”)
If you’ve watched many old Disney or Warner Brothers cartoons — a lot of which have quietly been taken out of circulation — you know that none of this is unusual for the era. Explicitly non-white characters were rare, and the ones that do show up represent something “other”; you’re supposed to react to them, not identify with them. So the problem isn’t that Dr. Seuss was a bad man in the context of his time — in many ways his books were more progressive than their competitors — but that some of his work has aged badly.
What should be done about that depends on what you want Dr. Seuss to be in 2021. If he’s to be a historical figure — a leading children’s-book author of the mid-to-late 20th century — then his work should speak for itself. Leave it alone, and organize a conversation around it, as HBO Max did when it briefly withdrew and then re-launchedGone With the Wind. (GWTW is a spectacular example of 1930s movie-making, as well as a valuable artifact in the history of America’s attitudes towards race. So I encourage you to watch it. Just don’t imagine that its Lost Cause mythology is an accurate depiction of the Old South or the Reconstruction Era.)
But if Theodore Geisel’s legacy is supposed to be timeless — Audrey’s vision — if his work is supposed to live through our era and beyond, then it needs to be curated. Parents and grandparents should be able to trust the Dr. Seuss brand. When you sit down to read to your four-year-old, you should be able to pick up a Dr. Seuss book without worrying that you might put something bad into a developing mind.
That curation is precisely what Dr. Seuss Enterprises was doing when it removed these six books from its catalog. By taking this action, DSE is making it more likely that kids will still be reading The Cat in the Hat or How the Grinch Stole Christmas in 2050.
The conservative policy vacuum. To understand the overblown response to the Potato Head and Dr. Seuss news, think back for a moment to Reagan Era conservatism. Whether you loved it or hated it — and even if you believed some ulterior motive was hiding in its background — you knew its defining principles:
Bold foreign policy that maintains America’s military strength and isn’t afraid to use it.
Free trade.
Less regulation, lower federal spending, and lower taxes.
Local self-determination with less central control from Washington.
That all went out the window with Trump. He liked to spend a lot of money on weapons, brag about American military strength, and occasionally threaten other nations with “fire and fury”. But he also pulled back from wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria; distanced the US from allies like NATO, Japan, and South Korea; and let Vladimir Putin do whatever he wanted wherever he wanted to do it. Mao was probably wrong when he referred to the US of his era as a “paper tiger“, but Trump’s America really was one.
Free trade was replaced by tariffs and trade wars. Some regulations went away — particularly those protecting the environment — but others he stretched to interfere more aggressively in the decisions of US and foreign corporations. Big spending (and big deficits) weren’t worth mentioning any more. And no president in my lifetime did quite so much to impose federal policy on cities and states that didn’t want it. (Last summer, only resistance from the Pentagon kept him from invoking the Insurrection Act and sending active-duty troops into American cities.)
As a result of this reversal, and the absence of any new guiding principles to explain it, today’s Republican Party no longer has a policy agenda. The 2020 Republican platform was to support Trump — period. When the GOP controlled the White House and both houses of Congress, it couldn’t decide what to do with that power, other than pass one big tax cut for rich people. It couldn’t even fulfill its promise to repeal ObamaCare, because that would leave a void that it had no idea how to fill. “Complain all you want that the covid-19 relief bill has been packed with all sorts of unrelated stuff from the Democratic wish list,” Megan McArdle wrote yesterday. “At least the Democrats have a wish list. What’s the Republican equivalent?”
Conservatism today is defined not by principles or programs, but by a Leader, an identity, and (most of all) an attitude: Conservatives are mad as hell and aren’t going to take it any more. Mad at “Them” — the libs, the Deep State, Big Tech, the blood-drinking pedophiles — who keep threatening and insulting them.
But the Biden administration is policy-centered, so to the extent that Biden is driving the national conversation, Republicans have little to say. If they wanted to oppose Biden on substance, they’d need to have a Covid relief proposal of their own. (Ten GOP senators did make a laughably low-ball offer that they knew Biden couldn’t accept, but even they only represented themselves. The Republican leadership offered no proposal at all.) Or a coherent response to January 6 and the larger problem of domestic terrorism. Or an infrastructure plan. Or an immigration plan. Or something.
With no ideas to offer, they can only keep their base riled by promoting a never-ending string of “outrages”. Otherwise they’ve got nothing.
The cancel-culture freak-out. The essence of Trump’s message to his base (a message no other Republican is in a position to compete with) is grievance: Somebody is trying to take something from you, so you need a strong authoritarian leader to fight for you.
Some of these threats may be exaggerated, but they have at least a foothold in reality. Many Democrats really would like to take away assault rifles and other military-grade weaponry, or at least stop Americans from buying more. But the number proposing to “disarm” the country entirely is vanishingly small. Many Americans do compete for jobs with foreigners abroad and immigrants at home, though trade and immigration also create jobs and the balance is debatable.
This week’s Seuss/Potato story has made this technique really obvious, because the frame fits so badly. Nothing is being taken away from anybody. Whatever you had hoped to do with Mr. Potato Head, you can still do. No one is coming for your Dr. Seuss books. And if you want more, you can buy more, except for a few books you probably had forgotten even existed. What’s more, the rights to those books never belonged to you anyway; if Dr. Seuss Enterprises thinks its brand is healthier without them, that’s up to them.
Conservative rabble-rousers did their best to pretend something else was happening. “They are banning Dr. Seuss books,” said Glenn Beck. They. Not the legal owners of the copyrights, or the organization created by Seuss’ widow to protect his legacy, but a nebulous “panel of ‘educators’ and ‘experts’.”
How much more do you need to see before all of America wakes up and goes “This is fascism!”? This is fascism. You don’t destroy books. What is wrong with us, America? Go out and buy those books today. Find out if you can get them. Buy Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head, because it’s the end of an era. It is the end of freedom in America.
Beck is so strongly attached to these six books — none of which are being destroyed — that he gets some of their names wrong.
He wasn’t alone. On Fox & Friends, Donald Trump Jr. also warned about the sinister “they”, and seemed to imply The Cat in the Hat had been canceled.
There’s no place that they won’t go. This week alone, they canceled Mr. Potato Head, they canceled the Muppets. They’re canceling Dr. Seuss from reading programs. … I literally know The Cat in the Hat by heart without the book there because I read it so many times to my children.
Kevin McCarthy similarly implied that the most beloved Dr. Seuss books were being canceled — not by the organization charged with maintaining his brand, but by people who don’t like Dr. Seuss. He tweeted “I still like Dr. Seuss” and then read Green Eggs and Ham on Twitter. Why didn’t he read If I Ran the Zoo and show us the primitive African natives?
Tuesday morning, as Christopher Wray verified that white supremacist groups were involved in the Capitol insurrection and Antifa wasn’t, Ted Johnson noticed a subtle difference in what news networks were covering.
Over the course of the past week, Fox News has spent 4 hours and 38 minutes on Dr. Seuss, Mr. Potato Head and Biden’s comments about Neanderthals, according to a tally by the liberal watchdog Media Matters for America. That compared to 42 minutes from CNN and 39 minutes from MSNBC on those topics.
Fox News on Tuesday alone devoted an hour and nine minutes to Dr. Seuss — more than the combined amount it spent on the coronavirus vaccine and FBI testimony about the Jan. 6 insurrection.
So this is what conservative media has come to: If you have nothing to say to America, and yet you need to keep your base riled up, then you need to rile them up about nothing.
It’s always a dilemma for me when a Nothingburger story gets hot. If all I’m going to do is point out that this story doesn’t deserve the attention it’s getting, then I have become part of the problem: I’m drawing your attention to something that doesn’t deserve it.
The alternative is to go meta: Of all the Nothingburgers in the world, why has this one turned into a Big Mac? Who is pushing it? Why does it serve their purposes? How have they managed to distort it into something it’s not?
You’ve probably guessed where I’m going with this: Dr. Seuss. Mr. Potato Head. Some private companies did some completely innocuous rebranding, and the whole conservative media went wild. Hang on to the cat in your hat, because the “woke mob” is banning the icons of your childhood! “This is fascism!” Glenn Beck announced, as if piles of Green Eggs and Ham and plastic potato parts were being doused with lighter fluid and set aflame.
I couldn’t let that go, so I went meta. The featured post this week is “Silly Season in the Culture Wars”. First off, I’ll tell you something Tucker Carlson never will: exactly what happened and who did it. In particular, I won’t use “they” or “them” without an antecedent, as Trump Jr. did when he said, “They’re canceling Dr. Seuss.”
Then comes the meta part: Conservative media needs to invent outrages like this, because in the post-Trump world, they have no ideas to discuss. There was no 2020 Republican platform, there is no conservative legislative program, and they don’t even have a coherent critique of what Biden is proposing. If not for an endless series of outrages-of-the-week, they’d have a lot of dead air.
The form of an outrage-of-the-week is that liberals are trying to take something you love away from you: your guns, your job, your freedom, your son’s masculine identity, … something. So a story about liberals taking away your fond childhood memories fits right in. The fact that it isn’t true is just a detail to work around.
Anyway, that’s ready to post, so it should be out soon. The weekly summary then has the week’s actual news to cover: The Covid relief bill is getting close to Biden’s desk. Other important bills are in the pipeline, and the moment-of-truth on the Senate filibuster is approaching. Vaccinations are accelerating. Covid case-numbers have started going down again, but are still so high that Texas is crazy to end all restrictions. The Senate held hearings on the Capitol insurrection. Andrew Cuomo’s future is in serious doubt. Plus we have bioluminescent sharks, an excuse to link to my favorite Weird Al video, and one very enthusiastic beaver. I should have that out before noon.
"Times Like These" (March 7, 2021) Worship Service
To stand in important moments, in the midst of historic chapters is to do our part. And to wonder about all those historic chapters, and generous, courageous shoulders that came before ours.
Meg McGuire, Ministerial Intern
Gayle Reynolds & Keith Hollon, Annual Operating Fund Drive
Reiko Oda Lane, organist
Mark Sumner, conductor/pianist
Michele Kennedy, soprano
Leandra Ramm, alto
Ben Rudiak-Gould, tenor
Asher Davison, bass
Eric Shackelford, camera
Shulee Ong, camera
Joe Chapot, Social Media Chat Support
Les James, Coffee Hour Zoom
Thomas Brown, Sexton
Judy Payne, flowers
Jonathan Silk, OOS, Sound, video edits
When my partner and I were first together, our parents used to talk about us with their straight friends and co-workers by making sure they knew that we were “just like everyone else.”
“You know,” they’d say, “they pay their taxes.”
This desire to point to our sameness, how we were just like them, was motivated by love, and it was an attempt to activate love. They were trying to overcome what they imagined or knew for sure their friends were thinking, trying to address whatever fears they might have, or image that came to mind when they thought about LESBIANS. If we were more the same than we were different, then we would be less scary, less “other,” more human.
The Unitarian Universalist minister and historian Mark Morrison Reed talks about the central task of the religious community as revealing the bonds that bind each to all – the connectedness and the relationship across everyone everywhere that compels us to act on one another’s behalf. This is the impulse behind this claim that we are basically the same. It is a way to invoke relatedness, and the duty to care, or at least the duty not to cause harm.
Twenty years later, our parents don’t do this too much anymore. They and a bunch of others making the same argument seem to have convinced sufficient numbers of straight people that the “gay agenda” was often as boring as the straight one…I mean…we do pay our taxes.
And this works relatively fine for those of us who successfully pass or code switch our way in the straight community, those of us whose gender expression perfectly lines up with the societal expectations for the gender we were assigned at birth, those of us who are monogamous, aiming for marriage, and/or parenthood, those of us who are white, and who are citizens…you probably get my point.
When the bonds that bind each to all are grounded only in the ways that we are alike, or the idea that we must “like” each other –someone’s always going to remain outside the circle; someone is always going to be the definition of “regular human,”and someone else is always going to be…irregular. Maybe even, sub-human, or “undermensch” as the so-called “scientific” field eugenics called it, or undermenschen as the Nazis came to apply it in their philosophy, picking up directly from the Jim Crow laws of the US.
In her book, Caste, Isabel Wilkerson delves deeply into this history – if you haven’t yet found your place in our Common Conversation, check out foothillsuu.org/caste. In an accessible, compelling narrative, Wilkerson offers a framework to understand how we have found ourselves caught in a culture that ranks one another’s humanness based upon a certain sameness, a culture where some are perpetually assessed to be insufficiently human, and so therefore outside the circle of care, or love.
Relying on sameness to determine a duty to care or the presence of love is not unusual, of course. It’s actually the norm. Despite political or religious slogans affirming justice for all, as non-violence expert and activist Kazu Haga writes, “when we say ‘all,’ do we really mean all? Usually what we mean to say is that we are fighting for justice for all of our people, the people we like, the people on our side. And too often, justice for our people comes at the expense of those people. When we are able to defeat those people, then our people will have justice.”
I think we all do this. Intentionally, unintentionally, consciously or subconsciously. We’re trained through our culture, and rewarded in our politics – maybe now more than ever before – to set these limits around who we actually mean when we say “all.”
I caught myself in this mindset earlier this week when I was working on vaccine equity. I felt that one of the groups was working against the goals that I felt were critical, and so, I wanted to shut them out. If they could be defeated, then our OUR people would win. I felt pretty righteous about my outrage for a while, and my strategy for success. Until I heard myself talking to a friend about it on the phone, and suddenly, I was like….hmm. maybe there’s another way…
I feel some shame admitting this, especially assuming that any of those partners might be hearing or reading this, and wondering if I mean them. I want to just say – I’m being vague on purpose. Because the point is – my impulse was sincerely wrong. And it goes against a core commitment of our Universalist faith –that when we say all, we actually mean all.
Universalism, as a religious tradition, started off as a theological claim about life after death. Our religious forebears asserted that there was no way that an all-loving God would damn any of God’s own people to eternal punishment and torment.
The idea was inconsistent with love in an ultimate sense. Universalism was a claim that whatever destiny any of us is meant for, all of us are meant for.
In the 20th century, this after-life affirmation became instead a claim, and a commitment we make about this life. An affirmation that as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr said, “we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” Whatever lines we may consciously or subconsciously seek to draw between us and them, enemy and friend, good or bad, worthy or unworthy –there is no escaping or undoing how interconnected we are, how interdependent.
No matter how different or disagreeable, no one is less or more human than any other of us.
King went so far to call it “disinterested love” because it is the sort of love that doesn’t care whether it is loved back. It is the love that will “go to any lengths to restore community.”
It’s helpful to remember that we are not always responsible for generating this love. Instead, our work is just to show up on its behalf, and further its reach. It’s helpful to remember this when we encounter people who are distinctly difficult to love, that while we need not generate love that is unconditional and universal, it is there nonetheless.
Including for us.
Maybe the fact that this is way harder than it sounds explains why – while we can glimpse pieces of Beloved Community, and these glimpses in their beauty compels us to keep moving forward – it is resoundingly a vision for the future.
King was doing the life-saving work of moral imagination, the sort of work that moves us out of the limitations of what is into the infinite beauty of the possible.
Imagine: In the Beloved Community, all people share in the wealth of the earth, and all people care for the earth. There is no hunger, or poverty, or homelessness. There’s no racism or other prejudice, and there is no war.
Which is not the same as saying there is no conflict; King understood that conflicts are inevitable in human communities that embrace rather than shun differences. It’s just that these conflicts are resolved through a commitment to non-violence, and grounded in a mutual respect for one another’s dignity.
Which again, is not the same as mutual agreement, or liking each other, or even spending time together. As Kazu Haga reminds us “… the Beloved Community is a big place, so we have can have love for people, and they can live all the way overthere in Beloved Community.”
I appreciate this reminder for many reasons –first, it affirms the role of boundaries in Beloved Community (that Sean and Elaine talked about last Sunday),and, in affirming Beloved Community’s bigness, it reminds us that in the Beloved Community, there’s enough of everything for everyone.
It’s a big tent with big resources with big love.
In the Beloved Community, no one hoards resources, and power is shared – we practice power with rather than power over; and there is no need to compete for some small slice of pie that is already stingy and insufficient – we can lift each other up, ensuring that each person, and each community has what they need.
This is one of the most radical ideas embedded in the vision of Beloved Community, because it stands in direct contrast to 21st century capitalism where we are taught there’s never enough, that you need to hustle to get what you need, and if you don’t have what you need, that’s on you.
I’ve seen this too in the work for vaccine equity.
Each organization is so accustomed to needing to compete for funding to meet the needs of their community, the idea that we could work together for a common good requires trusting that there will be enough for everyone – enough vaccines, enough funding support, enough acknowledgment of the labor and expertise and care to go around.
Given the realities of funding, the bureaucracy of government, and the overwhelming number and loud presence of white people in Northern Colorado, I get why these communities who serve people of color and immigrants would be doubtful and suspicious, and always wondering if they should instead pull out of collaboration and instead look out for themselves. They haven’t done this, but I get why they would.
The system we have created rewards competition and isolation, and the loudest and fastest movers get the attention from those who hold power-over and without any idea or model for power-with….It’s not really any one person’s fault, I want to be clear – it is the system that we have all inherited, the system we are caught in. In this system – this slow, messy, non-hierarchical emergent collaboration seeking to creatively meet our shared needs means it’s really unclear, for example, who will sign a Memo of Understanding, or receive funds with the appropriate 501c3. And to be clear – we want that memo of understanding, and the funds to the c3s – because that is the only way to move through the system as it currently exists!
It’s just that – in the end, however, this slow, messy and hard to document type of collaboration for the common good across deep differences and divides, the work of inviting folks out to tea and dinner and beers – the work of building the relationship that endures – this is the work that it actually takes to build the Beloved Community.
It is agape love not in the generic idealistic sense, but agape love in the particular. Where you have to find ways to overcome your instinct to defeat the person who annoys you or who seems like they are actively working against you or who you just don’t get – and instead find an authentic way to widen the circle so it includes them too.
And by you, I obviously mean, me.
The term Beloved Community was actually coined by philosopher Josiah Royce in the early twentieth century. He spoke of Beloved Community as that community worthy of our ultimate loyalty – what he called, the loyalty of loyalties. Unlike partial communities that seek to put limits around love or duty, the Beloved Community is that community that keeps drawing the circle wider and wider still.
It is a loyalty that is based not in our sameness, but to the Love that holds us across our differences. To call this Love holy, to pledge our allegiance to it.
Which in turn requires critical awareness of our own tribe, and our own trauma.
Our own tribe so that we can be aware of our implicit bias, that is, the hierarchy we hold deep in our brains and our bones for who is more, or less, our people; and in turn, perhaps, more or less human.
And then, our own trauma. We need to be aware of the struggles we carry from our own lifetimes, and those we inherit from past generations. We need to know when we are acting out of our wounds, rather than our hope; we need to know, so that we can heal – backwards, and forwards -and together.
Grounding our understanding of Beloved Community in Royce’s original ideas of loyalty reminds us that the heart of Beloved Community is not a belief in an idea, but a steadfast, unshakable commitment – a tough love.
Martin Luther King Jr was very clear that Beloved Community is possible in this life, but it is only possible when a critical mass of people make this commitment, based on an understanding of what it means to be loyal to this love.
This commitment is what drives the proposal for an 8th principle – because our principles are the covenant we make as Unitarian Universalists – our promises to ourselves, to one another, and to life itself. The 8th principle says: we commit our loyalty to the building of the Beloved Community, and our loyalty to the love that binds us each to all, the love that meets us across all of our beautiful diversity.
I wish I could say that making the commitment to the tough love of Beloved Community is is the hard part. Like the vote we’ll have in May is the end, when really it’s just the beginning.
Because the hardest part is what comes next. When we live as if all actually means all, “there is no easier way.” “…the work of justice often asks us to do impossible, hard, terrifying things.”
It asks us to risk things that actually matter, especially our own comfort, our sense of order, or control. It asks us to risk our own safety, our privilege, our hearts.
But the good news is that along with the hardest part also comes the sweetest part – because in following the hardest part we also more often get to to see, and we get to know the beauty. The goodness. We get to glimpse the promise of true Beloved Community, and the freedom that is based in a love that is unconditional, transformational, and universal.
Watch the Service: Download 03-07-21 Full Text To enable YouTube provided closed-captioning while viewing the service, click the “CC” icon on the bottom bar of your YouTube video player.
a collections of readings, prayers and music from the service of 7th March 2021 at Dublin Unitarian Church, Ireland. Led by Rev Bridget Spain with contributions from Janet Mulroy and Josh Johnston
Unitarian Ralph Waldo Emerson said that “The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul.” It is right and necessary to be informed, to struggle with ideas and theology, and to continually work toward doing good and being good. And there also comes a time to let go, and let it be.
Live over the past 5 years has twisted our conceptions of the continuum between courage and caution. What does courage look like, in 2021? And how can we live it out as a noble virtue?
It has been a year since Covid-19 caused the “life as we know it” to change. During this time, we have experienced sorrow, fear, ingenuity, and expressions of great generosity. Join us for this special service uniting Unitarian Universalist religious professionals around the country as we bear witness to this anniversary and respond with hope.
Mx. Katharine Childs, Unitarian Church of Montreal Rev. Matthew Crary, Borderlands Unitarian Universalist Rev. Joanna Fontaine Crawford, Live Oak Unitarian Universalist Church Aisha Hauser, CRE-ML, Church of the Larger Fellowship Rev. Walter LeFlore, Unitarian Universalist Church of Roanoke Rev. Nancy McDonald Ladd, River Road Unitarian Universalist Congregation Rev. Kimberly Quinn Johnson, Unitarian Universalist Congregation of the South Fork Rev. Darcy Roake, Community Church Unitarian Universalist, New Orleans Rev. Nathan Ryan, Unitarian Church of Baton Rouge Kathy Smith, CRE, Unitarian Church of Baton Rouge Rev. Pamela Wat, First Unitarian Church of Wilmington
Hi all, I am not a UU member but I hope it's okay if I talk about some things I'm feeling. I just need some community and I am really struggling to find it. I had a friend who was a UU member, and it seemed like a very accepting place, so I thought I would at least reach out.
I started reading the Bible seriously for the first time about a month or so ago, and playing with Christianity has given me a sense of faith that I've never known before. I feel like it gives me a new kind of strength to help me move through life, and I feel like I can love myself now, because I know that God loves me. I've wanted to interact with other Christians in some kind of community, but honestly it feels like they don't want me.
To be blunt: I'm bisexual, and lets just say I'm pretty far left on a lot of issues. My family, and other Christians on reddit, don't really take kindly to either of those aspects of my personality, and they see God as in agreement with them. In reading the Bible though, I'm understanding God to be all-loving, compassionate, and generous... and a lot of people I've interacted with don't seem to agree. Others have said that God doesn't love me because of my sin, but I really don't understand how an omnibenevolent God's love can be conditional, or that He 'picks favorites' among us.
Reading the Bible makes me feel inspired, but interacting with Christians has made me feel like I and so many others are not worthy of God's love. I've felt dull all day, wondering whether I'm lying to myself, and God really doesn't love me.
Are there other queer people in the UU Church that have had similar experiences with Christianity? Has UU been helpful to you? Would you recommend joining UU? If so, what are some starting points or texts to consider?
Thank you for taking the time to read this and consider my situation, it really means a lot to be able to talk about this with lovingkindness. Stay well
? for y’all. So apparently one the UUA board members turned out to have been running fake non-profits and some internet scams. Once the truth was revealed she went underground and up and deleted all her SM as a means of damage ctrl. Seems like a real prob having someone charged with governing a large, well funded non-profit be involved with financial fraud. Does anyone know if board members can be recalled when stuff like this happens? Like is that even an option? It’s disturbing to think they could’ve slipped threw the cracks like this. Don’t we vet board candidates or something?
"Love and Accountability" (February 28, 2021) Worship Service
Accountability can sound unpleasant, even scary, but what if it didn’t have to be? Disability justice educator and writer Mia Mingus offers a dream of what accountability can be- one that might support us in living into our work as a congregation.
Meg McGuire, Ministerial Intern
Carmen Barsody, Worship Associate
Daniel Jackoway, Worship Associate
Mari Magaloni, 8th Principle Task Force
Liz Strand, 8th Principle Task Force
Mark Sumner, song leader/pianist
Eric Hamilton, guitarist
Brielle Marina Neilson, song leader
Jon Silk, drums
Eric Shackelford, camera
Shulee Ong, camera
Joe Chapot, Social Media Chat Support
Les James, Coffee Hour Zoom
Thomas Brown, Sexton
Judy Payne, flowers
Alex Perez, cover image, https://unsplash.com/@a2eorigins
Jonathan Silk, OOS, Sound, video edits
One of the featured posts covers the progress of bills through Congress (Covid relief, the Equality Act) plus Senate action on Biden’s nominees.
and bombing Syria
Thursday, America planes struck in Syria near the Iraqi border. The raid was aimed at Iranian-backed militias that the Pentagon says attacked American and allied forces in Iraq with rockets. President Biden sent a letter to congressional leaders explaining the attack, as the War Powers Act requires. He found justification for the raid in “the United States’ inherent right of self-defense”.
A lot of Americans have probably forgotten that we still have troops in Iraq, but we do: about 2,500 of them. Their main mission is to prevent the Islamic State from reforming.
and Covid
The precipitous drop in new Covid cases looks like it might have leveled off. The 7-day average of new cases per day bottomed out at around 66K on February 21. Coincidentally, that’s two weeks after the Super Bowl. So maybe people let down their guard for Super Bowl get-togethers, or maybe the more-transmissible variants are starting to take hold, or maybe it’s random fluctuation. 66K is way below the peak of 259K on January 8 (two weeks after Christmas), but would have been considered shockingly high back in early October.
Curiously, deaths also have plateaued at around 2,000 per day, down from over 3,300 at the peak. This is odd because death totals usually trail new-case totals by a week or two, so they should still be going down.
“The J&J vaccine, which is easier to transport and store… is going to dramatically increase our vaccine availability,” Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a professor of medicine at George Washington University, told CNN Saturday. “It’s a big, big deal.” About 3.9 million doses will be available for ordering right away, according to Lori Tremmel Freeman, CEO of the National Association of County and City Health Officials — which could add about 25% more Covid-19 vaccination capacity for states.
3.9 million doses are available, and distribution might start today. Matt Yglesias speculates:
If Pfizer, Modern, and J&J all hit their stated delivery targets we’re going to be doing 4 million doses/day in March, and by April the whole vaccine story will shift to be about reluctance/hesitancy/resistance.
Trump made his return to the public stage yesterday, giving his first speech since leaving the White House. Reportedly, he talked for 90 minutes, so (life being short) I haven’t watched it. CNN’s Chris Cillizza listed the 50 most ridiculous lines, and I couldn’t even make through them.
Trump’s fans (and many of the people who fear him) still don’t realize he’s a has-been, but he is. He lost in 2020 by over 7 million votes. After he lost he tried to overthrow American democracy. He’s stuck in the past talking about personal grievances that have nothing to do with the lives of American voters. And odds are at least 50-50 he’ll be in jail when 2024 rolls around. So if Republicans want to run that loser again — hey, don’t let me stop you.
Two crazy stories come out of CPAC. One is true and the other is at best an amazingly unfortunate coincidence. The true one is that CPAC featured a golden statue of Trump. Comparisons to the Biblical golden calf idol appeared independently all over social media, but CPAC participants happily got their photos taken with their own idol anyway. The kicker is that the statue was made in Mexico.
The other story is CPAC’s main stage, whose elaborate design closely resembles the Norse odal rune, a symbol used by the Nazis. That sounds like the kind of insane thing Twitter users are always going on about, but the resemblance is hard to deny, once it has been pointed out to you.
The unresolved question is whether this was an intentional message to the international far right, a weird attempt to invoke some kind of dark magic, or some other sinister thing. Snopes calls such claims “unproven”, which it’s hard to argue with. CPAC organizers deny any intent and seem appropriately outraged, if not appropriately embarrassed. (I mean, the rune is really there, and the Nazis really did use it. I’d be embarrassed.)
I wasn’t going to mention the controversy if it was was just liberals entertaining each other by finding faces in the clouds and tweeting their outrage. But I decided to ask two additional questions: What do the people who cover Norse paganism think? And are actual Nazis getting the message?
As for the pagans, the Wild Hunt blog is taking this seriously. The Hunt notes that the stage shape is not driven by functionality, so somebody liked the design for other reasons:
The wings of the CPAC stage lead nowhere – they do not lead to stairs, and the stage’s entrances and exits are in the rear, flanking the back wall. The red triangle toward the rear of the stage similarly serves no apparent functional use. This means that the set was intentionally designed this way, not for its utility, but for its visual appeal – an image that looks, unquestionably, like the odal rune.
The Nazi connection runs deeper than just a photo of some SS officer’s collar insignia. (Go to the Hunt’s article if you want the full history.) And it’s not hard to see why, if you know the rune’s traditional interpretations:
The odal rune’s historical meaning deals with inherited estates, homelands, or the aristocracy.
So it’s an ideal “Make das Vaterland great again” symbol. In addition, the significance is not just Hitler-era history.
In the present day, the odal rune has been adopted as a replacement for the swastika in American far-right circles, notably by the National Socialist Movement (NSM), who changed their logo to the odal rune in November 2016. The change was specifically in response to the election of Donald Trump, as the NSM’s leadership hoped there would be an opening for their entry into mainstream conservative contexts under Trump and believed the odal rune would be more presentable to the public than the swastika.
On the other hand, I failed to find any actual Nazis high-fiving each other about this. I don’t have much in the way of Nazi contacts, but I looked around on the Daily Stormer and Stormfront web sites — I wonder what lists that got me onto — and didn’t run across any excited odal-rune chatter (though lots of folks at Stormfront were planning to livestream Trump’s speech).
and the report on the Khashoggi murder
The Biden administration released an unclassified report on the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul. The short version: MBS did it. The report is just four pages, and doesn’t say how the operation went down or how we know what happened, presumably in order not to reveal how we spy on MBS and the Saudis generally.
Congress had demanded a report during the Trump administration, but Trump stonewalled in order to protect the Saudi Crown Prince, who was chummy with Jared Kushner. Biden released the report to fulfill his obligation.
It’s hard to know what to do next. MBS ordered an American resident murdered. But he’s also the de facto head of state of a country that the US sees as a counterweight to Iran in the Middle East. We no longer need Saudi oil ourselves, but our allies do. Biden has already shown an intention to distance the US from Saudi Arabia somewhat. For example, we are backing away from the Saudi proxy war in Yemen, though it’s not clear exactly what that means.
and you also might be interested in …
Things got worse for Andrew Cuomo this week. In addition to the recent scandal about reporting Covid deaths in nursing homes, he now faces a second accusation of sexual harassment. The new charge is of verbal harassment — when they were alone in a room, the governor allegedly asked a young female aide leading questions that seemed to suggest they should start a sexual relationship. Earlier, another female aide had accused him of giving her an unwanted kiss after a number of similarly suggestive conversations.
The NYT looked for someone to corroborate the first accuser’s story:
The New York Times spoke to three people who worked in the governor’s office during Ms. Boylan’s time there. The people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that while they could not corroborate her allegations, they concurred that the governor would sometimes make inappropriate remarks during work and comment on people’s appearances.
Cuomo denied the accusation, but responded to the second with one of those half-way apologies that seemed to cover the first accusation as well.
At work sometimes I think I am being playful and make jokes that I think are funny. I do, on occasion, tease people in what I think is a good natured way. … I now understand that my interactions may have been insensitive or too personal and that some of my comments, given my position, made others feel in ways I never intended. I acknowledge some of the things I have said have been misinterpreted as an unwanted flirtation. To the extent anyone felt that way, I am truly sorry about that.
The WaPo’s Karen Tumulty believes Cuomo will be forced to resign, and I think that is appropriate. At the very least, he should announce that he will not run for a fourth term in 2022. Trump can claim that his dozens of accusers are all liars, and be confident that members of his cult will just repeat whatever he says. But standards are higher among Democrats.
BTW: Those who talk about the “liberal media” need to recognize that it wasn’t Fox News that broke this story. It was the New York Times.
Two counties in North Dakota are trying to save their coal-mining jobs by blocking wind power. A local coal-powered electric plant might close, and if it does, the nearby coal mine that supplies it will probably close as well, with a total cost of a thousand jobs.
The problem is that coal isn’t competitive economically any more, not just with renewables, but with natural gas as well. Stopping farmers from letting wind-energy companies put up windmills on their land probably won’t save the coal jobs for long.
In a 50/50 Senate, West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin can kill a bill or a nominee (or save the filibuster) all by himself. Frustrated progressive Democrats often ask, “Can’t we do better?”. Philip Bump looks at the last several elections in West Virginia, both presidential and senatorial. He concludes that the answer is no.
Another test for the QAnon theory: Thursday is March 4, which was the original Inauguration Day before the 20th Amendment changed it to January 20. Well, apparently, nothing that happened after 1871 is really legit.
QAnon believers claim that the US federal government secretly became a corporation under a law they believe passed in 1871 but does not actually exist, rendering every president inaugurated and every constitutional amendment passed in the years since illegitimate. But on March 4, the narrative goes, Trump will return as the 19th president, the first legitimate president since Ulysses S. Grant, with former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as his vice president.
Any resemblance to the many restoring-an-ancient-line-of-kings myths is purely coincidental, I’m sure. Don’t say you weren’t warned.
and let’s close with something clever
Not my cleverness, other people’s. Like this young man’s technique for watching a movie on his phone.
Lisa Turner has collected dozens of such “life hacks” — some more clever than others — on her My Health Gazette blog.
The country now depends on its most dysfunctional branch of government.
Joe Biden began his presidency with a flurry of executive orders, concerning everything from public health to immigration to racial equality. But the United States is not (and should not be) a dictatorship, so executive orders can only go so far. Executive orders can redecorate the rooms of our government, but they can’t remodel the building. To make real change, you need Congress to appropriate money and pass laws.
So as the Biden administration enters its sixth week, the action has shifted to Congress. Congress (as I have pointed out before) is the most dysfunctional branch of American government, and its weakness is the root cause the dysfunction of the other two branches: Both the White House and the courts overreach, because someone has to pick up the responsibilities that Congress drops.
Syria. We saw an example this week, when Biden ordered an air strike on Syria. The legality of this is questionable, because Congress has never specifically authorized military action in Syria. But the last few administrations have justified whatever they wanted to do in the Middle East by stretching the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) resolutions that Congress passed in 2001 after 9-11 and in 2002 prior to the Iraq invasion. The entire Obama/Trump campaign against ISIS, which culminated in Syria, happened under authority that Congress never realized it was granting two decades ago.
But the blame here belongs to Congress. A responsible legislative body would debate the exact bounds of presidential war-making in the area, and pass a new AUMF that repealed the previous two. Some — Senators Tim Kaine (D-VA) and Todd Young (R-IN), for example — have pushed for this, but most congresspeople would rather dodge responsibility and then complain later if things go wrong in either direction.
In this case, you can be sure that if the US suffered some major reversal in the Iraq/Syria theater — say, a high-casualty attack against our forces or a resurgence of ISIS — many of the same congresspeople who complain about unauthorized military action now would be complaining then that the President hadn’t done enough. Again, this pattern is independent of parties. It was equally true in the Trump and Obama administrations, and under congressional leadership of Republicans and Democrats alike.
Covid relief. The biggest bill facing Congress right now is the $1.9 trillion Covid relief package, which passed the House Saturday without a single Republican vote and two Democrats defecting. The Washington Post summarizes the content:
Beyond the minimum-wage increase, the sprawling relief bill would provide $1,400 stimulus payments to tens of millions of American households; extend enhanced federal unemployment benefits through August; provide $350 billion in aid to states, cities, U.S. territories and tribal governments; and boost funding for vaccine distribution and coronavirus testing — among myriad other measures, such as nutritional assistance, housing aid and money for schools.
The bill is popular with the American people, as well as with many Republican governors and mayors. But that isn’t enough to get it Republican votes in Congress. Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy have imprinted the lesson they learned during the Obama administration: If you monkey-wrench the economy, ultimately the party in the White House will get blamed for it.
The Democrats will be able to pass a bill popular with more than 3 out of 4 of us only because they have a slight majority in the House and can use a special budget measure to work around the Republican senators who represent 41.5 million fewer Americans than the Democrats do.
The coronavirus relief bill illustrates just how dangerously close we are to minority rule.
Minimum wage. Meanwhile, the Senate parliamentarian ruled that raising the minimum wage doesn’t fit inside the rules defining the reconciliation process. So if Senate Democrats use that process to pass Covid relief — as it looks like they must to overcome the expected Republican filibuster — the minimum wage won’t be in it. Raising the minimum wage is also popular on its own, and will probably be offered as a stand-alone bill. But popularity with the American people probably won’t garner it enough Republican support to overcome a filibuster.
The New Yorker blows up one central argument against raising the minimum wage:
The fast-food chains insist that if they were to pay their employees more they would have to raise menu prices. Their wages are “competitive.” But in Denmark McDonald’s workers over the age of eighteen earn more than twenty dollars an hour—they are also unionized—and the price of a Big Mac is only thirty-five cents more than it is in the United States. There are regional American fast-food chains that take the high road with their employees. The starting wage at In-N-Out Burger, which is based in Southern California, and has two hundred and ninety-five restaurants in California and the Southwest, is eleven dollars. Full-time workers receive a complete benefits package, including life insurance—and the burgers are cheap and good.
The genius of America is you need a 60-vote supermajority to raise the minimum wage, but the president can bomb some militia in Iran based on … I dunno … an AUMF from two decades ago that was about something else entirely or something.
The Equality Act. Thursday, the House passed the Equality Act, which would explicitly protect Americans against discrimination based on their sexual orientation or gender identity. It’s not inconceivable that the bill could also pass the Senate and become law, but getting the ten Republican votes necessarily to overcome a filibuster looks like an uphill struggle.
Whether it passes or not, the bill is becoming a hot-button culture war issue for conservatives, raising all kinds of dark fantasies that have little basis in reality. Most conservative attempts to argue this point don’t even try to assemble evidence, and the few that do are unconvincing. For example, a Heritage Foundation report against allowing access to single-sex facilities according to gender identity includes a nine-page appendix listing “Individuals charged with sex crimes in intimate facilities”, including such incidents as voyeuristic men dressing as women to enter women’s bathrooms.
I’m sure Heritage believes its readers should be impressed with this mound of “evidence”. But the question is not whether such incidents happen, or whether they continue to happen in venues that allow trans access to bathrooms corresponding to their gender identity. The question is whether changing the rules causes such incidents to increase. A trans-friendly bathroom policy exists in enough places now that the question should be answerable.
The Heritage report also does not consider the danger that a transwoman faces if the law forces her to use a men’s bathroom. It’s as if violence and harassment directed at transgender people should not count.
I also note another example of the selectivity of conservative care: They regard the possibility of opposite-sex voyeurism in bathrooms as a world-shaking problem. But men entering men’s bathrooms to look at boys elicits no policy response at all; the status quo is just fine.
The looming filibuster battle. I can imagine readers asking “What’s the point? Why pass bills in the House that Republicans can successfully filibuster in the Senate? They’re not going to change anything.”
That question has both a principled and a practical answer. The principled answer is that you always want to give people a chance to do the right thing, even if you don’t think they will. When politicians make excuses for not serving the people, they should never be able to say, “Nobody asked me.” All the major advances in civil rights started with people making demands that (in the short term) they knew would be turned down. Asking the question is how you get from a vague “It’s just not possible” to a specific “It would happen if those people stopped blocking it.”
The practical answer is that a showdown over the filibuster is looming, and Democrats need to be united to win it. Currently they’re not: Both Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Krysten Sinema of Arizona have come out against eliminating the filibuster.
Turning them around is going to require building popular support. But the filibuster itself is a procedural Senate thing that the average voter doesn’t care about. So the debate will turn on what the filibuster means to ordinary people as they live their lives. Popular bills need to come up and go down — along with the For the People Act, which would ban gerrymandering and many voter suppression tactics, as well as controlling dark money and encouraging small-donor campaign financing — to connect the filibuster with problems that people can see.
Defenders of the filibuster sometimes warn that Democrats will be sorry if they end the filibuster and then lose the Senate, as they might in 2022 (while still representing more voters than the GOP). But that observation ignores how the Republican Party has changed in the last decade: It has no legislative program beyond tax cuts, which can pass through reconciliation.
Conversely, Democrats are more likely to lose the Senate if voters see that a Democratic Senate can’t accomplish its goals.
PBS Newshour notes the “pattern of minority nominees encountering more political resistance than white counterparts”. A look at Politico’s list demonstrates that the difference isn’t across-the-board. Some Black (UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin), female (Greenfield, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellin, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines), Latino (Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas), and gay (Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg) nominees have gotten through the process relatively unscathed.
But where Republicans have unleashed fireworks, the targets have largely been people of color, particularly women, and white transwoman Rachel Levine, who endured some abusive questioning from Rand Paul. The Newshour article focuses on Deb Haaland, who seems likely to become the first Native American Secretary of the Interior, but took some harsh grilling from Republicans on the Energy Committee. Afterwards, John Kennedy of Louisiana told reporters she was “a neo-socialist, left-of-Lenin whack job”. (Haaland’s sin appears to be a desire to phase out fossil fuels. I suspect Lenin was pro-fossil-fuel, so Kennedy may not be completely wrong.)
The confirmation of Neera Tanden, who would be the first Indian American to head the Office of Management and Budget, was thrown into doubt when it lost support from Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia. He cited her controversial tweets attacking members of both parties.
Critics also have targeted Vanita Gupta, an Indian American and Biden’s pick to be associate attorney general, and California Attorney General Xavier Becerra as Health and Human Services secretary. Conservatives launched campaigns calling Gupta “dangerous” and questioning Becerra’s qualifications.
I think the apparent racism is less personal animosity than an attempt to exploit the implicit racism of the Republican base. (Manchin is a Democrat, but needs Republican votes to stay in office.) The GOP strategy is to paint Biden’s nominees as way-out, far-left, bomb-throwing extremists. As Republicans noticed during the Obama administration, and later refined in their attacks on the Squad, that kind of mud doesn’t stick as well to a white man as it does to a woman of color. (That’s why when Bernie Sanders and AOC support the same thing, the attack goes against AOC. The GOP has made AOC the face of the Green New Deal, while poor cosponsor Ed Markey can barely get any credit.) The base doesn’t even have to notice that they’re responding in a racist or sexist fashion, they just have to unquestioningly accept accusations against the chosen targets that they might doubt if the same things were said about white men.
What Haaland actually brings — and what the Republican Party seems to consider so dangerous — are experiences and perspectives that have never found representation in the leadership of the executive branch. In fact, Republicans’ depiction of the first Native American ever nominated to the Cabinet as a “radical” threat to a Western “way of life” revealed something about the conservative id: a deep-seated fear that when the dispossessed finally attain a small measure of power, we will turn around and do to them what their governments and ancestors did to us.
Presidential elections are rigged in favor of Republicans. North Dakota wants to keep it that way.
As we’ve seen in the last two elections, the Electoral College gives the Republican candidate about a 3-4% advantage, which might be growing as the rural areas (which the EC over-weights) get more conservative and the cities (which it underweights) more liberal.
Hillary Clinton won the 2016 popular vote by 2.1% but still lost the election, and Biden’s 4.4% victory in 2020 goes away if you lower his margin by .7% across the board. (He loses Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin, leading to a 269-269 tie that the House — with one vote per state delegation — would have decided in Trump’s favor.) Hillary would still have lost if you similarly boosted her margin in every state by .7%.
So the Electoral College’s thumb-on-the-scale was worth about 2.8% in 2016 and 3.7% in 2020. Republicans like to talk about “rigged elections”. Well, they’re right: Presidential elections are rigged in their favor.
The straightforward way to unrig our elections would be to pass a constitutional amendment eliminating the Electoral College and awarding the presidency to the candidate who gets the most votes. But that path requires a 2/3rds majority in both houses of Congress and ratification by 3/4ths of the states, so it can’t pass without bipartisan support. Few Republicans have a sense of fair play or respect for democracy, so they’re not going to give up the unfair advantage the EC gives them. [1]
An alternative scheme for unrigging our elections is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact: States agree to appoint electors for the candidate who wins the national popular vote, even if that candidate didn’t win in their particular state. If states representing 270 electoral votes all passed a law joining the compact and fulfilled their commitments, the Electoral College would never screw the American people again.
I have mentioned before that, as much as I like this idea, I would never trust this agreement. In 2020, we saw how many bad-faith actors hold positions of authority in the Republican Party. (Though most Republican election officials did their jobs honestly; Biden could not have won without them.) It was hard enough to feel secure that Republican legislatures wouldn’t step in and illegitimately award their electors to Trump, even though he got fewer votes both in their states and in the nation as a whole. If a Republican legislature in a place like Georgia or Wisconsin could give a Republican the White House just by agreeing with the voters in their state, I have to believe they would, no matter what commitments they might have made previously. [2]
Well, it looks like messing up the NPVIC is even easier than I had thought. North Dakota, owner of exactly three electoral votes, may be about the skewer the whole thing: The state senate has passed a law that forbids state election officials to release their popular vote totals until after the Electoral College meets.
[A] public officer, employee, or contractor of this state or of a political subdivision of this state may not release to the public the number of votes cast in the general election for the office of the president of the United States until after the times set by law for the meetings and votes of the presidential electors in all states
The upshot is that there would be no official national popular vote total. Compare this to the process laid out in the NPVIC:
Prior to the time set by law for the meeting and voting by the presidential electors, the chief election official of each member state shall determine the number of votes for each presidential slate in each State of the United States and in the District of Columbia in which votes have been cast in a statewide popular election and shall add such votes together to produce a “national popular vote total” for each presidential slate.
The chief election official of each member state shall designate the presidential slate with the largest national popular vote total as the “national popular vote winner.”
The presidential elector certifying official of each member state shall certify the appointment in that official’s own state of the elector slate nominated in that state in association with the national popular vote winner.
If everyone involved would carry out the spirit of this agreement in good faith, probably there would be no problem. It’s extremely unlikely that North Dakota’s votes would make the difference in the national popular vote, so even without knowing their totals, the popular-vote winner should be apparent. In 2016, for example, only 344K votes were cast in North Dakota, and Hillary won nationally by 2.9 million.
But now let’s talk about the real world, where bad-faith actors abound. If I’m, say, a Republican official in 2016 Wisconsin, where a good-faith application of the NPVIC would have me appoint pro-Hillary electors even though Trump won my state, I can claim that without the North Dakota votes the conditions of the NPVIC have not been fulfilled. Would the Republican legislature or a Republican-appointed judge overrule me? I kind of doubt it.
So I think the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is dead. This particular hole could be patched without a constitutional amendment, if Congress could pass a law (over a Republican filibuster) mandating that states release their vote totals in a timely fashion. But I think this would just start a game of whack-a-mole. And what if a red state whose vote totals do matter, like Texas, decides to play?
I think the monkey-wrenchers win this battle, and we’re stuck with the Electoral College until we can muster a constitutional amendment.
[1] Electoral College advocates sometimes hide their partisan intentions by making arguments that sound good, but don’t hold up to even a small amount of scrutiny. For example:
A presidential campaign aimed at achieving a popular vote majority would completely ignore most states and focus, instead, on a few populous states containing the nation’s largest cities. This urban-centric strategy would silence the political voice of most regions of the country.
Anybody who has lived in a state with a big city knows this isn’t true. If it were, no Illinois candidate would ever leave Chicago, Texas campaigns would only happen in Houston and Dallas, and Florida candidates would camp out in Miami. They don’t — and for good reason. Consider, for example, the map of the Ted Cruz/Beto O’Rourke Senate race of 2018. Cruz lost just about all the cities — Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, El Paso — but won anyway because the rural areas came through for him.
In a popular-vote system, candidates look for votes wherever they think they can get them, because all votes count the same. Convincing somebody to vote for you in Chugwater, Wyoming counts just as much as convincing somebody in Los Angeles.
In fact, if you apply the make-them-campaign-everywhere argument honestly, it will point you in exactly the opposite direction: Because of the Electoral College, presidential candidates only campaign in swing states like Pennsylvania and Florida, and ignore most of the American people. Here’s a map where states are sized according to how many presidential campaign events happened there in 2012. Three of the four biggest states — California, Texas, and New York — don’t even show up. But neither do small states like Alaska, Utah, or Rhode Island, because nobody bothers to compete in states where the electoral votes aren’t up for grabs.
In a popular-vote system, it would make sense for a Democratic candidate to campaign in, say, the Black neighborhoods of Memphis or the Hispanic areas around El Paso — because there are people there who might be convinced to vote for you. Similarly, a Republican candidate should hold rallies in upstate New York or conservative Chicago suburbs. But they don’t, because in the Electoral College system, competing for votes that won’t tip a whole state is wasted effort.
So in fact it’s the Electoral College that silences “the political voice of most regions of the country”.
[2] The Compact tries to deal with the question of states changing their minds:
Any member state may withdraw from this agreement, except that a withdrawal occurring six months or less before the end of a President’s term shall not become effective until a President or Vice President shall have been qualified to serve the next term.
But there is no enforcement mechanism, and a basic principle of our system of government says that no legislature can claim power over a future legislature. (As Jefferson put it: “The dead should not rule the living.”) So if Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan had joined the compact in 2015, and then in 2016 one of them passed a law refusing to award their electors to Hillary, I think Trump still becomes president. States might sue each other later, but the deed would be done.
The center of the news this week has been Congress, which is a refreshing change. The Founders intended Congress to be the most powerful branch of government, but the combination of partisan gridlock and a Republican Party that has no legislative agenda has all but sidelined Congress in recent years.
So one of the two featured posts this week, “The Action Shifts to Congress”, will cover the current state of various bills and other Congressional actions: Covid relief, the Equality Act, the minimum wage, and approving Biden’s nominees (or not). That should be out sometime between 10 and 11 EST.
In the meantime, though, I want to call your attention to a small state wielding a big monkey wrench: North Dakota looks poised to pass a law that could completely skewer the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. The NPVIC, if you remember, is an attempt to sideline the Electoral College by getting enough states to agree to give their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. You might think that North Dakota, with its three electoral votes and tiny electorate, couldn’t do much to mess that up. But where there’s a will to preserve minority rule, there’s a way.
That post, “North Dakota Is About To Kill the National Popular Vote Compact”, should appear soon.
That leaves the weekly summary with virus and vaccine updates, the Syria bombing, the bizarre personality-cult spectacle that CPAC has turned into, the finally-released report on Saudi Arabia’s murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Andrew Cuomo’s troubles, and a few other things. Let’s project that to appear between noon and 1.
For thirty years I was blacksmith of my soul.
I put it in the furnace of austerity and burned
it in the fire of egotism.
I laid it upon the anvil of reproach and beat it
with the hammer of blame until I made my soul a mirror.
For thirty years I was the mirror of myself, and was forever polishing that mirror with diverse acts of stoic harshness and detachment.
I now reflect on what trappings I had embraced as my own:
On my waist, I wore a belt of insecurity; a breastplate of dishonesty; a shield of mistrust.
My campaigns have taken a turn.
I am now a prisoner stripped of my armor,
I can no longer run, no longer hide.
I have cried out for understanding, to a memory, a part of my life no longer denied.
I have reached out and found my strength.
My redemption.
Now, I look into that mirror and what do I see?
Girded around my waist is truth; integrity is my breastplate; and faith, hope, and love are
my new shield.
I have seen that the garments I once fashioned for myself were but temporary and hollow.
They would perish like chafe in the wind.
Now, I have been bestowed with the garb
that is eternal, as my prayers were
answered—for now I tread the path
lighted by knowledge: art, poetry, and music.
My Guides are Monet, Frost, and Bach
Though the COVID-19 pandemic truly started months earlier, March 2020 was the month when its life-changing realities hit many of us in the US and other Western countries. In those early weeks of stay-at-home orders and new health and safety protocols, few of us could have imagined just how long and devastating this pandemic would become. There have been over 2 million recorded deaths from COVID-19 worldwide — with over 500,000 deaths in the US alone — and, as enormous as those numbers are, they fail to capture the full scope of loss that this year and the governmental mismanagement of the pandemic have brought. COVID has highlighted and exacerbated every one of the deep inequities in our society, and as those of you who are currently incarcerated know well, it has made our already-deadly prisons into places of even more violence and pain.
As we reach this one year mark of the pandemic as its been experienced in the West, it’s hugely important for us all to acknowledge the collective and individual loss we have experienced. Acknowledging and tending to our grief expands our capacity to hold it, allowing us more room to also hold the joy, resilience, and hope that may exist alongside that grief.
Below is an outline of a simple ritual for acknowledging and honoring the grief of this year of pandemic, as well as the gifts that this year may have brought. I believe that grief and gifts are inseparable — the losses we experience shape us, and we can honor them by making meaning from all they have taught us. Feel free to adapt or expand this ritual in any way that makes sense to you.
A prayer for grief & gifts
If you are able, I invite you to begin this ritual by gathering a pen and two pieces of paper, and finding a quiet spot to sit or lie down. Take a moment to breathe deeply, in and out, until you feel settled and calm in your body. You may then choose to light a chalice if that practice is available to you, or to sing or chant — whatever allows you to mark this time as sacred.
Then, call to mind all that has brought grief in the past year. As a list or in sentences, write down whatever comes to the surface. You may be grieving loved ones lost in the past year, or the continued absence of in-person community, or the loss of the sense of security you felt before the pandemic. Try not to filter what you’re feeling or compare your losses to that of others — all grief is holy and deserves to be honored.
Whenever you feel ready, turn your attention to the gifts or lessons of the past year. Perhaps this year has taught you to slow down, and listen more closely to the needs of your body. Or maybe you have learned more about your capacity for resilience, that you’re able to survive through heartbreak. Again, try not to filter what arises when writing down the gifts of this year — no matter how short or long your list of gifts is, each one deserves your attention.
Next, turn toward the year ahead. What do you hope to leave behind you from this year of pandemic? What do you hope to bring forward with you? Write down whatever rises to the surface, whether or not it is completely within your control.
When you have answered all of the prompts fully, go back through your answers and highlight or underline words that stand out the most. On a new piece of paper, use the format below (or your own version of it) to turn your words into a prayer or spell. Once you are done, read your prayer out loud. Then, fold the paper that has this prayer written on it and place it under your bed or beside your pillow. These words will now be with you as a loving companion in the coming year, a reminder of all that has been lost and all that has been gained, and the choices you are making about what to carry forward.
After a year of pandemic, I honor the heartbreak that I am carrying for all that has been lost. I am grieving ….
By holding my heartbreak tenderly, I also make space to take in the gifts and lessons this past year has brought. In this year, I have received the gift(s) of ….
Turning toward the year ahead, I hope to leave behind ….
In this next year, I seek to carry forward ….
By naming the grief and gifts of this year, I honor all parts of my experience as sacred. With these words I set my intentions for the year ahead, knowing that I am loved and held in care. May it be so.
Rev. Meg Barnhouse's sermon delivered on February 28, 2021. We have all been through something very difficult. Whether we lost power and water or just had to watch our family and friends lose those things and not be able to help because we couldn't get out, it has been a very traumatizing time. What does that do to a person's brain? What does that do to a person's energy? What is trauma brain? Do you have that?
Watch the Service: Download 02-28-21 Full Text To enable YouTube provided closed-captioning while viewing the service, click the “CC” icon on the bottom bar of your YouTube video player.
the address from the Sunday service at Dublin Unitarian Church, Ireland, on 28th February 2021. Rev. Bridget Spain is minister of Dublin Unitarian Church.
a collections of readings, prayers and music from the service of 28th February 2021 at Dublin Unitarian Church, Ireland. Led by Rev Bridget Spain with contributions from Andrew Connolly, Shari McDaid & Josh Johnston
Living during this pandemic is HARD, y’all. Join us for this honest but hopeful service about addressing the reality of the isolation but finding contentment (and maybe even joy) within its limitations.
This month the Minister's Book Club is reading John Lewis's Memoir (written with Michael D'Orso) "Walking with the Wind" and it has me thinking about the idea of being ready.
Rev. Vanessa Rush Southern, Senior Minister
Meg McGuire, Ministerial Intern
Richard Davis-Lowell, Worship Associate
Reiko Oda Lane, organist
Mark Sumner, conductor
Leandra Ramm, soprano
Brielle Marina Neilson, alto
Ben Rudiak-Gould, tenor
Asher Davison, bass
Eric Shackelford, camera
Shulee Ong, camera
Joe Chapot, Social Media Chat Support
Les James, Coffee Hour Zoom
Thomas Brown, Sexton
Amy Kelly, flowers
Waranont (Joe), cover image, https://unsplash.com/@tricell1991
Jonathan Silk, OOS, Sound, video edits
The weather caused power failures which caused water failures, and now the weirdness of Texas’ energy system is resulting in outrageous electricity bills. All that is in the featured post, plus the state’s history of mismanagement and its leadership’s attempt to deflect blame onto sustainable energy, which works fine in much colder places like Wisconsin and Antarctica. And Ted Cruz is the comedy relief, standing in the Cancun airport with his flag-of-Texas face mask demonstrating how much he identifies with the state he was running away from.
As long as that article is, one point got left out. Remember the Russian SolarWinds hack, the one that spread into more systems than anyone has fully listed? One of the things computer-security wonks (like my wife) worry about is penetration of systems that control the power grid.
Probably the scariest thing about the whole Texas situation was what would have happened if ERCOT hadn’t starting pulling the plug to reduce demand:
The worst case scenario: Demand for power outstrips the supply of power generation available on the grid, causing equipment to catch fire, substations to blow and power lines to go down.
That scenario could have left Texas blacked out for months (kind of like Puerto Rico). But now think about this: Imagine some hostile hacker, maybe from the Russian military, has penetrated ERCOT’s control systems. Maybe the hack only survives because the hackers don’t do anything to draw the system’s attention, but they know they have a short time window to meddle before they get detected and booted off. What if that time period is long enough to block the ERCOT shut-down order for the “minutes and seconds” necessary to trigger that worst case?
and legislation
The March 14 deadline is looming for Congress to pass Biden’s Covid relief package, or something like it. (Otherwise people start to lose unemployment benefits.) The administration is still hoping to get some Republican support, but also preparing to push a bill through the Senate using the reconciliation process that would circumvent a Republican filibuster.
That’s probably all going to work out somehow, because Biden has been going around the Republican opposition in Congress to get support from state and local Republican officials, as well as the American people. Neither Democratic nor Republican moderates will want the blame if nothing passes.
But two other bills will come up shortly, and their fates are much less certain: an immigration bill and a democracy bill.
The U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021 includes: an eight-year pathway to citizenship for nearly 11 million undocumented immigrants; a shorter process to legal status for agriculture workers and recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program; and an enforcement plan that includes deploying technology to patrol the border.
The For the People Act
makes illegal essentially all of the anti-enfranchisement tactics perfected by the right over the past decades. It then creates a new infrastructure to permanently bolster the influence of regular people.
The bill’s provisions largely fall into three categories: First, it makes it far easier to vote, both by eliminating barriers and enhancing basic outreach to citizens. Second, it makes everyone’s vote count more equally, especially by reducing gerrymandering. Third, it hugely amplifies the power of small political donors, allowing them to match and possibly swamp the power of big money.
Neither bill is likely to get support from ten Republican senators. Nor does either fit within the tight constraints on the reconciliation process, which is focused on issues of taxing and spending. So that will be the point where the filibuster issue can’t be finessed any further. Either Democrats will have to eliminate the filibuster (or poke such a big hole in it that it might as well be eliminated), or they will have to go back to core constituencies and admit failure.
This is a good time to repeat the theme of a 2018 Sift post “You can’t compromise with bullshit“. At that time, I was focusing on the various “border security” measures Trump and his nativist allies were pushing: the wall, concentration camps for asylum seekers, and so on. The point of these measures was to end the “American carnage” of a non-existent immigrant crime wave. Trump pushed this dark fantasy again and again, to the point of implying that the US has no indigenous criminals: “STRONG BORDERS, NO CRIME” he tweeted.
For years, Democrats had hoped for a grand bargain on immigration: Legal status for the 11 million undocumented immigrants already here in exchange for increased border security. The reason that deal has never worked out is simple: Because the “immigrant crime wave” never existed, no amount of border security can stop it.
Same thing with elections: No amount of “election security” can ever be enough to satisfy Republicans, because the “voter fraud” problem they are trying to solve doesn’t exist. As I wrote in 2018:
When claims are based on nothing, they can go on being based on nothing, no matter what you do to mollify the people who make those claims.
and the virus
The statistics continue to improve, while the spread of new variants of Covid-19 looms ominously. (I think the cartoon is too pessimistic, but it expresses an important point of view.) The US recorded its half-millionth Covid death, a total that is already well past the number of deaths the country had in World War II. 43.6 million Americans have gotten at least one vaccine shot, and 18.9 million are fully vaccinated. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which requires only one shot and can be stored in a simple refrigerator, is getting closer to approval. Shots could start in early March.
One of the striking facts about vaccine distribution is the racial inequity.
This is a good example of the kind of systemic racism conservatives deny exists. (Laura Ingraham is offended that President Biden even uses the phrase “systemic racism”.)
I’m pretty confident that nobody in the public-health power structure has been saying “Let’s not waste our scarce vaccines on people of color.” (That would be overt, personal racism, not systemic racism.) But somehow, things just work out so that white people are more likely to get vaccinated first. If nobody consciously makes racial equity a priority, the gears just turn in a way that favors Whites.
One of my earliest memories is of my grandfather and I watching the countdown on John Glenn’s Mercury flight. For a lot of people of my generation, space flights still evoke that little-kid belief that anything is possible if we all work towards it. Hearing that we had landed a new rover on Mars rekindled some of that.
It’s hard to decide what to say about him. He doesn’t deserve the protection of maxims like “Speak nothing but good about the dead”, because his whole career was about scorning those kinds of rules (like when the “AIDS Update” segment on his show mocked dying gay people). On the other hand, it’s not the dead who benefit from such restraint. Vindictive thoughts are corrosive; we control them for our own well-being.
So it’s tempting to say nothing, but Limbaugh had a big impact on American political culture, so his death requires an assessment. That assessment can’t be positive, because his impact was far from positive. But I refuse to revel in his death. I have smiled at some of the more vicious things I’ve seen posted on Facebook, but I won’t pass them on.
Over a 40-year period, Limbaugh’s voice popularized a new style of conservatism. Pre-Rush conservative media personalities like Bill Buckley and George Will modeled upper-class intellectuality: Some people are just better than the rest, and government attempts to pretend otherwise are bound to backfire. They could be funny in a clever, Victorian way; sometime the next morning you might figure out exactly how you had been insulted. They were embarrassed by the yahoos, the Birch-society conspiracy theorists of their day, and did their best to keep them in the closet. Most of all, the Buckley/Will conservatives were about ideas — bad ideas, for the most part, but defended with all the skill their Yale and Oxford educations could bring to bear.
Limbaugh changed all that, creating a conservatism that was about tribes rather than principles or programs. Day after day, he fought a scorched-earth culture war. He championed the yahoos, reveled in conspiracy theories, and lied without qualm or apology. The goal was not to persuade liberals, but to make them cry.
The Republican Party today, the party of Trump, is largely his creation. It has no core ideas or governing philosophy, but instead has personalities and grievances. It cares nothing about facts, doesn’t believe in democracy, and is comfortable being supported by violence. It can motivate 74 million people to vote, but it can’t come up with even a back-of-the-envelope diagram of a healthcare plan.
Did he have any virtues? Fellow conservative pundit Rich Lowry tweeted:
Liberals who didn’t listen to Rush, and just read the Media Matters accounts, never understood how *funny* he was. What set him off from his many imitators was how wildly entertaining he was, and the absolutely unbreakable bond he formed with his listeners.
But what kind of “funny” was he? Humor revolves around surprise: An expectation is set up and then violated. In most of the Limbaugh humor I saw, the surprise came from violating the taboo against cruelty. (“I can’t believe he said that!”) As Slate’s Justin Peters put it: “his was the wit of the prep school bully making fun of the foreign exchange student’s lunch.”
Limbaugh violated “political correctness” by relentlessly mocking and insulting anyone who threatened his white male Christian privilege. If you were similarly privileged (as Rich Lowry is), and if you felt stifled by a culture that increasingly disapproved of the vicious things you wanted to say, it was probably cathartic to hear Limbaugh say them and defy the consequences. But I’ve googled various versions of “Limbaugh’s funniest lines”, and all I get are the outrages collected by his critics. “Limbaugh jokes” will lead you to jokes about Limbaugh, not jokes he told. (They’re not particularly funny either.) Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf verified my finding:
He will likely be remembered more for the worst things he said than the best things he said, because unlike Buckley, who said his share of awful things, no Limbaugh quote stands out as especially witty or brilliant.
He wasn’t selling political ideas — and he never has. He was selling political attitude. The swaggering certitude. The mocking dismissiveness. The freedom to offend. The right to assert your privilege without guilt or embarrassment.
and continued fallout from the Trump coup attempt
Even after I have the thought “There oughtta be a law”, it’s still sometimes surprising to discover there actually is one: the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871.
Rep. Bennie Thompson (D- Mississippi) has filed a lawsuit against Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, the Proud Boys, and the Oath Keepers, invoking the KKK Act’s provisions for civil compensation:
The carefully orchestrated series of events that unfolded at the Save America rally and the storming of the Capitol was no accident or coincidence. It was the intended and foreseeable culmination of a carefully coordinated campaign to interfere with the legal process required to confirm the tally of votes cast in the Electoral College. …
Accordingly, this action seeks the award of compensatory damages to redress the harm to the Plaintiff caused by the Defendants’ use of intimidation, harassment and threats of violence to interfere with his discharge of his legally required duty as a Member of Congress and punitive damages to punish the Defendants for the reckless and malicious manner in which they acted and to enjoin and deter a recurrence of this unlawful conduct. …
Under the Ku Klux Klan Act, 42 U.S.C. § 1985(1), Defendants may not “conspire to prevent, by force, intimidation, or threat, any person … holding any office, trust, or place of confidence under the United States … from discharging any duties thereof; or to induce by like means any officer of the United States to leave any … place[] where his duties as an officer are required to be performed, or … to molest, interrupt, hinder, or impede him in the discharge of his official duties.” …
As a result of the acts set out in the above paragraphs committed in furtherance of this conspiracy, Plaintiff Thompson was hindered and impeded in the discharge of his official duties and suffered the deprivation of his right to be free from intimidation and threats in the discharge of his official duties, as explicitly protected under Ku Klux Klan Act. …
As a result, Plaintiff Thompson seeks an award of compensatory damages [and] an award of punitive damages to punish the Defendants for engaging in a concerted and continuing course of unlawful conduct and to deter the Defendants and others from engaging in similar unlawful conduct in the future.
[Don’t be confused like I was: The quote above doesn’t say that the KKK Act is from the year 1985. It’s section 1985 of the U.S. Code.]
A 21-page indictment alleged that the defendants “did knowingly combine, conspire, confederate, and agree with each other and others known and unknown” to force entry to the Capitol and obstruct Congress from certifying the election of Joe Biden as president in riots that led to five deaths and assaults on 139 police.
One of the attorneys who filed one of Trump’s baseless lawsuits to overturn the election is going to have to explain himself. The judge in that case has ordered him to face a grievance committee that could recommend discipline. (Disbarment? The article doesn’t specify.) The attorney “has not sufficiently allayed the court’s concerns regarding potential bad faith.”
you also might be interested in …
After a long delay, which might have been intended to avoid interfering with the election campaign, then not interfering with Trump’s attempt to invalidate the election, and finally not interfering with his impeachment trial, the Supreme Court has ruled that Trump’s accountants have to turn over the documents that Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance wants, including his tax returns. Vance responded with a laconic statement: “The work continues.”
Last spring, the country briefly went ga-ga over Andrew Cuomo’s Covid briefings. They were such a realistic contrast with happy talk that came out of the White House.
An investigation by the New York State attorney general found that the governor’s office may have misled the public on the number of pandemic deaths in nursing homes after it ordered elderly people hospitalized with the virus returned to their facilities.
One of the more interesting links in this week’s featured post came from the Chicago Tribune. Well, enjoy it while you can. The Tribune Company is about to be bought by a slash-and-burn financial group. In the same boat are the Orlando Sentinel and New York Daily News, which the Tribune Company owns. But Baltimore gets a reprieve. The Baltimore Sun will be spun off to a nonprofit organization.
Having lived in the Chicago in the 1980s and visited many times since, I’ve already mourned the Trib that I used to know. It once was the kind of paper you couldn’t finish in a single sitting. Those days are long gone, but the Trib still retains the ability to do a certain amount of real journalism. That’s probably going to end soon too.
My dad just told me “never laugh. They will mistake your nervous laughter as compliance. Instead, pretend you don’t get it, and watch them explain to you why you should be laughing.” I’ve used this advice my whole life since.
When I was 19 my boss said I should be a phone sex operator & laughed.
I said “I don’t get it”
He said “it’s a joke”
I said “explain it to me”
& that’s how I learned that once sexual harassers have to explain why their inappropriate jokes are funny, they stop laughing.
Tucker Carlson sarcastically poked at the Joe-and-Jill relationship, which seems infinitely warmer and more genuine than previous first couple’s. In the process, he managed to repeat his denial of climate change and invoke the ridiculous Biden-is-senile trope. (Trump never had the kind of mental acuity Biden demonstrated in his CNN townhall Tuesday in Milwaukee — though he did misstate a few statistics. When asked a question, Biden actually answered it, rather than talking over it and daisy-chaining rambles about himself and his grievances, as Trump usually did. His answers reflected his ability to imagine what the questioner’s life is like — something Trump could never do.)
The Bidens’ affection is totally real. It’s in no way part of a slick PR campaign devised by cynical consultants determined to hide the president’s senility by misdirection. No, not at all! Their love is as real as climate change!
Meanwhile, Newsmax picks another target: Biden’s 12-year-old German shepherd Champ.
and let’s close with something energetic
In 1943, the Nicholas Brothers performed what Fred Astaire claimed was the greatest dancing he had ever seen on film. The NYT told the brothers’ story, and here’s the video, from the movie “Stormy Weather“. (Hat tip to another sifter, the twisted one.)
This week’s human tragedy was caused by a political failure that no one is taking responsibility for.
This week’s Texas disaster has really been three related stories:
The situation on the ground has been horrific. Millions of people were significantly inconvenienced, many thousands had to leave their homes, and dozens died.
Bad weather was the immediate cause, but the deeper cause was bad policy. Texans’ hardships arose directly from the state’s short-sighted, low-regulation, keep-the-government-out-of-my-business political philosophy.
The response of the Republican politicians whole hold power in Texas has been reprehensible.
It’s important to keep all three stories in mind, and not let the entirely justified outrage you feel about Ted Cruz running away to Cancun or Greg Abbott blaming renewable energy divert your attention from the underlying human tragedy. So let’s examine the three aspects of this week’s events in their appropriate order.
What happened. A major winter storm hit most of the country this week. In the Midwest and Northeast, people expect that kind of thing from time to time, so we’re ready for it. Here in Massachusetts, we began the week with a foot of snow already on the ground from the previous storm. But even here, winter weather still causes problems: We haven’t put all our powerlines underground where they belong, so occasionally a heavy snow will bring one down and black out a neighborhood or two for a few days. But it seldom leads to a widespread calamity like Texas experienced.
Winter storms are much rarer in the South, so Southerners are not as well prepared. For example, it turns out that Memphis only has 13 snowplows for its 7,500 miles of streets. The situation was probably not much better in places like Mobile or Little Rock or Tulsa.
But nowhere else in the United States experienced the kind of cascading disasters that unfolded in Texas. By Sunday, the weather was more-or-less back to normal, with temperatures in the 60s and 70s across much of the state. But the crisis is far from over. CNN summarizes:
At least 26 people died across the state since February 11. Millions lost their power, forcing families to huddle over a fireplace, scavenge for firewood or spend nights in their car trying to stay warm. Others spent hours searching for food as shelves emptied and weather conditions led to food supply chain problems. The frigid temperatures caused pipes to burst, leading to water disruptions for roughly half the state’s population. Covid-19 relief efforts, including food banks, were shuttered. Vaccine shipments were delayed and many appointments were canceled.
It could have been even worse. According to unnamed officials quoted by The Texas Tribune, as demand increased and suppliers dropped out of the system, the state’s power grid was “minutes and seconds” away from “a catastrophic failure that could have left Texans in the dark for months”.
The worst case scenario: Demand for power outstrips the supply of power generation available on the grid, causing equipment to catch fire, substations to blow and power lines to go down.
If the grid had gone totally offline, the physical damage to power infrastructure from overwhelming the grid could have taken months to repair, said Bernadette Johnson, senior vice president of power and renewables at Enverus, an oil and gas software and information company headquartered in Austin.
What would that worst case look like? Probably something like this:
As a result of the blackouts, at least three Texans died of carbon monoxide poisoning because they ran their cars in unventilated garages. Elsewhere, the freeze affected local water-treatment systems, creating situations where people needed to boil their tap water (with what power source?) before drinking.
Some 13.5 million people throughout Texas have experienced water disruptions, with nearly 800 water systems reporting issues like frozen or broken pipes, according to Toby Baker, executive director for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. About 725 systems are under a boil-water advisory, Baker said. …
In Austin alone, the state capital’s water supply lost 325 million gallons due to burst pipes, Austin Water Director Greg Meszaros said in a Thursday news conference.
Aftermath. It will be weeks before the state’s plumbers can fix all the broken pipes, or we learn how many Texans caught Covid while gathering in the homes of whichever friends or relatives happened to have heat or water.
And the hits keep coming: In the aftermath of the natural disaster, many Texas households face an unexpected financial disaster: The New York Times profiled one Texan who suddenly found himself owing $16,732.
The steep electric bills in Texas are in part a result of the state’s uniquely unregulated energy market, which allows customers to pick their electricity providers among about 220 retailers in an entirely market-driven system.
Under some of the plans, when demand increases, prices rise. The goal, architects of the system say, is to balance the market by encouraging consumers to reduce their usage and power suppliers to create more electricity.
But when last week’s crisis hit and power systems faltered, the state’s Public Utilities Commission ordered that the price cap be raised to its maximum limit of $9 per kilowatt-hour, easily pushing many customers’ daily electric costs above $100. And in some cases, like Mr. Willoughby’s, bills rose by more than 50 times the normal cost.
That means $9 for a kilowatt-hour that usually costs [Griddy customer Karen] Cosby around 7 cents, and sometimes as little as 2 cents. … The price per megawatt-hour reached $9,000 around 10 p.m. Sunday night and stayed there for much of Monday and all of Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Friday morning, it fell to $35 and kept dropping. At 4 p.m., it was 85 cents. …
While searching for a new provider, Cosby flipped the breakers connected to her heating units and moved into a small bedroom with an air mattress and her two dogs, Onie and Birkin, and shut off the rest of the house. Her energy use was limited to a space heater, making a cup of coffee in the morning and using the microwave for four or five minutes to heat her meals.
“It’s been 43 degrees in the house since Monday, and I still have a $5,000 bill,” she said.
Why it happened. One of the striking things about the crisis was not just that Texas was hit worse than neighboring states, but that some parts of the state did much better than others. On Tuesday, at the height of the power disruptions, only .04% of households tracked in El Paso County were without power, while the comparable number was 29% in Dallas County, 44% in Travis County (Austin), 41% in Tarrant County (Fort Worth), and 18% in Harris County (Houston).
The difference was that El Paso, sitting at the far western edge of the state, is outside the Texas power grid. (MSNBC frequently interviewed Beto O’Rourke, who was sitting in his brightly lit El Paso home.)
Texas is the only state that has its own grid, which it maintains in order to avoid federal regulation. The rest of the US is on either the Western power grid (like El Paso) or the Eastern Power grid, like the panhandle and a few counties on the state’s eastern border. (In Bowie County, home of Texarkana, 10% of households lost power.) So when Texas’ supply/demand situation went bad, the rest of the country couldn’t bail them out.
As for why it went bad, there’s an immediate answer and then a more general answer. The immediate answer is that at precisely the time when Texans wanted more heat, suppliers were failing to handle the cold.
The system broke down this week when 185 generating units, including gas and coal-fired power plants, tripped offline during the brunt of the storm. Wind turbines in West Texas froze as well, and a nuclear unit near the Gulf of Mexico went down for more than 48 hours. Another problem emerged: Some power plants lost their pipeline supply of gas and couldn’t generate electricity even if they wanted to capture the high prices.
The biggest shortfall in energy production stemmed from natural gas. Gas pipelines were blocked with ice or their compressors lost power. Much of the gas that was available was prioritized for heating homes and businesses rather than generating electricity. That’s helpful for people who use gas for heating but less so for those who use electric furnaces.
That’s the short-term cause, but nothing about that was inevitable. The Chicago Tribune contrasted Texas’ problems with power generation in Wisconsin.
So why does the power continue to work in places like Wisconsin, where bitter cold is a way of life? The reason is simple: Generators in the Upper Midwest are designed to work in frigid conditions, unlike those in Texas.
“We designed all our infrastructure for these bitter-cold temperatures,” said Paul Wilson, a professor of nuclear engineering at UW-Madison who studies electrical systems.
That means insulation, heated pipes, crushers to break up frozen coal.
“We design everything with the understanding that it can get down to 40 degrees below zero and even stay there for a few days,” said Madison Gas and Electric spokesman Steve Schultz. “We also test our equipment regularly to make sure it’s working properly and prepared for frigid conditions.”
Wind turbines are equipped with winter weather packages such as heating elements to keep ice off the blades and insulated gearboxes, allowing them to work at temperatures as cold as 22 below zero.
But that costs money, and the Texas system prioritizes price over reliability.
Industry experts say there are no explicit regulations that outline cold weather reliability, but there are economic incentives in regulated states like Wisconsin, where electricity rates are structured to give utilities a return on their investments in power plants.
“In a place like Texas where you’re competing to be the cheapest all the time you’re able to take those risks,” said Marcus Hawkins, a former engineer with the Wisconsin Public Service Commission who now runs a multi-state regulatory organization. “Any added capital costs makes you less attractive to the market.”
Texas has long prided itself on its wholesale power market. It was born from a legislative effort in the 1990s that broke up the state’s utility monopolies, introducing competition among a larger universe of power generators and retail electricity providers.
The result was a laissez-faire market design that rewards those who can sell power inexpensively and still recover their capital costs. That keeps prices low when demand is steady. When demand spikes, however, so do prices, which can climb as high as $9,000 per megawatt-hour to incentivize power plants of all kinds to fire up.
If an electricity producer agrees to supply power into the market and then fails to deliver, the producer has to pay for the cost of replacing it. But if a plant trips offline and stays out of the market for an extended period, as happened this week, there is no penalty besides lost revenue.
USA Today describes one of the key features making Texas’ system vulnerable:
The ERCOT grid is what’s known as an “energy only” market, in which generators are compensated only for electricity actually delivered. In an “energy plus capacity” market, they also would be compensated for generating capacity that’s maintained but kept in reserve for special or unusual circumstances.
The result is a system that runs cheaply most of the time, but is prone to catastrophic failures like the one that happened this week. Essentially, the state is like a household that decides to save money by not paying for fire insurance. As long as your house isn’t burning down — and how often does that happen? — you’re winning.
Similarly tempting personal decisions would be not changing the oil in your car, not having health insurance, or not fixing the leak in your roof. Those things cost money, so in the short term your bank balance looks better if you skip them. For a while, Karen Cosby saved money by contracting for variable-rate electricity through Griddy. But this week she lost far more than she had ever saved.
The reason we have government regulations is precisely to remove short-term temptations (for both individuals and corporations) that have negative long-term effects. You could save money by buying a car without seatbelts or airbags, for example, but the government won’t let you. When Hooker Chemical started burying barrels of chemical waste in Love Canal in the 1940s, that probably looked like the most economical way to deal with it. But a few decades later it had caused a public-health disaster that cost $400 million to clean up. So in the long run it wasn’t economical at all. If there had been an EPA in the Roosevelt administration, Hooker undoubtedly would have complained about the cost of its regulations, and how much they added to the price of chemicals. But in the long run those regulations would have saved not just lives, but money as well.
Warnings. You can’t fault leaders for failing to see something that is truly unforeseeable. But while this winter storm was certainly unusual, there had been warnings that such things were possible. The Groundhog Day Blizzard of 2011 similarly led to rolling blackouts, for the same reasons as played out this week:
Post-analysis indicated that the cold temperatures had caused over 150 generators to encounter difficulties; loss of supply, instrumentation failures, and gas well-head freezing were some of the source causes
After that event, the Texas Public Utilities Commission issued a report. The Austin Statesman article on that report quoted a previous report from 1990 about a 1989 winter storm.
“The winter freeze greatly strained the ability of the Texas electric utilities to provide reliable power to their customers. Record and near-record low temperatures were felt throughout the state resulting in a significantly increased demand for electrical power.
“At the same time that demand was increasing, weather-related equipment malfunctions were causing generating units to trip off the line.” As a result, it noted, the state suffered widespread rolling blackouts and “near loss of the entire ERCOT electric grid.”
A state senator in 2011 recalled the 1990 report and said:
What I don’t want is another storm and another report someone puts on the shelf for 21 years and nobody looks at.
But the only difference this time around is that the report only sat for 10 years rather than 21. (Which, BTW, is exactly what climate change predicts: Extreme weather events will happen more frequently.) Both reports listed ways ERCOT and the generating companies could make the system more resilient in the face of cold weather. But in typical Texas fashion, most of the recommendations were neither mandated by law nor motivated by subsidy. They were simply best practices that a responsible company should follow, even if the market pulls them in another direction.
So here we are again.
Political response. In a state like Texas, where one party has been in power since George W. Bush became governor in 1995 and the GOP gained full control of the legislature in 2003, I suppose it’s too much to expect the political leadership to say, “Wow, we really screwed up. But now we’ve got religion about winter storms and regulation, so we’re going to do better.” Even so, you might hope for a blame-free let’s-focus-on-the-future stance that more-or-less deals with the reality of the situation.
That’s not what has happened. Instead, the process seemed to go like this: What Republican talking points are lying around to respond to unreliability in the energy grid? How can we use those pre-established frames to shift the blame onto liberals?
For years, the fossil fuel industry’s criticism of solar and wind power has been that it’s unreliable: Sometimes the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow, but you can always burn coal or natural gas. Republican politicians like ex-President Trump frequently echoed that claim:
You know, Hillary wanted to put windmills all over the place. Let’s put up some windmills — when the wind doesn’t blow, “just turn off the television darling, please. There’s no wind — please turn off the television quickly!”
This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America. … Our wind and our solar got shut down, and they were collectively more than 10 percent of our power grid, and that thrust Texas into a situation where it was lacking power on a statewide basis. … It just shows that fossil fuel is necessary.
Then it got cold and the windmills froze, because that’s what happens in the Green New Deal. … Now the same energy policies that have wrecked Texas are going nationwide — coming to your state.
So it was all working great until the day it got cold outside. The windmills failed like the silly fashion accessories they are, and people in Texas died.
Trump-administration Energy Secretary Rick Perry arguably is more to blame for this week’s disaster than anyone else, because he was the governor who received and ignored that PUC report on the 2011 storm. But rather than apologize for his failures, he criticized President Biden:
If this Green New Deal goes forward the way that the Biden administration appears to want it to, then we’ll have more events like we’ve had in Texas all across the country.
If the fatal farce in Texas seems all too familiar, then you may be noticing an eerie resemblance to the botched pandemic response of the Trump administration. The impulse of Republicans in government is not to govern but to shift responsibility and try to affix blame, almost always on “liberals” or “socialists” or some other partisan goblin. What they seem utterly unable to provide are honest leadership and real solutions.
And finally we come to Ted Cruz. If these events ever become a major movie, Ted Cruz is going to be the comedy relief, the buffoon whose self-centeredness is so absurd that the audience can only laugh. You’ll see footage of a family shivering in their car or some elderly woman hoping her daughter will return soon with a fresh oxygen canister, and then you’ll see pot-bellied Ted Cruz standing in the Cancun airport wearing his flag-of-Texas face mask. (All that’s missing is somebody to play Laurel to his Hardy.)
After he’d been spotted and the story was blowing up on social media, Cruz did what any good father would do and blamed his pre-teen daughters.
Like millions of Texans, our family lost heat and power too. With school cancelled for the week, our girls asked to take a trip with friends. Wanting to be a good dad, I flew down with them last night and am flying back this afternoon.
That statement wasn’t just craven, it was misleading: Dropping the kids off wasn’t in the original plan. Ted’s original ticket had him staying through the weekend. Anyway, the jokes practically wrote themselves: When a failed state can’t provide basic services, who can blame a father for leading his family across the Mexican border to find a better life?
Almost as bad as Cruz’ original decision was the way that right-wing media defended him: He’s just a senator. What could he possibly do?
The fact that people think Ted Cruz, a United States Senator, can do anything about a state power grid, even his own, is rather demonstrative of the ignorance of so many people who cover politics.
People who can take care of themselves and their families in an emergency should take care of themselves and their families in an emergency, if only to remove the possibility of their having to be taken care of by the public. Of course, Senator Cruz probably will be more comfortable in Cancun than he would be in River Oaks, but it is no less the case that by absenting himself from the scene, he has given Houston — including its utility providers and its emergency services — one fewer person to worry about. From that point of view, Senator Cruz has a positive moral obligation to be in Cancun.
Atlantic’s David Graham makes the proper response:
Cruz’s error is not that he was shirking a duty he knew he should have been performing. It’s that he couldn’t think of any way he could use his power as a U.S. senator to help Texans in need. That’s a failure of imagination and of political ideology.
You know who thought of something he could do? Beto O’Rourke, who narrowly lost to Cruz in 2018. He organized volunteers to call Texas senior citizens, find out if they needed anything, and help them access available resources.
BIG THANKS to the volunteers who made over 784,000 phone calls to senior citizens in Texas today. You helped to connect them with water, food, transportation, and shelter. And you made sure that they knew we were thinking about them and that they matter to us.
Somebody else who came through was the congresswoman right-wingers love to hate: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who used her fame and connections to raise millions of dollars for Texas relief. Ted knows a bunch of rich people who supposedly care about Texas. Do you think maybe he could have done that?
But Ted couldn’t lift a finger, because doing so would just promote the idea that the public good is a real thing, that people should expect politicians to care about them, and that government has a role to play in dealing with forces beyond the scale of individual action.
And if people started to believe things like that, the Republican Party would be toast.
This is another week where events knocked me off the article I planned to write. At first, I thought the Texas winter-storm story would just be a few paragraphs in the summary, with some links to more detailed articles and maybe a picture of Ted Cruz in the airport. But the deeper I looked into the Texas disaster — I’m over-using “disaster” today because I keep looking for synonyms not being satisfied with them — the more I felt that nobody was telling the full story.
This week’s Texas disaster is really three stories: the suffering on the ground, the failure of regulation that caused it, and the irresponsible responses of the Texas political leadership. (Cruz has become the poster boy for that irresponsibility, but he’s far from unique.) There’s a lot to know about all those things, but I haven’t found anybody pulling it all together the way I want it pulled together. It’s way too easy just to laugh at Cruz and miss the more serious implications.
So the featured post today is “Who Messed With Texas?” and it will be out around 10:30 EST. It’s long, but full of details I find fascinating. (I hope you do too.) Like: After the Groundhog Day Blizzard of 2011, a Texas state senator recalled the report written in 1990 after a 1989 winter storm shut down a lot of the power grid, and said, “What I don’t want is another storm and another report someone puts on the shelf for 21 years and nobody looks at.” Good call, senator: The 2011 report only sat on the shelf for ten years. Or: Burst pipes in Austin alone have released enough water to fill the Empire State Building.
A lot of good analysis is out there, like the Chicago Tribune explaining why the power grid works in frigid Wisconsin, and video like the scary surge arcing through urban power lines, and pictures of windmills operating normally in Antarctica. But I hadn’t seen anybody assemble it all, so I did.
The weekly summary then has the ongoing virus-and-vaccine news, Biden’s immigration and voting-rights policies taking shape as legislation, the Mars landing, my attempt to process Rush Limbaugh’s death without either whitewashing his baneful influence or kicking his corpse, conservative media’s effort to fight Biden’s growing popularity by attacking his wife and dog, and Rep. Bennie Thompson’s lawsuit against Trump invoking the KKK Act of 1871. Finishing that should take me until about 1.
Watch the Service: Download 02-21-21 Full Text To enable YouTube provided closed-captioning while viewing the service, click the “CC” icon on the bottom bar of your YouTube video player.
Assistant Minister Rev. Chris Jimmerson's sermon delivered on February 21, 2021. Jim and Jane Henson created their lovable puppet characters over six decades ago, and the Muppets really began to gain prominence in the early 1970s. Through their decades of television and movies, what have the Muppets had to tell us about life, love and creating community?
the address from the Sunday service at Dublin Unitarian Church, Ireland, on 21st February 2021. Pam McCarthy is a congregation member of Dublin Unitarian Church.
a collections of readings, prayers and music from the service of 21st February 2021 at Dublin Unitarian Church, Ireland. Led by Pam McCarthy (a congregation member of the church with contributions from Dorene Groocock and Josh Johnston
"Lessons of Love" (February 14, 2021) Worship Service
Years ago I read an article in some low-brow magazine in which a woman was reflecting on what she had taken away from all the past relationships that were long gone. Broken hearts (or breaking hearts) was only part of the story. Learning French, because she fell in love with a Frenchman, was one. There was a laundry list of how love had changed her from the superficial to the enduring. Lessons in Love.
Rev. Vanessa Rush Southern, Senior Minister
Don Wiepert, Worship Associate
Reiko Oda Lane, organist
Leandra Ramm, soprano
Brielle Marina Neilson, alto
Ben Rudiak-Gould, tenor
Asher Davison, bass
Mark Sumner, pianist
Eric Shackelford, camera
Shulee Ong, camera
Joe Chapot, Social Media Chat Support
Les James, Coffee Hour Zoom
Thomas Brown, Sexton
Amy Kelly, flowers
engin akyurt,cover https://unsplash.com/@enginakyurt
Jude Beck back cover https://unsplash.com/@judebeck
Jonathan Silk, OOS, Sound
Without drawing that bright line, you are ceding your party to this: a party of not living in facts, that bullying is acceptable behavior and that violence is acceptable behavior if you are trying to preserve your “way of life”, whatever that means. This will result in more people, especially within the echo chamber they are living in, seeing people that they disagree with as a mortal enemy, which for some small percentage of them translates into “I have a justification for violence.“
– Elizabeth Neuman, former Assistant Secretary for Threat Prevention and Security Policy in Trump’s Department of Homeland Security
Most of what I want to say about the impeachment trial is in the featured post. But it was already getting long and a few odds and ends didn’t fit there.
Lisa Murkowski’s vote to convict may be evidence for the moderating influence of what is sometimes called the “jungle primary” system. In November, Alaska passed a ballot initiative that changed its elections. Instead of the usual system, where parties hold primaries and then the winners of those primaries meet in the general election, Alaska now has a unified primary for the entire state. The top four vote-getters advance to the general election, which is decided by ranked-choice voting. That change seems like a big deal to me, so I’m surprised I hadn’t heard about it until now.
In other words, Murkowski doesn’t have to fear facing a Trumpist candidate in a primary restricted to Republican voters. Both the primary and the general will involve the entire electorate.
Of course, Murkowski may not have feared a primary anyway. In 2010, she lost the Republican primary to a more conservative candidate, but then won the general election as a write-in candidate.
I want to call attention to one of the arguments Trump’s defenders used: This bad precedent will come back to bite you. Trump lawyer Bruce Castor put it like this:
If you go down the road Mr. Raskin asks you to go down, the floodgates will open. The political pendulum will shift one day. This chamber and the chamber across the way will change one day and partisan impeachments will become commonplace.
He warned that former officials that Republicans love to hate — like Obama attorney general Eric Holder — could be impeached. Lindsey Graham predicted Kamala Harris will be impeached if Republicans take back the House in 2022.
In other words, the arguments used in this case and the precedents it establishes could be used in bad faith in the future. But that’s true of any government action: If we raise tax rates now, some future Congress could raise them to 100% and confiscate everything! If we convict a murderer of murder, someday you could be convicted of murder too!
Just stop. If there’s some reason to believe that the current impeachment was pursued in bad faith, Castor should have brought that up for discussion. Similarly, if there is something regrettable about a good-faith application of this precedent — say, if you think Democrats will be sorry when Biden is prevented from using violence to hang onto the White House four years from now — Trump’s defenders should have talked about that. But don’t threaten us with the unknowable bad faith of future Congresses.
Another bad argument is the one McConnell and Portman made after voting to acquit: The criminal justice system should handle this. That really is a precedent that could come back to bite us.
Here’s what’s wrong it: I don’t know of any specific law against hanging onto power after you lose an election. Crimes were involved in Trump’s scheme, like possibly incitement to violence or election tampering, but his fundamental wrongdoing was political. He attempted a subversion of the entire system rather than the kind of specific action that a law might ban.
Having watched Trump’s attempt to wiggle through the loopholes in American democracy, I can imagine that a cleverer usurper might stay in power after losing without provably breaking any laws at all, just by abusing the power of his office and the zeal of his supporters to intimidate or cajole officials into doing what he wanted. Think back to the Raffensperger call, and now imagine that the Georgia secretary of state had believed — without the president even hinting at it — that some Trump supporter would kill his family if he didn’t “find” those eleven thousand votes. There might not be any provable crime, just the derailing of our constitutional system.
That’s why it’s wrong to take an overly legalistic view of impeachment. The point is to protect democracy, and the attack might consist of actions that nobody has ever thought to make illegal, because only the president can do them, and no president has ever tried before. “High crimes and misdemeanors” is vague for a reason. Similarly, beyond-reasonable-doubt is a good standard if we’re talking about putting someone in jail. But I don’t think everyone should stand around doing nothing if we’re only 75% sure our democracy is being subverted.
When our entire republic is threatened, Congress should do what it needs to do.
I find myself agreeing with Ben Sasse way more often these days. Should I worry about that, or should he?
Conservatives regularly denounce executive overreach – but we ought primarily to denounce legislative impotence. … If Congress cannot forcefully respond to an intimidation attack on Article I instigated by the head of Article II, our constitutional balance will be permanently tilted. A weak and timid Congress will increasingly submit to an emboldened and empowered presidency.
The NYT’s Charles Blow believes the January 6 riot and the Republican unwillingness to hold Trump to account for it is the end of the Blue-Lives-Matter movement.
In the Senate’s acquittal — or more accurately, abetting — of Donald Trump, they stripped away the facade of the opposition to Black Lives Matter and the elevation of Blue Lives Matter.
It was never about preventing the desecration of American symbols. Members of the insurrection mob smeared feces throughout the Capitol after they broke into it.
This was never really about the protection of officers, generally speaking, but about allowing officers to treat with more impunity the people who protested the maltreatment of Black people.
Covid-19 infection and hospitalization numbers are now plummeting nationwide after rounds of devastating surges that followed the holidays. The country’s seven-day average of new cases is now below 100,000 — down from a peak of about 250,000 in early January, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. Hospitalizations are also way down from their peak of more than 132,400 on January 6, data from the COVID Tracking Project show.
Deaths are also down, but not as sharply. The seven-day average death toll is down to 2600, after peaking at over 3300 a few weeks ago. It makes sense that deaths would be a lagging indicator, because people usually don’t die until some while after they’ve had a positive test and been hospitalized.
The number of Americans who have gotten at least one vaccination shot is up to 38 million, and increasing by 1.5-2 million each day. But the experts CNN talked to believe that isn’t the reason for the decrease in cases. After taking chances with social gatherings during the Thanksgiving-to-New-Years holiday season, people have become much more careful. (I described this a few weeks ago as the deal-with-God theory: “If you just let me get through Christmas, I’ll be good.”)
Meanwhile, the more-contagious variants continue to spread, though none of them have become the most common version yet.
and Congress needs to do something about it
Right now, Biden’s $1.9 billion Covid-relief proposal is being turned into a fully detailed bill by the House Budget Committee. This is currently at the behind-the-scenes stage of putting together a proposal that has full Democratic support. Nothing formal will happen this week because Congress is on recess.
If House Democrats can stay united, they have enough votes to pass the package. The problem will come in the Senate, where the bill will either need to attract 10 Republican votes are fit through the filibuster-proof reconciliation process.
The looming deadline is March 14, when the Covid-related unemployment benefits lapse.
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Covid relief is a sufficiently popular bill that Senate Democrats will probably be OK with using reconciliation to get it through, especially if they can attract a handful of Republican senators, but not enough to overcome a filibuster. But the filibuster will become a real issue when the focus shifts to political reform: outlawing voter-suppression tactics, ending gerrymandering, and so on. Reconciliation was designed to get must-pass budget items through, so non-financial legislation doesn’t fit well into that process.
The voter-suppression issue is particularly important in the Black community, because Blacks have so often been targets of suppression. And Democrats owe a considerable debt to their Black supporters: High turnout in Black precincts was a major factor in Biden’s win, and even moreso in the two Georgia races that allowed Democrats to take the Senate.
A voting-rights bill should come out of the House before much longer. If moderate Democrats in the Senate let a filibuster kill it, the moderate/progressive split in the Party could reopen in a big way.
I’m trying hard not to let my relief that Trump is gone make me too gullible about the Biden administration. For example, I love watching Jen Psaki’s press briefings, because so often she communicates actual information that, when you check on it, turns out to be true. And she handles hostile questions without getting hostile in return. But I have to keep reminding myself: She’s a press secretary, so if the Biden administration ever needs something covered up, she’ll be the face of that effort.
Similarly, I’m cynical enough to know that no presidential interactions with the press are truly spontaneous. But damn. This four-minute clip of Joe and Jill out walking their dogs on the White House lawn and talking about what Valentine’s Day means to them. It’s awfully endearing.
Maybe stuff like that is why the public has been giving Biden the kind of honeymoon every president used to get. So far, his approval rating has never fallen below 50% — a level Trump never reached. 538 has him at 54.6% positive 37.3% negative.
In general, Biden is doing a good job of selling his positive image: a basically decent guy who is working hard and trying to do the right thing. If people continue to believe that about him, they’ll forgive him for policies they don’t fully agree with.
and let’s close with something old made new again
One of the classic songs about the dehumanization of the working class was Tennessee Ernie Ford’s “Sixteen Tons”. Geoff Castellucci has used his incredibly deep voice and some self-harmonizing software to produce a 21st century version.
One of the under-appreciated aspects of this song is how much religious content it has. Right from the first line: “Some people say a man is made out of mud.” Who says that? Genesis does. It says that humans are shaped by the hand of God, who breathes a soul into them. The second line’s counter “A poor man’s made out of muscle and blood” essentially denies that account. Maybe you rich folks were sculpted by God and endowed with a soul, but nothing in a poor man’s life testifies to that.
Going theological for a second, “having a soul” is a poetic way of saying that your life is an end in itself. You have your own reasons to be on this Earth; you’re not just a tool for other people to use. “Sixteen Tons” raises the question: Do we really believe that? About everybody?
Officially, Trump was acquitted. But he still lost, and the Republican Party lost with him.
[I’m not sure who to credit for the cartoon above, but I found it here.]
At this rate, the fourth impeachment will nail him. (No. Seriously, I hope this is the last impeachment article I ever have to write.)
The Senate vote. When Trump was impeached in 2020, a majority voted for acquittal: 52-48 on the abuse-of-power article and 53-47 on obstruction of Congress. Only one Republican (Mitt Romney) voted to convict, and him only on abuse of power.
Saturday, in contrast, seven Republicans voted against Trump, resulting in a 57-43 majority for conviction. That was still ten short of the 2/3rds supermajority needed, but makes laughable Trump’s characterization of the trial as “the greatest witch hunt in the history of our Country”.
The seven Republicans with spines were Romney again, the two “moderate” women who always come up when Democrats are looking for bipartisan support (Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine), the guy who is positioning himself to be the take-back-the-GOP-from-Trump 2024 presidential candidate (Ben Sasse of Nebraska), two guys who don’t have to worry about a primary challenge because they’re retiring (Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania and Richard Burr of North Carolina), and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, whose term runs until 2026, and who gave a refreshingly simple explanation of his vote: “I voted to convict President Trump because he is guilty.” (That vote got him immediately censured by his state GOP.)
The guilty-but-acquitted faction. You might think Cassidy’s explanation goes without saying — that of course people who thought he was guilty voted to convict — but in today’s intimidated Republican Party it doesn’t. Mitch McConnell also thought Trump was guilty, but he voted to acquit anyway, because that’s the kind of guy McConnell is.
The speech McConnell gave immediately after the vote, when he could just blow smoke without any consequences, resembled a summation for the prosecution. He called the insurrection “a disgrace” caused by Trump’s “disgraceful dereliction of duty”. He held Trump “practically and morally responsible” for the attack on the Capitol, because “The leader of the free world cannot spend weeks thundering that shadowy forces are stealing our country and then feign surprise when people believe him and do reckless things.” After the insurrection began, Trump’s response was “unconscionable”. “He didn’t take steps so federal law could be faithfully executed, and order restored.”
McConnell didn’t convict because he manufactured a constitutional reason not to, one in conflict with the practice of the framing era, against a precedent set in the 19th century, and rejected by the Senate itself just a few days ago: “We have no power to convict and disqualify a former officeholder who is now a private citizen.”
Other too-timid-to-vote-their-conscience GOP senators — Thune, Portman, Capito, and maybe more — also hid behind this bogus “constitutional” principle. I predict this interpretation will go out the window if it ever protects a Democrat.
McConnell went on to say (in a section of his speech he apparently added at the last minute, because it wasn’t in the pre-speech transcript his office provided):
President Trump is still liable for everything he did while he was in office. … He didn’t get away with anything yet. Yet. We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being accountable by either one.
This idea will go out the window even sooner. If Trump does get criminally prosecuted, expect McConnell and all the other “constitutional” objectors to denounce his indictment as a politicization of the justice system. Republicans never admit that they have placed Trump above the law, but any forum that tries to hold him accountable is the wrong one.
The witness controversy. Saturday morning there was a flurry of uncertainty, as the House managers asked have a witness: Republican Rep. Herrera Beutler, who had reported on House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s phone conversation with Trump:
When McCarthy finally reached the president on January 6 and asked him to publicly and forcefully call off the riot, the president initially repeated the falsehood that it was antifa that had breached the Capitol. McCarthy refuted that and told the president that these were Trump supporters. That’s when, according to McCarthy, the president said: ‘Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.’
This incident is damning, because it emphasizes not just that Trump wasn’t eager to call the mob off, but that he was using the attack to pressure Congress; he wanted them not to finalize his loss by accurately counting the electoral votes.
The problem with Beutler’s account is that it’s hearsay; the story of the call was “relayed to me” by McCarthy. Her testimony would backfire if Trump’s lawyers then called McCarthy to the stand and he denied that the incident ever happened. If Trump’s lawyers wanted to call a lot of witnesses — they claimed they would, but that was probably a bluff — the trial might have continued for two weeks or more.
In the end, a compromise was worked out: An affidavit from Beutler was entered into the record, no witnesses were called, and the trial wrapped up on Saturday as planned.
On my Twitter feed, I saw the progressives I follow — both national figures and my personal friends — react in outrage. DailyKos founder Markos Moulitsas tweeted (and was retweeted by Amanda Marcotte):
The storyline just changed from “soulless Republicans acquit guilty Trump” to “cowardly Democrats abandon case”
I don’t see it. (And as a matter of record, that was not the Sunday morning headline.) To me it looks like this: As of Saturday morning, the prosecutors had achieved everything they were going to achieve. They had performed flawlessly and made a convincing case to the country, while Trump’s lawyers looked pathetic. They had persuaded enough Republican senators to invalidate Trump’s predictable claim of a “witch hunt”, but not enough to convict.
The wonderful thing about a trial is that it cuts through the cacophony of conflicting voices and focuses attention on a single narrative, or two competing narratives. Trump’s scattershot approach — Antifa! the George Floyd riots! — may work on social media, but he had no answer for the story the House managers told: After Trump had lost the election, he tried to hang onto power through lies and violence.
America heard that story.
Keeping the trial going for another week or two would not have changed the outcome. It’s possible those two weeks would have gilded the lily. Maybe Republicans would squirm more and look worse to the public. But another possibility was that something unpredictable would give Trump’s supporters a talking point. (Imagine, say, that another police shooting had led to violence from groups Democrats support.) Maybe the trial would bog down in procedural issues and the nation would tune out. Maybe the politics would turn as voters wondered why the Senate was talking about Trump rather than Covid relief.
If I had been in the Democrats’ strategy room, I think I’d have said, “We’ve got what we’re going to get. Let’s end this before anything goes wrong.”
Trump lost. One reason I feel that way is that I agree with David Frum: Trump lost. As the NYT’s Peter Baker put it, the vote was “an escape, not an exoneration”.
I think the 57-43 vote, in which Democrats stayed united and Republicans fractured, is the final episode of the 2020 election — the loss that concludes four months of Trump losing.
Ever since the vote totals started moving decisively towards Biden late on Election Night, Trump has been assuring his supporters that vindication was coming: Election boards would refuse to validate Biden’s win. No matter how many times Trump’s lawyers failed, the next court case would be the big one. Republican governors would refuse to certify the election results. Republican legislatures would appoint their own electors. Mike Pence would refuse to recognize the swing state votes; and if he didn’t, January 6 would be “wild”.
I hope that someday, somebody in Trump’s inner circle lets us know what he thought was going to happen when he sent his mob to the Capitol. His pre-insurrection speech didn’t instruct them just to protest the inevitable culmination of the electoral process, he told them to stop it: “stop the steal”. But how did he imagine they would do that? Just standing outside the Capitol waving Trump flags clearly would not do it. And even their violent riot only delayed Trump’s defeat by a few hours. So what was his plan for victory? Did he really expect them to hang Pence? Hunt down Pelosi? Use those zip-ties to take members of Congress hostage? Capture or destroy the electoral-vote ballots? What?
Whatever he imagined, it didn’t work. The insurrection was another defeat. His QAnon supporters then had elaborate fantasies of what would happen on Inauguration Day, but that vision only yielded another disappointment. And this week, if you were waiting for Trump himself or his brilliant legal team to humiliate his accusers, you were disappointed again.
The broken brand. When I think about Trump’s appeal, I remember a line out of Robert Penn Warren’s classic political novel All the King’s Men. Weeks after the Boss, Governor Willie Stark, has been assassinated, the narrator runs into Stark’s stuttering driver Sugar Boy. “They w-w-wasn’t n-n-nobody like the B-B-Boss,” he says. “He could t-t-talk so good.”
People look for things in their heroes that they find lacking in themselves. In Trump, people who felt like they were losing identified with a winner. Americans who felt voiceless and powerless identified with someone who was loud, unafraid to say outrageous things, and impossible to ignore. If they feared being called “racist” or wearing some other negative label, they loved that Trump never took such criticism lying down, but always gave back better than he got. I’ve heard his White House’s communications strategy described like this: Every day should be a drama in which Trump defeats his enemies.
That’s been his brand: a fighter, a winner. And this week completely wrecked it. Day after day, the House managers described his “Big Lie” of election fraud, and how it led to the failed insurrection. And no one struck back. He was invited to testify and chickened out. His lawyers had a giant stage on which to prove to the world that Biden stole the presidency, but (like the lawyers in most of his court cases) they didn’t try. Instead, they argued narrow legal points: The Constitution doesn’t allow the Senate to convict a former president. The First Amendment gave him a right to say what he did, whether it was true or not.
Rather than defend him, Republican senators hid behind technicalities. No talented lawyers would take his case, so he was left with clowns that Jamie Raskin’s crew completely outclassed. At times it seemed as if Trump’s lawyers hadn’t even talked to their client. When did Trump find out the riot was happening? asked Senators Collins and Murkowski, two potential swing votes. There was no way to know, claimed Michael Van Der Veen (a personal injury lawyer suddenly called up to the big leagues), because the House managers had refused to investigate. Later, Van Der Veen whined that the trial was “the most miserable experience I’ve had down here in Washington, D.C.”, setting Raskin up to respond: “For that I guess we’re sorry, but man, you should have been here on January 6th.”
Trump is no longer the larger-than-life winner his followers need him to be. He’s a loser surrounded by losers. (And that’s only going to get worse as lawsuits and indictments unrelated to January 6 start to roll in.) Trump was supposed to make people stop laughing at his supporters, but if you’ve been echoing his repeated claims of vindication, you keep getting embarrassed when they come to nothing.
Now that the trial has ended, the country’s attention will shift back to the battle against Covid, and to Biden’s $1.9 trillion proposal to repair the economic damage it has done. For months — even while he was still president — Trump has had nothing to say about the pandemic. And now, no one cares what he thinks.
The broken party. The Senate outcome — Democrats united, Republicans divided — symbolizes a larger political reality going forward. The split wasn’t between those who believed the Democratic narrative and those who don’t. A bipartisan consensus of Americans understand now that Trump tried to stay in power through lies and violence. Democrats are united in believing this was bad. Republicans are split about it.
One-sixth to nearly one-fifth of Republicans have praised the January 6 attack in polling from PBS NewsHour/Marist and Quinnipiac. That’s a far higher percentage than among the public overall (just 8% in the Marist survey and 10% in Quinnipiac.) In the American Enterprise Institute poll, about 3-in-10 Republicans said they believed the QAnon conspiracy theory.
The share of Republican voters who express support for the use of force to advance their political goals in general is considerably larger. In the American Enterprise Institute survey, 55% of Republicans agreed that “we may have to use force to save” the “American way of life.” Roughly 4-in-10 agreed with an even more harshly worded proposition: “If elected leaders will not protect America, the people must do it themselves even if it requires taking violent actions.”
Brownstein suggests that what Mitch McConnell has described as a “cancer” in the party may have gotten so big that it is inoperable. Maybe the conspiracy-theory-and-violence faction of the GOP is too small to win with, but too big to win without.
I don’t think anybody over there has an answer for that.
Whenever I do a philosophical post like last week’s “Why You Can’t Understand Conservative Rhetoric“, I wonder how well it will catch on, and worry that I’m basically just talking to myself. It turns out I shouldn’t have worried this time: The post is as close to viral as the Sift gets these days. It’s got over 9K page views so far and should pass 10K before it’s done. It’s the most popular Sift post since NRA types realized that they hated “How Should We Rewrite the Second Amendment?” in 2019. (Of course, neither post compares with ones from the golden age of viral blogs, before social-media algorithms added more friction to the system. Between them, “Not a Tea Party, a Confederate Party” and “The Distress of the Privileged” have over a million page views.)
Anyway, this week there’s really no choice about where to focus: The impeachment trial was historic, significant going forward, and the center of the public’s attention. You can take a glass-half-empty view that Trump should have been convicted and banned from future office, or a glass-half-full view that the trial fractured the Republicans and leaves Democrats united.
I take a half-full approach in this week’s featured post “The Week That Broke Trump’s Brand”, which should be out around 10 EST. The House managers’ narrative — that Trump lost the election, but tried to hang onto power through lies and violence — is pretty widely accepted now. The senators differed on how they feel about lies and violence as a political strategy. Democrats rejected it, and Republicans split three ways: some rejected it along with the Democrats, some continue to favor it, and a sizeable chunk in the middle doesn’t want to get on the wrong side of those who favor it.
This is going to be a problem for the country, but we’ll figure it out. The Republican Party, though, is in a serious fix. The lies-and-violence faction is too big to alienate, but not big enough to win with. The 2022 Republican primaries are going to be a circus.
Anyway, there’s still a pandemic to discuss, and a $1.9 trillion package waiting for Congress to act on. That will be the main subject of the weekly summary, which I guess will appear around noon.
Rev. Meg Barnhouse's sermon delivered on February 14, 2021. One of the most famous poems about love is in the Christian New Testament. Who wrote it? To whom was it written, and why? What wisdom might it hold for us?
Watch the Service: Download 02-14-21 Full Text To enable YouTube provided closed-captioning while viewing the service, click the “CC” icon on the bottom bar of your YouTube video player.
a collections of readings, prayers and music from the service of 14th February 2021 at Dublin Unitarian Church, Ireland. Led by Rev Bridget Spain with contributions from Patrick Rogers, Josh Johnston and members of the Dublin Unitarian Church Choir
the address from the Sunday service at Dublin Unitarian Church, Ireland, on 31st January 2021. Rev. Bridget Spain is minister of Dublin Unitarian Church.
Rev. Frederick-Gray shares gratitude and appreciation for the generosity of congregations, which powers the UUA's mission to equip congregations, train and support leaders, and advance UU values in the world.
"The Year of the Ox" (February 7, 2021) Worship Service
Lunar New Year, begins next week Friday, February 12th. Although I am not in a family that has celebrated Lunar New Year, many in our community do which is such a gift. Especially this year, this Year of the Ox. Reading about this figure -- hardworking, reliable, honest and loyal -- am I the only one who finds herself thirsting for a world and a Year re-animated by the virtues of the Ox? Let's celebrate that!
Rev. Vanessa Rush Southern, Senior Minister
Dennis Adams, Worship Associate
Lori Lai, Worship Associate
Reiko Oda Lane, organist
Leandra Ramm, soprano
Brielle Marina Neilson, alto
Ben Rudiak-Gould, tenor
Asher Davison, bass
My-Hoa Steger, pianist
Mark Sumner, conductor
Eric Shackelford, camera
Shulee Ong, camera
Joe Chapot, Social Media Chat Support
Alex Darr, Coffee Hour Zoom
Thomas Brown, Sexton
Carrie Steere-Salazar, flowers
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Jonathan Silk, OOS, Sound, drums, Video Edits
This week everybody was talking about the impeachment trial
Which starts tomorrow. Both the prosecution and the defense have filed briefs outlining their positions. The prosecution (technically the “impeachment managers from the House”, but I think that’s a needless mouthful of words) requested that Trump himself testify, and he has refused.
He could be subpoenaed, but that would undoubtedly set off a long litigation that Democrats would rather avoid. Instead, I believe the purpose of asking for Trump’s testimony was to make it clear that it’s his choice not to speak under oath, where his lies could result in perjury charges. Whenever the ex-President’s lawyers make some claim about what he was thinking or what he intended, prosecutors can point out that this is hearsay, and that they wanted to get direct testimony but were rebuffed.
If he did testify, this cartoon from his first impeachment would be relevant again.
CNN explains why both sides want a speedy trial: Democrats don’t want the Senate distracted from approving Biden’s nominees for too long, and Republicans want the country to stop thinking about the January 6 insurrection.
It looks like the lawyers have prevailed on Trump not to use the impeachment trial to repeat lies about his “landslide” victory over Biden, and how it was stolen from him. Instead, they’ll claim (falsely) that it’s unconstitutional to hold an impeachment trial for an ex-president. That allows Republican senators to acquit for procedural reasons, without supporting or justifying the insurrection Trump incited.
BTW: Every statement coming out of the Trump camp refers to him as the “45th President”. He is not allowing his people to call him the “ex-president” or “former president”, presumably because he still does not acknowledge that Biden (or anyone else) is the 46th president.
However, his lawyer’s claim that the proceedings are unconstitutional rests on the fact that he is no longer president. One reason he doesn’t want to testify, in my opinion, is that he could be asked questions like “Is Joe Biden the President of the United States?” or “Did Dominion voting machines send results overseas to computers that flipped your votes to Biden?”, where his answers would mark him as either delusional or a liar.
It’s good to see Biden avoiding the bipartisan trap Obama fell into in 2009. The point of “unity” is to give Republicans a bill they could support, and that many of their voters do support, but Biden can’t control whether any Republicans will vote for it. Biden knows the public will hold him responsible for the results, so his first priority is passing the bill the country needs. That’s why he hasn’t backed off of his $1.9 trillion proposal.
It seems likely the House will pass it with few changes. The question is whether it gets through the Senate, which it will if all 50 Democrats vote for it and Vice President Harris provides the tie-breaking vote. Friday, the Senate passed a budget resolution on party lines. That is a procedural prerequisite for invoking the filibuster-proof reconciliation process to pass Covid relief.
Republicans are complaining about this tactic, which they used to pass the Trump tax bill, claiming that it shows a lack of commitment to bipartisanship. But in reality, the only hope of getting Republican support is to have a Plan B if they won’t get on board.
In general, I think Democrats should compromise in only two situations:
What Republicans are asking for is actually a good idea.
The changes Republicans want don’t make the bill significantly worse, and they will vote for the bill if it is changed.
Too often, the Obama administration compromised with Republicans, got none of their votes anyway, and then were blamed by the public for the less-effective bill.
The big question is whether the Senate Democrats can hold together. Joe Manchin of West Virginia is the most likely defector, but so far he is staying on board. He is insisting on a “bipartisan process”, but says that means “Democrats and Republicans will have amendments”, not that the bill will be held hostage until it can get Republican votes. It helps that West Virginia’s Republican governor has come out in favor of a big relief package.
and the Covid statistics turn
Fewer Americans are now hospitalized with Covid than at any time since the Thanksgiving wave started. New cases are down sharply, to 107K Saturday from 318K on January 8. Deaths are edging lower, but not by nearly as much: The average number of daily deaths for the past week is 2800, down from several days above 3300 in mid-January. Deaths are always the last statistic to turn. In a week or two the daily average should be well under 2000.
Those are all numbers we would have considered horrifying in October. But at least they’re headed in the right direction now.
Everyone is complaining about the vaccine distribution process, but it is happening. By yesterday, 31.6 million Americans had gotten at least one dose, and 9.1 million were fully vaccinated.
The interesting question is how demand will hold up. Right now, many more people want to be vaccinated than can get appointments. But at some point, all the people who describe themselves as “eager” to be vaccinated (like me) will have had their shots. Then the burden will shift to coaxing reluctant people to be vaccinated. Nobody is sure when that shift will happen.
Johnson & Johnson has applied for approval of its vaccine, which is simpler but somewhat less effective. It is one shot instead of two, and can be stored in an ordinary refrigerator. The AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine is nearly ready to apply for approval as well. It is a two-dose vaccine, but can be stored in a refrigerator.
Somehow, though, I’m not comforted by the thought that everybody else in the world is just as close to the end of their rope as I am.
and the QAnon lady* in Congress
[* I’ve heard MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace refer to her that way, and I kind of like it.]
As I pointed out last week, freshman Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has promoted a lot of truly horrific ideas over the last few years, both orally and on social media. Wednesday, the House Republican caucus decided she is not a problem, and no disciplinary action is needed.
Democrats were not having that, so Thursday evening the full House voted to kick her off of the committees the GOP had assigned her to: Education and Budget. Only 11 Republicans voted for that resolution; the rest support her.
In the debate over that resolution, Greene gave a self-justifying speech; some Republicans have said it was similar to the speech she gave to the Republican caucus before it decided not to punish her. I link to the full text so that you can judge it in context, without relying on me (or anybody else) to interpret it correctly.
Having provided that backstop, here’s what I see in her speech.
She avoided taking responsibility. “The problem with that is though is I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true and I would ask questions about them and talk about them.” Who “allowed” her to repeat all those crazy things? What does that even mean?
She falsely claimed that her objectionable statements are all from years ago, and all from social media. “If it weren’t for the Facebook posts and comments that I liked in 2018, I wouldn’t be standing here today and you couldn’t point a finger and accuse me of anything wrong.” Actually, things she has said and done in person are just as disturbing, and she was defending QAnon as recently as December 11: “Asked by @ryanobles on Pelosi saying GOP has ‘QAnon in [their] caucus,’ Marjorie Taylor Greene said ‘I don’t think there’s anything wrong w/ people looking things up & not believing things in the news…it’s unfair to criticize regular Americans looking things up on the internet’.” On December 4, she praised a pro-Q news article.
She falsely claimed that her words have been taken out of context. “Big media companies can take teeny tiny pieces of words that I’ve said, that you have said, any of us and can portray us and to someone that we’re not, and that is wrong.” The full context of her statements usually makes them worse, not better. Last week I called your attention to a completely unhinged 40-minute video she uploaded to YouTube in 2018. Even if she had completely repudiated all the claims she made then, people’s habits of thinking don’t turn over that quickly (at least not without some kind of medication). The lunatic in that video should not be making decisions for our country.
She equated QAnon with the mainstream media, and in particular equated believing that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to the conspiracy theories of QAnon. “I started seeing things in the news that didn’t make sense to me like Russian collusion, which are conspiracy theories also, and have been proven so … Will we allow the media that is just as guilty as QAnon of presenting truth and lies to divide us?” Reports from both the Mueller investigation and the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that Russia intended to help Trump get elected, that Trump knew they were helping, and that (at least in some instances) his campaign welcomed that help. That doesn’t sound like Jewish space lasers to me.
She vaguely alluded to changes in her views, but did not specifically deny any previous claim. For example, she said “School shootings are absolutely real. … 9/11 absolutely happened.” But she did not say that the Parkland school shooting (the one she badgered survivor David Hogg about in 2019) really happened, or that a plane really did strike the Pentagon on 9/11. While saying in general that she had “stopped believing” parts of QAnon, describing it as “a mixture of truth and lies”, she never said which parts she denies and which she still thinks are true. Does she, for example, still believe that top Democrats are pedophiles who drink children’s blood? (On January 31 she tweeted: “What would the list of the anti-Trump pedos and associates look like? It would likely contain all of the people currently frothing with MTG hate.”) At a bare minimum, I think Greene should submit to questioning about such things. I’d start with: “Is David Hogg a crisis actor, or was he present at a real event where his classmates were murdered?”
She did not acknowledge that she advocated violence against other members of the House, apologize for advocating violence, or disavow violence going forward.CNN’s KFile claims to have seen videos Greene has since deleted from her Facebook page, which she said that Nancy Pelosi was guilty of treason, which was “punishable by death”. She liked comments that talked about executing Pelosi and other Democrats by hanging or firing squad.
Weirdly, in a tweet the day after the Capitol Insurrection, Greene accused numerous Democrats of being “accomplices” to “Antifa/BLM terrorism”, and added: “Those who stoke insurrection & spread conspiracies have blood on their hands. They must be expelled.”
Q is not a “conspiracy theory”. The faked moon landing was a conspiracy theory. Perhaps birtherism was a conspiracy theory, though one with similarities to QAnon because of its strong ideological valence. But Q is not a conspiracy theory. It’s a fascistic political movement which predicts and advocates mass violence against liberals (and everyone else outside its definition of true Americans) in an imminent apocalyptic political reckoning. What we call the ‘conspiracy theories’ are simply the storylines and claims that justify that outcome. They could easily be replaced by others which serve the same purpose.
In other words – and this is still a very basic confusion – the Q phenomenon is not a factual misunderstanding that more credible news sources or prevalent fact-check columns would deflate and tame.
In the big picture, it’s not all that important whether or not Greene believes that the Clintons sabotaged JFK Jr.’s airplane or George Soros started a California wildfire with a space laser. But whether she is still part of “a fascistic political movement which predicts and advocates mass violence against liberals” matters a great deal.
Alexei Navalny, the opposition leader Putin had poisoned, returned to Russia on January 17 after recuperating in Germany, and was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison for violating his probation on an embezzlement charge that he claims was trumped-up to discredit him. Since returning, he has been a symbol of opposition to Putin, inspiring protests around the country.
The center of the protests is not Navalny’s personal popularity, but the failures of the Putin regime, which is corrupt, has let economic inequality get worse, and has not handled the pandemic well.
But economic inequality is the reason that people are most unhappy with Putin, according to research by Moscow-based independent pollster, the Levada-center. Some 45% of respondents faulted Putin for “failing to ensure an equitable distribution of income in the interests of ordinary people” in 2018, up from 39% in 2015. In Russia, the top 10% own 83% of the country’s wealth, making it the most unequal of the world’s largest economies followed by the U.S. and China, according to Credit Suisse Research Institute in 2019.
We will not tolerate actions that go against the fundamental principles of the oath we share, including actions associated with extremist or dissident ideologies. Service members, DoD civilian employees, and all those who support our mission, deserve an environment free of discrimination, hate, and harassment. … I am directing commanding officers and supervisors at all levels to select a date within the next 60 days to conduct a one-day ” stand-down” on this issue with their personnel. Leaders have the discretion to tailor discussions with their personnel as appropriate, but such discussions should include the importance of our oath of office; a description of impermissible behaviors; and procedures for reporting suspected, or actual, extremist behaviors in accordance with the DoDI. You should use this opportunity to listen as well to the concerns, experiences, and possible solutions that the men and women of the workforce may proffer in these stand-down sessions.
“They’ve abolished ICE without abolishing ICE,” said one distraught official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because that person was not authorized to speak to the media.
I suspect the distraught official is exaggerating, but I wouldn’t be sorry if he weren’t. Trump’s ICE was a rogue agency that knew nobody above them cared about the people they could detain.
A voting technology company swept up in baseless conspiracy theories about the 2020 election filed a monster $2.7 billion lawsuit on Thursday against Fox News, some of the network’s star hosts, and pro-Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, alleging the parties worked in concert to wage a “disinformation campaign” that has jeopardized its very survival.
I can’t vouch for how they figure the $2.7 billion, but the basic idea of this suit makes a lot of sense: A group of people knowingly spread lies about Smartmatic, and those lies had dire financial consequences for the company. Another lied-about voting-tech company, Dominion, has already sued.
Within days, Fox News had axed Lou Dobbs, who helped spread many of Trump’s election-fraud conspiracy theories on the air.
Suits like Smartmatic’s are rare, because they’re hard to win — unless the person who smeared you does it really blatantly. Josh Marshall explains:
The Supreme Court rightly put a very high bar on success in libel suits for public people and entities. You have to be wrong. And you have to have known you were wrong or have had a malicious indifference to whether you were right or wrong. It’s very hard to [meet] that standard. …
The Smartmatic/Dominion cases are the first case at scale that seems almost to try out the Sullivan standard. Fox and various other pro-Trump entities made numerous, repeated and HIGHLY damaging claims which certainly in the cases of the institutions and almost certainly with the individuals (with Lindell he may simply be crazy) they [knew] were false.
The U.S. trade deficit over the four years of President Donald Trump’s presidency soared to its highest level since 2008, despite his tough tariff tactics intended to bring it down, a new Commerce Department report showed on Friday.
The combined U.S. goods and services trade deficit increased to $679 billion in 2020, compared to $481 billion in 2016, the year before Trump took office. The trade deficit in goods alone hit $916 billion, a record high and an increase of about 21 percent from 2016.
Like most of what he did, Trump’s trade policy was mainly a reality show. It was always more about creating the appearance of action than achieving results.
I just think that there is no need for him to have the — the intelligence briefings. What value is giving him an intelligence briefing? What impact does he have at all, other than the fact he might slip and say something?
The main reason former officials of all sorts are given access to intelligence is that current officials might want to consult them about ongoing situations that have roots in the former official’s tenure. When he says there’s “no need”, Biden is really saying that he can’t imagine a situation where he’d want Trump’s advice. It’s a subtle but devastating barb.
It’s not just that conservatives define terms differently. Sometimes their relationship to words defies definition entirely.
If you’re like most liberals, you probably from time to time take a walk on the other side of the line. Maybe you channel-scan through Fox News or even Newsmax. Or click on some of the links your Trump-adoring relatives send you. Or listen to a speech by some politician you can’t stand. Maybe you go so far as to read entire books written by people like Tucker Carlson or Newt Gingrich, or by academic types who are probably liberals themselves, but have spent years studying Trump supporters in rural Louisiana or in Evangelical churches.
The cancel-culture example. The usual liberal response when we run into one of these one-sided pejorative terms, terms that apply to us but never to them, is to charge hypocrisy. From the way the term applies to us, we intuit a definition, then ask why conservatives don’t apply that definition consistently. [1]
Wil Wilkinson, formerly a vice president at the liberal Niskanen Center, is sometimes pointed out as an ironic victim of “cancel culture”, because he recently lost his job after making an unfortunate joke on Twitter. [2] The irony comes from the fact that Wilkinson has been a critic of the whole cancel-culture conversation. To some conservatives, Wilkinson getting “canceled” is like the moment in a horror movie when the monster attacks the guy who’s been claiming there’s no monster.
I also tend to believe that terms that successfully pick out real things in the real world — terms that aren’t merely vehicles for yay! / boo! sentiments — can usually be given a definition that allows us to get at least a rough handle on what’s included and excluded from the category. But I’ve yet to encounter a definition of “cancel culture” that overcomes my suspicion of sloganized epithets.
Wilkinson quotes L.D. Burnett: “There is no such thing as ‘cancel culture’. There is only culture.” In other words, societies have norms, and violating those norms leads to consequences. If you behave in ways your community considers unacceptable, people will shun you in an attempt to shame you into compliance.
In the Burnett/Wilkinson model, the examples of so-called cancel culture are just situations where norms are changing. Actions that used to be acceptable (like a male executive referring to his female secretary as “my girl”) have become unacceptable, and actions that used to be forgivable examples of bad taste (like making racist or sexist jokes at the expense of a co-worker) are now firing offenses.
If you still believe in the old norms, then the consequences that follow from violating the new norms are extreme over-reactions. But instead of openly debating the old norms versus the new norms, old-norm advocates simply apply a pejorative label to the new-norm consequences.
Slogans like “cancel culture” and “political correctness” are used again and again to short-circuit debate, avoid the underlying substantive controversy, and shift the entire burden of justification onto advocates of the rival position. … That’s why “cancel culture” tends to strike me as more of an evasive maneuver than a coherent idea with determinate content.
I was glad to see Wilkinson bring in “political correctness”, because that is an important example of the same phenomenon: Groups that used to be politically and culturally powerless, or even invisible, (like non-whites, women in the workplace, gays and lesbians, or Hindus) can now demand to be treated respectfully. If you show the kind of disrespect that used to be common, you will face consequences.
Instead of debating that norm-change openly, though, people who refuse to adjust to the new norms apply the pejorative label “political correctness” to the consequences. Like “cancel culture”, the term has no definition.
Let’s go meta. Burnett points out that labeling some action as “cancel culture” is itself an attempt to induce shame. In other words, it tries to enforce what the shamer sees as a norm.
Wilkinson’s article is also trying to enforce an unstated norm, one about how people are supposed to think and argue: Words are supposed to have definitions, and not be “merely vehicles for yay! / boo! sentiments”. Arguments are supposed to appeal to universal principles that go beyond just “my side is right and your side is wrong”. People who violate those norms should be ashamed of themselves, and the rest of us should refuse to take their arguments seriously until they change.
In academic circles, those standards go without saying. No one in any field would write in a journal article: “I’ve decided to leave ‘the elite’ undefined, so that I can apply the term pejoratively to my enemies but not my friends.” From the academy, similar norms have trickled down to the educated classes — who don’t always respect or observe them, but nonetheless accept that they ought to respect and observe them.
We sometimes forget, though, that not everyone thinks this way. In fact, there was a time when no one thought that way. Entire civilizations have functioned without definitions or universal principles.
Definition versus usage. If you’re a physicist, the word “red” has a very precise definition for you: light with a wavelength between 620 and 720 nanometers. For the rest of us, not so much. I’ve been using “red” for as long as I can remember, and I didn’t know that definition until I just looked it up.
It’s not that I have some other definition of “red”. I don’t have one at all, and yet I never feel the lack of it. I have a very clear idea what “red” means. I just can’t express it in words.
I don’t remember learning “red”, but I suspect it was the same way I’ve seen parents teach it to their children: Somebody pointed at red things and said “red”. When I tried to imitate them, they corrected my mistakes and cheered when I got it right. Eventually my performance became flawless.
Sometimes an undefined term has a paradigmatic example. At the paint store, “red” is specified by a color card: If something resembles the color card, it’s red. Similarly, “sweet” is the taste of sugar. To the extent that a taste resembles sugar, it’s sweet.
You could live your whole life without ever learning the dictionary definition of anything. Your community would train you in the proper usage of words, and when people disagreed, some paradigmatic example could resolve the dispute. The idea that you’re supposed to be able to define your words in terms of other words would just go right past you.
That’s what’s going on with “cancel culture”, “political correctness”, and the conservative phrases I listed above. They don’t have definitions, they have usages. People learn how to use these terms by hearing other people use them, then doing trial-and-error until their usage matches the rest of the rest of the conservative community.
So why isn’t Colin Kaepernick an example of cancel culture? Because it’s not used that way. If someone pointed at a dandelion or a banana and said “red”, I would just know that they’re wrong. I couldn’t explain why they’re wrong; they just are. “Red” isn’t used that way.
What does “America is a republic, not a democracy” mean? Nothing, actually. The phrase has a usage, not a meaning. Conservatives say it when liberals object to some minority-rule tactic like gerrymandering or the Electoral College or giving Wyoming the same number of senators as California, but DC and Puerto Rico none at all. If you’re hoping for some definition of “republic” that turns that usage into a meaning, though, you’re not going to get one.
Oral culture versus literate culture. If you want to see a society just beginning to grasp how to use the definitions and principles of logical thought, go read one of Plato’s dialogues. Most of them follow the same formula: Socrates is talking to somebody who uses a word, like “courage” (Laches) or “temperance” (Charmides) or “justice” (Republic). Socrates asks them what the word means, and they give him an example of its proper usage. So Laches says: “He is a man of courage who does not run away, but remains at his post and fights against the enemy.” Socrates points out that an example isn’t a definition, and they go round and round from there.
What becomes clear in these dialogues is that in Golden Age Greece, definitions were kind of a new thing, and the idea that you ought to be able to define the terms you use was novel, even a bit weird. Literate culture was still being invented, and it was trying to replace an oral culture where words had proper usages, but not definitions. Folks like Laches clearly expected a process like this: If two people aren’t sure they mean the same thing by a word, they trade examples (“Fire trucks are red.” “Ripe strawberries and tomatoes are red.”) until the agreement is clear.
Universal principles were similar innovations of literate culture. In the previous oral culture, traditional wisdom consisted of stories, and of aphorisms that might be the morals of stories. Aphorisms typically are not even trying to be universally true, like principles, but often come in contradictory pairs. So “Always look before you leap” contradicts “He who hesitates is lost”. Oral-culture discernment revolves around understanding the story you happen to be in. Is the current situation part of a look-before-leaping story or a hesitate-and-lose story? A stop-and-smell-the-roses story, or a make-hay-while-the-sun-shines story? [3]
Discernment is primarily a community process that depends heavily on tradition and authority. That gives it a resilience and stability, but also makes it prone to perpetuating a community’s bigotry and justifying the self-serving pronouncements of corrupt authorities. (It’s way too tempting to discern that we’re in a you-have-to-yield-to-me story.) Literate culture’s logic aimed at replacing discernment with more individual and algorithmic processes like measurement, calculation, and deduction.
In spite of its books and intellectuals, Evangelical Christianity is fundamentally an oral culture. Trumpist conservatism is built on top of it. One of the challenges conservative Christians have faced since pledging their allegiance to Trump is how to justify supporting a man who has literally no Christian virtues, and who appears to understand nothing about the Christian religion.
The answer they found was a story: the end of the Babylonian Captivity and the refounding of the Temple in Jerusalem. A key player in that story is Cyrus the Great of Persia, who was not a follower of Jehovah, but nonetheless was used by Israel’s God to fulfill His promise to Jeremiah and the Jewish people.
For believers who subscribe to this account, Cyrus is a perfect historical antecedent to explain Trump’s presidency: a nonbeliever who nevertheless served as a vessel for divine interest. For these leaders, the biblical account of Cyrus allows them to develop a “vessel theology” around Donald Trump, one that allows them to reconcile his personal history of womanizing and alleged sexual assault with what they see as his divinely ordained purpose to restore a Christian America.
That’s how oral culture works: This is the story we’re in, so we should do these things. No principles of action are being proposed, so you can’t argue about it in a Socratic sense. It arises from a process of community discernment, not a process of logical thought.
If you push further on Trump’s transgressions, you’re likely to hear that Christians believe in forgiveness. A text from the Bible will be quoted to prove it. Of course, they didn’t believe in forgiving Bill Clinton, but that also is Biblical, because the Bible contains both harsh and forgiving verses. Clinton was a harsh-verse situation, and Trump is a forgiving-verse situation. [4] If you can’t see that, you’re not part of the community. [5]
For her, QAnon was always less about Q and more about the crowdsourced search for truth. She loves assembling her own reality in real time, patching together shards of information and connecting them to the core narrative. (She once spent several minutes explaining how a domino-shaped ornament on the White House Christmas tree proved that Mr. Trump was sending coded messages about QAnon, because the domino had 17 dots, and Q is the 17th letter of the alphabet.)
When she solves a new piece of the puzzle, she posts it to Facebook, where her QAnon friends post heart emojis and congratulate her.
This collaborative element, which some have likened to a massively multiplayer online video game, is a big part of what drew Ms. Gilbert to QAnon and keeps her there now.
“I am really good at putting symbols together,” she said.
Q has identified the story we are living inside [6], and the community now attempts to discern how current events fit into that narrative.
How should we respond? I wish I had a better answer. The main advice I have is to recognize what’s happening and stop doing things that don’t work, even if you think they should work.
The factor you have the most control over is your own thinking. So: Don’t read meaning into things that don’t have any meaning. And don’t respond as if they meant the things you think they ought to mean. “Cancel culture” and “political correctness”, for example, are a sticks-and-stones situation. If they meant something negative, and that meaning applied to something you were doing, then you should probably feel bad about it. But they don’t mean anything; they’re just words that are said in particular settings.
Rather than answer based on the meaning you imagine a phrase has, question it. If the person you’re talking to thinks a term has a meaning, let them explain it. Chances are that they can’t. Let them be frustrated rather than you. (WWSD. What would Socrates do?)
When dealing with people you know well, consider the possibility that they don’t know (or have forgotten) that literate culture and logical thought are even possible. Providing an example of a different way of thought will probably not produce sudden results. But over time it might be significant.
[1] A few conservatives also interpret this behavior as hypocrisy. Robby Soave of Reason wrote:
If you only criticize cancel culture when it’s your side being canceled, then you aren’t really attacking the concept—you’re just playing defense for your team.
[2] “If Biden really wanted unity,” Wilkinson tweeted, “he’d lynch Mike Pence.” The joke — that if Biden did lynch Pence, he’d be carrying out an ambition of radical Trumpists, thereby promoting unity — was lost on his bosses, who focused on the apparent call for violence. They don’t let conservatives get by with the it’s-a-joke excuse for endorsing violence, so they didn’t accept that excuse from one of their own either.
[3] Eric Havelock’s Preface to Plato is all about life on the boundary between oral culture and literate culture. The reason Plato was so hostile to poets, in Havelock’s telling, was that poetry was the source of the aphorisms that competed with principles. As long as people revered the poets as fonts of muse-inspired wisdom, logical thought would never take hold.
[4] “The Christian’s Bible is a drug store. Its contents remain the same, but the medical practice changes.” – Mark Twain, Europe and Elsewhere, “Bible Teaching and Religious Practice”
[5] An example of how the same narrative can be either positive or negative: Compare the Biblical characters of Esther and Jezebel. Both are women who marry foreign kings, and use their influence to make the king more accepting of the religion of their homeland.
Esther is one of the Old Testament’s great heroines, and Jezebel one of its villainesses. The difference is almost entirely a my-team/their-team thing: Esther is a Jewish queen of Persia who uses her influence to save Jews from persecution. Jezebel is Phoenician queen of Israel who induces King Ahab to open Israel to the religion of Baal. (Trumpist pastors have begun calling Kamala Harris “Jezebel”. It appears to mean nothing more than that she’s a powerful woman they don’t like.)
[6] The story is that “elites” at the top of the media and the Democratic Party (but also some Republicans) are Satan worshipers who practice pedophilia and drink human blood. Donald Trump is the hero who is going to bring them down. The exposure and punishment of these crimes, leading to mass arrests and executions, is always just around the corner.
This week presents a challenge I think I’ll be stuck with for some while: The Biden administration and Democrats in Congress are doing some very important things, but it’s hard to pull my eyes away from the Republicans as they set themselves on fire.
So: a $1.9 trillion Covid relief bill is steaming ahead, and stands a chance of passing before long. Biden continues to announce major changes in policy; we should soon hear how he plans to control the Gestapo-like organization ICE had turned into under Trump. The new administration is struggling to deal with the vaccine-distribution mess Trump left behind, while the new-infection numbers are finally turning around. Little by little, Biden’s cabinet is getting approved.
But meanwhile, Trump’s impeachment trial starts tomorrow, and he just refused to testify voluntarily. While state GOP organizations are censuring life-long conservatives like Ben Sasse and Liz Cheney, Republicans in the House nearly all supported keeping QAnon lunatic Marjorie Taylor Greene on major committees after she gave a lie-laden speech in her own defense. The GOP leadership in both houses is digging in to oppose a Covid relief bill that 2/3rds of the voters want.
What to pay attention to? Serious sensible governance during a time of crisis? Or raving lunacy?
You’ll see my quandary this week: I’ll try to highlight governance, but I’ll also mention the other stuff — and once I start talking about it, it’s hard to stop. MTG is a case in point: I hate to give her this much attention, but I don’t feel like I can leave that speech alone.
Anyway, the featured post, which should be out soon, focuses on Republicans, but in a more philosophical way: “Why You Can’t Understand Conservative Rhetoric”. I end up claiming that conservative rhetoric arises out of what is fundamentally an oral culture, and that liberals make a mistake when we try to understand it from a literate-culture point of view. We waste a lot of time trying to decipher and respond to notions like “cancel culture” and “political correctness” as if they had logical content, when actually they don’t.
The weekly summary goes back and forth: from impeachment to the Covid bill to the Covid pandemic to MTG’s speech to anti-Putin protests in Russia and so on. I’m still picking a closing, but there are several good ones to choose from. I’m going to try to get that out by noon.
A week ago, we knew an extraordinary cold front was coming. But we had no idea the trauma that was ahead because of bad decision-making by government and industry leaders. This Sunday, we come together with our sorrows, our gratitude, our anger, and our resolve.
Rev. Meg Barnhouse's sermon delivered on February 7, 2021. We come to another of our beloved traditions held each year around Imbolc and St. Brigid's Day. The Blessing of the Animals invites folks to (in a non-pandemic year) to bring their animal companions to church so that we may all benefit from their love as we bless them in their companionship to their humans.
Watch the Service: Download 02-07-21 Full Text To enable YouTube provided closed-captioning while viewing the service, click the “CC” icon on the bottom bar of your YouTube video player.
a collections of readings, prayers and music from the service of 7th February 2021 at Dublin Unitarian Church, Ireland. Led by Pam McCarthy (a congregation member of the church with contributions from Frank Kelly and Josh Johnston
the address from the Sunday service at Dublin Unitarian Church, Ireland, on 7th February 2021. Pam McCarthy is a congregation member of Dublin Unitarian Church.
"The Wonder of Being Alive" (January 31, 2021) Worship Service
Being alive is more than just existing, more than not being dead. Adjectives abound when we talk about being alive. We can be animated. Lively. Alert. Awake. Being alive, to me, is about being in relationship. For some of us, we feel most alive when we are with other people. Others find their aliveness in nature. Many find it in art, particularly the making of art. As we begin the slow return to spring, let’s spend some time imagining what it means to be alive in this world.
Rev. Alyson Jacks, Associate Minister
Sam King, Worship Associate
Larry Chinn, pianist
Asher Davison, song leader
Mark Sumner, accompanist
Eric Shackelford, camera
Shulee Ong, camera
Joe Chapot, Social Media Chat Support
Alex Darr, Coffee Hour Zoom
Thomas Brown, Sexton
Carrie Steere-Salazar, flowers
Em bé khóc nhè, cover image
Jonathan Silk, OOS, Sound, Video Edits
"The Wonder of Being Alive" (January 31, 2021) Worship Service
Being alive is more than just existing, more than not being dead. Adjectives abound when we talk about being alive. We can be animated. Lively. Alert. Awake. Being alive, to me, is about being in relationship. For some of us, we feel most alive when we are with other people. Others find their aliveness in nature. Many find it in art, particularly the making of art. As we begin the slow return to spring, let’s spend some time imagining what it means to be alive in this world.
Rev. Alyson Jacks, Associate Minister
Sam King, Worship Associate
Larry Chinn, pianist;
Asher Davison, song leader
Eric Shackelford, camera
Shulee Ong, camera
Joe Chapot, Social Media Chat Support
Alex Darr, Coffee Hour Zoom
Thomas Brown, Sexton
Judy Payne, flowers
Em bé khóc nhè, cover image
Jonathan Silk, OOS, Sound, Video Edits
Probably the story of our time in politics is that the Republican Party is radicalizing around an explicitly anti-democratic violent white nationalist ideology, and that most of elite establishment media is uninterested or editorially incapable of accurately telling that story
This week everybody was talking about the Biden administration
One featured post goes through the flurry of executive orders that Biden has already issued. For the most part they are important orders that turn the country in the right direction. But to really be successful, Biden has to get legislation through Congress. The first item on his agenda is his Covid relief plan. It provides economic relief to individuals, sends money to states to use distributing vaccines, funds the changes necessary to reopen schools, and institutes a national testing-and-contact-tracing plan.
Ten Republican senators — exactly the number needed to overcome a filibuster — have approached Biden with a much smaller effort: $618 billion rather than $1.9 trillion. I’m not sure exactly what the differences are. Biden is meeting with the senators today.
Biden has three avenues open: Pass something small with bipartisan support (assuming all ten of these senators stay on board, which I regard as a large assumption); pass something large through the reconciliation process with only (or almost entirely) Democratic votes; or pass a small bipartisan bill now and then come back with a larger Democratic bill later. (This would give Republicans cover: They voted for something and opposed something.)
I’ve been pleased that so far Biden has been unwilling to close off his options without getting any concessions back. If he had pledged, say, not to use reconciliation, then I doubt Republicans would be making a counter-proposal.
Chuck Schumer did something similar with the filibuster.
Two weeks ago, I wrote about why the Senate should abolish the filibuster. (My argument transcended any particular legislation that might get filibustered: If a tiny slice of the electorate — say, small majorities in the 21 smallest states — can block what most of the country wants, the American people are going to lose faith in democracy.)
Well, this week Mitch McConnell essentially filibustered to save the filibuster: He blocked the organizing resolution that would allow the Democratic majority to replace the Republican committee chairs, holding out for a stipulation that the Senate would not alter the filibuster during these next two years. Chuck Schumer held out for the agreement Tom Daschle and Trent Lott worked out the last time there was a 50-50 Senate, which made no such promises.
Schumer held his ground and McConnell yielded. What McConnell got instead of an amended resolution was that two Democrats, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, repeated filibuster-supporting promises they each made when they were elected in 2018.
It’s important to understand that this all about appearances: Whatever the organizing resolution says, and whatever individual senators might pledge, Democrats can end the filibuster any time they want — if they are unanimous. The question is how the politics would shake out: Will Manchin and Sinema look bad to their voters if they change their minds? Would the entire Democratic Senate majority look bad if they had passed a resolution defending the filibuster and then later reversed themselves?
And the answer to those questions is entirely situational: What will McConnell use the filibuster to block? That partly depends on how clever Democrats are in using the filibuster-avoiding maneuver known as reconciliation (which is how Republicans passed the Trump tax cut and nearly repealed ObamaCare).
If some very important, very popular legislation gets filibustered, that creates an opportunity for Manchin and Sinema to say “When I supported the filibuster, I never imagined Republicans would misuse it like this.” (Both say they’re not open to changing their minds, but who knows if they will? Neither comes up for reelection until 2024, and by then the filibuster could be ancient history.) Or maybe Schumer will come up with some trick for negating the filibuster in that particular case without getting rid of it completely, giving Manchin and Sinema some cover.
In short, this is not the best time fight this battle, and Schumer wouldn’t have the votes to win right now even if he wanted to fight it. That explains why the party’s progressive wing isn’t pushing too hard for it right now. At the moment, it’s an abstract battle about Senate procedure. Soon the terrain will shift to something voters care about, and then the situation will change.
Having the option of eliminating the filibuster pushes the Republicans to negotiate in good faith. Democrats should not give that up without getting something back.
and impeachment, which is all about where the Republican Party is going
Most of what I had to say about this is in one of the featured posts. But a few odds and ends didn’t fit.
Former President Donald J. Trump has abruptly parted ways with five lawyers handling his impeachment defense, just over a week before the Senate trial is set to begin, people familiar with the situation said on Saturday. … Mr. Trump had pushed for his defense team to focus on his baseless claim that the election was stolen from him, one person familiar with the situation said.
Any defense attorney holds a broad obligation to represent his or her client zealously. That’s a crucial part of our adversarial justice system. But there are limits on what a defense attorney can argue. For example, per the American Bar Association, it would be unethical for any attorney to raise an argument “that he knows to be false.” The “rigged election” narrative certainly fits that description.
According to the NYT, something similar happened as early as November 12: Trump’s lawyers told him there was no fraud on a scale sufficient to flip the election in his favor, so they parted ways and Rudy Giuliani took over.
Thursday the 12th was the day Mr. Trump’s flimsy, long-shot legal effort to reverse his loss turned into something else entirely — an extralegal campaign to subvert the election, rooted in a lie so convincing to some of his most devoted followers that it made the deadly Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol almost inevitable.
Conservatives sometimes try to divert attention from Majorie Taylor Greene with the “What about left-wing radicals in Congress?” ploy. But Democrats are responding with a bring-it-on attitude. And they should: AOC, like Bernie Sanders, is more liberal than some Democrats want to be, but I think everybody understands that she lives in the real world. Progressives want the US to be more like Denmark, not Camelot. Denmark is a real place that is doing fine.
Greene, on the other hand, does not live in the real world.
Another typical whataboutist move diverts discussion of the Capitol Insurrection by bringing up the violence associated with the George Floyd protests (most of which were peaceful). The best description of the difference between those two incidents comes from Tom Robinson on Quora:
One of these things was protesting murder while the other was protesting Democracy.
Typically, an American political party that loses the presidency by seven million votes asks how it can appeal to a larger slice of the electorate. The GOP is asking how it can stop Democrats from voting.
An MTG-endorsed conspiracy theory (about how Jewish-funded space lasers caused a California wildfire) makes this Mel Brooks clip timely again.
The problems that led to the January 6 insurrection are not just political. They’re cultural. Roughly half of Protestant pastors said they regularly hear people promote conspiracy theories in their churches, a recent survey by the Southern Baptist firm LifeWay Research found. “I believe there is a huge burden now on Christian leaders, especially those who entertained the conspiracies, to lead the flock back into the truth,” Kinzinger tweeted on January 12.
I think conservative Christians won’t solve this problem until they realize how deep it goes. The original “fundamentalists” in the early 20th century were reacting against two developments in modern thought: Darwinian evolution and the “higher criticism” of the Bible, which applied to scripture the techniques of interpretation scholars had invented to understand ancient texts like the Homeric epics. The fundamentalist response was to avoid these challenges by encouraging the development of bad thinking habits among Christians. Any kind of denial or logical fallacy was fine if it came to the right conclusions.
Well, a century later, those bad thinking habits have been exploited by purveyors of all kinds of nonsense: climate-change denial, Covid denial, QAnon, “Stop the Steal”. The conservative Christian mind is now like a poorly designed software application; it has back doors that allow hackers to circumvent the usual protocols and make the app serve purposes unrelated to its designers’ intent. That’s how we arrive at the situation Kinzinger diagnoses so clearly:
There are many people that have made America their god, that have made the economy their god, that have made Donald Trump their god, and that have made their political identity their god.
Christianity in general is not going to fix this problem until until it goes back to the source: It needs to figure out how to deal with the reality of evolution, and with the uncanny resemblance of the Bible’s oldest sections to many other texts from the same eras. A few of the more liberal sects did this work a long time ago, but the bulk of the movement would rather build a fortress around its errors than change.
Several writers have tried to explain what this phenomenon “means”. Like, why is it happening? Why Bernie? Why this particular image? I think it’s not hard to understand: The original Bernie-at-the-Inauguration photo captured a truth we all recognized: Wherever Bernie goes, he’s still Bernie. The historic grandeur of an inauguration doesn’t change him, so why would anything else?
In his first phone call with Vladimir Putin since taking office, President Biden pressed his Russian counterpart on the detention of a leading Kremlin-critic, the mass arrest of protesters, and Russia’s suspected involvement in a massive cyber breach in the United States.
In short: we’re an independent country again. Our president is no longer under the thumb of the Russian president.
Impeachment is a chance to put the Trump Era in its rearview mirror, but instead the GOP is doubling down on authoritarianism and conspiracy theories.
Less than a month ago, then-President Donald Trump incited a mob to attack Congress, for the purpose of hanging onto power in spite of having decisively lost the November election. At the time, that crime seemed to put the capstone on the most lawless administration at least since Richard Nixon’s, and maybe in all of American history.
Republican members of Congress, who (like Democrats) had to evacuate the House and Senate chambers in fear for their lives, briefly seemed willing to reconsider where their unquestioning support of Trump had brought them. Trump’s attempted coup — the culmination of a months-long plot attempt to undo his loss and effectively end American democracy — brought to a head a theme that the country has been debating since 2015: How far will Republicans let Trump go?
Back then, the debate was about norm-violations that look small compared to insurrection, but had previously been beyond the pale: calling Mexican immigrants rapists, or claiming that American POWs are not heroes, or ridiculing a reporter by imitating his disability, or encouraging his supporters to be violent, or bragging about sexually assaulting women.
Trump critics raised a reasonable question: If those actions aren’t over the line, where is the line? We never got an answer, but instead were accused of paranoia. Trump was unorthodox and not “politically correct”, but imagining that he was dangerous to the American Republic was just “Trump Derangement Syndrome”, a particular form of craziness induced by an irrational hatred of a man most of us didn’t care about one way or the other before he began running for president.
Closing ranks. This week we got some additional information: For the majority of the GOP, physically attacking Congress and trying to end democracy isn’t over the line either.
Tuesday, 45 of the 50 Republican senators signaled their unwillingness to hold Trump accountable for inciting the Capitol lnsurrection by voting not to hold an impeachment trial at all, on the grounds that the Constitution doesn’t allow impeachments of former officials. (That’s not a credible position, as explained in the Appendix.) Among the 45 was Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who previously had seemed open to conviction.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, meanwhile, made a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to get back in Trump’s good graces. In the wake of running for his life, McCarthy had said Trump “bears responsibility” for the insurrection. But Thursday he needed to kiss the ring.
Purging anti-Trumpists. Instead, the party has decided to punish those Republicans who showed some loyalty to America’s constitutional system of government. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida), went to Wyoming to raise ire against Rep. Liz Cheney, who said “There has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution” than Trump inciting a mob to attack Congress, and then voted for impeachment. Don Jr. spoke to the anti-Cheney rally by phone. A state senator has already announced a primary challenge.
The Arizona Republican Party has censured Governor Ducey, ostensibly for taking action against Covid, but the fact that he refused to misreport Trump’s electoral loss was probably also a factor. South Carolina’s Republican Party has censured Rep. Tom Rice for his pro-impeachment vote. Trump is calling for Georgia Governor Brian Kemp to face a primary challenger, again because he refused to overrule the voters and give Georgia’s electoral votes to Trump.
Defending extremism. Simultaneously, the GOP is doing little to distance itself from Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Trump-supporting freshman Congresswoman from Georgia who has brought a new level of insanity to the Capitol. Here’s one good summary of the full range of Greene’s unhinged-ness and here’s another one.
But if you prefer to see for yourself and make your own judgments, Greene posted a 40-minute rant to YouTube in 2018. (Warning: that’s 40 minutes of your life you’ll never get back. I recommend skipping the first half, which is mainly about how Facebook is censoring her — by applying the same community standards it applies to everybody.) If you’re looking for a point to it all, she never really gets around to making one. But along the way you’ll learn such fascinating things as
Hillary Clinton had JFK Jr. murdered to clear the field for her Senate race in 2000. It was “another one of those Clinton murders”.
No plane actually hit the Pentagon in the 9/11 attack.
Getting rid of Saddam Hussein was part of an intentional plan to destabilize the Middle East, so that the US could be “invaded” by Muslim refugees. “And that happened under Barack Obama’s presidency.” George W. Bush barely comes up in the entire 40 minutes.
Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-CA) is introducing a resolution to expel Greene from Congress, but without some Republican support it won’t get the 2/3s majority needed to pass.
Prague Spring. The best analysis of the GOP I’ve seen came from New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait, who used a Soviet analogy. While the post-insurrection openness to criticizing Trump may at first have looked like Glasnost, it was actually a Prague Spring, “a brief flowering of dissent and questioning of dogma quickly suppressed by a remorseless crackdown.”
Chait breaks the Party into three factions:
Never Trumpers. Flake, Romney, Kasich, and a bunch of mainstream-media columnists.
Violent authoritarians. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, QAnon, the Proud Boys. They’re sorry Trump’s insurrection failed to keep him in power, but have no other regrets about it.
Soft authoritarians. McConnell, McCarthy, Rupert Murdoch and his media empire. (To my mind, these folks are equivalent to the Hindenburg conservatives of the Weimar Republic.)
The heady predictions that the party would break free of the Trumpist grip already seem fanciful. If anybody is suffering repercussions for their response to Trump’s autogolpe, it is the Republicans who criticized it. Conservative Republicans are threatening to strip Liz Cheney of her leadership post after she voted to impeach Trump. … Adam Kinzinger, another pro-impeachment Republican, is facing censure. The Michigan Republican member of the state board of canvassers, who broke with his party to certify the state’s election results, is losing his job as a result of his refusal to go along with Trump’s lie. Fox News is firing journalists associated with its election call that Biden won Arizona. …
The path of least resistance for the soft authoritarianism will be to oppose Trump’s conviction on technical grounds, and then hope he fades away quietly.
Least resistance. The sad thing is that the soft authoritarians could get their wish if they weren’t such cowards. They have the power to push Trump off the stage, if they would only use it. But they won’t.
McConnell, McCarthy, and the rest need to ask themselves where this going. Trump’s behavior is not going to improve. The domestic terrorist movement he has allied with isn’t going to stop. Next-generation Trumps like Greene aren’t going to tone it down. The soft authoritarians are tying themselves to people whose actions they can neither control nor predict.
This is how bad it’s gotten: Eric Cantor is the voice of reason. The GOP’s problems didn’t start with Trump, he writes. They started when Republican politicians started pandering to their base voters’ fantasies rather than telling them what is and isn’t true or possible.
For Cantor, the government shutdown of 2013 was a key moment. Ted Cruz and some other leaders told the base that the party could defund ObamaCare, if only its leaders fought hard enough. They couldn’t and didn’t, but pretending that they could put the nation through a pointless crisis. Here’s how Cantor sees the path forward:
In many ways, it is the classic prisoner’s dilemma. If the majority of Republican elected officials work together to confront the false narratives in our body politic — that the election was stolen (it wasn’t), that there is a QAnon-style conspiracy to uproot pedophiles at the heart of American government (there isn’t), that a Democratic-controlled government means the end of America (it doesn’t; it may produce worse policy, but the republic has survived 88 years of Democrats occupying the White House) — all Republicans will be better off. If instead most elected Republicans decide to protect themselves against a primary challenge through their silence or even their affirmation, then like the two prisoners acting only in their own interests, we will all be worse off.
Trump’s impeachment trial is a golden opportunity to start rooting out those false narratives. But for that to happen, Mitch McConnell will have to provide leadership. That seems unlikely.
Appendix: The Constitutionality of Impeaching Former Officials
Slate does a good job explaining why former officials can be impeached. It’s not even a close call.
Let’s start with the Constitution, which never directly addresses the question. Article I says that the House “shall have the sole Power of Impeachment” and the Senate “shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments”. It limits the punishments for the convicted to “removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States”, leaving any further punishment to the courts. Article II stipulates that convicted officials “shall be removed from office” after conviction, but it is silent about whether former officials can be disqualified from future office.
That’s all the guidance it gives. The implication of these sparse instructions is that people at the time of the founding already knew what impeachment meant. (Similarly, the Constitution also doesn’t define “Money” or “credit” when it gives Congress power “To borrow Money on the credit of the United States”.)
What everyone would have known was how Great Brtain handled impeachments. (In Federalist #65, Alexander Hamilton said the Constitution’s notion of impeachment derived from Great Britain’s.) They also would have known how the already-existing state governments did it. Slate spells it out:
Indeed, the British impeachment that most informed the Framers’ thinking about the impeachment power was the impeachment of Warren Hastings for improprieties as the governor-general of Bengal. Hastings had been out of this office for two years before his impeachment by the House of Commons. Moreover, at least two states—Virginia and Delaware—had established that their impeachment power extended to former officers.
Also, Congress has faced this issue before, and resolved it during the Grant administration:
Congress has also expressly addressed this question and resolved it in favor of the original understanding. In 1876, the House drafted articles of impeachment against President Ulysses S. Grant’s Secretary of War, William Belknap, but Belknap resigned before the House could vote on the articles. The House debated whether Belknap’s resignation deprived the House of jurisdiction. After the debate, the House voted to impeach Belknap, implicitly rejecting the argument that it lacked jurisdiction. The Senate also took up the issue and voted 37–29 that Belknap’s resignation did not deprive it of jurisdiction.
So the question has an obvious answer, for those who are willing to know it: Trying Trump after he has left office is entirely constitutional. Claiming it isn’t is just an excuse to let Trump off the hook without considering the evidence against him.
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