Tag Archives: Trump

Political Rants

New year, old bottle.

Here we go headlong into 2016. It feels as if we’ve already had the year, since pop culture obsesses over the horse-race aspect of elections even if it rarely delves into the substance of what’s at issue. Truth be told, the talk shows have been talking about 2016 since 2012, the day after election day. Evidently, it’s an eyeball magnet for them, so they’ll never stop talking about it, particularly now that we’ve entered the age of Trump. Good television will always trump (no pun intended) good politics, hands down.

So, what are the substantive issues that we should be grappling with in this election year? Same ones as in practically every other year, and you can name them as credibly as I can. Here’s my list:

Cheap eyeball magnetCapitalism’s Failure. This is an issue that touches on everyone, young and old, working and unemployed or retired, poor and not-so-poor. The internal contradictions of American and, by extension, global capitalism came to a head in the crash of 2008, and we are still living in the aftermath of that disaster. Yes, the government can point to select data points that indicated a modest level of recovery, but the fact remains that an economic system that has consistently failed the vast majority of the population over the past 30 years has entered into an entirely new phase of failure. Most working Americans are toiling at the only job they can find, earning an inadequate rate of compensation. Our major cities are choked with legions of homeless people. This system is broken; it only serves the top one percent. We need to take a hard look at this, sooner rather than later.

Phony Wars. Our military adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq are entering a new year with no end in sight, and we’re building up presences in Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere. These conflicts spawn other conflicts, inspire retail terrorists, and generally create havoc. I’m not hearing a lot of meaningful discussion about this from the current herd of presidential candidates. Let’s hold their feet to the fire this year.

Climate Change. While it is snowing like hell today, this has been the warmest and most snowless late fall – early winter in upstate New York in my experience. And while we have the Paris accord, very little is being done to reduce emissions and prevent this ongoing climate disaster from becoming an unmitigated catastrophe and a threat to human survival in the decades ahead. We have the means to move the needle on this; now we just need the will. That’s totally up to us.

Black Lives Matter. With the failure to indict the Cleveland PD officers who shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice last year, it is clear that we need to set new standards for law enforcement methods and accountability. That said, the problem evident in these deadly interactions runs much deeper than what can be corrected through police reform. Law enforcement methodology reflects the values of the society it serves; namely, white society in America. There are deep historical, economic, and cultural reasons for this, and we need to address these at their root, not simply prune the unsightly branches.

The list goes on, but we would do well to inject these issues into the election year discussion, preferably in a manner that draws connections between all three.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Faith and politics.

I’m guessing you don’t need my opinion on Donald Trump’s proposed ban of all Muslims from entering the United States – you’ve probably heard the full gamut, from Steve King to Bernie Sanders. My first thought was for all of the Muslim students I have known and met, both natural born U.S. citizens and visa holders from countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palestine, and others. I hear this insane rhetoric, growing louder by the day, and I think of a young fellow from Afghanistan – about the nicest person you could hope to meet – and what his thoughts might be about the people who “liberated” his country, then overstayed their welcome for 14 years.

Christian jihadistThis is what happens in America when anything like a foreign-inspired terror attack takes place: we want to corral all Muslims and start bombing some country most of us couldn’t find on a globe with both hands. I’ve lived through many cycles of this, from the Iran hostage crisis through the first gulf war, to the embassy bombings in the late 1990s and on into the 9/11 era. I can remember a Muslim friend from Bosnia being a bit taken aback by the rhetoric and the kind of full-on nationalism pushed through the corporate media that came about after Clinton bombed Iraq in 1998. It’s times like these when Muslims – and yes, people with beards and headscarves more generally – feel compelled to start looking over their shoulders.

There’s a push, primarily by Republicans but with Democratic assent as well, to view international terrorism and specifically ISIS as a grave, even existential threat to citizens of the United States. Opinion polls have been showing that this is paying off – people are good and scared, which is music to ISIS’s ears. But what the hell – thousands of people in America are killed by the domestic terror of gun violence every year, some of it motivated in part by extremist religion. I would say that that was more unambiguously the case in the Colorado Planned Parenthood shooting than in the San Bernardino attack, just on the basis of the rantings of the shooter, Robert Dear. We are far more likely to be shot by someone like Dear than by someone like Farook.

So … why are we encouraged to fear the lesser danger? It’s the political magic of otherness. Always a winner in America.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Stirring the pot.

Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump recalls seeing footage of “thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey cheering as the Twin Towers fell on September 11, 2001. Fellow candidate Ben Carson briefly claimed to have seen the same inspiring vision in his mind’s eye, too, then backed off. (He seems to be recalling the clip of five Palestinians jumping up and down that was most likely a hatchet job.) Trump’s claim is the ideal bookend to his recent suggestion of maintaining a federal database of Muslims in America, a component in his new post-Paris attack national security platform. It’s a simple, time tested formula: call out a domestic population that you can term a fifth column and associate with a foreign enemy, then repeat your rhetoric and watch your polling numbers rise. Oldest trick in the book.

Look in the mirror, America.The thing is, Trump is a mirror to the Republican base, as Sam Seder and others have pointed out. This is a mostly white minority of virulently anti-immigration, nativist, evangelical Christian Americans who are attracted to Trump for the time being because he arrogantly articulates their hatred of the “other” and gives voice to their sense of outrage over being relegated, however temporarily, to opposition party status. I have heard commentators blame this constituency on Obama – the nauseating former Bush adviser Nicole Wallace, for instance – but it’s useful to remember that even in the depths of his second-term unpopularity, Wallace’s former boss retained a solid core of conservative support, including the same crackpots that showed up at McCain/Palin campaign rallies in 2008. That was the nascent “tea party”, the constituency that has kept Trump in the high twenties for months now.

Stirring up racist or bigoted sentiments is always a dangerous game, but it’s one that remains popular with politicians who have no real value to offer the constituencies they seek to serve. We white people tend to think of non-white, non-European, non-Christian people as different. We see this in the response (or lack of same) to the Beirut bombing, compared to the near media obsession over Paris. Even the President does this. When he talks about Paris, he refers to the fact that we see ourselves in the sidewalk cafes; that Parisians are like us. There is a deep reservoir of anti-foreign, anti-other sentiment in our society. It is hard to avoid this mentality when you become an imperial power. You can mask it, conceal it, but it tends to bob to the surface.

We’ve all seen this movie before. I like to think that there are enough decent people in this country to overcome this type of ugliness, but if there is some kind of attack in the United States over the next year, all bets are off.

luv u,

jp