The Chimera Called Unity

 I thought President Biden's inauguration speech was quite good. The rhetoric was generally hopeful without being "soaring," patriotic without absurd hyperbole, humble and yet determined. Most of all it left an impression of the man himself, which may be its most important accomplishment. The man himself seems genuine, earnest, determined, and also humble (a refreshing change). 

I thought the weakest part of Mr. Biden's speech was his central theme of unity. Not only is any sort of real unity nothing more than a fleeting pipe dream, but the American political system does not depend on it. In fact, politics is a means for dealing with inevitable disunity. This is a point that Madison made strongly in his debate with Patrick Henry at the Virginia Ratifying Convention in 1788.

If we posit that unity is necessary for progress, as the president suggested, the question then becomes, unity about what? Since on every important political issue there is widespread and earnest disagreement, where does unity come in? I suppose it is in the agreement to vet our differences through politics, rather than, say, mob violence (which 2020 had altogether too much of). The agreement to in fact disagree but not dismiss the other side from the field of political play. There will always be another side. The glass will always be half-full. There is no arc of history leading to one side's chosen land, while the other side's is rejected forever.

To speak of the necessity of unity in order to make progress is, in this sense, not only naive but it embodies the potential for a kind of tyranny of the majority. Being out of sync with the majority opinion, or at least the opinion presently in power, becomes a kind of rebellion against blessed unity. It becomes unpatriotic. If progress requires unity, then our leaders will be forever frustrated (as they in fact have always been).

In our system progress requires debate, coalition building, and legislative compromise. To the extent that the president, as the executive head of only one branch of government after all, can rule apart from legislative enactments, he can keep up the pretense that compromise is not a necessary part of politics, and simply emulate a corporate CEO and issue edicts. To that extent he is not truly a participant in the Madisonian conception of governance at all, but one who has found an end-around, a way to over-ride all that. This was Donald Trump's method of governing, turning the legislature into nothing more than a supporting cast in the drama. 

I don't say all this in order to mount a rhetorical assault on the Biden presidency. I voted for him despite many political disagreements, knowing that disagreements get hashed out in our political system, if it is working as intended, in ways that don't entirely satisfy either side. But I voted for him because I thought he was a man of character, of basic human decency, and I thought that such was what America most needed in this moment. Mr. Biden's inaugural address only confirms that view. There will be plenty of time ti differ about politics, but I'm thankful for a good man in the White House.

On Faith & Politics

 I'm writing this post early on the Saturday after the election. I'm listening to Gerry Mulligan and looking forward to going to a men's breakfast at church.

We don't generally talk about politics at church. I could guess at what some of my brothers are thinking, and I'm pretty sure of which way one of them voted, but that's about it. We are not a red or a blue or even a purple church. This reticence about politics probably speaks to a determination to not let ourselves be divided along political lines. 

And not to be distracted. A church is a group of people who think they are on to something. On to something big. Virtually everything else seems like a lesser thing, and on these lesser things we may and often do differ. 

We have no authority apart from Jesus. Our authority runs in very narrow but not insignificant paths. We have the authority to forgive. To withhold judgement. To offer grace far and wide in the interest of displaying the beauty of of God in Christ (God as seen, as revealed, in Jesus).

But of course there are Christians who do put politics first. Personally, I think they are making a big mistake. I think it's corrupting. Show me a politics-first person who does not believe his or her political opponents are stupid and evil, and you will have shown me the exception, not the rule.

[Note: I've moved on from Mulligan to the Houdak Trio for my background music. This stuff is incredible!]

Where was I? Oh yeah, the matter of politics and faith. I do think a political program may well flow from a faith position. Actually, it would be strange if one didn't. And I also think that many of us (us Christian believers) have not thought these connections and transitions through. Our political views are alongside our faith-understanding, but unrelated. Our politics is a sort of cultural inheritance, and we have been careful to give it preferential treatment, protected status.

It's similar to not letting your faith disturb your attraction to violence, or to pornography. I am not equating political views to sin, but when anything has a protected and untouchable place in our psyche, it is an idol.

A sign of this sort of idolization is our willingness to lie on behalf of our political interests. You see, if our politics flowed from our faith in Christ, we would never lie for politics. Or for a politician. If Christ comes first, lying is off the menu, sorry.

That is what has disturbed me most about Evangelical supporters of Trump. The willingness to pass on the official lies of the administration. To call lies truth. When you think a man is beyond the reach of ordinary sensible skepticism, that man is your idol. You are enmeshed in sin.

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Read also:

We Are All Revenants, by Bradley Jersak

Joe's touché moment

I don't generally watch candidate debates, but I read about them later in both purportedly objective media sources and in opinion pieces. I always enjoy these "who won/who lost" articles. Candidates who are ahead in the polls are usually said to have won the debate if they did not flub their lines, appear senile, or allow others to score knockout blows against them. Candidates who are behind in the polls, on the other hand, are said to have won if they had memorable moments or staggered the frontrunner with a nice verbal jab.

They all say Joe Biden won the most recent debate, mostly because he didn't seem befuddled even once in the whole three hours. Me, I'm delighted with his "Let's be constitutional" response to Kamala Harris' gun-control plan. What a novel idea! I have no confidence in Joe, but there's his touché moment.

As for Kamala Harris, she's running as the "No, let's not be" candidate in the guise of being the "Yes we can" candidate. Analysis here.

Is it my imagination, or does everyone talk about the executive orders they'll make on the first day in office (they're more likely to say, "on Day One")? They're all auditioning for the role of the-man-on-the-white-horse, riding in to save the day. It's an emergency situation, they all contend, and so there's no time for Constitutional niceties, etc. So Biden's comment really stands out.

Not that I'd ever vote for a Scrantonian, mind you. The only one of the Democratic candidates I have any admiration for is Tulsi Gabbard, who wasn't allowed in the debate because she isn't a serious candidate like, say, Andrew Yang. He promised to give people money, thus proving his seriousness.

But in truth, I most likely won't vote for anyone in the coming election, or I'll opt for a 3rd party candidate if one of them seems refreshingly intelligent and, well, real. Have you seen Biden's hair/teeth/tan?

Politics and Hate

"Politics is eminently a realm of hatred," says Anthony Esolen in this article at American Greatness.

Has that always been true? It certainly seems truer now than ever before. Perhaps this is why most of the truly saintly people I know are the least politically minded. Politics brings out the worst in us.

I had a vague knowledge of who David Koch was (although until very recently I mispronounced his last name). My mispronunciation was corrected when I ran into someone who hated them, bringing them up in sarcastic comments at every opportunity. [Who are these Coke brothers he keeps talking about, I.] I was surprised at the level of hatred for someone he didn't know at all and in fact someone whose life never impinged on his own in the least. And when David Koch recently passed away, this hatred was on display again in Leftist memes on social media. But why?

And by the way, it is just as evident on the right as on the left. I tend not to bother much about young politicians from districts far from my own. So a Dem Representative from a district in Minnesota said something stupid. If she were my congresswoman, I might be working hard to defeat her in the next election, but she's not. So why lose sleep over her. And yet many on the Right are on a continual tirade against The Squad, and if you don't share it, if in other words you are insufficiently hateful toward them, your conservative credibility will be called into question. Our politics now is defined by who we hate, and how intensely we hate them.

I could cite many examples (and Esolen cites many from his own experience inacademia). This need to hate is very strong in us. Fairness goes out the window. Probity and moderation have long fled. Thoughtfulness and generosity of spirit need not apply. As in the case, say, of Antifa zealots, hatred becomes an organizing principle for community, the glue that holds the group together.

There's an interesting piece at Quillette called The Great Scattering: How Identity Panic Took Root in the Voic Once Occupied by Family Life. The author, Mary Eberstadt, says,

The diminution and rupture of the family and the rise of identity politics cannot be understood apart from one another.

I think that's right. In any case, the author provides plenty of food for thought. Connecting the ideas of both Esolen and Eberstadt, I think that hatred and Identity Politics go hand in hand. I am comparing no one in particular to Hitler, but his political philosophy was nothing if not "Idetnity Politics."

Anyway, it's a sad and disturbing development. Sometimes a grim thought wiggles its way into my brain: things are reminding me of the French Revolution. Oh, that's extreme, I tell myself. You really can't go that far! But I do wonder if someday it will not seem to far-fetched.

Donald Trump and Identity Politics

So when I was kid growing up in and around Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania in the 60s and early 70s, I was exposed to a lot of racial and ethnic stereotyping, antisemitism, and strange conspiracy theories about the nefarious Roman Catholic Church trying to take over the country.

The John Birch Society was a thing, and I vaguely recall flyers from them. We kids were told that the Catholics were stockpiling weapons in the basements of their churches, waiting for the right moment to being the takeover. So all those summertime church bazaars with fried dough and candy apples, etc., staffed by kindly blue-haired grannies, were all just a precursor to some gigantic RC Anschluss. I well remember peering into the basement window of the St. Ignatius Church, trying to spy out the guns.

This calumny, that the Catholics were bent on taking over the country, was repeated for "the Jews." Every disgusting antisemitic trope you can think of was taken as a given in my household as well as those of most of my neighbors. Both the Catholics and the Jews, you see, had a dual loyalty problem. You shouldn't vote for Kennedy, because he was ultimately beholden to the Pope. And the Jews, their highest allegiance was to Israel, not America.

So when I first heard about President Trump's endearing tweet suggesting that all Jews who disagreed with him politically were "disloyal," it sounded like a familiar trope to me. I assumed he meant disloyal to America, but Trump later explained that he meant disloyal to Israel. So here we have a twist on the old trope. In the president's mind, Jew's need to have a dual-loyalty. The president was condemning all Jews who vote Democratic as insufficiently loyal to a foreign nation!

This seemed strange to me, and stupid, with the odor of antisemitism (making generalizations about how all Jews ought to think, condemning them if they don't think that way) wafting through the Twittersphere.But then I remembered that Trump is an eager participant in the Identity Politics sweepstakes that now seems to dominate our electoral universe. This puts religious/ethnic/racial identity above all else, and encourages voters to think that way. These "identities" are essentially upstream from politics, they are a "first thing," and therefore should shape our responses to everything else. That seems to be the idea, anyway.

On the left, Blacks are encouraged to think this way and only this way, and I'm sure that many leftist politicians would think, if not say, that any Black voter who didn't think and vote accordingly was being, well, insufficiently loyal to his race. A similar way of thinking about Whites, which should logically follow, is however deemed racist. And to think that way about Jews, well it's clearly antisemitic.

What I am saying is, it's all a crock. You can't practice this particular brand of demagoguery for some and not expect your opponents to pick up the proverbial gauntlet themselves. Because, electorally speaking, it works. Or at least seems to for now.

I would posit that saying all Jews ought to think a certain way or be branded disloyal is, yes, antisemitic. It's generalizing about a large and diverse population, and insisting on conformity to your political view. But worse, it's insisting that, and expecting that, all Jews identify first as loyal to Israel and vote accordingly.

Identity Politics is not really a moral or ethical position, but simply a political tactic, useful to those seeking power. Trump knows he's not going to change the minds of the 79% of Jews who voted against him in the last election, but he also knows, or thinks he knows, that this kind of language will rally the White Evangelicals, many of whom support Israel. Apparently, he already has their vote, but he'd really like to legitimize through repetition the underlying presumptions of Identity Politics.

I call that a dangerous trend.

Day 27: The politics of disdain, and the politics of grace

American Greatness has a nice piece called Rage Rules American Politics. Here's a snip:

Screaming at each other over policy disputes, the loudest segments of the population set out to prove that they are unworthy to ever be trusted with the power to rule over people with whom they disagree. They made their case well, and it would be advisable to refuse deference to any government that any of them control.

AG is, of course, a very pro-Trump journal, and probably the most thoughtful of the type. Some might answer that it was their guy who amped up the rage-factor in American politics, and the article even acknowledges that to some extent.

I've called it the politics of vituperation. Each side provides constant fodder for the other's rage. Closely related is to all this the politics of disdain. From Obama's desperate clingers comment to Hillary Clinton's "basket of deplorables," not to mention a thousand presidential tweets from the current occupant of the big white house in Washington, disdain for political rivals is the expected stance. Your political colleagues will suspect you of insufficient ardor if you display any degree of respect for the other side.

Of course, we have all at times been both vituperative in our politics and disdainful toward our political opposites, but I am talking about a permanent, settled, predictable, and unrelieved disdain. It's as if what was once merely a debate-tactic (called upon when the debater's position is weak or he is simply too lazy to actually rely on facts) has grown into an emotional pre-set.

More from AG:

By fall of 2018, an Axios poll found that roughly half of the surveyed Democrats and Republicans alike considered each other "ignorant" and "spiteful." More strongly, 21 percent of Democrats said Republicans were "evil," and 23 percent of Republicans said the same about Democrats.

And:

Chances are, the thought of being ruled by evil people fills you with dread. And you ramp up the insults and apocalyptic language accordingly, with all that entails.

Arguments about where this all started and who's to blame will get us exactly nowhere. As an individual who works with and enjoys the company of many people whom I disagree with politically, it's an attitude I can't afford. There's not much we can do about it, except to refuse to contribute. To be, in other words, a practitioner of the politics of grace. 

Day 26: On political rhetoric, or We're all little Stalinists now

Have you noticed that everyone's a partisan these days? The whole world seems to have turned into an Op-Ed page. Some people still want to "reason together," but most simply draw from their small set of truisms and talking points and repeat them over and over.

That may be an overstatement, born of a slight case of discouragement. But certainly, partisanship as a way of being, a way of interacting, is on the rise. A partisan sees everything, every act of communication, in the light of his/her allegiance to the cause. Ordinary acts of communication take on a propagandistic coloring. Everyone seems to see themselves as a foot-soldier or talking-head for the Party or the "movement" (whatever that may be).

When you're a partisan, you give no quarter to the opposition. You concede nothing. They're all Nazis. Or they're all Communists. They're all racists. Or reverse-racists. Or nationalists. Or traitors. The point being, partisanship thrives on oversimplification, lurid fear-mongering, declarations rather than conversation, name-calling, and weighted language that attempts to marginalize opposing ideas. Not just refute them, mind you, but to silence them.

The thing is, we readily perceive these partisan tactics when they are used against our favored political positions ("There they go again!"), but we applaud those same tactics when they are arrayed in favor of "our side."

If you scan the news using Google News, you will see that even front-page stories from legacy newspapers with lots of inherited reputation for objectivity have become nothing more than partisan attempts to lead the reader to a preferred conclusion. This is the kind of thing that has been famously labeled "Fake News!" Furthermore, on that same Google Newsfeed, you will see no attempt to differentiate opinion pieces from the news. The traditional newspaper generally segregated their opinion pieces to one or two pages at the back of the first section. Not so Google News.

This is why even the opinions of pop-culture entertainers are treated as important assets to the cause.

And Facebook and Twitter are of course prime real estate for partisan rhetoric. Social media didn't create the problem, but it has provided the perfect platform for the dissemination of partisan talking-points, the goal of which is not to approach truth, but simply to sway opinion.

It all seems like a dangerous development for American democracy. In political terms, it sometimes seems  that we have all become apparatchiks, political operators, almost, you might say, eager little Stalinists. I fear for my country.

Day 25: On the coming presidential election

Every now and then, if I pay a little bit of attention to the Democratic candidates for president, I start thinking that maybe, just maybe, I could vote for Donald Trump.

But all that has to happen is for DT to get on Twitter and say, well, just about anything, and I'm back to thinking I will never never never never vote for that man.

Although it may sound like I'm in a quandary here, really I'm not. I'm perfectly happy to abstain from voting in presidential elections. It is highly likely that in 2020, if I'm still around by then, I'm going to be deeply bothered by both candidates. But I've come to believe that lesser-evil voting is not for me.

I usually get pushback on this matter of the "voting is your patriotic duty" variety. Sometimes I get pushback from supporters of one candidate or another (or haters of one candidate or another, who tell me that  "voting against" can be just as important as "voting for").

Much of this storytelling is just that: the story we tell ourselves about the value of voting. I suppose it's as workable a system for choosing a leader as any other that nations have come up with through the centuries. I do vote in most of the other levels of government from the Senate down to the city council, etc.), but our presidential election process seems like nothing more than a giant receptacle for BS. The gist of my feeling on this matter comes down to a bumper sticker slogan: "Don't vote! It only encourages them!"

All that having been said, this election feels a little different to me. The Democratic Party's tilt to port seems like something pretty drastic to me. Given our drastic president, I had about convinced myself that I could vote for a moderate Dem, if they were sensible enough to nominate one, but it looks like that is not going to be an option.

And so, oh well! I will probably not be voting in the coming election. But I will watch with interest, and sometimes comment here at A Stranger Here. But I promise . . . not very often.

Day 19: Thinking about the next election

One of the purposes of writing down your thoughts is to find out what you're thinking. Writing it down is close kin to figuring it out. A thought that remains unexpressed (or not well expressed) is not wholly understood. Its connections and consequences, its place in the "big picture," remains unrevealed or misunderstood. Perhaps not everybody has to "spell it out" for themselves in writing. Perhaps they can pursue a thought, develop it, understand its place in a grander scheme, all without the aid of a writer's tools. That's not me though.

Not that writing it down inevitably leads to enlightenment. One can write it out and yet continue in one's own ignorance of all the implications, of the very truth or untruth of what one has written. Writing your thoughts does not guarantee that your thoughts will be improved by the process, or that they will be valuable to yourself or anyone else because they are accord with what is.

In other words, one can write out one ignorance, or one can even actively deceive by means of the written word. So writing a thought down does not make it a true thought, but if one is pursuing the truth, it might help to write it down and follow where it leads.

I write all this, which may seem utterly obvious to the reader, to justify myself in writing about politics now and then on this blog. In some ways, I'd rather avoid it, but I do need to figure out what I think on various subjects, not the least of which is who I should vote for (if anyone) in the coming election.

As a starting point, let me just say that I'm not sure. I'm undecided. The choice is between the Republican candidate, the Democratic candidate, some third party candidate, or nobody at all. In recent elections, I've tended to vote for nobody. In the last election, I was a Republican Never-Trumper and after his nomination at the Republican convention, I even disenrolled from the Republican Party.

But here we are three years later, with a political process that seems to have devolved into bitterness and invective. I spoke of this a while back in a post entitled The Politics of Vituperation. Though I was a Never Trumper last time, this time, though I dislike the president as much as ever, I am considering voting for the man. Given all my criticism of him over the past few years, that will be more or less shocking to many who know me.

Okay, there I've said it. The thought has been written down, and now I will have to see where it leads. I find I've gone on long enough for one post, so I'm going to leave it that. I might, just maybe, vote for Donald Trump!

I'll spell out the pros and cons in a future post. The choice I am facing is between Trump, a third-party candidate, or nobody, for the Democrats, it seems to me, have gone quite mad. I will spell out what I think about this in future posts, but for now, take a look at this: Wokeness Driving Gay Southern Liberal Trumpward. I'm like that fellow, someone who you would never expect to vote for Trump, so his reasoning is very interesting to me.

More on all this in coming posts.

Day 9: The Politics of Vituperation

Yesterday I recommended The Imaginative Conservative. Here's how they describe themselves:

The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics as we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility.

Now that's a far cry from our typical political discussions these days, isn't it? I read a fair amount on the current political scene, and the one common element on both sides is anger or vituperation. Once one has bought into the demonization of the opposing side, compromise, even civil discussion, can seem immoral.

You see this all the time in online exchanges (on Facebook or wherever). Is it any longer possible to change this trend? The admission that one's indignation is perhaps not as righteous as we like to think is an admission that all of us have great difficulty making. And much of this angst has been manipulated into us, like yeast into a batch of dough. Most of the time these angry declarations are made up entirely of oft-repeated talking-points that are nearly word-for-word borrows from talk radio hosts or our favorite political bloggers.

Now, I have contributed to this trend myself, not infrequently. If hatred or fear motivates our politics, we are swimming in dangerous waters. Suddenly mobs in the street wielding clubs are deemed heroic. People are doxed, people lose jobs over 5-year old Tweets that took the wrong stand on some issue or other. Death-threats and public shaming increase. All middle ground disappears.

Here are the rules of modern political discussion:

• Always depict your opponent's case in the weakest possible manner, making it seem not only ludicrous but quite possibly evil.
• Make fun of your opponent's facial features, body shape, etc.
• Compare everything your opponent says to Naziism.
• Predict utter doom if your opponent's case is implemented or his candidate wins.
• Depict compromise as caving to Fascists.
• Call names.

I've probably done all of these, but I'm going to monitor myself a little more closely from now on. I'm shooting for magnanimity now!

The Tragedy of Donald Trump

This election is transitioning from total farce to all-out tragedy before our very eyes.

The latest is the off-hand "locker room banter" caught on a hot mic in 2005. I suppose my readers know what I'm talking about, so I don't have to repeat. There has been a storm of criticism in response, not least from his own side. Some holdouts still try to change the subject to Bill Clinton or say it's not really a big deal compared to Hillary's transgressions. But the failure to call this particular spade a spade because someone else's sins are worse is a prime example of how politics demeans us. We cannot look at our guy, our chosen one, with absolute honesty. We cannot call a spade a spade.

Is it significant? We used to hear all the time, way back in 1992 and 1996, that character matters. And I think it was Winston Churchill who said, "Character is destiny." In the 90s, Clinton defenders sometimes argued that his sexual issues and his political leadership operated on two different levels, private and public, and had nothing to do with one another. His detractors quoted Churchill and said once we excuse this kind of conduct we lose our soul as a nation. The case for the defense was essentially political, while the case for the prosecution was essentially spiritual.

These same arguments are being made today, only now Donald Trump takes the place of Bill Clinton. Many of the same people who held Clinton in contempt now eagerly defend Trump from the same charges. For them, the bar is very high for criticizing Donald, but extremely low for criticizing Hillary. Double-standards abound.

Just how character influences and poisons decision-making and leadership is hard to say, Certainly lousy creeps have sometimes done good things in office I suppose. And we aren't electing saints, as Trump's apologists like to say. But I still say that moral leadership is big part of the job-description. Presidential leadership has a significant impact on the moral climate of the nation. Trustworthy men and women are needed most of all. Donald Trump is all swagger and bravado on the surface, a manner that has served him well in his world, but under that surface, and not far under, is a lot of darkness. And as Christians ought to understand, the darkness in a man will make itself known, It's what's inside a man that stains him.

How do we overlook this and indeed reward it with power? We have been presented this election year with an extraordinarily poor choice. My contention is that as Christians we must distance ourselves from a system that does not give us a morally acceptable choice. I would be gratified if out of this the Body of Christ would re-discover that the way of the Cross is not a march toward political power. If we accept the alluring promise of influence from Trump, we make a devil's bargain, the very deal that Jesus rejected in the wilderness.

I suspect that the Trump campaign is finally sinking. I see this morning that another lurid episode has come to light. The Clinton campaign has of course had months to dig this stuff up and the timing of these stories, just before the second debate and right at the time that  early voters are receiving their mail-in ballots, is no coincidence. And everyone seems to agree there will be more.

And that's the thing. This is turning from farce to tragedy, as I said, because the Republican Party willfully chose and blindly followed a path that many saw would end exactly here. The Republican brand is smeared, of course, but that's the least of it. The Trump brand, the promotion of which has been Donald Trump's career for many years now, is irreversibly tarnished, but neither is that the worst of it. The seeds of this downfall were present from the start, and that is the essence of tragedy. We know that Macbeth's lust for power will get him in trouble, or that Oedipus should not sleep with that woman. Only downfall can follow.

I may be wrong, but I think we are in the "downfall" phase of a tragedy that began with Trump's triumphant march through the primaries (although it really began somewhere in his boyhood, at a level that none of us will ever know), and is ending now in the collapse of the storybook Trump and the revelation of the truth of his soul before the eyes of millions. It is not a pretty sight.

Have you ever seen A Face in the Crowd? A no account drifter rises to become first a television phenomenon with the persona of the good-hearted straight-talking country boy, then on top of that a political force. The new medium of television makes him a star. People believe in him, trust him, but behind the scenes he is a contemptible creep. But character will out, of course, and in the end we see first the revelation of the lustful bully, and finally, deeper even than that, when the last layer is peeled away, the boy-man crying pitifully for attention.

As I say, I may be wrong, and the resilient Trump may bounce back from this as well, but former friends (however reluctant, like Paul Ryan) are starting to disassociate themselves from him. Even the Trump camp has done the rarest thing, issuing an apology of sorts. They had gambled that an America that seems to wallow in so much sin would surely have no problem with Trump's spotty past. But though a good man is proverbially hard to find, we still want at least the good actor playing the part reasonably well. Trump has lost his chance at that.

Several times during the primaries Trump said that he didn't really need to be president. He could walk away and go back to his life of promoting the Trump brand (Trump hotels, Trump wine, Trump steaks, Trump airlines) and be fine with that. The thing is, the brand itself is in trouble too. When the man is revealed, the brand is destroyed. Can he save himself from this? I don't know. It will be interesting to see. But we may be watching the slow-motion crash-and-burn not only of a candidacy, but of a man.

3 thoughts

1. I have only one vote. Out of, what, 130,000,000? It counts, but it doesn't count for much. Nothing hangs in the balance. It's not real important to the outcome of any national election, so no one need get bent out of shape if, well, I simply "throw it away." It's not my civic obligation to choose between two scoundrels. Not voting seems a perfectly legitimate option to me in any election year, but maybe especially in this one. See, no matter who I vote for, one of these two, Donald or Hillary, is going to win. I can't stop either outcome from happening.  One of them, Hillary, represents a political setback for the country in my opinion. The other, Donald, is a nightmare. So I'm skipping this one. It's just a bad, bad choice.
2. Autumn is here. Leaves all over the yard. Drove to Boston over the weekend and in some spots along the highway the color was breathtaking. Other stretches, they hadn't yet begun to change.
3. As I mentioned, I spent my birthday in Boston, having a fine time with the fam. Being there on the last weekend of the David Ortiz era was something. That town really loves Big Papi. As a card carrying member of Red Sox Nation since 1977, so do I. He made our baseball dreams come true.