The Weird Times

Inner Monologues and Desultory Reporting from Outer Space

The Weird Times Issue 20, September 27, 2020

“We are only witness to the motion of history. The task is to swim - not drown. The promise we make to our hearts is that our love will always find the shore.” —E.Ethelbert Miller

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Trump just told you how he plans to become America’s Dictator. Believe him. Umair Haque, Medium, 9.25.20

His literal words were: “there won’t be a transfer.”

Trump isn’t refusing to commit. He is telling you he does not intend on a peaceful transfer of power. Refusing to commit implies hedging, some level of vacillation, hesitancy. That is far too generous a way to put it. “There won’t be a peaceful transfer” is not a refusal to commit — it is a commitment in the other direction. Against peace, and against transferring power.

“There will be a continuation of power.” Even if it’s not a peaceful one. He is literally telling you that he intends to continue in power, any way that he can. There is no room for interpretation or doubt here. His words are very simple and plain and clear. He isn’t exactly a philosopher. He’s telling you precisely what he intends to do, which is for there not to be a transfer of power, but a continuation of his Presidency, any way that he needs to achieve such a thing, whether or not it is Constitutional, legal, democratic.

This is not something we can ignore. I don’t think the media fully understands that the danger we face requires more of them. I do think Republicans are preparing on the state level to do this. There will not be any meaningful objections by national Republican so-called leaders, for whom a Trump coup is a comfortable extension of their current hyper-partisan reality.

So we are on our own now. Our first best hope is a landslide election and clear results in the swing states on election night. Democrats and progressives must put aside health fears of in-person voting and go to the polls either early (if allowed in their state) or on Election Day. Bring a book. Stand in line as long as it takes. VOTE IN PERSON.

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As the week unfolded following the unfortunate passing of RBG , it became pretty clear that the Repugnant Party has every intention of carrying their hypocrisy to its natural conclusion, exposing them once again for being committed to the narrow group consisting first and foremost of their billionaire funders and their minority rule theocratic political base, and not (ever ever ever) the people of the United States and the institutions of our democratic government. I don’t know why anyone is surprised by this. This group is fully committed to using the court system to achieve goals it could never attain in any fair election, to establish social controls that the majority of the people of this country do not want, and to institutionalize the power of money to control the economic system of the country, keeping the most right wing billionaires in control of our destiny.

We cannot stop the Senate from confirming Amy Coney Barrett.

There are only two things to do right now:

• Elect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

• Defeat as many Repugnant senators as possible.

And to accomplish these simple, but extremely challenging goals, we have a few important things to do, and not much time left:

• Turn out the largest number in history of Democratic voters in swing states and every state where a Democrat is running against a Republican senator

• Protect the integrity of the election

• Loudly, continually oppose the invented fantasy that if the election results take more than a day, the election must be turned over to the courts to adjudicate

• Defend every Repugnant lawsuit that challenges results, as their goal is to throw the election into a constitutional crisis

• Expose the funders of the Republican party – billionaires and Russian oligarchs

If you are feeling pessimistic and unable to act, just remember, you are not alone. We the people have the power to make change, and to protect democratic principles and institutions. This is the fight of our lifetime. We did not ask for it and we do not welcome it, but we must activate ourselves to save the future.

Some organizations you can work with to accomplish these goals.

• Flip the Vote

• SwingLeft

• Powered by People (Beto O’Rourke’s grassroots group)

• Indivisible

• 350.org

• Flip the Senate

Senate races to work for:

• Hickenlooper, Colorado

• Ossoff, Georgia

• Harrison, South Carolina (let’s get rid of Lindsey Graham now)

• Gideon, Maine

• Cunningham, North Carolina

• Kelly, Arizona

• Greenfield, Iowa

• Bollier, Kansas

• McGrath, Kentucky

• Heger, Texas

• Jones, Alabama

Republicans will replace RBG but Democrats hold the trump card – no, really by David Litt, The Guardian, September 23, 2020

The average American disagrees with Republican orthodoxy on every major issue: healthcare, climate change, gun violence, immigration, taxes, Covid response. Yet thanks to the biases embedded in the American political process, Republicans have not just remained viable, but secured extraordinary amounts of power. We can’t know for certain who would benefit from upending the status quo that existed at the time of Justice Ginsburg’s passing – but we do know which party has the most to lose.

What’s more, the GOP has not just benefited from the bias of the American political process – they’ve benefited from the fact that many Americans don’t realize such a bias exists. Despite some politicians increasing eagerness to erode our democracy, large majorities of Americans still believe in representative government. Among other things, they want to see higher turnout in elections; they want wealthy interests to have less influence in our politics; they oppose the electoral college; don’t want President Trump to rush through a judicial pick so close to an election; and were horrified when attorney general William Barr teargassed peaceful protesters earlier this year.

It’s possible that as fights over our political process become more high-stakes and more public, Americans will become less supportive of democracy. But it seems more likely that they’ll grow increasingly resentful of the party which views representative government as a threat.

…

“Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

It’s no surprise that Donald Trump wants to govern without consent. But the constitution is clear: we don’t have to let him do it.

(David Horsey/LA Times)

What if Trump loses the election, but tries to engineer a seemingly legitimate scenario to subvert the results? Impossible, we might think, and hope. Not so. Be on guard!

The Election that Could Break America: If the vote is close, Donald Trump could easily throw the election into chaos and subvert the result. Who will stop him? – Barton Gellman, The Atlantic, from the November 2020 issue.

“The worst case, however, is not that Trump rejects the election outcome. The worst case is that he uses his power to prevent a decisive outcome against him. If Trump sheds all restraint, and if his Republican allies play the parts he assigns them, he could obstruct the emergence of a legally unambiguous victory for Biden in the Electoral College and then in Congress. He could prevent the formation of consensus about whether there is any outcome at all. He could seize on that un­certainty to hold on to power.

Trump’s state and national legal teams are already laying the groundwork for postelection maneuvers that would circumvent the results of the vote count in battleground states. Ambiguities in the Constitution and logic bombs in the Electoral Count Act make it possible to extend the dispute all the way to Inauguration Day, which would bring the nation to a precipice. The Twentieth Amendment is crystal clear that the president’s term in office “shall end” at noon on January 20, but two men could show up to be sworn in. One of them would arrive with all the tools and power of the presidency already in hand.

“We are not prepared for this at all,” Julian Zelizer, a Prince­ton professor of history and public affairs, told me. “We talk about it, some worry about it, and we imagine what it would be. But few people have actual answers to what happens if the machinery of democracy is used to prevent a legitimate resolution to the election.”

…

Trump’s behavior and declared intent leave no room to suppose that he will accept the public’s verdict if the vote is going against him. He lies prodigiously—to manipulate events, to secure advantage, to dodge accountability, and to ward off injury to his pride. An election produces the perfect distillate of all those motives.”

Let us not hedge about one thing. Donald Trump may win or lose, but he will never concede.

Are we prepared to fight this?

We must declare our willingness to not allow democracy to fall to a tyrant. And we must think through how to do that, before this begins to unfold.

Are we prepared?

Knowledge and awareness are the basis of our power.

Always remember that DJT is a con artist and a television personality first and foremost. His daily goal is to own the news cycle by any means necessary. This is an important and thought provoking piece: The Strongman Con, Teri Kanefield.

Dear People: It’s time to talk about the Strongman Con.

People totally forget that the GOP lost the midterms by 8 percentage points. Losing the midterms was not good for the GOP. If they could have avoided that, they would have. They couldn’t avoid it. They lost.

Q: Why would someone like Putin want to be overestimated?

A: Being overestimated is how wanna-be Strongmen appear powerful. It makes them feared and respected.

Trump is first and foremost a conman. He wants his supporters to think he is invincible. He wants you to think that he can’t be stopped.

Trump has been compared to Hitler. The better comparison is Mussolini.

Weber, in his classic essay, Politics as a Vocation, outlined 3 sources of authority for government. In a nutshell they are:

·       Traditional (monarchy)

·       Personal charisma (today we’d say ‘cult leader’ or demagogue)

·       Legal / rational (democracy / rule of law.)

Mussolini, like Trump, drew his authority from #2, what Weber called Personal Charisma. Trump critics have a hard time with the charisma part.

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Why the Democrats are our Narrow Favorite to Win the Senate, The Economist, September 23, 2020. Their new statistical model gives Democrats a 67% chance of flipping the Senate.

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Episode Nine of Mighty Song Writers Video Series – Matt Quinn of the band Mt. Joy on early influences and musical storytelling.

“…writing can lead you in so many directions….”

We don't come down, we just stay up all year
Counting our vices dear, and the shit that got us here
When I looked up it didn't have to be a language
No written rules or commandments
It was enough to be alive

--“Jenny Jenkins” Songwriters: James Samuel Cooper / Matthew Ryan Quinn — Jenny Jenkins lyrics © BMG Rights Management

This series supports the nonprofit Mighty Writers in Philadelphia, which has taken up the challenge during pandemic to provide food and words to needy communities during pandemic.

Someday we will look back at the four years we have just lived as pivotal – and despairingly so. Even if we beat DJT and the Repugnants, so much damage has been done to our polity, we may never recover. In a very short period of time, we may well have lost a democracy that was muddling along in seemingly working order for 240 years.

How this happened will be the subject of hundreds of books.

“Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone.”

(Big Yellow Taxi, Joni Mitchell)

Despite the weight of our current times, there is always some good news to report:

How beavers became North America’s best fire fighters, Ben Goldfarb, National Geographic, September 22, 2020.

“A new study concludes that, by building dams, forming ponds, and digging canals, beavers irrigate vast stream corridors and create fireproof refuges in which plants and animals can shelter. In some cases, the rodents’ engineering can even stop fire in its tracks.”

(I interviewed Ben Goldfarb about his excellent book, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers, and Why They Matter for my podcast series Writerscast in 2018.)

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Bringing Beaches Back to Life: the First Nations restoring ancient clam gardens, Adrienne Mattei, The Guardian, September 23. In the Pacific northwest, local people work the shoreline, creating conditions for useful species to thrive.

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Statins Reduce COVID-19 Severity, Likely by Removing Cholesterol the Virus Uses to Infect, Heather Buschman, PhD and Jeanna Vazquez, UC San Diego. Analyzing anonymized patient medical records, UC San Diego researchers discovered that cholesterol-lowering statins reduced risk of severe COVID-19 infection, while lab experiments uncovered a cellular mechanism that helps explain why.

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The Facebook Defectors Turning Trumps’s Strategy Against Him, Arielle Pardes, Wired, 9.15.20. The platform was key to the president’s upset victory in 2016. Can a group of former employees use it to boost Joe Biden?

But McGowan rolls her eyes at the notion that Trump conjured some kind of digital black magic in 2016. She takes no issue with copying his playbook. In fact, she admires the way that conservative power brokers, including the Koch brothers, have used data to their advantage. She just wants to do it on the left. Some Democratic megadonors seem to buy her argument: Acronym and its affiliated political action committee have received millions in funding from LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, film director Steven Spielberg, and venture capitalist Michael Moritz.

Nearly three-quarters of adults in the US use Facebook, most of them every day. “This is where the game is played,” Barnes says. “As long as the field is there, that's the field we're going to play on.”

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JURY OUT

Any other witnesses?
     I wave my hand
I can’t see you  
It’s the smoke from the fires
There’s not much time 
I’ll be brief
And?
June 19, 1953
Your birthday?
My first memory of grave danger
Reference?
Ethel and Julius Rosenberg
Relevance?
It was a very bad time
Bad and good like other times
 The country was on the verge of . . . .
Okay, anything else?
Dog tags, we had to wear a dog tag
You were in the military?
No, I was a child but we lived near . . . .
Then what’s your point?
My teacher said so they could identify our bodies
That sounds melodramatic
        I swear that’s what she said
Anything else?
Our synagogue in Atlanta was bombed
That I didn’t know
Hardly anyone knows but it was bombed because . . . .
Memory seems to be your problem
Amnesia is a national problem
Relevance?
Education is supposed to . . . .
This isn’t the place for lecturing 
I’m sorry but there’s more
Then get to it
11-22-63, 2-21-65, 4-4-68, 6-
You play the numbers?
         It’s Trump who is playing with . . . .
Aren’t you sick of Trump?  
Desperately sick
You better stay in bed
No one can afford to stay in bed
I find your contrary nature irritating 
11-3-2020 is the top priority
We can't predict the future
But we can predict the consequences
Who says?
It’s on all of us to say
Meaning?
 VOTE! VOTE! VOTE!

—Summer Brenner

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The Beanball

You didn’t see the election coming.

You tried to duck but it was too late.

You mistook a curve for a fastball.

As you lie on the ground 

both dugouts empty.

Your helmet continues to spin

like a country out of control.

—E. Ethelbert Miller

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The Laying
On
Of Hands


Under
the
blue
heron
sky
i write
down
what
I will
later
cross
out

The
ash
in the
book
that
I have
carried
to the
water's
edge
pulls
at me
to
jump
away
from
my
body

I can
taste
the salt
of the
ocean
and feel
the drowning
undertow
of my
country

—Beau Beausoleil

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My end of September reading list

For Now, Eileen Myles, Yale University Press

A People’s Guide to Capitalism, Hadas Thier, Haymarket Books

Concordance, Susan Howe, New Directions

The Poetry Deal, Diane DiPrima, City Lights

Mind Over Media: Propaganda Education for a Digital Age, Renee Hobbs, W.W. Norton

We Called it a War, Sargent Shriver, Rosetta Books

The Man Who Sold America: The Amazing But True Story of Albert Lasker and the Creation of the Advertising Century, Jeffrey L. Cruikshank and Arthur W. Schultz, Harvard Business Review Press

Parallel Perspectives: The Brush/Lens Collaboration, Holly Gordon and Ward Hooper, City Point Press

Stay Strong.