It Will More Than Do: Jamie Raskin, National Hero

The presentation for the prosecution by Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) during this past week’s remarkable Senate hearing was very simply magnificent. It was stunning. It ought to be archived somewhere, prominently, to be replayed for generations to come so that they will know about the guilt of Donald Trump in inciting the riot on Capitol Hill on January 6 and about the intellectual and ideological ruin that is the current Republican Party.

His presentation was exacting, forensic, logically irrefutable, nearly flawless in execution and a masterpiece of rhetoric—some of the best of which was more or less extemporaneous, as when he embraced the “tag” put forward by Trump’s hapless and incompetent lawyers that the charges against the former president were a new “Raskin Doctrine.” The video evidence, much of which was new, brought home again the seriousness of what happened that day. That Raskin performed this brilliant service to his country in the immediate aftermath of the death of his college-age son by suicide….what can you say? 

In the Twitter-sphere and elsewhere a lot of people were disappointed or furious that Democrats “folded” when they declined Saturday to call witnesses. This was after a report from a moderate conservative who was with House minority leader Kevin McCarthy during an angry phone call with Donald Trump in the middle of the riot, urging the president to call off the rioters. Trump had (of course) expressed that the rioters were antifa, to which McCarthy angrily responded that no, they were his supporters. To which Trump reportedly said, “Well, Kevin, I guess these people care more about the election than you do.” (And McCarthy reportedly responded, “Who the fuck do you think you are talking to?”)

A most damning bit of evidence. But Raskin and colleagues’ presentation was already damning as to Trump’s comportment during the riot. Their presentation was electrifying and sobering all at once, an effect that would have been diluted as the trial wore on. And Republicans were going to drag it out, endangering passage of Biden’s COVID relief and the confirmation of judges. And all the most damning witnesses imaginable were not going to get a conviction in this Senate, owing to the moral, intellectual and ideological rot of the Republican members—a rot that was now recorded, along with Trump’s guilt, on national television for all of time. Raskin was able to get the report about McCarthy's phone call on the record, which was enough. Mitch McConnell’s scorching condemnation of Trump after the acquittal—which may have been part of the bargaining that happened Saturday morning—underscored that despite the acquittal, this was no victory for Trump or Trumpism.

It was a massive defeat. His lawyers were a humiliated laughingstock, and everyone who watched it knows it. David Frum wrote a couple of great columns during the trial, one about the incompetent buffoonery that has always seemed to be endemic to anything Donald Trump touches, and a later one after the acquittal, titled “It’ll Do.”

It will more than do. There is nothing more important than that the Biden Administration have a successful first year---that means massive COVID relief and the acceleration of the vaccine rollout. We might, just possibly, be moving back toward something like normal by September. This will do more to neutralize Trumpism than all the witnesses that might have been called. That can happen now because the House managers quickly wrapped up a searing, brutally winning case against the former president.

And Jamie Raskin is a national hero.  

Liberals Should Let Go of Roe v. Wade

   The painful Capitol Hill spectacle of the last two weeks must surely have made clear, to anyone on either side of the partisan divide, what has been in plain sight for a long time: the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, the fate of which lay behind the brutal machinations of both parties, is the poison pill at the heart of all that has gone wrong in American politics in the last forty years.
   It has also, I believe, been a disaster for the liberal left, permanently alienating a segment of the population from legitimate liberal-left causes: livable wages, a fair tax structure, a strong public education system, and universal healthcare.
    I think the procedure should be legal, and if the court had kept its nose out of this subject many states, if not most, might have ratified abortion by now. But I have never been able to understand how the Court construed this to be a constitutional right, or how “due process,” as protected by the 14th amendment, can be extended to include a medical procedure. I wonder how many of the ruling’s defenders can explain it.
   It’s a deal that many liberals, wanting to defend the liberation and empowerment of women, have made, I believe, with a bad conscience (I say so because for years I did so). The obstinacy with which Democrats have clung to this tortured reading over the years, has convinced the approximately one-third of Americans who regard abortion as a profoundly moral issue that the left simply does not negotiate in good faith. Roe v. Wade was the primer for a politics that was all about saying what you need to say to satisfy your “base,” regardless of facts, Constitutional principles, or anything else more enduring than winning the day.
   Let us stipulate that the other side has learned to play the game. God knows. The Republican party is thoroughly captive to a President who is a fluent liar and who has gone the final logical step and entirely discarded facts or truth as a governing principle. The devolution hardly began with Trump, however; there has been a steady corrosive drip of insincerity. Does anyone even remember the shameless Republican posturing around a private domestic tragedy in the case of Terri Schiavo?
   In the long slide to our current depths, Sarah Palin’s “death panels” lie must be regarded as the really, really deep dive. You might remember that “death panels” referred to a provision of the Affordable Care Act that would have established a funding stream and a reimbursement code within the Medicare program to pay doctors to have a conversation with patients about completing an advance directive, living will and other aspects of end-of-life planning. Congress killed the provision in the wake of Palin’s lie. (Six years later, in 2015, Medicare did indeed begin paying physicians to have these discussions with their patients).
   Palin’s lie has had legs. Almost a decade later, I know of an individual on Facebook who has posted that Ezekiel Emanuel, the Harvard medical ethicist who was an author and proponent of the provision, did so for the purposes of being able to “euthanize political opponents.” Give that some thought: there is an American out there, and he is not alone, so distrustful of “coastal elites” that he believes (or pretends to believe, in the safe space of social media where fantasies flourish) that they want to kill him.
   This is an individual who should be on our side. A decade ago the housing collapse and financial services industry scandal demonstrated that Wall Street can screw over the average American before Washington politicians can get their shoes on; both of those industries are now being de-regulated. Our elected politicians rely on ungodly amounts of money to get elected, much of it coming by hook or by crook, from Wall Street. The Supreme Court has ruled that a corporation is a “person” and the lavishing of extravagant amounts of money on a candidate is a form of free speech. A multi-billion-dollar, investor-driven pharmaceutical industry bears a very large share of responsibility for an opioid epidemic that has exacted extraordinary suffering on every segment of American society. We have the only healthcare system in the developed world where the first question you get asked when you go to the hospital is, “How is this getting paid for?” Private equity firms are buying up cash starved medical practices; by what logic does anyone think they will not dictate the limits of medical care according to their profit demands? For profit colleges. For profit prisons. For profit detention centers for detained immigrants.
   But go on any right-wing website, or tune into Hannity or Limbaugh, or look up your Trump-loving Facebook friend (if you have one) and you would think the United States was menaced by……socialism. Meanwhile, the Trump Administration practices the real thing, handing out $12 billion in subsidies to farmers damaged by protectionist policies that run counter to traditional conservative free trade policy, perfectly closing a perfect loop of perfect hypocrisy.
   Such is the measure of how badly we have lost the audience we should have. When the issue of abortion is returned to the states, where it should have been all along, at least some of the passion on the pro-life side will have been leaked out, and the political dynamics will favor a measure of choice: voters (including men) will have to live with the prohibitions they impose upon themselves. Then perhaps the liberal left can return to principles and policies aimed at securing the economic ground beneath Americans’ feet so they can thrive and prosper—policies like a publicly funded, single-payer national health insurance system that would be, I believe, restorative of American health in more ways than one. 
   It should have happened years ago. The passage of Medicaid in 1965, a kind of afterthought to the Medicare program, was believed to presage what would be the next logical step—universal healthcare coverage for every American citizen.
   In the interval, the Democratic Party and the liberal-left fatefully lashed itself to the electrified cage of a legal reading that some 30 percent of Americans believe to be morally reprehensible. The shockwaves from that ruling, and the cascade of escalating lies, dissembling, and demagoguery on both sides over the years, have seared our cultural and political fabric and warped our regard for each other. It has also, I believe, done serious damage to much that is good and true and unassailable in the American liberal tradition.

Road Trip: Hills, Voices, Mysticism, Candidates and Letting Go

“When I’m in California, I feel like something bad is going to happen, because there’s so much empty space. Here it’s cozy. If you believe the mountains are yours, like most West Virginians do, when you get back to these mountains you feel comfortable again. You feel at ease….When I see the mountains, it’s like they’re embracing me.”

 

I spent what felt like a lot of time driving through West Virginia this weekend on a 13-hour road trip from Washington, D.C. to Columbus, Ohio and back (six and a half hours each way), and found myself thinking about this comment. It’s from a lovely article by Larissa Macfarquhar in a recent New Yorker Magazine, a deeply sympathetic and informative portrait of Donald Trump supporters in a small town in southern West Virginia. It’s a highly descriptive statement; the hills in that country are so compressed together they do seem to make you feel enclosed. (During my first exposure to rural West Virginia on school trip when I was 12, I remember then being impressed by exactly this feature, and being rather scared of it; from suburban Washington, it was for me startling different and made me feel cut-off, entombed possibly in a vale of mist and shadows, and it exacerbated, perhaps, the lonely homesickness I was feeling on my first extended time away from home.) The crowded hills leave no space for the kind of expansiveness that one normally associates with a landscape, but create instead the characteristic hollows or ‘hollers.’ When fogs fills the hollers it becomes a world folded in on itself, shrouded, as it were, in its own distinctive self-history; it is out of this haunted landscape that the “high lonesome” sound of bluegrass was born. These impressions, and others I gathered 35 years ago when I took a bus trip across the country and then, a few years later, drove across the country, have caused me to think more than once about the effect of landscape on one’s perceptions of the world.

On this weekend I was driving between northern Virginia and Columbus, Ohio, and back the tops of the trees all over the hills were touched with the beginning of autumn.  Bright color, but still only dappled—one can imagine a careful child’s sponge painting, the reds and yellows and orange crenellated, and lots of greenery still carpeting the lower reaches of the ancient hills. In another two weeks it will be a riot.

******

Listening to the radio for six-and-a-half hours on a Sunday drive through the near-midwest and Appalachia is an interesting experience. A social historian, listening to a tape years later, might draw some interesting inferences about our country. Country music, “classic” rock stations, preachers of every stripe. Oddly, a large number of preachers with Scottish or Irish accents. Preachers relating (not explicitly, but still transparently) the meaning of being Christian to the importance of not voting for Hillary Clinton. Football games broadcast through static. A commercial in which an avid sounding 20-something fellow opens with, “I’d like to talk about an issue of grave social importance—condom use.” It was an advertisement for Trojan.

There is also a station I have lighted on many times driving through the East Coast mountain region—We Are One Body: WAUB, operated (according to the station’s website) by the diocese of Greensburg, Pennsylvania, out of Latrobe, Pennsylvania. There are no commercials, but the station does rely on contributions and there are occasional solicitations for donations.  It is otherwise a continuous reflection on Catholic Christianity hosted—most of the time I have ever tuned in—by the kindest sounding, most soft spoken, most brotherly young man, reflecting either on Scripture or very often on arcane doctrine of the Church. (I have heard him reflect—he doesn’t really “expound” the way preachers and pundits do—on the meaning of specific paragraphs and nuances of obscure Papal proclamations.) If there is a political or doctrinal inflection in one direction or another along the familiar cultural fault lines, I haven’t detected it. Certainly, the station would be appealing to the most orthodox Catholic; it is appealing to me, a non-Catholic skeptic. The website states that the station is “catechetical and contemplative” and “the programming is intended to present the life of the Church in a way that makes the Mystical Body of Christ more apparent.” (Catechetical and contemplative or not, the Brothers behind We Are One Body are living fully in the digital age. The website offers a downloadable App, and several venues for listening online at http://www.waob.org/.) The reflections are interspersed with Gregorian chant, a musical form well suited to contemplation and especially resonant driving alone through those old, old hills, and with periods of silence. A radio station that promotes periods of silence. I think it’s a concept that should catch on.

Somewhere else on the radio dial, far away from We Are One Body, a devout, exasperated Catholic was asked what the Church could do about the fact that young people—“Millennials”—were drifting away from the Church. He grumbled about the intellectual vacuity of what he termed “the atheist idea” and seemed to believe that the way to get young people back in the pews was to argue them back. I would like to have told him he would do just as well to go outside and beat his head against a rock.

But it has occurred to me later that in fact the Catholic Church has an enormous gift that could draw in many of the disaffected—namely this rich, rich inheritance of contemplative mysticism, of which We Are One Body is a such a charming representative for motorists driving 65 miles an hour across the Interstate highways of the Appalachian mountain range. (Protestants, having no such inheritance, are left with offering to the un-churched these ubiquitous folk and “alternative” worship services with the rock band and the theatrical trappings.) If Catholic parishes began thinking about creative ways to offer the Church’s ancient treasure of contemplative mysticism to their communities I believe they would find young followers. Actually, I think young people might eat it up. 

It is not, after all, the life of the Spirit that young people (and others) are fleeing from in their flight from the Church (and from religion in general); it is rather from what I would broadly call—by way of shorthand—“clericalism,” the deification of little men in robes and vestments, the perfumed odor of pharisaical righteousness, the itchy, obsessive preoccupation (inherent, it seems, in every orthodox religion) with what everyone is doing with their poor, sad sexual organs, and the habit of most organized religions and many “religious” people to fabricate a God who conveniently just happens to look (and vote) as they do.

On the Sunday I was driving, the young Brother was reflecting on the Incarnation, the distinctiveness of the Christian belief that Jesus was God made flesh, and the need to meditate on this most paradoxical of all doctrines—that Jesus was fully man and yet also God.  

******

When I wasn’t listening to We Are One Body, or trolling the airwaves for music that wasn’t deeply depressing, I hung around the high upper 80s on the radio dial where, if you are close enough to a major city, you can pick up public radio. West Virginia public radio is quite good. There was a lengthy interview with J.D. Vance, author of “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.” Vance’s book sounds fascinating—he sounds like an interesting and likable man, with a rather tortured family history—and its garnered a lot of attention, in part, Vance acknowledges, because of the election, which has focused attention on poor working class whites. (In this, his book has been joined by the way, by “White Trash: The 400-year Old Untold History of Class in America.”)

But about this particular “meme”—Donald Trump and the white working class. Among the countless things that anger me about this election and Trump’s ascendancy, perhaps this is the most infuriating: while it is certainly true that white working class men are almost entirely voting (or saying they will vote, or showing up at rallies) for Donald Trump, there is absolutely no way in the world he could have come this far in an election on that demographic alone. (Leave aside the preposterous delusion—bewildering to all those who see Trump for what he transparently is—that the New York real estate tycoon is some kind of honest broker for poor white working class people, or that he could give a damn about the West Virginians depicted in Larissa Macfarquhar's New Yorker article.)

The Trump phenomenon, in fact, is fed by legions of invertebrate Republican "leaders" at all levels, the usual low-IQ loud mouths in conservative media , and many, many perfectly comfortable American men and women whose jobs are not endangered and have never been anything but elaborately privileged, even judging by American standards, let alone the standards of how most of the rest of the world lives.

When I reflect on this and this sad and miserable election, I think of a profoundly sorrowful statement by Garrison Keillor. “If we elect this man president we are not the country we think we are….The churches should close their doors.”

 

*****

My trip took me through Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, West Virginia again and Western Maryland before coming into the mad traffic of the greater D.C. area.

The drive out from D.C. on Friday was miserable—it took at least two-and-a-half hours in northbound traffic to get as far as I might have gotten normally in one hour, and it rained the rest of the way. I had hoped to get to Columbus that night, but thought it better to stop for the night. I was visiting my daughter in college. We had a lovely time with her mother on Saturday, ignoring the Parents Weekend organized events and doing our own thing. But on Sunday I was impatient and crabby (I had a fuming fit standing in line at the Panera because a couple in front of us took too long placing their order) and eager—why? For what reason?—to get on the road.

I think my daughter was embarrassed for me at my immaturity. Or I was embarrassed for myself. Actually, she’s an adult and the necessary steps of separating she began as a teenager are all but completed. I doubt she gives me a lot of thought when she doesn’t absolutely have to. I haven’t quite let go of her—being her father has been the only aspect of my life in which I unquestionably knew what I was doing. All the rest of it, I have been making it up as I go along, a blind man groping along in the dark. I should let go of her, but I don’t know exactly what’s next.

It reminds me of a story I like a lot, “To Know a Woman,” by Amos Oz. The novel is a favorite of mine—I don’t read a lot of fiction—but I will admit it is a strange one. A lot of readers who love Amos Oz are stumped by it, understandably. Yoel Ravid is a middle aged Israeli, recently retired from the Mossad, the nation’s storied intelligence service. His wife has died in circumstances that are slightly mysterious, possibly involving a neighbor with whom she may have been having an affair. His teenage daughter seems to have some incompletely defined illness—which may or may not involve a certain amount of deliberate playacting on her part. Yoel’s relationship with her is scratchy, but not much more so than that of most fathers and teenage girls.  He is befriended by a middle-aged real estate agent, an odd fellow, a bit of a playboy whose admiration for Yoel is ever so vaguely erotic, something like a schoolboy crush.

The story is told in short, terse chapters in which not a lot happens. There is an atmosphere of tense uncertainty throughout, of frustrated action, of something being always uncannily “off,” not quite right—an ambience with which I somehow feel quite at home. Yoel’s is a keen intelligence, far seeing and penetrating, but hobbled by ambivalence—or rather, by a preternatural caution. He’s a cautious man by training (I am one by nature) and like me he wants to make the next step in his midlife a right one.

There is a pleasant, convalescent tenor to the resolution of the story, a relaxation—like a clenched fist slowly uncramping—of the low-grade anxiety that grips the story throughout, a sense of things out-of-balance suddenly righting themselves. Uncertainties are not so much resolved as let go of, as when Yoel (admonished by his daughter’s precocious boyfriend) agrees that he must let his daughter go and breathe on her own. For himself, Yoel is an observer, and he finds late in life a sudden pleasure in observing, only observing for its own sake and nothing more.  

Well, it’s a long drive back home from Columbus, not a fun one necessarily and I wasn’t wrong to be impatient, regardless of what my daughter thinks. On the other hand, I have always experienced driving to be somewhat meditative and as I found myself paying attention to those hills and valleys and the voices on the radio, and meditating on these observations as I wrote them over the following week since my return, I felt in a similar way that this too is who I am, an observer, whatever else may come as I grow old. Maybe that is all I will ever be.

It is not a bad fate. “Since he was capable of observing, Yoel grew fond of observing in silence. ... And if it was necessary to focus the gaze and remain on the lookout for hours and days, even for years, well there was no finer thing that this to do.”

 

Our Coming Clothespin Election: Hold Your Nose and Vote for Hillary

The writer Adam Gopnik has offered up some recent French history as an object lesson for how we might approach the coming election here in the United States. In 2002, the French far right National Front, headed by Jean-Marie Le Pen, managed—through luck, circumstance and lackluster opposition—to advance to a two-man contest for Prime Minister with the conservative reigning PM Jacque Chirac.

Le Pen is a not-so-closeted fascist whose opinions roughly mirror those of Donald Trump—foreigners out! Muslims out! France is for the French! It surprised exactly no one when Le Pen recently tweeted that if he were an American, he would vote for Trump.

But in that election year, French socialists and leftists united with sane conservatives to deny Le Pen. “Socialists who had spent their lives opposing Chirac, who thought him unprincipled, mediocre, and significantly corrupt, held their noses—some literally asked to take clothespins into the voting booths—and voted for him, and against Le Pen,” Gopnik writes. “…There are politicians we strongly disagree with, and then there are anti-constitutional crypto-fascist authoritarians.”

I think we are headed toward our own clothespin election, in which the probable candidates will be objectionable to many on both sides. I’ll not waste Observer readers’ valuable time on Donald Trump; but read Mr. Gopnik’s article in its entirety (http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-clothespin-campaign-a-french-history-lesson-for-anti-trump-republicans) or David Brooks’ scorching commentary (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/18/opinion/no-not-trump-not-ever.html?_r=0), or this blistering article by Ezra Klein (http://www.vox.com/2016/2/10/10956978/donald-trump-terrifying.)

Ted Cruz, the republican alternative to Trump, is vastly more intelligent and certainly more authentic. But he is offering up the same brew of radical nationalism along with his own brand of angry, reactionary politics, and the weird and flatly inaccurate idea that America is a “Christian” nation.
Anyway, after the New York primary, it’s not been looking good for Cruz.

Gopnik aimed his article at conservatives whom he hoped would see that Trump is a disaster for their own cause, as well as for the nation, and expressed hope that perhaps the Bush family might, sometime in October, come out and endorse Hillary Clinton. “…[R]ational or far-sighted conservatives should be sighing with relief that the alternative to the monster they’ve created is a reasonable, experienced mainstream centrist whose chief fault in progressive eyes is that she is too close to the conservatives’ own ideology.”

Well, we’ll see. But it’s possible that many Democrats will need to bring their own clothespins to the voting booth this year. What can one say about Mrs. Clinton (and her husband) that has not already been said? Even discounting her most unhinged critics on the rabid right who think she is the Spawn of Satan (or Satan’s wife), the truth is that there is lot not to like about her.

But she is the presumptive nominee (and by the time this appears may have locked up the nomination). As for her tenacious Democratic opponent, I confess that, personally, I have never “felt the Bern.” Sanders’ signature issues are admirable—I’m a longtime advocate of a single-payer healthcare system, the only issue with which I identify as a “progressive”—but they are entirely aspirational and have no chance at all of coming to fruition when our Congress is populated by fellows like that guy who threw a snowball in the chamber of the House of Representatives to “prove” global warming is a myth. The model for Sanders’ vision are the Scandanavian social democracies, where a network of social insurance programs is founded on a broadly accepted cultural ethic of common provision, social solidarity and shared responsibility, including a very high tax rate (nobody is getting anything for “free”)—an ethic that doesn’t even remotely exist in this country, where even the commitment to an asset as integral to our national identity as public education has eroded.

Forget “free” public college tuition. Here is a prediction: The next big “crisis” that will have everyone wringing their hands and wondering how it happened and why we didn’t see it coming, is when a bridge somewhere collapses. And just you watch: that water and lead poisoning scandal in Flint is just the tip of a great big iceberg underneath our nation’s cities.  

Public taxpayer dollars subsidize a vast but largely invisible infrastructure supporting all that we take for granted as the comfort, convenience and reliability of the “American way of life”: safe roads and bridges, a safe food supply, clean water, and a public health system that can identify emerging diseases and respond before they become epidemics.

It’s setting the performance bar pretty low, but perhaps our political leaders could tend to these fundamentals. Perhaps conservatives (including the clown with the snowball) could be reminded that it was the Eisenhower administration that built the Interstate highway system.

In these fraught times, a “reasonable, experienced, mainstream centrist”—even one as compromised as Hillary—may be just what we need, and a more than tolerable option given the alternatives in the other party. If fair-minded conservatives can embrace her, as Mr. Gopnik hopes they will, then the rest of us—either progressive fans of Sanders or others, like me, who just wish the Clintons were, you know, better people—can also make a sacrifice for sanity.

Garrison Keillor wrote a clever and funny column about this election, urging a little less gloom from people like me. But he ended on a grave note. “The choices, at this point, are extremely limited. Some Bernie women wish Elizabeth Warren were running. She’s not. There is a disaster who is in the race, though, and he’s done well against divided opposition. Come summer, the pluribus will need to unite.”

So let’s unite. And if you need to, grab a clothespin, clamp it to your nostrils, and pull the lever for Hillary.