Tag: democracy

The Mismeasure of Man: Democracy in America

As a young boy, around 8 I think, my family was stationed at West Point, New York. One of many places I lived as an Army brat. My favorite place to hangout and play was at the old stone fort overlooking the Hudson River:  Fort Putnam.  One’s childhood imagination filled the space with soldiers, and prisoners in the dungeons, as we played on the ramparts and nearby woods.

One day, wandering through the fort’s grounds, there was a young man digging a shallow pit, about four feet by four feet and several inches deep.  A small pile of dirt was nearby, along with a shovel, a small shallow wooden box with a screen, and some bags.  I stopped and asked what he was doing.  He said he was doing archaeology for a class project.  He showed me some bits of pottery and a handful of rusty nails.  He let me hold them.  He even let me do a little digging.  

About a decade later I was majoring in Anthropology with a concentration in Archaeology.  My favorite class, ever, was a lab in human osteology.  Bones, human bones.  Ancient bones. My favorite professor, Dr. Ann Palkovich, was giving the class.   The bones we were studying were from a dig in the middle east, Israel, I think.  They were approximately two millennia old.

Every Friday there was a quiz.  There were about a dozen small boxes, labeled with a number, and in that box was a fragment of a bone.   Our task was to identify it.  Was it a bone?  If so, was it a human bone?  If it was a human, what bone was it?  What side of the body?  As the course progressed, and our skills and knowledge developed, the bone fragments became smaller and smaller. 

One day, walking into the lab, sitting on the tables were skulls from the collection.  Their empty eye sockets – orbits technically – beckoned.  Holding one, looking into the empty orbits, one wondered what that person had seen, what their life was like.  Skeletons spoke to us.  They told us their age, height, sex, what diseases they may have had, a history of injuries, markers of malnutrition, signs of what labor they engaged in.

Skulls have a very disturbing history in anthropology I learned in another class.  Much of it dark. Stephen Gould’s Mismeasure of Man greatly influenced me; a tattered copy of his book sits next to my keyboard as I type.

 In the mid- to late-19th century, the emerging science of anthropology was consumed by racist notions of white European superiority.  There was a confluence of 18th century notions human species being divided into race-based species — endowed with different levels of intelligence—and empire, colonialism, and Darwinian evolution.  Scientifically determined racial hierarchies of intelligence and civilizations were developed, with white European men (and their descendants) at the very top, with blacks at the very bottom.  Women of every race were also inferior to the men within their race.

This combination of naturalists, anthropologists, and cranks set out to scientifically prove that whites were superior.  The skull was the key, they thought.  Skulls were collected (mostly looted and stolen) from around the world and the craniums volumes were measured.  Cranial volume was a measure of brains, or intelligence.  And wouldn’t you know it.  Skulls of white European origin men had the highest cranial volumes.  Blacks the lowest.  Criminals also had the lower cranial volumes…. as did women.

The results were rigged we know.  Through both intentional and unintentional selection biases, data was manipulated or ignored.   This era of scientific racism had massive consequences.  It informed government policies on immigration, policing, the penal system well into the 20th century.  It served to justify colonization, empire, slavery, Jim Crow, and oppression of certain peoples.  You see, they believed, blacks could never be civilized, or intelligent, or worthy of humane treatment.  

You hear this racist legacy now when a white person says a black person is articulate.  Or, read that Florida’s school curriculum requires teachers to teach that black slaves learned life affirming skills from their white owners.  Or when black and women generals are fired for no reason other than their skin color or gender.  Hegseth believes that blacks and women can’t achieve high ranks in the military without preferential, woke, promotions. They are, Hegseth is convinced, inherently inferior intellectually and morally.

I thought scientific racism had met an ignoble death.  But alas, it’s rearing its ugly head once again and is alive and well in Trump’s world.  It is a corner stone of America’s foreign and domestic policies of the current administration.  Trump’s national security policy paper claims that western European civilization is being diluted by immigrants from Africa and the Middle East.  His constant demeaning of Africans – Somalis are low-IQ – or banning of visas from mostly African and Islamic countries, harken back to that dark age of scientific racism. 

Does Trump not know that the wheel was simultaneously invented in Mesopotamia (Southern Iraq), Turkey, and in Hungry (per recent study), some six thousand years ago while west Europeans were, well, still eating each other.

Does Trump not know that the chemical compound now known as gunpowder, was invented in China in the 9thcentury? Then about four centuries later the Chinese also invented the cannon.  According to a Ming dynasty book, they called it a “thousand ball thunder cannon.” Now that’s cool. West Europeans, were, well, still too uncivilized to invent a cannon.

Does Trump not know that an Arab mathematician at Baghdad University in the 9th century, wrote a book titled “Al-jabr ‘wa al-muquabala“?  Or, as we know it, Algebra.   Mohamed al-Kwarizimi, is the father of Algebra and the namesake of Algorithm. West Europeans, were, well, still in the Dark Ages. 

Does Trump not know that our number system 0 to 10 (the Arabic System) was invented in India, adopted by Arabic mathematicians?  That zero was not a western invention? In addition, trigonometry developed over millennia in Babylonia, India (sine, cosine, versine is attributed to an Indian mathematician and astronomer named Ayabhata), and the Arab world before reaching so-called western civilization, those great Teutonic cultures, who, were, well, still eating without proper utensils.

(Note to dumbass Texas: since you recently codified a state school curriculum denigrating Islam and the Arab world perhaps you ought to ban the teaching of high-level math. Don’t want them ‘Arab’ ideas to infect your children’s brains do you?)

So called western civilization is greatly indebted to other “civilizations.”  All those right-wing gun owners who don’t want to be replaced and fear western civilization is in terminal decline fearfully clutch guns made possible by those barbarians, the Chinese. 

Perhaps the one thing so-called western civilization can lay claim to is Democracy.  A Greek word meaning rule by the people.  Our Constitution’s preamble, “We the people….” traces directly back to Ancient Athens.  Mind you, in the late 19th century as Greeks emigrated to the U.S. they weren’t welcomed.  One person wrote they were ‘broken men from a broken land.’

Paradoxically, America’s claim to fame – a constitutional republic where the people rule – our one true gift to the world, is being laid to waste day-by-day by Trump, his administration, and his supporters that insatiably guzzle his tonic of racism and white supremacy.  Quite the contradiction to destroy democracy to save it from the clutches of non-western civilization.

The movement of people, and thus, ideas and inventions over millennia are what makes humans so powerful.  When you block the movement of people, you also block innovation and new ideas.  These inventions and ideas are what power our modern way of life in America.  A cumulative synthesis of ideas spanning peoples across the globe. Building walls and rejecting new people invites a slow decline and death of American civilization, not a golden age, but a new dark age.

Les Enfants Terribles

“The infant is more secure in his world than the mature man is in his wider world,” wrote American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in The Irony of American History. Stop, pause and think deeply about those words.  That thought is both simple and profound, I think.

Niebuhr was an influential voice of conscience as the shadow of the Cold War darkened the world and McCarthyism was eating at America’s soul. He wrote through the lens of a mid-century white male American gaze, eliding some of America’s worst excesses as a nation, or, at times, obliquely referencing them.   But who doesn’t write though the lens of the present and one’s lived experiences.   

His salient points, nonetheless, were about virtue, and in his book’s case: not rejecting the “Christian idea of the ambiguity of human virtue” while America pursues it Cold War battles with the Soviet Union through proxy wars.   He wanted America to avoid the trap that our way, the American way, was the one true way. 

You can imagine, were he alive today, Niebuhr would be a tenacious critic of Trump and the Christian right’s cult of virility; embodied by Stephen Miller’s pronouncement that the only virtues in the world are power, strength, and violence. Niebuhr’s and Trump’s concepts of virtue and Christianity are diametrically opposite. 

As for an infant being secure in his world, I think Niebuhr was critiquing the naiveté of the growing popularity of the myth of American exceptionalism and government policies that flowed from that belief.  The hubris that Americans of European heritage were a chosen people, in a land created by God for them, blinded them to history’s lessons.  We see that myth once again resonant in America.  Our government is run by these man-infants, these enfants terribles who naively and mistakenly believe that they are God’s chosen, that they speak for God, that only they have the virtue to lead America.  

Well before Niebuhr, many, many centuries ago, Abu al-Ala al Ma’arri  — a freethinking  poet, philosopher, and writer, some would say heretic — was born in Syria in the late 10th century.  He was skeptical and suspicious of any religion’s claim to absolute truth.  

Blinded by smallpox while young, he was nonetheless a prolific author, dictating his many works.  I came across a quote of his while reading about the crusades.  At the time, I was posted to Beirut and had borrowed a three-volume work on the crusades to help pass the nights away.   While al Ma’arri lived before the first crusaders set foot in Jerusalem in 1099, he did live in an Arab world where Shia and Sunni battled over the soul of Islam, territory, and power.  

Al Ma’arri’s truism stuck with me.  I even printed and framed the quote, hung it in my office for years:  “The inhabitants of the earth are of two sorts:  Those with brains, but no religion, and those with religion, but no brains.”  It was reminder to me of the sectarianism, fanaticism, and zealotry that drove (and drives) much of our world’s history.  In Beirut, the grim reminders of sectarian civil war were everywhere.  

It’s about extremism.  Whether it be religious bigotry and zealotry predicated on deliberate interpretations, misreadings, or misconceptions of religious texts to murder the other; or scientific Darwinism used to justify the sterilization or murder of the mentally and physically disabled.

We never seem to learn the lessons of sectarian violence.  If anyone is the personification of this ideation of no brains but religious certitude and bigotry it is Secretary of Defense Hegseth.   For Trump in general, and Hegseth in particular, the Iran war wasn’t really a war to prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons, although it was part of the equation. The war is really about going to war with Islam on a global scale, punishing a transgressive Iran for not becoming supplicants like the Saudis or Emirates.  

Netanyahu, for his part, exploited Trump’s and Hegseth’s biases and infant-like world view for his own purposes.  For all his faults, and there are many, Netanyahu is not naïve like an infant, he sees the world for its complexities.

As for domestic politics, most every single consequential executive order issued by this President revolves around a form of white male Christian sectarianism and zealotry:  American history (who counts and who’s erased), DEI (reinstating white male privilege), Immigration/birthright citizenship (racist replacement theory), access to reproductive rights (male control of the female body), and vaccinations (God decides who lives or dies). 

Our government, it seems every day, is falling deeper into the latter half of al-Ma’rri’s dictum and continues to self-radicalize as Trump’s misjudgments tanks the economy and he is humiliated on the world’s stage by Iran.   It is bad enough that the Executive Branch has been captured by these enfants terribles, but when Congress and the Supreme Court are also controlled by this gang of enfants terribles, things become dangerous.  

Trump’s strongman grip strangling America’s democratic institutions is starting to slip as he becomes weaker politically, but his weakness is also simultaneously a time of greater danger.  All strongmen flail violently when the end nears.  Miller’s virtues — power, strength, violence — are a warning.

Democratic institutions like the courts should be rallying around the Constitution, and they are at the lower levels.  But, given the Superme Court’s recent stay of a lower court’s order blocking implementation of parts of Trump’s executive order regarding mail in ballots, I doubt the Court will block Trump’s meddling and interfering with the mid-term elections. 

America has had periods of rupture before and come back stronger.  Will our country recover from the coming rupture this November?  We have seen what Trump’s acolytes can and will do to overturn an election.  Unlike January 6, 2021, the guard rails are gone.  They are acting for God, they believe.  Will Trump’s paramilitaries (DHS) rain pain on Americans after the mid-terms?  Will the military occupy blue cities and seize ballot boxes?  Will the Justice Department conduct mass arrests and detentions of Trump’s political opponents, blue state governors?  Will Speaker Johnson refuse to seat newly elected democrats in the House?  I wouldn’t be asking these questions if I thought they were far-fetched.  Ten years ago, I would say these are crazy questions.  Now, you feel in your gut that they aren’t far from the mark.

 Our 250-year-old experiment in in serious jeopardy, both at home and abroad.  We are a nation without friends.  A bully pushing agendas driven by sectarian ideologies.  Even our geographic neighbors – Canada and Mexico — hate us, it seems with a passion.  Why? Because we the people choose this nut job now residing in the White House.  We put him there. We choose this path with eyes wide open.   Most Americans who voted choose to reelect a Machiavellian, narcist, psychopath with a god-complex whose first disastrous term ended in an attempted coup.  What could go wrong?

V is for Voting

Famously, presidential candidate Bill Clinton posted a reminder note that said, “It’s the economy, stupid.”  A cue that wonky policy sound bites or nuanced discourses on the pro and cons of a particular policy only go so far with the average voter.  For most voters, it comes down to kitchen table issues:  

Can I pay the mortgage or rent? 

Can I feed my kids?

Can I afford a middle-class life?  

They measure these questions against the previous few years:  Am I better off today than I was four or two years ago?

For conservatives and Republicans, continuing failures to successfully manage kitchen table issues – remember 2008 and 2020, the Great Recession and then the COVID pandemic – brought them down a path to embrace the most divisive candidate, and then President, in modern American politics.  Kitchen sink issues were replaced by xenophobia, homophobia, Islamophobia, gynophobia and its corollary misogyny, and racial animus.  

The basic kitchen table question must be revived.  Am I, and the people of Louisa, better off today than they were January 20, 2025?

I say, “No.”  The people of Louisa are worse off by most kitchen table measures.  

Louisa’s farmers are hard hit.  High diesel and gas prices, record fertilizer costs combined with low prices for commodities, and disappearing lucrative foreign markets, like China, are crushing Louisa, and American, family farmers.  This is the result of Trump’s misguided tariff war with China.

While unemployment remains at 3.9 percent, core inflation continues to shrink paychecks.  Wage shrinkage from inflation continues to be a self-inflicted wound.  Trump’s economic nationalism, which includes steep tariffs on most countries, continues to drive inflation up and shrink real wages.  

The disastrous never-ending war on Iran continues to keep gas at over $4.00 a gallon and diesel at over $5.00.  Borrowing money is increasingly costly as investors sour on America’s ten-year bond, raising interest rates for mortgages, credit cards, car loans, and small farm and business loans. 

Food Insecurity: The Louisa Resource Center Council’s Food Bank has seen record numbers of visitors, I learned, over the past year.  Louisa County Public Schools this  summer — starting June 8 — began a summer school age nutrition program serving meals at various locations throughout the county. The meals are free of charge, and available for any child ages 2 to 18. No ID is required. This program speaks to the ongoing food crisis for vulnerable children in our county. How is it we have the first trillionaire, yet our children go hungry?

Housing costs in Louisa soar:  Housing costs have been increasing for well over a decade.  The median sales price for a home in Louisa is $445k, up from $234k a decade ago.  The price per square foot, however, increased close of 6 percent over the past year.  This is a huge rise, directly correlated to Trump’s tariffs.  His recent 50 percent tariff on Canadian wood products, will only make matters worse regarding affordable housing.

Access to health care continues to shrink: Deep cuts to Medicaid and Medicare subsidies and the elimination of the Affordable Health Care Act premium subsidies have left many folks in Louisa County with no health care or delayed health care, many of them vulnerable children.

Meanwhile, as the denizens of Louisa pay the price for Trump’s mismanagement of about everything he touches, he and his family have profited to the tune of $2 billion dollars, mostly in the dark world of crypto currency.  The swamp he promised to drain has turned into a deep sea of corruption.

You can also frame the “are you better off today” question in terms of our democracy.  Is America’s democracy better today than it was before January 20, 2025?

I think most Americans would respond with an emphatic “No.”

By most measures, America is backsliding from the hallmarks of liberal democracy:  Pluralism, the rule of law, a healthy civil society, a government with three coequal branches, government transparency, equal access to voting and representation in government at local, state, and federal offices.

Sustained attacks on America’s institutions such as a non-partisan civil service, an apolitical military, Congressional powers, the federal courts, an independent justice Department have severely degraded America’s 250-year experiment.

Our Justice Department has become so rotten that a man was arrested and charged with vandalizing the Lincoln reflecting pool just to support Trump’s claims that his embarrassingly botched reflecting pool make over was sabotaged.  Prosecutors lied to and mislead the grand jury that indicted him.   This is what dictators do.

Despite all these challenges and threats to our democracy, we must still care …. and take the time and effort to vote.  The Democratic primary is this coming Tuesday, August 4.  Get out and vote for one of the three Democratic candidates for our district (Tom Perriello, Rob Tracinski, and Suzanne Krzyaowski).

As for this November, Rep. John McGuire (R) must go.  He has done nothing over the past two years for the folks of Louisa County or the 5th Congressional District.  His main job has been to kiss Trump’s big, beautiful orange ass. His legislative achievements for Louisa: a ‘big fat nothing burger’ as right-wing influencers are fond of saying.  Mostly culture war stuff.  He did vote for the big, beautiful bill, however, which crushes Medicaid and Medicare services to Louisa’s poorly paid working class and her seniors, and refuses to reign in Trump’s never ending illegal war with Iran.  As for Louisas farmers, he has been a big fat zero.  

Seems he is more interested in the stock market as he bought Nvidia stock twice this year and other stocks that his House Committee assignments oversee.  Once a couple of weeks after Trump purchased his own Nvidia shares.  Hmmmm?

Now, as we near the November mid-terms, Trump is increasingly signaling he will not accept the results.  He is positioning the Justice Department, the country’s intelligence services, and the Department of Homeland security to support his claims of fraud.  Will the military stay above the fray or go all in with Trump? What will the Supreme Court do?  

This raises the very serious question that are on many minds.  Will there be a peaceful transfer of power after the mid-terms?  Voter turnout this November must be huge. A democratic win must be overwhelming. Not by one or two points but by tremendous majorities.  Trump won’t dare to challenge a massive electoral loss, especially in deep red counties and states.  At least I hope he doesn’t.  But he is crazy, and not all there, so who knows.  If he does, then we must be prepared take a different tact, massive civil disobedience in coordination with court action. 

So, ask yourself, and ask your family or friends, are we better off today than we were in January 2025?  No. So, let’s get out and make our voices heard next week and in November. 

This Old Flag: What is the 4th of July to Americans?

“Our masters, they have lived under the flag, they got their wealth under it, and everything beautiful for their children. Under it they have grind us up, and put us in their pocket for money.  But the first minute they think that old flag mean freedom for we colored people, they pull it right down and run up the rag of their own. But we’ll never desert the old flag, boys, never; we have lived under it for eighteen hundred six-two years, and we’ll die for it now.”

Corporal Prince Lambkin, 1st South Carolina Colored Infantry

What is the 4th of July to Americans? 

Besides the obvious play on Frederick Douglass’ famous speech, that question has occupied, no troubled, my mind these past several months.  Not only for Americans as a people, but for myself as well.  Why does our 250thanniversary simultaneously inspire me, but also repel me?  I recall the energy and excitement of our bicentennial in 1976, although through the lens of a 12-year-old.   

As a patriotic American that served in uniform and served in our foreign service overseas in war and conflict zones, this anniversary bothers me. It vexes me because I think, it is deeply tarnished and soiled.  Mostly because it has been stolen and appropriated by Trump for his personal glorification and enrichment.  I ‘ve been to countries where tinpot dictators’ rule and Trump’s America has many hallmarks of these petite regimes.

There are two national plans on how to celebrate our nation’s story of independence. One, a bipartisan celebration planned by a commission authorized and funded by Congress in 2016, and the second, a partisan celebration highlighting one faction:  The Trump Organization.

America250 is, according to its website, is the “U.S. Semi-quincentennial Commission established by Congress in 2016 to plan and orchestrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.”  It is led by persons “Appointed by the House and Senate leadership of both parties, the nonpartisan Commission is composed of 16 private citizens, 4 U.S. Representatives and 4 Senators, as well as 12 Ex Officio members from all three branches of the federal government and its independent agencies.”  For close to a decade this commission has been working across party lines to plan for our 250th anniversary celebrations.

Freedom250 is a Trump initiative managed by an event planning firm – Event Strategies LLC — with long ties to Trump. As with anything Trump, things are opaque and murky, like the reflecting pool.  Its’ website is silent as to its leadership, organization, and make-up.  The White House calls it a ‘public-private venture.’  The company, according to a Wired article, has raked in tens of millions of tax payer dollars, to including a potentially $100 million windfall in government contracts with the General Services Administration. (https://www.wired.com/story/they-helped-plan-the-january-6-rally-now-their-events-company-is-raking-in-millions-in-government-contracts/)

Initially, from what I could gather, both the America250 commission and Trump’s Freedom250 organizers worked together.  The original event organizer for America250 was let go and Event Strategies LLC got the gig.  This explains, I think, what happened to $150 million that was appropriated by Congress for the 250th anniversary in the “big beautiful bill.  The bill did not designate whether the taxpayer dollars went to America250 or Freedom250.  From what I learned from an NPR interview regarding Freedom250, it was initially agreed that $100 million would go to America 250, with the remaining $50 million going to Freedom250.  That decision was reversed.  As of this writing, less than a week before the 4th of July, America250 was allocated only $25 million. This begs the question, where did the $125 million go? 

Freedom250 quickly monetized July 4th by selling Freedom250 logoed merchandise through its website, mimicking America250 website selling America250 logoed anniversary products.  Sales from America 250 would go to the Congressionally authorized Commission presumably.  Where then, do the sales from Freedom250 go?  Event Strategies LLC?   It seems Trump and his corrupt cronies are perhaps profiteering from our grand 250th anniversary.  

This arrangement highlights, I think, that Trump’s love of America is purely and simply transactional.  “Make America Great Again” is a multimillion-dollar profit center for Trump.  A slogan to capture the MAGA masses imagination and rake in their hard-earned dollars.

Our country has many blemishes, our history is troubled, great injustices were perpetrated, but as Corporal Lambkin intoned in his remarks, this is our country good or bad, we love it, and we will die for it.  It is as much our land as it is anyone’s, slave master or freed slave, and we will fight for it.  And we [the former slaves now soldiers] have the patriotic moral high ground.  He probably wouldn’t understand the MAGA slogan, or, more likely, think it more fitted to the slave master’s rebellion than his own quest for freedom and equality.

Lambkin and his fellow soldiers knew something about what it means to be a patriotic Americans.  Something that Trump can’t ever grasp.  America is about community, about service, about sacrifice, about progress towards a better good, to work for something bigger than oneself.  Trump is and always will be about himself.  Greed, corruption, money, power, and fame.  Trump had an opportunity to fight for his country.  He did not.  He thinks those that served and died for their country are “suckers.”  His words not mine.  

Trump is like those slave masters who got their wealth under the American flag, but when it became too pluralistic, too inclusive, too democratic, they rebelled like spoiled pampered aristocratic slave masters.  Instead of moving forward toward a better America, Trump wants ‘real’ Americans to follow him as a redeemer, a modern-day liberator of white Christian America.  

This self-styled autocratic piped piper of Mar a Lago is trying to take America back to a mythological, godly ordained America where great white men ruled wisely and justly, women swooned and had babies, and blacks knew their place.  That is the America Trump yearns for. I can’t tell if he wants to go back all the way to 1856 or just 1954.  Erasing the history of blacks, Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and women is part of that strategy.

Trump and Freedom250 hijacked our 250th anniversary. It is the coronation and deification of Trump, not a celebration of America and all walks of American life.  The mixed martial arts extravaganza on the White House lawn is an example of this Trump centric spectacle.  An eroticized male theater of mostly naked white men grappling with each other for the affections of our dear leader Donald Trump, with Trump sitting ring side admiring their hard, sweaty bodies, in a space mostly devoid of women.   Happy Birthday wishes big boy!

In the run up to into 2026 we have been subjected to a barrage of endless Trump vanity projects.  Renaming the Kennedy Center after himself.  Building a billion-dollar ballroom, hanging three-story tall portraits of himself on government office buildings, bejeweling the White House with gold, having the Treasury mint coins with his image, ordering special U.S. passports be printed with his image superimposed over a famous print of the signing of Declaration of Independence.  The message:  Trump is America, America is Trump.

It is hard to remain enthusiastic about our 250th anniversary when it is overrun by rats and imbeciles.  The constant conveyor belt of assaults on our constitution, on who’s a citizen, on our rule of law, on our civil society, on our courts, on our men and women of color who serve our country with dignity and honor, fatigues the everyday American. This list of Trumpian inspired vainglorious squalor can go on for pages.   

So, what then is the 4th of July to me?  For me it remains a time to reflect on our American origin stories, the confluences of many nations, representing peoples already here and those that immigrated, willfully or otherwise.  We were conceived as a nation built on an ideology of equality, not race or nation.  It was this enlightenment promise that all men are created equal that drew people to this country in the decades that followed. That promise today is still seen as equally valid as it was the day it was penned.  

We still have work to do, however, as anyone not blinded by rightwing propaganda can see.  Our founders in the preamble to the Constitution recognized that achieving this grand promise was just a beginning.  The preamble is a statement of a goal, an endpoint in some distant future.  It is a goal I think most Americans continue to strive for.  To go backwards is un-American, to go forward is quintessentially American.  

I am proud to be an American, but I find myself more akin to Corporal Lambkin’s ideal of what it means to be an American, to make for a more perfect union, despite our imperfections.  Not the backwardness, hate, and greed represented by the current person soiling the White House and its hallowed grounds. America and Americans are better than that.

Goethe, a Dead Italian Poet, and an American Presidency

In the late 18th century Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe completed a play loosely based on the late 16th century Italian poet Torquato Tasso.  Part autobiographical, according to one scholar, Goethe explores Tasso’s real-life moments of inspired poems created in the throes of mental illness, perhaps during episodes of manic depression or schizophrenia.  

At one point Tasso was confined to a ‘madhouse’ for pulling a knife on his patron, the Duke of Ferrara, Alfons.  In the play, the protagonist also was placed under house arrest for threats and pulling a knife.  Goethe uses the play to explore the ‘tensions between the rational and the irrational,’ according to one academic article. From this play comes the much-quoted saying, “the coward only threatens when he is safe.”

This is a cogent observation of the human condition, even if the quote has become something of a truism.  It worries me because our President seems to be threatening everyone and everything as he too shuttles between the rational and the irrational.  His knife is our military and domestic paramilitary police.

Things are not going well for Trump – mentally or politically — it seems.  

His war with Iran is a military, strategic, and political disaster.  Iran checkmated him.  Meanwhile, as the Strait of Hormuz remains closed and America’s main street economy tanks, Trump fiddles with childlike vanity projects.  

Inflation is rising at a quick pace, all because of Trump’s disastrous tariff wars and his catastrophe of a war with Iran, a war of choice.  Last week gas prices were at this country’s highest national average cost per gallon ….ever.  Americans, according to a new report, are falling behind in debt payments “at the fastest pace since the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.”  Credit card delinquencies rose to 13 plus percent in the first quarter of 2026.  Additionally, auto loan delinquencies are also at record numbers.  His polls are lower than sleepy Joes ever were.  

Internationally, the world is aghast at Trump’s pretenses of not only being King of America but seeking to rule the world.  At every opportunity he channels the evil emperor Ming the Merciless of Flash Gordon fame.  Trump’s daily mental ruptures are rattling global markets.  The 10-year government bond yield is at record highs, meaning sureness in the U.S. government ability to pay off its debts is declining.  Because mortgage rates are linked to the 10-year bond, not to the Fed’s rate that banks get, it means that mortgage rates remain stubbornly high, making it harder to buy a home. That’s Trump’s doing, not the Chairman of the Fed. In short, international confidence in America is in freefall. 

Yet, Trump seems wholly unconcerned with the mid-terms or 2028.  Just pleasing his MAGA base and ignoring the basic sensibilities of democracy and the democratic process. As if they no longer exist. He even posted an image of himself with a rifle and the carcass of a rhino.  Threatening Republicans who don’t back him 100 percent. 

 Why?  What does he have up his sleeve that makes him think he is safe from political disaster and reversal?

I can only guess he isn’t concerned about the Republicans losing the house and senate this November or the White House with a democratic incumbent in 2028.   That the outcomes of the vote of 2026 and 2028 are irrelevant; that he intends, and believes, he can and will stay in power. 

As Trump vacillates between the rational and irrational, he increasingly lives in the latter camp. I am deeply concerned that a mental health driven constitutional breakdown is becoming increasingly likely should neither his Cabinet or Congress intervene.  Given the cowardice of his cabinet Secretaries, Vice President, Roberts, Johnson, and Thune, Trump has nothing to fear and continues his campaigns of threats.

A Supreme Mess: Roberts and His Den of Constitutional Thieves

“Good Morning Chief Justice Roberts, I see you put out the new signs”

We are, I think, in a supreme mess. A vindictive Chief Justice Roberts just settled a vendetta. As a Reagan Administration lawyer, Roberts opposed strengthening the Voting Rights Act. He penned memos arguing that letting someone sue a state for a ‘discriminatory effect’ was federal overreach, and interfered in states’ rights.

Despite his opposition to the amendment to the voting rights act, Congress in 1982 passed the bill in a bipartisan vote. Forty four years later he and five other conservative justices strike down that amendment as part of ten-year set of rulings undermining the law and Congresses’ intent. In effect stealing not only the Voting Rights Act, but the 15th Amendment, from the American people.

Congress clearly and resoundingly spoke on this major question in 1982. Now, the chief proponent of the Major Questions doctrine, says not good enough. If anything, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was, and is, an example of Congress clearly stating its will, the will of the people, on a major constitutional question. That is enforcing the 15th Amendment.

This ruling highlights why we are in trouble as a nation. To the conservative super majority, It’s not about the Constitution, it’s about settling personal and political vendettas. Dangerously, the Robert’s Court is a corrupt right wing political machine, rewriting the Constitution at will. The increasing use and misuse of the shadow docket, anonymous rulings, labored arguments that collapse under their own weight, the outright fabrication of history and data, all point to a debased and crooked Court. A Court where profiteering and acceptance of bribes by some justices is brazenly open.

I think the court will overturn birthright citizenship in part. It just opened the flood gate for gerrymandering districts to favor whites (sorry, I meant I Republicans) months before the mid-terms. I also believe when Trump seizes ballots this November the Court will permit it to do so. When Trump announces his intent to run for a third unconstitutional term the Court will invent a new doctrine to permit Trump to run again. Hopefully the gentleman with the scythe will come calling first.

This corrupt court and a dysfunctional Congress are all that stand before a tyrannical Trump and one party authoritarian rule. We are, therefore, in a heap of trouble, up a constitutional creek without a paddle. Now is the time to look to the future and decide how we, as a people, will respond.

A Very, Very Short History of Voting Rights in America: 1776 to 2026

Let’s begin with a very short quiz.  True or false: Up to 1926 non-citizens in many States could vote in local, state, and national elections.  

If you answered True, you are ………correct.

If you carefully read the original ratified constitution, you will note that it did not explicitly define who could vote.  Or, for that matter even define citizen or citizenship.  In fact, and practice, voting rights in the several states at our founding tended to be based on the big three:  acquired wealth, gender, and race.  These three qualifications defined who could and, consequently, who could not vote.  While property qualifications pretty much disappeared in the early 19th century, gender and race defined who could vote, not citizenship, for many, many decades.

Some state constitutions merely asserted “white males” could vote with no mention of citizenship.  As the country expanded westward voting by aliens was encouraged, for instance in the Northwest Ordinance of 1789 “freehold aliens” could vote.  Some states required aliens to take an oath that they were upstanding inhabitants and intended to become citizens.  Becoming a naturalized citizenship was linked to race, however, in our early Republic.

The Naturalization Act of 1790 stated that only “free white person of good character’ could become citizens after two years of residence, however, several following Acts raised the residency requirements first to five years, and then in 1798 the Alien and Sedition Act raised the residency requirement to 14 years.  This last requirement did not last long and was in response to fears of dastardly French influences.

The Constitution of 1789, while never linking voting to citizenship, clearly stated, however, that the President, Representatives, and Senators must be citizens, and added an additional modifier for President, they must be a ‘natural born citizen.’  The absence of any express statement in the constitution linking citizenship to voting suggests that voting by non-citizens was such common practice that it was deemed a common law right, at least in the American colonies which, before the revolution, were generally governed by written charters.  

Americans, it seems, before they were technically American, were better off than their fellow Englishmen in Great Britian in terms of suffrage.  In Great Britian, voting in the 18th century was extremely restricted and it was not until a series of reforms in the 19th century did Great Britian enlarge the voting franchise.  

For about 150 years then, many states permitted aliens, that is non-citizens, to vote.  I think Scalia, were he alive, and other constitutional originalists would vomit at that thought.  

Voting by non-citizens did ebb and flow over time, however. Wars resulted in contractions of voting rights by non-citizens, for instance the War of 1812 and the First World War saw pushback.  The rise of nativist movements as waves of immigrants arrived provoked some pushback as well on non-citizen voting rights in the mid 19th century.  This accelerated when immigrants from eastern or southern Europe — such as Greece or Italy — began arriving in huge numbers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.[i]  

Basically, folks from an earlier list of shithole countries or representing threatening religions, you know, the ever-dangerous Catholic or Jew.   Claims of intellectual, genetic, and moral inferiority abounded.  They couldn’t assimilate many claimed.  Does that not sound familiar?

As we have seen, voting rights in America has a peculiar history and was (and is it seems) very much tied with gender and race, not citizenship. Citizenship was a variable state by state.  Women gained the right to vote 105 years ago.  African American men in 1870.  Asian immigrants could not become U.S. citizens until 1952, and therefore ineligible to vote.  

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 did much to enforce and federalize and nationalize the right to vote.  It did much to ensure all citizens, regardless of race or origin, were given equal opportunity to vote.  That is no longer the case.  While the reversals of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 have been articulated in terms of impacts on black and brown voters, the demise of the Act will have broader impacts on other communities: Asian, South Asian, Middle Eastern, Pacific Islander, and other diaspora communities.  

Trump’s new immigration policy is designed to impact the make-up of the next generation of voters.  Afrikaners over Africans, whites over others.  And, with the help of the Robert’s court, making it harder for everyday Americans of color to vote in states with long histories of denying black and brown people the right to vote.  The attack on the Voting Rights Act is just one part of a broader, systemic attack on who is an American, who can become an American, and therefore, who has a voice in America’s present and future.

This November we are voting for more than just neutering Trump politically, we are fighting for whose America this is, and who will inherit America from us once we are gone.  This is a generational vote, a vote for our kids, our grandkids, and our generations of unborn Americans. 

Post Script:  The Supreme Court recently invalidated Louisiana’s congressional district voting map because districts were gerrymandered by race.  A normal grace period of a month was set aside by the Court to allow immediate action by Louisiana.  Voting was already underway.  The Louisiana governor is currently refusing to count over 30k mail-in votes already received.    

[i] Texas permitted non-citizens to vote until 1921.  Indiana as well. Kansas 1918. Oregon 1914.  Virginia 1818.  Pennsylvania 1838.  See Ron Hayduk, Democracy for All: Restoring Immigrant Voting Rights in the United States, 2006.

Spring Cleaning: Vote YES

Gardens have been used as metaphor for ages and even has a starring role in many religions. Many early modern political commentators invoked gardens, for instance, that democracy was a garden that needed tending to thrive.  And we know some gardens harbor snakes.

Tending my garden is a year’s long endeavor, but spring is my favorite time.  It’s a time of renewal and growth, bumblebee queens seek the brilliant yellow dandelion flowers — a critical food source – while perennials begin to poke their heads up.  Weeds start to reappear as well, like the dreaded bindweed.  You must get them early, ripping them out root and all, before the flowers turn to seeds.  However, as any gardener who has dealt with bindweed knows, it is a war of attrition.  

A noxious bindweed has invaded our government, and Congress is an untended garden, overrun with weeds and invasive species of autocracy, blocking out America’s native species of the rule of law, equal rights, and the doctrine of coequal branches of government.  It is time to weed Congress and relocate some of the slithering critters lurking in dark crevices.  Voting YES to redistrict Virginia’s congressional districts is one way.  Time is essential as the last day to vote is Tuesday, April 21.

I am imagining by now most registered voters in Virginian have voted in the referendum to draw new congressional district maps.  Tuesday is your last day to vote, so, if you have not yet voted, do so.  A YES vote is one for sanity and restoring our national social contract.  Ensuring that Congress stands up to and reins in a corrupt and malevolent president.  The current House of Representatives is a disaster.  For those in Central Virginia’s 5thCongressional District, this November we will have the opportunity to vote out Rep. John McGuire, a Trump vassal.  

If the disastrous war of choice against the Iranian people is not convincing enough, Trump’s self-appointment and deification as God’s prophet and latter-day Jesus, should get you across the finish line and vote YES.  

Redistricting Virginia is not my preferred course of action, but if I am to ever have a voice in Congress again, I feel strongly, redistricting is my only option at this time. I acknowledge the paradox of gerrymandering Virginia to elect more Democrats while arguing that democracy is in trouble. I get it. Trump’s direct order to Republican governed states to redistrict crossed a line, however.  Many states obeyed Trump.  An eye for an eye, right? Virginia Republicans have only themselves and Trump to blame.  You thought you “owned the libs.” But when you whack a hornets’ nest often enough…… You get my point. If you are angry at what the Democrats are doing in Virginia, write Trump at the White House and tell him he screwed you.    

You can tell this referendum has got the MAGA folks up in arms, almost literally.  Vote NO signs are more plentiful than dandelions in Louisa County.  When I was up in Northern Virginia a few weeks ago, there was a small rally at the intersection of Routes 29 and 50 in Fairfax at 9 AM on a weekday.  They were animated.  We need to respond with similar commitment and get the YES vote out.

In addition, the Republicans on-line and streaming ad campaign is desperate.  The latest version is a video that portrays Governor Spanberger as an arsonist burning down a barn; replete with sinister narration claiming the redistricting is a ruse to take away guns, impose higher taxes, and give welfare to illegal immigrants.  That last claim about welfare is usually made by a “Virginia Farmer” in a dead pan pitch. That is rich, given the billions of tax dollars flowing into farmers’ pockets to offset rising costs to operate farms due to Trump’s tariffs and his war against Iran.  They sense they are losing, I think.

Let’s work together and start tending the garden of democracy once again.  If you have not voted yet, please do so, and vote YES.

Onward Christian Soldiers: Trump’s War on Iran and Secular America.

In the year 1188 AD, both England and France imposed an income tax to help pay for the third Crusade.  It was called the Saladin Tax.  It was a first.  It was 10 percent.  Saladin was the general, the Sultan, who recaptured Jerusalem the year before, expelling Christan forces who ruled Jerusalem since the first crusade when a Christian army captured the holy city in 1099, butchering most inhabitants. 

Saladin captured the imagination of the West.  They even invented a European origin story for him; he was featured in western literature, to include in Dante’s inferno.  In 1920 when the French General Henri-Joseph-Eugene entered Damascus after the victorious allies divided up the Ottoman Empire amongst themselves – Mandates they called them – he visited Saladin’s tomb and allegedly said, “Mr. Sultan, we’ve returned to the Orient.” 

They drew new maps and new countries.  Syria and Lebanon came under French rule, Palestine and Transjordan went to the British empire.   Europe certainly did return and managed through their imperial hubris, ignorance, and contempt for the peoples of the region, set the stage for over a century of regional and global conflicts and wars over this land. To include Trump’s war with Iran

God, it seems, gets the both the blame and the glory.  Depending on who wins the day.

To listen to Secretary of Defense Hegseth, Trump’s war with Iran is a crusade.  He uses Christian imagery to portray American forces as soldiers of Christ.  His prayers ask that God and Christ guide American bombs, bullets, and missiles to kill evil enemies.  Onward Christian soldiers wearing God as his armor.  He stated that there would be no quarter.  The crusaders in Jerusalem in 1099 offered no quarter.  Man, woman, child, struck down by sword and axes guided by Jesus and God.  

That notion of chivalry and God died on the fields of Flander, the Somme, and Ypres hundreds of years later.

Unfortunately, Hegseth is not an outlier in Trump’s world.  The White House increasingly compares Trump to Jesus, betrayed, and arrested.  At a recent private Easter event, Trump’s spiritual advisor Pastor Paula White-Cain compared the experiences of Christ’s crucifixion to Trump’s legal troubles, you know sexually assaulting a woman in a department store dressing room or paying off a porn star to keep silent about an affair.  Although I think she must have forgotten about these secular trials.  I too see Trump and Jesus in the same thought, every time he opens his mouth or posts on Truth Social, I say, “Jesus Christ, what the fuck did that idiot just say.”

It is not new in our history for American leaders to invoke God, especially after great tragedies or wars or other calamities.  America’s sense of its exceptionalism is deeply rooted in God. That shiny city on a hill.  It is new, however, for an American president to lay claim to divinity.  The Beatles were crucified, pun intended, when they claimed they were more popular than Jesus during a radio interview.

Trump is deliberately, cynically I think, erasing the line between him and Jesus.  Many of his adherents are in lock step with him, nonetheless.  For Trump to claim divine rule requires not only breaking down, but utterly demolishing, the wall between state and church.

Our country has a long history of keeping religion out of state and keeping the state out of religion.  For good reason as we can see by Trump’s insane comparison to Jesus. The Constitution does not mention “God.”  Not even the oath of office for president mentions God.  When asked why God did not appear in the Constitution, Alexander Hamilton famously quipped, “We forgot” or “We don’t need any foreign help.”  Whether these were apocryphal response, I don’t know, but they have a ring of authenticity.

In 1777, while a Delegate to Virginia’s General Assembly, Thomas Jefferson submitted a statute for Religious Freedom.  It was shelved given opposition from the still powerful Anglican Church members. That bill lay dormant of over a decade and was resurrected by James Madison in 1785 after Patrick Henry submitted a bill a year earlier calling for a tax to pay ministers of the Christian religion.  

In response to Henry’s bill, Madison wrote a Memorial and Remonstrance against the assessment.  In it he warned that the state should not support any religion.  That belief in God was between a man and his creator, that the state had no business interfering with such relationship.  He warned that once you support Christian ministers, what will stop a particular sect within Christianity from assuming dominance over the others.  Henry’s bill did not pass.

Virginia’s Baptists supported Madison’s Remonstrance and the Religious Freedom bill.  They had suffered heavily from Anglican Church violence in the 18th Century, especially during the Virginia’s Great Awakening in the 1740s.  Itinerant Baptist ministers were whipped or jailed and driven out of counties. Sadly, many Baptists today who support destroying the barrier between church and state have forgotten that history.

He was right.  In Texas, which provides tax dollars to both secular and religious charter schools, Islamic charter schools requesting public funding are being denied funding, claims leveled about terrorism.  Bashing Muslims has become sport in Texas amongst those Republicans running for office.  A proposed public school reading list contains the bible, but not the Koran.

In addition to the Remonstrance, Madison also resubmitted Jefferson’s decade old bill to Virginia’s General Assembly.  It passed.  Both Madison’s Remonstrance and Jefferson’s bill for Religious Freedom should be required reading.  Both argue that God doesn’t need the State:

“That Almighty God hath created the mind free, and manifested his supreme will that free it shall remain by making it altogether insusceptible of restraint; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments, or burthens, or by civil incapacitation, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness….”  Adding, “not to propagating it by coercion …but extend it by its influence on reason alone.” 

What became the first amendment to the constitution, written by Madison, were born in Madison’s Remonstrance and Jefferson’s Statute for Religious Freedom (1786).  It clearly articulates that the government  could not establish a state religion or prohibit the free exercise thereof.  A careful balance.  

In 1802, President Jefferson, in a famous letter to the ‘Danbury Baptists,’ wrote that the 1st Amendment built a “wall of separation between Church and State.”  While Jefferson had no direct hand in the writing of the Constitution — he was the American Ambassador to France during the constitutional convention, and was not in Congress when the propositions were submitted by Madison which became the Bill of Rights — he and Madison regularly corresponded, explaining their thoughts and ideas of government and the constitution.  

This separation of church and state, this wall, has informed the liberal American experiment that in a healthy democracy the role of religion and the role of government are better kept distant and respectful. 

That arrangement worked spectacularly.  Religion thrives in America because of this wall of separation.  It is a paradox then that America aims to finish off a despotic theocratic state in Iran while planting the very seeds of a despotic right wing white nationalist Christian theocratic state in America.  

MAGA voices like Gladden Pappin – who claims the Pope will appoint Melania as queen – and Rod Dreher want American to go back to the Middle Ages, where the church held power, where the Bible was the law of the land. They hate and despise the enlightenment and liberal ideals of democracy, human rights, and the freedom to enjoy a personal relationship with God, without government surveillance and dictate.

The conspicuous and dangerous allusions to Trump, God, and Christ in prosecuting Trump’s war against Iran are anathema to America’s founding ideals and over 250 years of history.  God help us all.

Oral Arguments and Severed Horse Heads: The Supreme Court and Birthright Citizenship

Yesterday the Supreme Court heard arguments in Trump v. Barbara whether Trump’s Executive Order stripping birthright citizenship from children of non-citizens was constitutional.  Every lower court hearing cases regarding the Order ruled that it was unquestionably unconstitutional. The arguments before the justices of our country’s highest court should have taken on the patina of well worn rituals and procedures. However, it was far from normal.

Last year, at an initial hearing before the Court, a majority of justices kept an injunction on the order in place, staying the implementation of Trump’s Order indefinitely.  The vote was 6-3.  Not shocking, given a radical core of conservative justices seem hell bent on overturning everything that smacks of small “l” liberal governance.  The Court could have left the appeals court in ruling in place, basically saying that the lower court’s ruling was sound.  They did not.  Instead, a least four justices voted to hear the case.

Yesterday, in an unprecedented move, Trump attended the oral arguments. His attendance, for all intents and purposes, was a direct attack on the separation of powers enshrined in our Constitution.   Trump did not stay for all of the arguments, leaving after the first hour.  His message sent, I think.  

Most of the justices, it seemed, were skeptical of the government’s argument that birthright citizenship should be limited.  The government’s argument hinged on the words “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” and the word “domicile” in the seminal 1898 Supreme Court ruling United States v. Wong Kim Ark.  Their arguments rehashes of earlier losing arguments.  This should be a slam dunk case, but it isn’t.

In a previous post, I predicted with despair that Trump and the government would prevail.  I thought perhaps I was wrong, and was heartened when the justices in a 6-3 vote kept the injunction in place.  That signaled the government would most likely not prevail in court.  Yet, I worried that at least four justices wanted to hear the case.  

This case should not be a nail biter.  It has been settled law for 128 years.  But with today’s Court consisting of a super majority of conservatives with a hard-core troika of ultra radical conservative justices, anything is possible.  

Enter Trump.  No sitting president has ever attended oral arguments at the Supreme Court. It is unseemly, and I think, an assault on the doctrine of the separation of powers.  His presence was like a dog pissing on a tree, marking its territory.  Trump was marking his Order and signaling to everyone, ‘do not rule against me and my Order.’ It was designed, I argue, to intimidate the justices that are on the fence, so to speak.  That is Barrett and Gorsuch.  Like the Godfather movie, Trump was the decapitated horse’s head laying at the foot of the bed.  A warning of bloody consequences. 

I would not be surprised that folks acting on Trump’s orders engage in a campaign of intimidation, influence, and ever terror against Barrett and Gorsuch in the coming weeks. He will use similar tactics that he has already used on his other perceived enemies.  His no holds barred attack on the Chair of the Federal Reserve is just one very recent example.  DOJ investigations, insinuations of wrongdoing, grand juries, threats of impeachment against other federal judges.  This will get nasty.

Even though many of the justices seemed skeptical in whole or in part of the government’s arguments; to include the Chief Justice Roberts, the majority opinion is far from settled.  The final vote is in doubt in my mind.  Congress abdicated to Trump.   Will the Supreme Court do so as well?   Surrendering the Judicial Branch to Trump, so that he can hang its stuffed head next to all the gold and gild bling in the Oval Office.   That is to be seen.