3/7/24

 Thursday, March 7, 2024

In bed at 9, awake and up at 1:50 with some shoulder and wrist/hand pain.  35°, cloudy day ahead.  The wind is ESE a 8 mph, 5-11/18.  Sunrise at 6:16 at 96°E, sunset at 5:49 at 264°W, solar noon alt. 42°.     

Treadmill; pain.  I didn't do any shoulder stretches yesterday, dealing with bladder issues.  I took one Advil at about 2:15 a.m. and will take one Tylenol between 5 and 6 a.m.   

I'm grateful that I was able to go on a shopping trip to the Port Washington WalMart with no accident or emergency.   

Psychologists say the looming rematch is prompting intense feelings of powerlessness and unease among Americans. In this morning's NYTimes:    

Complaints about politicians are as old as American politics itself. But pollsters and strategists believe something different is happening this year. Rarely have so many Americans been so unhappy with the direction of the country for so long. Rarely have so many voters said for so long that they want different leaders. The voters who dislike both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump are talked about so often that they now have their own political moniker: double haters.

What does "democracy" really mean in America?  Republicans and anti-democrats like to point out that our beloved (not!) Founding Fathers created a "republic, not a democracy," and there is no denying that the wealthy, largely slave-owning elites who crafted the Constitution in 1787 feared political power in the hands of the masses of their fellow countryen: hence the Electoral College, the Senate, and even the 3/5ths rule for representation in the House.  It took the Civil War and the spilling of rivers of blood to emancipate and enfranchise the nation's slaves, but after the brief period of Reconstruction and the stationing of federal troops throughout the former Confederacy, Jim Crow took away what the Civil War and the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amerndments gave.  Women weren't guaranteed the right to vote until 1920 with the ratification of the 19th Amendment.  It wasn't until 1965, when I was in Vietnam 'figh(ting for freedom and democracy') that LBJ's Voting Rights Act made a real dent in Jim Crow voting restrictions.  By 2013, the Republican appointees (Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito) on theU.S. Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holder, largely eviscerated the Act.  Shelby County v. Holder  opened the door, once again, for voter suppression. Since then, states have made it harder to vote; in 2023, at least 14 states enacted 17 restrictive voting laws. A recent study by the Brennan Center of nearly a billion vote records over 14 years shows that the racial voting gap is growing almost twice as fast in places that used to be covered by the preclearance requirement. 

In any event, what does "democracy" really mean in this country when there is such widespread dissatisfaction with both Joe Biden and Donald Trump?  Does the mere fact of having popular elections mean we have a democracy when the candidates for election are wildly unpopular?  Joe Biden is been 'underwater' in voter satisfaction for most of his presidency and Donald Trump would surely be a loose cannon in a second term.  Moreover, Trump doesn't even need to win the popular vote to regain power; he just needs to win the Electoral College, favoring states like Wyoming, South Dakota, and Rhode Island over California, New York, and Illinois.  The Electoral College and the Supreme Court gave us George W. Bush and the catastrophic invasion of Iraq, and the Electoral College and the Supreme Court may well give us a second term for Donald Trump and the mahapach of American government.

Do ordinary citizens have a real voice in this process?  I'm thinking of yesterday's news story about Donald Trump meeting with Elon Musk and "other large donors", i.e., billionaires, looking for their support, which is to say, money.  I'm thinking of Bernie Sanders campaign against Hillary Clinton - Bernie with all his 'small donor' support vs. Hillary with the DNC, Wall Street, and big donors behind her.  I'm thinking again of Wall Street, "private equity", Silicon Valley, Big Pharma, the military-industrial complex, and all the other people and entities that control American politics and the American government.  I'm thinking of the anarchist Emma Goldman's wise quote: "If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal."  

So much for my first morning rant.  Now on to another.

"It’s Not Just That Biden Is Old; It’s that he’s being reckless is an opinion piece in today's The Atlantic onlineb by Mark Leibovich.  He captures some, but hardly all, of why I'm so angry with Joe Biden.

It’s easy to sympathize with an old-timer reluctant to give up something he loves. In Biden’s case, though, the stakes are potentially catastrophic. By running again—despite his age, despite his low approval ratings, despite his poor showing in the polls against Trump—Biden could be engaging in one of the most selfish, hubristic, and potentially destructive acts ever undertaken by an American president. If he winds up losing, that’s all anyone will remember him for. Bill Maher has said Biden could go down as the “Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the presidency.” Or of democracy. (My italics)

We should make no mistake about the affable, empathetic, 'regular guy from Scranton'; he is a vain, selfish, power and prestige hungry guy, out for Number One.  He is not so fulsome a liar as Trump, but he is a liar.  He is not so obsessed with wealth and its accoutrements as Trump, but he is a guy who bought a du Pont mansion on a senator's salary and who doesn't want to give up the White House and its staff of round-the-clock servants and aides.  He is unquestionably a better human being than Trump, but he's no hero or exemplar.  He's gotten far on his fabulous smile, his hugs, and his ceaseless ability to milk the death of his first wife and his daughter for sympathy and support.  He's long been an old-fashioned Irish "pol", like Chicago was full of when I was growing up there, a backslapping gladhander.  He reminds me of a sober, steadier Frank Galvin, the Irish lawyer played by Paul Newman in The Verdict.  Galvin was desperate for paying clients; Biden has always been desperate for votes and admiration.  When he was a senator from Delaware, he ably represented the wealthy, powerful, corporate interests in Delaware.  He was no 'leftie' or liberal.  He danced to the tunes played by the money boys.  And now he's a double-crosser, getting elected by touting himself as "a bridge" and "a transition" between his generation and the next and refusing to get out of the way when all the evidence of his unpopularity and vincibility all but demands it.   

Tonight is the State of the Union speech.  Will I endure the pain of watching it?  Can I?