Pentwater, Michigan
October 10, 2018
Okay, the Kavanaugh nomination happened just as I figured it would. But I wasn't the only one, and predicting it wasn't exactly a feat of Nostradamus-like proportions. It was more a foregone conclusion that got interrupted temporarily by the testimony of one of Kavanaugh's several sexual assault victims.
Here again, we have to examine the way we're viewing the news lately (and by "we" I mean the anti-Trump people). So clouded has our judgment become by our bitter loathing of the president and his people that we fail, often, to see what is and is not happening. Mostly we fail to see that Republican partisan politics will win out over reason and decency almost every time. But since those of us who oppose Trump are mostly reasonable and decent people, we view the world through that lens. We're on the side of fair play, for the most part, and also on the side of diversity and inclusiveness. Well, it's about time we got a little less tolerant. If this is a war between ideologies, as it is safe to say it is, then we shouldn't be in the business of giving anybody the benefit of the doubt. In war you pick a side and try to annihilate the other side. In that regard I applaud the attempts of the Democratic senators to derail Kavanaugh's nomination, even though they were pretty much doomed from the start by the unwavering mathematics of the Senate as it is now comprised.
When Kavanaugh got nominated most people (and by people I mean news reporter types) accurately predicted that he would be approved, in spite of the fact that, once on the bench, he would surely oppose liberality at every turn. This conclusion just followed from the fact that there are a majority of Republicans in the Senate. During his hearings he lost his composure and telegraphed to the whole country that he was precisely what liberals feared he was, namely, a card-carrying right wing Fox News conspiracy theorist of the first order, whose judgment would be unalloyed in the future by any consideration of even the possibility that a Democrat might be right about anything. (Not that there's anything wrong with being so partisan: such views almost perfectly mirror my own feelings about Republicans, and I would be happy to go onto the Supreme Court and be the undying voice of left-wing opposition.) Viewed in retrospect, his tearful rant was a master stroke on Kavanaugh's part, since it established him as a once-in-a-lifetime guaranteed Republican partisan. The failure to nominate someone with such a pristine pedigree of conservatism would be the great regret of any Republican senator for the rest of his or her life. Even Senator Murkowski of Alaska was almost apologetic about not voting for him, and made up some bullshit so she could vote "present" rather than "no."
So, to quote a line from one of my favorite Cohen Brothers movies, "What have we learned?" One thing, for sure, regarding women Republican senators. They are Republicans first and foremost. Their womanhood does not "trump," as it were, their conservatism, their hatred, their loathing of liberality and fairness. This was another miscalculation many commentators made. Somehow they thought that feminine solidarity would win out over partisan politics. But no. And really, why should they have been so rash in their expectation? These women are, after all, Republicans. If they'd been the least bit sensitive to the plight and rights of women, they wouldn't have run for office as Republicans in the first place. And for Christ's sake, it's not as if there aren't dozens of other women who have put in with the forces of evil and been appointed to positions of power--Betsy DeVos, Nikki Haley, Kirstjen Nielsen, the wretched Sarah Sanders, not to mention the many harpies on Fox News. Why should the Senate, of all places, be exempt from morally compromised women members? These individuals have, with Lady Macbeth, called out
Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts,
Unsex me here; and fill me,
From the crown to the toe,
Topful of direst cruelty!
We suffer when we assume that there are good people on both sides of the political aisle, because we waste time that could be better spent opposing the bad ones. Perhaps at one time there were "good" Republicans, but no more. If they're good, they won't be Republicans. Sorry, maybe your dad was a Republican and you think of him as basically a good guy. But your dad was foolish and misguided at best, and bigoted and filled with fear and loathing at worst. Time to stop thinking there are salvageable Republicans, male or female, and recognize them all for what they are--the minions of the devil. And you know who the devil is, right?
Wednesday, October 10, 2018
Friday, October 5, 2018
Nature
Pentwater, Michigan
October 5, 2018
Most folks who read the blog already know that I've moved to Michigan. What does this portend for the world? Well, nothing. Things will keep moving along, blog or no blog, California, Michigan, wherever.
Tomorrow they'll approve the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. I'm so sure of this that I'm going to publish this today, before the vote. If I'm right I won't gloat, and if I'm wrong, then I'll have some explaining to do. Now, to hear the people on NPR talking (which I pick up in the background as my wife listens on her iPad), you'd think there's some serious question about whether he'll get the nod. There's lots of excited and wishful speculation about Senator Susan Collins from Maine, and Joe Manchin from West Virginia. One NPR guy asked the rhetorical question whether Manchin would want to be the single Democrat who sealed the Kavanaugh nomination, to which I thought, Hell Yes, if it gets him re-elected. Then there's Jeff Flake, who gets lots of respectful consideration from liberals because he doesn't like Trump, notwithstanding the fact that he's a conservative Republican. But he'll vote for Kavanaugh too, because Kavanaugh embodies his right wing views pretty much down the line.
Still, the moderates and left-of-center folks hope against hope that Kavanaugh won't get picked. Well of course I hope so too, but I don't go on the air and make a national hobby of telling everyone so, nor do I try to shape the more or less immutable facts to match my wishes. But that is the disease of the anti-Trump media. They've been denying the fact of his presidency since the day after he was elected, so it should be no surprise that they deny the fact that he has the votes in the Senate to get his guy approved.
This reminds me of the story of the scorpion and the frog. A scorpion wants to cross a body of water, but can't swim. So it asks a frog to carry it on its back. The frog initially says, "No way--you'll sting me!" The scorpion replies, "Why would I do that? Then we'd both drown." The frog sees the logic of this and agrees to carry the scorpion. About halfway across the scorpion stings the frog. As they're going down into the water the frog asks, "Why did you do it?" The scorpion answers, "I couldn't help it. It's my nature."
Remember this tomorrow as you see people voting against logic, but according to their nature.
October 5, 2018
Most folks who read the blog already know that I've moved to Michigan. What does this portend for the world? Well, nothing. Things will keep moving along, blog or no blog, California, Michigan, wherever.
Tomorrow they'll approve the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. I'm so sure of this that I'm going to publish this today, before the vote. If I'm right I won't gloat, and if I'm wrong, then I'll have some explaining to do. Now, to hear the people on NPR talking (which I pick up in the background as my wife listens on her iPad), you'd think there's some serious question about whether he'll get the nod. There's lots of excited and wishful speculation about Senator Susan Collins from Maine, and Joe Manchin from West Virginia. One NPR guy asked the rhetorical question whether Manchin would want to be the single Democrat who sealed the Kavanaugh nomination, to which I thought, Hell Yes, if it gets him re-elected. Then there's Jeff Flake, who gets lots of respectful consideration from liberals because he doesn't like Trump, notwithstanding the fact that he's a conservative Republican. But he'll vote for Kavanaugh too, because Kavanaugh embodies his right wing views pretty much down the line.
Still, the moderates and left-of-center folks hope against hope that Kavanaugh won't get picked. Well of course I hope so too, but I don't go on the air and make a national hobby of telling everyone so, nor do I try to shape the more or less immutable facts to match my wishes. But that is the disease of the anti-Trump media. They've been denying the fact of his presidency since the day after he was elected, so it should be no surprise that they deny the fact that he has the votes in the Senate to get his guy approved.
This reminds me of the story of the scorpion and the frog. A scorpion wants to cross a body of water, but can't swim. So it asks a frog to carry it on its back. The frog initially says, "No way--you'll sting me!" The scorpion replies, "Why would I do that? Then we'd both drown." The frog sees the logic of this and agrees to carry the scorpion. About halfway across the scorpion stings the frog. As they're going down into the water the frog asks, "Why did you do it?" The scorpion answers, "I couldn't help it. It's my nature."
Remember this tomorrow as you see people voting against logic, but according to their nature.
Monday, April 9, 2018
Credo
Monrovia, California
April 9, 2018
Let's talk about religion. It's in the news frequently, as the administration has deliberately attempted to exclude people from our country who adhere to one religion in particular--Islam. This in turn raises questions about whether it is constitutional, under the First Amendment, to systematically bar immigrants, or refugees, from countries whose populations are so predominately Muslim that to exclude them is tantamount to barring Muslims--the so-called Muslim Ban. Trump's first version of this was so blatantly unconstitutional--allowing as it did for the admission into this country of members of religious minorities in those same Muslim countries, i.e., Christians--that even a Supreme Court filled with Scalias, Alitos, and Thomases would have had no choice but to strike it down. So the next version or two, which we might call Muslim Ban Light, was more facially neutral, and appears to have been given a temporary green light by the Supreme Court, to be reviewed in more detail later. And since those old farts work at a snail's pace, the whole thing might not get sorted out for years.
April 9, 2018
Let's talk about religion. It's in the news frequently, as the administration has deliberately attempted to exclude people from our country who adhere to one religion in particular--Islam. This in turn raises questions about whether it is constitutional, under the First Amendment, to systematically bar immigrants, or refugees, from countries whose populations are so predominately Muslim that to exclude them is tantamount to barring Muslims--the so-called Muslim Ban. Trump's first version of this was so blatantly unconstitutional--allowing as it did for the admission into this country of members of religious minorities in those same Muslim countries, i.e., Christians--that even a Supreme Court filled with Scalias, Alitos, and Thomases would have had no choice but to strike it down. So the next version or two, which we might call Muslim Ban Light, was more facially neutral, and appears to have been given a temporary green light by the Supreme Court, to be reviewed in more detail later. And since those old farts work at a snail's pace, the whole thing might not get sorted out for years.
The result of all this anti-Muslim rhetoric and Muslim-targeting activity from this administration and from previous ones, going back at least to 9/11, has been to increase the sympathy of liberals toward Islam, a religion that hardly got a second look a generation ago in this country, before the Ayatollah, unless you were Jewish and/or concerned about Israel. The press and the government, prior to the takeover of the executive branch by its current gang of thugs, were careful not to blur the lines of distinction between what they characterized as regular harmless Islam and and radical militant Kill-The-Infidel Islam. Adherents to the latter version are now called Islamists, to distinguish them from everyday Muslims. And the clergy and experts in the religion--the ones who get interviewed on CNN--are always quick to point out that Islam is essentially a religion of peace, and that the bad-guy suicide bombers and ISIS types don't represent the vast majority of quiet, assiduous believers in this essentially misogynistic and backward faith.
As so often happens, civil libertarians have a tendency to choose strange bedfellows in the name of protecting the Bill of Rights. It's one reason I've never succumbed to the ceaseless junk mail requests of the ACLU to join its ranks. Not that I'm opposed to the Bill of Rights generally. I like the freedom of press and speech and assembly parts, in particular, as well as the amendments that protect the accused in criminal actions. The Second Amendment I would gladly shitcan, since no one seems to know where to draw the line there, although plain common sense, if it were applied, would tell you that it has outlived its original intended usefulness. That view recently got a respectable airing by retired Justice John Paul Stevens. But that's a subject for another rant. It's freedom of religion that concerns me here. And again, it is the application of common sense that seems to be singularly lacking in the construction of this portion of the First Amendment. Freedom of religion, I believe, was never intended to be an impediment to the orderly conduct of national affairs. If a conscientious objector refuses to be inducted into the military in time of war, then the government has a right to sanction that person in some way. Not severely, but rationally. I myself was a conscientious objector to the Vietnam war, and, but for the intervening draft lottery that mooted the point for me, would have been classified 1-O, which would have meant that I could have been drafted and assigned to a nonmilitary place, such as a mental hospital, where I ended up working anyway. My personal conscientious objection to that war wasn't based on any deeply held conviction that war in general is immoral or unsupportable, although I had to tell the draft board that it was. Instead it was based on my private conviction that the U.S. had no business doing battle with the communist government of North Vietnam. And look how it all played out. Well, I digress.
Many people believe that radical Islamism is Islam at its worst and most perverted. To some extent that's undeniable, but I must take issue with such a simplistic view. A more logical way to look at it is that any religion is at its worst when its own fringes commit atrocities, and particularly when it believes that it must explain itself to outsiders. If you have to explain it, it certainly isn't explaining itself very well. If you must keep saying "Islam is a religion of peace," while Muslims of one kind or another are busy killing each other and those outside the faith, you have a basic problem. Not a P.R. problem, but a problem of squaring ruthless objective reality with some sort of sanitized theological ideal that, after all, many members of that religion don't believe anyway. Any religion is merely a reflection of the political mindset of its adherents at a given moment in time. The mistake is in assuming that a religion embodies an ideal, an absolute, or even a constant. Today's Islam may or may not be the Islam of a century ago, but guess what?--it pretty closely resembles the Islam of 500 to 1000 years ago, when Christian crusaders were fighting Muslims for control of the Middle East and Southern Europe. I call that a lack of progress.
By that token, it needs to be said that the same goes for Christianity, which is about as much or as little a "religion of peace" as Islam is. The difference is that the most militant, acquisitive, imperialistic period of Christianity is largely behind it. Christianity, in Europe at least, is a toothless old lion, snoozing and dreaming of the many beasts it has torn apart and eaten raw in its more active years, and becoming ever more irrelevant. But it is still only as good as the last bad thing that was done in the name of Christianity.
Europe, the homeland of Christianity, is entering its post-Christian phase (even in such recent theocracies as Ireland), with its churches little more than works of historical architecture and its clergy carrying the moral authority of someone's old Aunt Minnie. The sectarian violence in the Balkan states and the crazy Polish revisionism regarding the Holocaust are, of course, notable exceptions. Meanwhile, here in the United States, we are still dealing with the growing jihadist mentality of the conservative Protestant Right, also misogynistic, backward, absolutist, and proselytizing, if less overtly violent than the Islamists are. The Protestant Right has systematically fought against women's rights, gay rights, racial equality, tolerance, and scientific reality with a fervor that would warm the heart of the nastiest Taliban cleric. And in fairness, we can't give a free pass to Catholicism, which also is a major perpetrator of discrimination against women, not allowing them into its priesthood, and insisting that a woman's right to choose whether or not to have a baby isn't her right or her choice at all, but rather the prerogative of God alone, and by extension God's spokesmen on earth. That's spokesmen, not spokespersons. And to add insult to injury, the Pope and his little Roman boy's club in the Vatican are recognized not just as a theological, but as a political entity, and given the status of a country, which other world leaders should visit like they would visit France or Germany, as wacky as that notion might seem in the 21st Century.
To put it plainly, many of the views of everyday Islam, and Christianity, should not be tolerated by anyone. Given the stated intentions of these religious groups to spread--and indeed to impose--their views everywhere, at the risk to the nonbeliever of eternal and sometimes terrestrial damnation, they both are dangerous in the extreme. Now, I know what some of you are thinking. When we don't tolerate all religions equally, we start sliding down a slippery slope. Where might it end? Which religion will be safe from intolerance if we start picking on just one, or a few, of them? This is basically homegrown American thinking, and to the extent that it's accepted in Europe or elsewhere, it's been exported from this side of the ocean to the other, not the other way around.
But as easy as it is among liberals to condemn aspects of Christianity, it seems equally difficult to step on the toes of Islam, lest we be seen as, heaven forbid, intolerant. My question is this: when will people with secular moral and political authority stand to condemn religions that encourage, tolerate, or at best overlook the inhumane and unequal treatment of women, nonbelievers, and other segments of humanity? Bloggers like me can do it all day long, and we get handfuls of readers. But if the European Union or the United Nations or some other world body did it, wouldn't it get more notice and respect? When will the people who agree with what I'm saying stand up and say to the world, Islam isn't good, it's BAD. It is not a religion of peace, it's a religion of violence and sexism. It must stop slaughtering infidels and requiring women to go around with their heads covered while the men do whatever the hell they want. Covering one's head in public is not an expression of feminine cultural solidarity, as the twisted logic of cultural relativism would have you believe. It is a disgusting acquiescence to tyranny, and a sad reflection of the acceptance of the inherent injustice of the religion that imposed it in the first place. Islam is, to put it bluntly, fucked up.
To borrow the words of Walter Cronkite, one of the last of our national secular spokesmen, "That's the way it is."
Many people believe that radical Islamism is Islam at its worst and most perverted. To some extent that's undeniable, but I must take issue with such a simplistic view. A more logical way to look at it is that any religion is at its worst when its own fringes commit atrocities, and particularly when it believes that it must explain itself to outsiders. If you have to explain it, it certainly isn't explaining itself very well. If you must keep saying "Islam is a religion of peace," while Muslims of one kind or another are busy killing each other and those outside the faith, you have a basic problem. Not a P.R. problem, but a problem of squaring ruthless objective reality with some sort of sanitized theological ideal that, after all, many members of that religion don't believe anyway. Any religion is merely a reflection of the political mindset of its adherents at a given moment in time. The mistake is in assuming that a religion embodies an ideal, an absolute, or even a constant. Today's Islam may or may not be the Islam of a century ago, but guess what?--it pretty closely resembles the Islam of 500 to 1000 years ago, when Christian crusaders were fighting Muslims for control of the Middle East and Southern Europe. I call that a lack of progress.
By that token, it needs to be said that the same goes for Christianity, which is about as much or as little a "religion of peace" as Islam is. The difference is that the most militant, acquisitive, imperialistic period of Christianity is largely behind it. Christianity, in Europe at least, is a toothless old lion, snoozing and dreaming of the many beasts it has torn apart and eaten raw in its more active years, and becoming ever more irrelevant. But it is still only as good as the last bad thing that was done in the name of Christianity.
Europe, the homeland of Christianity, is entering its post-Christian phase (even in such recent theocracies as Ireland), with its churches little more than works of historical architecture and its clergy carrying the moral authority of someone's old Aunt Minnie. The sectarian violence in the Balkan states and the crazy Polish revisionism regarding the Holocaust are, of course, notable exceptions. Meanwhile, here in the United States, we are still dealing with the growing jihadist mentality of the conservative Protestant Right, also misogynistic, backward, absolutist, and proselytizing, if less overtly violent than the Islamists are. The Protestant Right has systematically fought against women's rights, gay rights, racial equality, tolerance, and scientific reality with a fervor that would warm the heart of the nastiest Taliban cleric. And in fairness, we can't give a free pass to Catholicism, which also is a major perpetrator of discrimination against women, not allowing them into its priesthood, and insisting that a woman's right to choose whether or not to have a baby isn't her right or her choice at all, but rather the prerogative of God alone, and by extension God's spokesmen on earth. That's spokesmen, not spokespersons. And to add insult to injury, the Pope and his little Roman boy's club in the Vatican are recognized not just as a theological, but as a political entity, and given the status of a country, which other world leaders should visit like they would visit France or Germany, as wacky as that notion might seem in the 21st Century.
To put it plainly, many of the views of everyday Islam, and Christianity, should not be tolerated by anyone. Given the stated intentions of these religious groups to spread--and indeed to impose--their views everywhere, at the risk to the nonbeliever of eternal and sometimes terrestrial damnation, they both are dangerous in the extreme. Now, I know what some of you are thinking. When we don't tolerate all religions equally, we start sliding down a slippery slope. Where might it end? Which religion will be safe from intolerance if we start picking on just one, or a few, of them? This is basically homegrown American thinking, and to the extent that it's accepted in Europe or elsewhere, it's been exported from this side of the ocean to the other, not the other way around.
But as easy as it is among liberals to condemn aspects of Christianity, it seems equally difficult to step on the toes of Islam, lest we be seen as, heaven forbid, intolerant. My question is this: when will people with secular moral and political authority stand to condemn religions that encourage, tolerate, or at best overlook the inhumane and unequal treatment of women, nonbelievers, and other segments of humanity? Bloggers like me can do it all day long, and we get handfuls of readers. But if the European Union or the United Nations or some other world body did it, wouldn't it get more notice and respect? When will the people who agree with what I'm saying stand up and say to the world, Islam isn't good, it's BAD. It is not a religion of peace, it's a religion of violence and sexism. It must stop slaughtering infidels and requiring women to go around with their heads covered while the men do whatever the hell they want. Covering one's head in public is not an expression of feminine cultural solidarity, as the twisted logic of cultural relativism would have you believe. It is a disgusting acquiescence to tyranny, and a sad reflection of the acceptance of the inherent injustice of the religion that imposed it in the first place. Islam is, to put it bluntly, fucked up.
To borrow the words of Walter Cronkite, one of the last of our national secular spokesmen, "That's the way it is."
Sunday, April 8, 2018
The Good News
Monrovia, California
April 8, 2018
Safely through the first year plus of the Trump presidency. I say safely because he hasn't done much physical damage--only to the truth as a general ideal. There he has done much harm, redefining truth in an eerily Orwellian way, so consistently and often that we now accept as givens that there are such things as "fake news" and "alternative facts," rather than simply lies. Most rational people see this with a firm sense of the irony of it all, while his true believers have gained a couple of catchphrases with which to dress up and rationalize their adherence to his ultimately pedestrian and transparent brand of jingoism and white supremacy. The rest of us have been given permission by the mainstream media to call Trump a liar, an idiot, and a hatemonger quite openly. Some might call that a win-win situation.
It is now perfectly acceptable to wish for and expect the impeachment of the president (whether or not that will ever happen) and to assume that whatever he says will be not only self-serving, but also the opposite of factual. It's as if Pinocchio is in the Oval Office and his nose is getting longer every day--either an amusing state of affairs or a sad one, depending on your disposition. In fact, Trump has effectively cut himself and Fox News off from everybody else, so that it's easier, even for well-meaning but dimwitted people (a large part of the electorate), to see the line between falsehood and propaganda, on the one hand, and news on the other.
Those of us who are hunkered down to weather out the storm that is Trump are teaching ourselves to look at the relative severity of the waves of buffoonery that regularly crash down on the decks of the ship of state, and to gauge their force in terms of how much permanent damage has really been caused. How much? Well, not much. So far nothing his Attorney General, or his Education Secretary, or his hapless and now departed Secretary of State have done has effected any permanent or even major temporary change in things. Even the appointment of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court did nothing except to resurrect his predecessor, Antonin Scalia, and give him a new lease on life. The ship of state is vast and turns only by small degrees, no matter who is at the helm. And thank God for that. Just imagine if Trump was a prime minister capable of instituting his harebrained ideas more or less at will, instead of a comparatively feckless president of a massive bureaucratic corporation, whose board of directors (Congress and the Supreme Court) do not answer to him but to the shareholders and our venerable corporate culture. True, he and his allies in the Congress have altered the tax code in ways that will not be fair to all, but then the previous version wasn't fair to all either, and these things can be tweaked and changed and even undone. It happens regularly.
To read this may come as a shock to some of you whose personal angst and disgust have been so strong that you cannot separate your feelings from what actually has, and has not, taken place. After all, you think, hasn't the precious reputation of the country on the world stage been forever besmirched? Aren't we a half minute closer to doomsday? Haven't we abandoned our symbolic commitment to the laudable, if chimerical, goal of doing something about global warming? Isn't the executive branch of the government now filled with cruel rogues and incompetent hacks? Well, turn off Facebook and take a deep breath. That's my advice to everyone, including myself.
Because I'm here to give you the Good News. And sorry, the Good News is not that Jesus died for your sins or that God is watching over us all with some kind of ineffable plan. No, better than that, my friends. The Good News is that all this is transitory, and not in a slow way, like the melting of the glaciers. In less than three years it will be time for another presidential election, if we haven't all been nuked by then. What if, at any other time in your living memory, someone had told you that in three years things will almost certainly be better. Would you have believed it?
So relax.
April 8, 2018
Safely through the first year plus of the Trump presidency. I say safely because he hasn't done much physical damage--only to the truth as a general ideal. There he has done much harm, redefining truth in an eerily Orwellian way, so consistently and often that we now accept as givens that there are such things as "fake news" and "alternative facts," rather than simply lies. Most rational people see this with a firm sense of the irony of it all, while his true believers have gained a couple of catchphrases with which to dress up and rationalize their adherence to his ultimately pedestrian and transparent brand of jingoism and white supremacy. The rest of us have been given permission by the mainstream media to call Trump a liar, an idiot, and a hatemonger quite openly. Some might call that a win-win situation.
It is now perfectly acceptable to wish for and expect the impeachment of the president (whether or not that will ever happen) and to assume that whatever he says will be not only self-serving, but also the opposite of factual. It's as if Pinocchio is in the Oval Office and his nose is getting longer every day--either an amusing state of affairs or a sad one, depending on your disposition. In fact, Trump has effectively cut himself and Fox News off from everybody else, so that it's easier, even for well-meaning but dimwitted people (a large part of the electorate), to see the line between falsehood and propaganda, on the one hand, and news on the other.
Those of us who are hunkered down to weather out the storm that is Trump are teaching ourselves to look at the relative severity of the waves of buffoonery that regularly crash down on the decks of the ship of state, and to gauge their force in terms of how much permanent damage has really been caused. How much? Well, not much. So far nothing his Attorney General, or his Education Secretary, or his hapless and now departed Secretary of State have done has effected any permanent or even major temporary change in things. Even the appointment of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court did nothing except to resurrect his predecessor, Antonin Scalia, and give him a new lease on life. The ship of state is vast and turns only by small degrees, no matter who is at the helm. And thank God for that. Just imagine if Trump was a prime minister capable of instituting his harebrained ideas more or less at will, instead of a comparatively feckless president of a massive bureaucratic corporation, whose board of directors (Congress and the Supreme Court) do not answer to him but to the shareholders and our venerable corporate culture. True, he and his allies in the Congress have altered the tax code in ways that will not be fair to all, but then the previous version wasn't fair to all either, and these things can be tweaked and changed and even undone. It happens regularly.
To read this may come as a shock to some of you whose personal angst and disgust have been so strong that you cannot separate your feelings from what actually has, and has not, taken place. After all, you think, hasn't the precious reputation of the country on the world stage been forever besmirched? Aren't we a half minute closer to doomsday? Haven't we abandoned our symbolic commitment to the laudable, if chimerical, goal of doing something about global warming? Isn't the executive branch of the government now filled with cruel rogues and incompetent hacks? Well, turn off Facebook and take a deep breath. That's my advice to everyone, including myself.
Because I'm here to give you the Good News. And sorry, the Good News is not that Jesus died for your sins or that God is watching over us all with some kind of ineffable plan. No, better than that, my friends. The Good News is that all this is transitory, and not in a slow way, like the melting of the glaciers. In less than three years it will be time for another presidential election, if we haven't all been nuked by then. What if, at any other time in your living memory, someone had told you that in three years things will almost certainly be better. Would you have believed it?
So relax.
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