Exposing Our Greed and Venality Trump Distracts Attention From Damage to Our Protections

By now we should be used to his excessive vulgarity, his racism, his lying, his cheating. It should roll off our consciousness like water off a duck’s back.

Surely Melania must know about his sleaziness. No doubt, she has made a Faustian compact to live in a gilded palace, and now the White House, in return for accepting his casual infidelities, if not in actual deed, for certain in lewdness.

The rest of us, and the world, have to endure a considerably less than perfect projected presidential image of America. 

The real tragedy of Trump is that he has exposed the venal selfishness and bias inside too, too many of our citizens and the men and women chosen to represent us in the legislative and administrative arenas intended to benefit us all.

Trump’s characterization of Haitians and Africans squares effortlessly with the persona recognized by anyone who has followed his career. The surprise from this incident is the failure of public officials and ordinary citizens to emulate Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) and Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL) to express revulsion in the face of racism, bigotry and the denigration of the standards of the office of the president. (One wonders what was Trump’s response when challenged by Graham. Bullies usually back down. Did he express remorse or did he continue to violate proper decorum?) 

Reminiscent of the “I cannot recall” testimony of Republican operatives in the Nixon White House during the 1973 Watergate hearings, and 14 years later by Rear Admiral John Poindexter during the Iran-Contra hearings, Senators Tom Cotton (R-AR) and David Perdue (R-GA), astonishingly claimed they heard nothing. Surely if Graham admonished Trump, as he said he did, it could not have been in whispers. Nor in private. Were Cotton and Perdue, along with other attendees House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), Rep. Robert Goodlatte (R-VA), and Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL) sleeping through this meeting?  Or playing with a fidget spinner?

Cotton and Perdue have tried to blunt the report on Trump’s language by casting doubts on Durbin’s integrity. “I’m saying that this is a gross misrepresentation, it’s not the first time Sen. Durbin has done it,” Perdue said on ABC’s This Week. But Graham, recently thought to have a close relationship with Trump, has not denied Trump’s vulgar language (http://www.cnn.com/2018/01/13/politics/trump-remark-reaction/index.html).

Trump has declared he is not a racist, but his actions (against black athletes, minority voters, Hispanic immigrants, Muslims and Jews) and at times silence in the face of White Nationalist provocations have been more affirmative than any rejection of the appellation. 

Those Americans who voted for Trump are a mixed bag. The true believers, among them evangelicals of all religions who have abandoned their respective god’s principles to idolize a vengeful, egotistical leader devoid of compassion, absolve him of any wrongdoing regardless of its accuracy or provenance. Theirs is a belief grounded in zealotry and intolerance (https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2018/01/12/politics/trump-supporters-react/index.html).

Economics drives those who held their noses and voted for Trump. They might not like what he says or how he acts but they like the rise in their stock portfolios. They have sold their principles, along with environmental protections and American world leadership, in exchange for riches. But as Jesus told his followers in Matthew 6:24, “You cannot serve God and mammon.”

As a nation we have aged beyond the time when a Walter Cronkite could express on the CBS Evening News disenchantment with the war in Vietnam and a president (Lyndon Johnson) could reportedly have said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.” Today we tune into cable telecasts (hard to call them newscasts) that reinforce our prejudices (https://apnews.com/2761a6d6cedc4b91b739a6db93a3a236). There is little opportunity to build a national consensus of truth and facts.

A duck gliding smoothly across a lake is an image of tranquility. As is often noted, however, the real action is below the surface where the duck’s legs are busily paddling away. 

Trump is no serene image but he is a distraction to the destructive activity underway in the halls of government, not the chambers of Congress, rather the offices of agencies and departments now supervised by men and women dedicated to dismantling regulations that protect consumers, workers, voters, the environment, international agreements and other initiatives intended to balance the greed of the wealthy and empowered with the needs of the common populace (Here’s the latest in Politico’s weekly review of five things Trump did while you weren’t looking: https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2018/01/12/trump-policy-medicaid-immigration-trade-000619.)

Trump garners our attention. He galvanizes the resistance. He will bring voters to the polls, against and for him, in numbers a Mike Pence or any other Republican would not. But, in substance, he is no worse than what any other conservative Republican would be doing. 

Except, in the cult of personality he is generating and in his in evocation of powers, real and imagined, presidents before him rarely, if ever, espoused, Trump is a dangerous political phenomenon.

Which leads me to conclude with an excerpt from a reflection written by Jules Harlow contained in the Lev Shalem (whole heart) prayer book read during an ecumenical service Sunday night honoring The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at Temple Israel Center of White Plains. 

“Help us, Eternal, to honor humility.

Too often we follow the foolish and the wicked; 

Too often we follow mockers and the arrogant.

“Protect us, Sovereign, from ourselves as from others.

Too often we speak slander and violence;

Too often we falter in our faithfulness.”

  

Longing for No News Alerts That Scare The Hell Out of Me

I think I was like most teenagers growing up. I generally knew what was going on in the country and the world in the early and mid-1960s. I watched Walter Cronkite on CBS and listened to his colleague, the avuncular Eric Sevareid, dispassionately analyze current events and long term trends. And there were huge stories for both Cronkite and Sevareid and their fellow broadcasters to parse. The Cuban missile crisis. The civil rights movement. The assassination of a president. The Great Society initiative. The growing war in Vietnam. The space race.

It wasn’t until the summer of 1966, however, that I became aware of a need to listen to news every hour on the hour. Keep in mind that WCBS Newsradio 880 in New York did not become a 24 hour news station until August 1967.

I absorbed the importance of listening to news headlines every hour from a high school graduation present my parents provided—a trip to Israel. As I would ride the Egged buses across Jerusalem or Tel Aviv I would notice passengers intently listening to news broadcasts upon each hour.

Living during a perilous time in that nation’s history—that phrase applies to every moment of Israel’s 68-year history, but I digress—Israelis not only wanted to know the latest news. They also were listening for broadcast codes to alert them should their reserve units be called up.

A year later, during the Six Day War, I became obsessed with knowing the latest news from Israel. For good reason—my sister was in Israel, ending the second year of study abroad. Our family had no way of knowing if she were safe, where she was, what she was doing (turns out she was packing crackers for the soldiers). 

Naturally, after I became a journalist, I continued, to this day even in retirement, to turn on the radio at the top of each hour. For decades it was to hear if anything traumatic had transpired in the Middle East. Now, in addition, it is to hear if anything Trumpatic has traumatized (at least half) the nation.

I obviously do not agree with what our new president and his sycophantic Republican House and Senate are doing. But let’s be honest. Nothing was not foretold during the campaign. 

Hearing the hourly news keeps me abreast of the latest rollbacks. That’s what we have so far. Donald J. Trump is bringing us back to the pre-Obama years. He is doing what Obama did to Bush II-era regulations, what George W. Bush did to Clinton-era regulations, what Bill Clinton did to Reagan-Bush I era regulations. You can’t blame the public for feeling whipsawed by the constant change, the feeling on both sides of the aisle of one step forward then two steps backward.

We want transparency from our elected officials. What could be more transparent that the money grab schemes of the Trump family? What could be more blatant than Trump’s assertion that the public doesn’t care? Republican elected officials have shown they don’t. And so far, average GOP Joe Citizen hasn’t shown he cares either. 

Even on forced repatriation of illegal aliens Trump has been no more extreme than the deporter-in-chief Barack Obama (more than 2.5 million sent back to their countries of origin). Yes, the separation of a woman from her family made for heartrending visuals last week but if Trump’s storm troopers round up criminals of whatever stripe he would be acting within the bounds of socially acceptable power, even if a portion of those deported are no more dangerous than any street corner drunk or check kiter.

What any sane person doesn’t want is a violation of fundamental trust in our government and country. We don’t want truth to be undermined by “alternative facts.” We don’t want science to be rejected and supplanted by alternative theories. We don’t want our commitment to international leadership to be replaced by isolationism, a void to be filled by Russia and/or China. We don’t want our status as a nation of immigrants to be sullied by fear. We don’t want our cherished Constitution and its rule of law, as protected by an independent judiciary, to be trampled. We don’t want the long march of equality for all religions, people, gender and sexual orientation to be stalled. We don’t want to fall into the abyss like past empires that rewarded a sliver of oligarchs while the populace struggled to maintain dignity and economic independence.

And so we listen to the news every hour to see and hear the latest excess from a White House turned into a golden goose by a leader who never had to worry about his next meal, who never developed empathy for those who did, who never had to burnish in the crucible of public opinion a plan to help the less fortunate, who never engaged in any domestic or international exchange if it did not directly impact his personal wealth, who treated the public as rubes with money for the taking through shady construction deals and phony education programs, who denigrates our institutions, our elected officials and our judiciary even as he cozies up to dictators who murder their opposition, muzzle the free press and subject their people to deprivation so that they and their acolytes can live comfortably. 

A Saturday Night Live skit provided an apt closing to this blog posting. In it, a People’s Court judge tells Trump, portrayed by Alec Baldwin, he’s doing too much. She pleads with him, “I want one day without a CNN alert that scares the hell out of me.”

Belated New Year Thoughts on Blogging, Water, Solar, Lost Hats, Blimps, Guns and Foreign Students

Happy belated New Year. 

If it seems more time is passing between postings, you’d be correct. Last year I wrote 79 rants, er, blogs, compared to 85 in 2014, which was a reduction from 107 in 2013, which was 49 fewer than the 156 posted in 2012 and even that was 31 below my all-time production high of 187 in 2011.

Can I explain away this verbal shortfall? Somewhat, though some might discount my excuses. First in my mind is that for the last 16 months I have been driving Gilda to and from work Monday through Wednesday. That’s four to six hours behind the wheel each day, depending on traffic. Writing takes time, and, more to the point, the driving is exhausting. So blame Gilda if you crave but don’t get more blogging.

Second, for the last three years I have had a real estate license. I mostly help my friend Linda, occasionally co-hosting an open house, or erecting For Sale signs, or securing information from city/town hall records. Maybe I work a couple hours each week, not a lot, but enough to carve into my writing time. So blame Linda, as she’s the one who talked me into getting my realtor’s license.

Third, in response to several comments, I’ve reduced the number of blogs devoted to sports. After all, no one has replaced Derek Jeter on the New York Yankees as copy-worthy. 

Fourth, I’m to blame for just being … lazy. Lord knows there’s enough craziness out there, especially during this presidential election cycle, to keep me busy multiple times each week. Yet I too often fail to exert myself. Lethargy prevails. But what good is retirement if you can’t be excused for just goofing off? 

Okay, now that I’ve explained myself, here are some thoughts I hope interest you:

Water, Water Everywhere: Amid all the rainfall out West and the flooding along the Mississippi, not to mention how my backyard looks after last night’s and this morning’s monsoon, we should not lose sight of the real water problem that exists around the world—there’s a growing scarcity of potable water that threatens to be the next reason nations go to war or regions within our country dispute federal water management policies. 

Water has become more expensive than oil. Not really. Just seems that way. While clearing out some old files, I came across our city water bills for 2003. For the full year we used 10,200 cubic feet of water, equivalent to 76,301 gallons, at a cost of $73.80, or .0009672 cents per gallon. For 2015 we used 11,000 cubic feet of water, 82,285 gallons, at an annual cost of $220.60, or .0026809 cents per gallon—a 177.2% increase per gallon over the last 12 years. 

Had the price just increased by the cumulative rate of inflation (29%), our price per gallon of water would have been .0012476 cents for a grand total of $102.66. 

Solar Savings: At least we are saving money on our electricity usage thanks to our solar electric panels. Eight months into the program we’ve saved nearly $700. Equally important, we’ve reduced our ConEd dependence by nearly 5,000 kilowatts.  

Hats Off: I’m bummed out. I lost one of my favorite baseball hats, a promotional gift I received back in 1994 to celebrate the release of That’s Entertainment III by Metro Goldwyn Mayer. Actually, three hats came my way. I kept two and gave one to my art director, Milton, after he said he’d like one. 

The hats are quite pliable, making it easy to fold into a winter jacket pocket. I think I lost the hat in a movie theater while watching the new Star Wars flick. 

Bottom line—I preferred the hat over the movie. and by that I mean both Star Wars VII and That’s Entertainment III.

Hot Air Rising: Today’s CBS Sunday Morning aired a piece on the evolution of the Goodyear blimp. It reminded me of my quixotic attempt to bum a ride on a blimp moored in Miami.

Back in 1972, as part of a graduate journalism program at the Newhouse School of Public Communications of Syracuse University, my class covered the Florida presidential primary. We were stationed in Miami. I was assigned to follow the campaign of John Ashbrook, a conservative Republican congressman from Ohio. He had little chance of winning, especially in the Miami area, so I had lots of free time. Two of my classmates and I came upon a Goodyear blimp moored at a field. The blimp was there for coverage of a sporting event some days later. We talked up the crew who promised us a free ride the next day. When we arrived Tuesday morning at the mooring site, the blimp was not there. Seems Walter Cronkite’s crew had been ordered to film Miami vistas for that evening’s election coverage. I never forgave Cronkite for pre-empting my chance to float in air.

Bang Bang: Christmas Day I headlined a blog post asking if you found an AR-15 under your tree, Seems I wasn’t too far off from the truth. 

Click on this article from Britain’s The Daily Mail and you’ll see some extraordinary pictures of “Americans showing off their new weapons at the firing range the day after Christmas - including a woman’s custom-made pink anti-tank rifle”: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3380575/

I fail to understand why anyone needs such personal firepower. 

Finally, Some International Humor you might identify with, courtesy of my brother-in-law David, who along with my sister Lee, has participated for several years in a university program to house foreign students in the Los Angeles area. Here are three “thank-you” notes received from Chinese parents by one program host:

“Thank you for teaching my son to wash dishes.”

“Thank you for teaching my daughter to make her own bed.”

“Thank you for teaching my son to cook and heat up his own food.”

Losing It

I’m losing stuff around the house, and I’m not talking about the normal things one can’t find, such as a single sock in the laundry. I actually solved that problem several years ago by safety pinning pairs of socks together. My current laundry loss is one of those plastic dryer balls that replace the chemical dryer sheets like Bounce we used to put in with the laundry. The spiked dryer balls tend to hide in the folds of fitted sheets, but I searched all my bed linens to no avail. Weird.

Also strange are the nearly empty water jugs I kept in the basement following last year’s storms that cut power in many areas. Survival experts suggested you keep several gallons of water on hand, so I dutifully bought a couple of two-gallon plastic containers of water to store in the basement. Last week I noticed they were almost empty. No telltale puddles or water marks around them. So much for disaster preparedness. 

If Mitt Romney wins the election he’s expressed a commitment to eliminate funding for Public Broadcasting Service, including Sesame Street and its signature character, Big Bird. Putting aside the left-wing mind-control argument Republicans have postulated about Sesame Street, the now 43-year-old children’s educational program has been a fount of early learning.

When one of our nephews was a toddler, his mother sat him in front of the television to watch the then new show. Some months later, he stunned her by reading the label of a cereal box. As she and her husband had not practiced reading with him, the only explanation was Sesame Street. 

Gilda and I employed Sesame Street when our kids were young. Saturday mornings we’d let Dan and Ellie watch Sesame Street and Electric Company as we lounged in bed. We, along with tens of thousands of other parents, protested when PBS changed its Saturday morning programming from kid-friendly to politics and business shows. I think we might have stopped sending money to PBS for a while.

Over the Columbus Day weekend Gilda and I visited Dan, Allison, Finley and Dagny in their new home in Acton, Mass. They live in the Fifth Congressional District represented by Niki Tsongas, widow of Paul Tsongas, the former U.S. Senator and one-time Democratic presidential hopeful. I met both of them during a business trip to New Hampshire in early 1992.

Before boarding the shuttle flight to Boston from LaGuardia, I recognized Tsongas. As luck would have it, I sat across the aisle from him. But he never looked my way during our time waiting for takeoff. His body was shifted toward his wife’s window seat. I’m notorious for falling asleep on airplanes even before getting airborne, so I fretted about missing an opportunity to talk with him.

I tried to stay awake by reading The NY Times. I was midway through the first section of the paper when I saw my opportunity. After finishing an article on Tsongas’ chances in the upcoming New Hampshire primary, I tapped him on the shoulder and said I couldn’t resist talking to the man profiled in the article I had just read. He was most gracious. We chatted for several minutes. When I told him I was headed to New Hampshire, he joked he had spent some time there himself. 

Last night while watching the Yankees-Orioles playoff baseball game, I believe I heard John Smoltz, one of the announcers, say he wanted to get a ride on one of the blimps providing overhead shots of the game and surroundings. I can empathize with him.

Back in 1972, as part of a graduate journalism program at the Newhouse School of Public Communications of Syracuse University, my class covered the Florida presidential primary. We were stationed in Miami. I was assigned to follow the campaign of John Ashbrook, a conservative Republican congressman from Ohio. He had little chance of winning, especially in the Miami area, so I had lots of free time. Two of my classmates and I came upon the Goodyear blimp moored at a field. The blimp was there for coverage of a sporting event some days later. We talked up the crew who promised us a free ride the next day. When we arrived Tuesday morning at the mooring site, the blimp was not there. Seems Walter Cronkite’s crew had been ordered to film Miami vistas for that evening’s election coverage. I never forgave Cronkite for pre-empting my chance to float in air.

There’s a truism in sports—never let a weaker opponent stick around. Score points early and often, so they’ll be discouraged and give up. If you let them hang around, they could surprise you and win. What’s true of sports is also true of politics. Barack Obama, an avid sports fan, has just learned the truth of that aphorism with his lackadaisical performance during last week’s debate with Romney. 

What possessed him to breathe new life into his opponent’s chances is beyond anyone’s analytic powers. Perhaps he himself can’t explain why he played the debate the way he did. I can’t explain it any more than I can explain where my dryer ball disappeared to or why there was no telltale sign of my stored water. I can replace the dryer ball and the water. The question is, can Obama replace the lost affection and momentum among his supporters and undecided voters? 

Politics, As Usual and Unusual

You might have noticed I’ve taken a short hiatus from political commentary. It’s hard, repetitive work continually finding fault with politicians. Look what Gail Collins of the NY Times has to do—each time she writes about Mitt Romney she has to figure out some way to include the fact he strapped the family dog to the roof of the car when he took his family on a vacation to Canada. If I were paid to write about politics, I’m sure my keyboard would be ablaze with fiery ire. But since this is just an avocation. I’m trying to keep my biases in check. At least for the short term.

Speaking of my biases, I’m against men showing skin when they cross their legs. So it was comforting to see President Obama learned his lesson and wore appropriate high socks during his Sunday 60 Minutes interview. Correspondent Steve Croft, on the other hand, exposed his shins to America. Disgusting.

(Real long-time readers of this blog might recall one of my earliest posts railed against the “shins of the president.” As it’s a short entry, I won’t make you click a link to it, I’ll just reproduce it here:

“Now a word about proper sock length. Watching a clip Sunday of Barack Obama on "This Week With George Stephanopoulos," I was struck by the fashion no-no displayed by the president. Sitting with his legs crossed, Obama showed viewers several inches of bare skin where his pants leg did not meet the top of his socks. It is inexcusable, it’s a fashion faux pas, especially considering his wife’s keen fashion sense, that the commander-in-chief of the United States does not wear knee-high socks when he is dressed up. Indeed, anyone, anyone who is in politics, in business or in any way in a public situation, should wear knee-high socks. There is nothing appealing or sexy about seeing a man’s shin-bone skin. Bottom line—if you’re going to wear socks, make sure they cover all of your lower leg. Here’s hoping someone in the White House reads this before Obama’s appearance on Letterman tonight.”)

Someone with sartorial sense and a keen eye must have gotten to Obama.


My “vacation” from political writing has coincided with the ascent of Newt Gingrich as a key player in the Republican presidential sweepstakes. How interesting that many evangelicals and other supposedly values-oriented religious voters have made light of Gingrich’s rather sordid past. They’ve thrown their support to the twice-divorced former speaker of the House. They’ve chosen to ignore his abandonment of the Protestant religion in favor of Catholicism. They’ve accepted his admission of past sins, even the one where he told a previous wife he was leaving her while she suffered from cancer. They don’t hold it against him that he twice (at least) had affairs while married, that he hypocritically tried to impeach Bill Clinton for actions from inappropriate extra-marital sexual activity while he himself was guilty of the same vice. How beguiling that he ignored one of Jesus’ most famous precepts, “Judge not lest ye be judged.”

But then, it is hard to fathom an electorate blind to the failings of their anointed leaders. Ronald Reagan impregnated Nancy Davis before they were married. Not to be outdone, Democrats stood by Clinton and John F. Kennedy. It’s only when they flaunt their improprieties, as Gary Hart did, or try to cover them up, as John Edwards did, that voters rebuff them. Gingrich, with his deep, stentorian tones, has embraced his imperfections, has recanted his sins, so attractive to an evangelical community that sees salvation in faith by atonement.

What they don’t see is how destructive GOP policies on health care, unemployment compensation, pollution, education support and other social issues have been and would be to the family. There can be honest disagreement over abortion rights, but when did the Bible lose its compassion for the poor, for the downtrodden, for the orphaned? When did it become religiously acceptable for the community to abandon the less fortunate? When did the Bible end its advocacy that the rich take care of the needy? The Bible is not a capitalist manifesto. If anything, it is a social contract where those better off are instructed to help the rest of society.

Perhaps if they studied which political ideology has time and again worked to make life easier and more comfortable for the vast majority of our nation, and not an exceedingly small sliver, they will rethink their support for those who would strip away benefits from the masses while safeguarding the treasures of millionaires and billionaires.


If Only He Had Taken the Bet....I’d be $10,000 richer. Like Mitt Romney during Saturday night’s Republican presidential candidate debate with Rick Perry, I proffered a $10,000 bet, the subject of which was, who hosted the mid-1950s CBS TV show, You Are There?. My adversary, a much smarter fellow than I, whose adult education class I attend, and who shall remain nameless so as not to embarrass him, said it was Edward R. Murrow. He said he had tapes at home with Murrow as the host.

I, on the other hand, vividly remember the host being Walter Cronkite. One of my earliest TV memories is watching You Are There. Cronkite would relate the background for the half hour program that recreated historical events as if they were developing news stories, then place an earphone to the side of his head while intoning, “You are there.” The show’s dramatization of the David and Goliath story stays with me even to this day. At least in my mind’s eye, the climactic scene begins with David reciting the 23rd psalm as he walks out to confront Goliath.

Google “You Are There Walter Cronkite” if you need validation of my claim. Murrow, it turns out, hosted another show, See It Now, a newsmagazine and documentary series, also on CBS.