Tag: Donald Trump

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Tennessee Senate Republicans Stand With Trump on Voting “Irregularities”

President Donald Trump poses with a can of beans and other Goya products.

No winner of 2020’s presidential election should be declared until voting “irregularities” have been investigated and court appeals have been exhausted, according to some of Tennessee’s top lawmakers.

Twenty-four members of the Tennessee Senate Republican Caucus members signed a letter issued Tuesday stating they stand “absolutely and unequivocally with President Donald J. Trump as he contests the unofficial results of the presidential election of 2020.” The letter was sent at least to members of the press but was not addressed to any entity or organization.
Tennessee Senate Republican Caucus

The ultimate result of the election, they said, remains “uncertain.” The lawmakers cited unsupported claims of voting “irregularities” in states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Nevada.” An election winner should not be declared for any candidate, they said, ”until these irregularities have been thoroughly investigated and court appeals have been exhausted.”

They also believe the coronavirus pandemic led to “an extraordinary amount of absentee ballots and voting by mail. Thanks to this and “razor-thin margins,” a winner in the election should not yet be called.

Tennessee Senate Republican Caucus

“While this election may have been ’called’ by various media outlets, the election process is far from over,” reads the letter.

Tennessee Senate Republican Caucus

Like Al Gore in the 2000 election, Tennessee Senate Republicans said President Donald Trump has another month to contest the election through recounts and litigation.
[pullquote-1-center] ”This is an important election,” the Republicans said. “There is no reason to come to a premature conclusion with this many lingering questions. While the results of most presidential elections are clear on or around election day, the results become official only when the presidential electors vote in December.

“President Trump has a right to challenge the results of this election until at least that point. We support him in doing so and encourage all Tennesseans and Americans to be patient until the result of this election can be determined.” Tennessee Senate Republican Caucus

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Cover Feature News

Too Close to Call!

CREDIT: REUTERS | Mike Segar

From the very beginning, it was obvious that calling the 2020 presidential election would take a while. Joe Biden was doing well enough in the nation’s suburbs to raise Democratic hopes, but Donald Trump’s re-election campaign was performing tenaciously enough to suggest that his 2016 victory was more than a fluke. Both parties were gaining in areas where they trailed four years ago, and leads were being swapped back and forth in several key states.

Democrats seemed likely to prevail in some key Senate races, though it was uncertain whether they could close the gap with the GOP in the upper chamber.

The outlook was complicated by the fact that the president is certain to follow through on his frequently voiced threats to litigate in areas where the outcome of the vote did not turn out to his satisfaction. All in all, the main thing demonstrated by the unprecedented outpouring of votes from both halves of the American electorate was that the United States of America remains profoundly disunited.

REUTERS | Mike Segar

(left) Donald J. Trump and (right) Joe Biden

Never before in an American national election had questions of turnout loomed so large. Both sides strained to get every one of their identifiable supporters to the polls, and not a day had gone by without President Donald Trump or his surrogates expressing over-hyped concerns about the prospect of unprecedented numbers of voters — especially via the medium of mail-in ballots, a mode of voting that was liberalized in virtually every state as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

There had been big-time anxiety on both sides of the mail-in issue, as on the election results themselves. On the one hand were Trump’s daily accusations, totally without evidence, of inevitable ballot fraud and his stated refusal — as in 2016 — to accept the possibility of an unfavorable verdict by the voters; on the other hand were the fears of the Democratic opposition that Trump would stop at nothing to obstruct such a verdict. The new director of the U.S. Postal Service, a billionaire Trump donor with the Dickensian name of DeJoy, seemed determined to do his bit by decimating pre-election postal services, reducing employee overtime, uprooting mailboxes, and destroying mail-sorting machines.

Closer to home, Tennessee state government, overwhelmingly dominated by the president’s GOP party, hunkered down in an attempted last-ditch defiance of judicial mandates that had relaxed the state’s restrictions on absentee voting. Tre Hargett, Tennessee’s secretary of state, insisted to a congressional investigating committee that state law did not countenance fear of COVID-19 as a reason to vote absentee. “Pitiful,” responded Senator Angus King of Maine, an Independent. And reflecting both concern about the intractable virus and, as polls would indicate, a zeal for change, the applicants for mail-in ballots multiplied everywhere, as, for that matter, did the number of early voters.

WhiteHouse.gov

Donald J. Trump

So, for better or for worse, did the crowds that continued to flock to the site of mass rallies conducted by the barnstorming Donald Trump: For better, in that the president continued to be the source of legitimate mass enthusiasm on the part of his sizable hard-core base and thereby reinforced the importance of populist energies; for worse, in the sense that each one of Trump’s showy and largely maskless assemblies threatened to be a super-spreader event to the detriment of the general health and welfare.

Among the other rolls of escalating numbers was the one that could only be called a national casualty list: On election eve, the number of COVID-19 cases in the United States had risen past 9 million, the number of deaths was more than 230,000 at a national rate of nearly 1,000 new fatalities a day, and there was as yet no light at the end of this tunnel. The president himself, of course, had come down with the ailment; so had First Lady Melania Trump and numerous other denizens of the White House, including several members of the staff of the president and of Vice President Mike Pence.

With first-rate state-of-the-art medical facilities at their immediate disposal to facilitate recovery, they were still the lucky ones. For the rank and file of Americans, the outlook was more ominous. The Trump administration largely eschewed a national anti-virus policy, leaving it to the individual states to devise strategies of their own insofar as they had means or inclination to do so. Bizarrely and tragically, attitudes toward the coronavirus pandemic began to bifurcate according to the nation’s political divisions, with “red” or Republican states largely following the president’s exhortations to open things up — business, schools, whatever — and “blue” Democratic states attempting in various measures to keep the clamps on overtly public activity.

For all practical purposes, the nation resembled (and still does) an isolation ward. No plays, movies, or other dramatic entertainments save those that were streamed online; meetings, too, conducted via computer; workforces operating from home; athletic events taking place without their audiences and in locations other than the cities that teams supposedly represented. Everything was down the rabbit hole or through the looking glass.

Suddenly that non-word inadvertently coined by Warren G. Harding in the presidential campaign of 1920 has come into its own: “normalcy.” Harding was speaking in the context of a just-concluded world war of then-unprecedented savagery and, not incidentally, of a marauding virus, the Spanish influenza bug of 1917-18 that killed an estimated 100 million people worldwide.

REUTERS | Brian Snyder

Joe Biden

If there is any quality that Democratic nominee Joe Biden demonstrated during his run for the presidency, it was that of being normal — not dull-normal, as Trump’s preternaturally stolid vice president, Mike Pence, often seemed to be, but normal in the sense of having recognizable neighborly qualities. Biden lacks Trump’s capacity for theater, as he also lacks the charismatic personality of his former governmental partner, Barack Obama. But his ability to be convincing with a vernacular (or normal) phrase like “C’mon, man!” is unparalleled.

During the Democratic presidential primaries of the winter and spring, most of the score or so of Democratic presidential aspirants declared themselves on the cutting-edge side of public issues. Biden was singular in his hewing to the center. It held him back in every primary contest but the deciding one, South Carolina, when the race had narrowed down from the field at large to one of Biden versus the party progressives’ main man, Bernie Sanders.

In that context, it was both ironic and appropriate that Biden’s eventual choice of a running mate came down to Kamala Harris, the liberal California senator who had chided him in an early debate for being too willing to work across the aisle with the other side.

There was a time, back in the summer, when domestic disturbances arising from the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis and the ever-simmering fact of racial inequities seemed to give an electoral opportunity to Trump and the advocates of the social status quo. And there was arguable hypocrisy on the part of those participating in the demonstrations or defending them while turning a blind eye to the violence and potential super-spreader aspects of them. But if polls are correct, the specter of looters has proved as irrelevant to the case of Joe Biden as has the imputation to him of socialism.

Still, there was no denying that an air of crisis accrued to the presidential election of 2020. Conservatives did sense the onset of long-pending social and demographic changes that frighten them. Liberals did abhor the continued power and influence of a monolithic monied economic class and its attendant rampant income inequality. And Americans at large could not fail but take alarm at such existential threats as the nonstop environmental disasters — fires, hurricanes, floods — that have afflicted the country’s coasts and its heartland alike. Trump may be the most important skeptic in public life regarding the reality of climate reform.

And so it went, up until Election Day. Pulses racing in anticipation, hearts pounding in dread. This was not like the World Series or the Super Bowl. There is no “life goes on” sense in case of a loss. It was not even like the nomination (and subsequent rushed Senate confirmation) of the conservative Amy Coney Barrett, a Rhodes College graduate, to the Supreme Court. For all the fear and trembling Democrats endured over that, some pundits were divining in it — the possibility of post-election judicial interventions notwithstanding — a silver lining: The more-than-likely nullification of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) would create both the opportunity and the incentive for a Biden administration to consider Medicare for All, and what the Court might take away from Roe v. Wade, either the states or Washington itself would presumably have a chance to restore — or improve. A Democratic Congress and Senate would surely attempt to legislate a return to the status ante quo. Meanwhile, looking forward, there might be more Democratic votes in the heartland for voters estranged from the party for a generation on social grounds.

But Trump has been Trump for four years. Millions of Americans, and not only progressives, counted it as a miracle that the country’s social fabric had held together at all during this era of persistent turmoil and raging divisiveness, amid a tweet-driven cult-of-personality presidency that seemed more like a TV reality show gone amok than a process of government. None of this is to gainsay what many, and not only Republicans, will acknowledge to have been the country’s pre-pandemic economic successes — though the long tough slough back from the fiscal crash of 2007-08 was begun during the presidency of Barack Obama, Trump’s Democratic predecessor.

And Trump’s stock-market numbers, boosted by his huge corporate tax cut in late 2017, arguably signified a widening wealth gap between haves and have-nots at least as much as it did a sense of general prosperity. Whatever the case, Trump could, and did, trumpet a win in the declining numbers of Black and Hispanic unemployment, as he also did (through draconian means) a measurable decrease in both legal and illegal immigration into the country. He could not, however, keep out another more powerful immigrant, a strain of highly contagious coronavirus that came to be known as COVID-19.

History may ultimately judge the Trump administration to have been snake-bit, though the bad luck (or karma) implied by that term may have been the natural consequence of the president’s penchant for snake-handling — i.e., his eccentric or risky or downright dangerous deviations from the hitherto accepted (here’s that concept again) norms of American government. All things considered, his four years to date seem in retrospect to have been favored by the indulgence of the gods.

As significant as the presidential race has been, the consequences of the 2020 election transcend what will have happened in it. The reality is that, even as you read this and possibly for weeks afterward, we may not know for sure what direction American government will be taking henceforth. There were 11 or so Senate races that, going into the election, were regarded as being competitive. Given the near certainty  that litigation of the election results will occur, it will be difficult for a time to assay the prospects for legislation or to tell who actually is in charge, or to what extent.

And, no matter who commands the technical majority, there is likely to remain some vestige of the impasse between parties that has in recent years turned self-government into something like a Cold War of the civil variety. Though it caused him some grief, initially, as he began his primary run, Biden’s belief in reconciliation as an aim in itself would become a major selling point to the nation at large and especially to independents and Never-Trumper crossovers from the Republicans. And, though Trump had offered little but scorn to the leaders of the political opposition, his very demagogic success in appealing to working-class remnants of a onetime Democratic consensus had suggested something of a pathway across the divide.

In a true sense, factionalism — or as it is now being called, tribalism — may have run its course. As had been the case at other turning points in the nation’s history, the twain would have to meet — or else.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Have a Blessed Day!

I was in Fresh Market Sunday morning. I know it’s a little pricier than some places, but it’s smaller and a really buttoned-up store: masks required, six-foot floor markers, one person into the meat counter area at a time, plastic screens at checkout, sanitizer, etc. I feel comfortable shopping there.

I picked out some produce, some fruit, and headed over to the dairy section. On the way, I saw two women at the dessert counter, talking with the baker, masks down around their necks. It ticked me off, but they weren’t my problem and I was in a bit of a hurry. Then they became my problem.

President Donald Trump salutes

I was picking out some yogurt when the women walked right up next to me, yakking and laughing, still with their masks around their necks. I turned and said, more politely than I should have, “Please put your masks over your face and stay six feet away.”

Silence. Then one woman looked at me as though I were a crazy man, eyes large, shocked expression on her face, as though the idea of wearing a mask was something an alien might suggest. She turned to her friend, laughed, looked back at me, and said, “Oh, baby, you’re gonna be all right. We’re all good.”

I said, “No, we’re NOT good unless you pull your mask up and back off.”

The woman cocked her head, and said, patronizingly, as though I were six, “It’s okay, sweetie. Don’t you worry. You have a blessed day, now.”

Ah yes, “Have a blessed day” — the verbal closer of choice for passive-aggressive religious types, one step removed from “Bless your heart.” Grrrr.

Anyway, after anointing me with the love of Jesus, the women backed off a few feet (not pulling up their masks) and went back to yakking. I finished shopping and reported them to the checker, who called the manager. I hope they got their blessed butts kicked out, but who knows?

Look, I don’t want to get COVID, but if I do, it’s not going to be because I acted stupidly. And it’s not going to be because I allowed stupid people to invade my personal space. I’m not as scared of COVID as I am of fools, religious whack-jobs, science deniers, conspiracy believers, most Republicans in Congress, and people who think President Trump is setting a good example. Ignorance is the true killer, and it’s what the president’s enablers in his party and in the right-wing media continue to spread. The fact that Trump himself and half the White House staff have caught the disease hasn’t changed a thing.

In case you missed it, here’s what Trump tweeted on Monday: “I will be leaving the great Walter Reed Medical Center today at 6:30 P.M. Feeling really good! Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life. We have developed, under the Trump Administration, some really great drugs & knowledge. I feel better than I did 20 years ago!” Trump also said he might be “immune” to the disease. What?

Trump could have used his personal experience to spread empathy and awareness, to point out that even someone as protected and rigorously tested as the president of the United States is vulnerable to COVID. He could have acknowledged that millions of his fellow citizens who’ve had the disease didn’t get helicoptered to a hospital as soon as they showed symptoms; they didn’t get dozens of doctors and specialists and tests and experimental treatments and 24-hour care. He could have said something as simple and compassionate as, “This is a scary and dangerous disease. Please wear masks and practice social distancing.”

But that would have required showing humanity, something Trump sees as weakness. Instead the president opted for Il Duce reality show theatrics: exiting a helicopter on the White House lawn at the precise hour of the evening news, climbing a flight of stairs to a perfectly back-lit balcony, pulling off his mask, and standing manfully for a full minute, before holding a long salute for the cameras and then turning to walk into the White House, still unmasked. It was so manly, the Fox News pundits got the vapors.

Meanwhile, an average of 40,000 Americans a day are getting COVID; 1,000 or so are dying. There are hotspots all over the country. Some states are buttoned-up like Fresh Market. Others, like Florida, are wide open, with no COVID restrictions whatsoever. Yeehaw. And let’s not forget that millions of people have lost their jobs because of this needlessly prolonged epidemic.

I hope you’ll forgive me, but I’m rooting for one more to lose his.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Debate & Switch

Wow. What a debate, eh? I mean, who could have seen that coming? President Trump demanding that Joe Biden take a drug test live, on national television? Whoa!

And then, Biden coming back with that great dad-joke one-liner: “Urine sane, Donald! Don’t piss me off!”

Then, what about when Trump told moderator Chris Wallace that not paying taxes “makes me smart,” and Biden said, “Well, then, how smart do you have to be to pay a porn star $130,000?” You have to admit, that was a classic moment, one for the history books.

And don’t get me started about Trump making fun of Sleepy Joe’s cosmetic surgery, and Biden pointing out that Trump deducted $70,000 from his taxes for makeup and hair. That was tense, right? These guys were like two old (really old) heavyweights, letting it all out, hammering away at each other. American democracy at its finest.

Well, okay, none of that happened. Or maybe it did. It wouldn’t surprise me. Crazier things have happened. In fact, they do, every week. But by now you’ve probably figured out that I had to finish this column on Tuesday, several hours before the first 2020 presidential debate began. So what everyone will be talking about on Wednesday after the debate is a mystery as I write this. I do know it will probably be ridiculous — or terrifying. Or both. And I do know I’ll be drinking as I watch it. These things make me very nervous, especially this year.

Maybe we’ll get yet another giant bombshell of a revelation that will “end Trump’s presidency,” something “he can’t possibly survive,” like ignoring Russia putting bounties on American troops, or telling Bob Woodward he intentionally downplayed COVID-19, or paying off a porn star to keep quiet about a liaison, or intentionally separating children from their parents and putting them in cages to deter immigration, or falsely saying mail-in ballots were a crooked Democratic scheme, or telling America that he wouldn’t accept November’s election results unless he liked them.

What’s next? Who can possibly predict? It’s just exhausting. Every day there are new tweets, new lies, new outrages, new revelations. And I’m sure by the time you read this, some fresh nonsense will have happened — during the debate or after — that no one could have even imagined.

We’re in a topsy-turvy world, where blue-collar white guys who have more than $750 deducted from every paycheck are defending a president who pays no taxes and got a $72 million tax-refund check, where religious evangelicals who claim to be disciples of Jesus are standing up for a man who is the very antithesis of Christian values, where Republicans who used to claim to be “conservative” have abandoned any and all principles, choosing instead to relentlessly kiss the ass of an amoral grifter. Lamar Alexander, I’m talking to you. Among many others.

I miss normal. I miss presidents who have pets and wear casual clothes and go on vacations with their kids, presidents who don’t spend every spare moment watching Fox News and trying to get — or divert — our attention by tweeting at us 40 times a day. I miss not having to think about our fearless leader every time I turn on the news or go online. I miss being able to assume that the president — Democrat or Republican — is looking out for the American people and trying to do what they think is best for us, instead of constantly working a hustle for their own bottom line. I miss being able to assume the president has at least some core principles, some level of integrity.

I’m tired of all this incompetency and narcissism and lying and exaggeration — every damn day. I think most Americans are. But it’s clear by now that those who support Trump — maybe 40 percent of us — are all in, no matter what he says or does. It’s a cult. Nothing will deter their allegiance to their orange Jim Jones. And it’s also become quite clear that nothing ends this madness but an election, and even that is in question with this guy.

More chaos lies ahead of us — maybe weeks, maybe months — all complicated by the unrelenting virus that hangs in the background, ready to re-emerge if we let down our vigilance. The bottom line is undeniable: We need a massive landslide defeat of the man who has corrupted the American presidency, who has turned federal agencies into political fiefdoms, and who has made the U.S. Justice Department into his personal law firm.

Vote. That’s it. Do it in person, if at all possible. This chapter of American history needs to end.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Senator Alexander Favors Immediate Vote on Supreme Court Nominee

Senator Lamar Alexander

Pre-empting the expectations of many that he might have reservations about an immediate Senate vote on replacing the just-deceased Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander announced Sunday that taking such a vote would be fine with him.

Said the Senator: “No one should be surprised that a Republican Senate majority would vote on a Republican President’s Supreme Court nomination, even during a presidential election year. The Constitution gives senators the power to do it. The voters who elected them expect it. Going back to George Washington, the Senate has confirmed many nominees to the Supreme Court during a presidential election year. It has refused to confirm several when the president and Senate majority were of different parties. Senator McConnell is only doing what Democrat leaders have said they would do if the shoe were on the other foot. I have voted to confirm Justices Roberts, Alito, Sotomayor, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh based upon their intelligence, character and temperament. I will apply the same standard when I consider President Trump’s nomination to replace Justice Ginsburg.”

Thus, for the second time within a year, Alexander deflated the hopes of those independents and Democrats who thought that the Senator, on the basis of his reputation as a Republican moderate, might part the ways with President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) on a major issue. (The other time was on the occasion of the impeachment of Trump, when Alexander voted with other GOP regulars to acquit the president without hearing witnesses.)

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Four Nights in Cyberspace — the 2020 DNC

My chief fear, as the virtual DNC began on Monday night, was that they didn’t make the mistake of over-producing it. Not for the last time, I found myself wishing it were possible to have a real rough-and-tumble convention.

And, after a needlessly slow start, killing prime time with the kind of desultory welcoming and filler material ordinary conventions start with in the morning or early afternoon, the DNC got going and massed several strong speeches and moments. The point to keep in mind is that in normal convention years the strong stuff starts right away— at 8 p.m. CDT or 9 p.m. EDT.

Having Bernie Sanders on fairly early was a good move toward answering several questions at once. A runner-up in 2020 as he was in 2016, could the Vermont Senator, an

Bernie Sanders

icon of the progressive left, close ranks with the Democrats’ centrist standard-bearer? Though he had made a speech on behalf of Hillary on opening night of the 2016 convention, it seemed not to have cleared away doubters — either in the Clinton ranks or in his own — and the remaining sense of suspicion left a tuft of malaise stuck to the coordinated campaign.

What he said this time around, speaking on a studio stage to the camera, not only sounded fully sincere, it was less a concession than a bona fide endorsement of the candidate who had bested him, Joe Biden. Indeed, it was the first example, of many to come in the convention, of what might be called testimonials from The Friends of Joe Biden — a group of illustrious and/or affecting exemplars who could implicitly be compared to the cronies and satraps of the incumbent President.

Bernie professed himself open to liberals, moderates, and even conservatives — a statement that put him on the same unity-minded platform as Biden — and provoked this thought: Those folks who worried that Sanders could not appeal to a national electorate, what were they thinking? Nobody could have been more obscure than an Independent Senator from Vermont, and look at the national following he had inspired with his attacks on economic inequality! And, the reality of Trump now a given, who could doubt this time that Bernie’s following would come with him in full support of the Democratic ticket?

In juxtaposition to Bernie Sanders on that first night was John Kasich, the moderate former Governor of Ohio who had been in the Republican field of candidates in 2016 and now served to bracket the ticket’s potential from the other side of the political spectrum. (In a sightly jarring and probably unnecessary acknowledgment of his role, Kasich would say he doubted that a President Biden would take any “hard left” turns.)

Michelle Obama was not a matter of right nor left. Nor was the former First Lady an old-fashioned adornment to the patriarchy. She came across as a truth-teller and a judge, sounding this more-in-sadness-than-in-anger note: “Donald Trump is the wrong president for our country. He has had more than enough time to prove that he can do the job, but he is clearly in over his head. He cannot meet this moment. He 

Bennie Thompson

simply cannot be who we need him to be for us. It is what it is.”

One more notable fact of that and subsequent nights: Mississippi’s venerable African-American congressman Bennie Thompson, sounding agreeably Old-Southern in his role as permanent Convention chair.

How about our girl Raumesh, one of several virtual testifiers on Joe Biden’s behalf to kick off Night Two of the DNC as sequential keynoters. Remember her floor speech from Phiadelphia in 2016? (Hillary, the state Senator from Memphis memorably said, was “a bad sister.” Unfortunately, she was also, arguably, a bad candidate.)

Raumesh Akbari

Raumesh Akbari, in any case, has been sprinkled with stardust twice — deservedly.

And, one thought, lookee at Caroline Kennedy and son Jack Schlossberg in a brief camera turn. Dang, he’s got those looks, almost a double for his late uncle JFK Jr.

A future-tense candidate?

Youth was similarly served by a pro forma nominating speech for Bernie Sanders by New York Congresswoman Aexandria Ocasio Cortez — AOC, as she’s increasingly called in tribute to her out-of-nowhere celebrity as an instant eminence of the left. Her speech was less about Bernie than it was about her wish list for the political future: “… 21st-century social, economic and human rights, including guaranteed health care, higher education, living wages and labor rights for all people in the United States; a movement striving to recognize and repair the wounds of racial injustice, colonization, misogyny and homophobia …”

It may have been obligatory to give time at some point to John Kerry, the party’s unsuccessful 2004 nominee — or was that old footage of Edmund Muskie? Not much, in any case, was advanced from the moment. Former presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were more effective links to the party’s past. It is impossible not to respect Carter nor to appreciate Clinton, for all the fresh tarnish on the latter’s image.

Caroline Kennedy and Jack Schlossberg

It was nice to see the friendship between Joe Biden and the late GOP maverick John McCain being remembered — not so much in the somewhat exaggerated hope of attracting fall-away Republicans as to remind the audience of Biden’s ability to work across third rails and party lines.

The absolute hero of the evening — both emotionally and ideologically — was the long-term ALS survivor Ady Barkan, who by his courage, perseverance, and very presence embodied the case for a revamping and extension of national heath care — a wider one, alas, than is envisioned (or at least publicly sanctioned) by Biden.

Jill Biden was a delight, and it was revealing to see her widen the domestic profile of her husband a bit further while giving us a preview of her likely presence-to-be on the national scene.

But, by all odds, the high point of Tuesday night was the roller-coaster ride across America in the form of the live roll call for President — the casting of the votes made sequentially from the scene of each of the nation’s 57 states and territories. What a trip, in every sense of the term! A virtue made of necessity — surely to be repeated in less pandemic future times.

Immigration had been touched on as an issue here and there on the Democratic Convention’s first two nights, but it became something more than that on Night Three when the nation was exposed to videos of 11-year-of Estela Juarez, daughter of an ex-Marine and an undocumented Mexican, crying over her mother’s forced deportation, alternating with excerpts of the President snarling about “animals” and his intention to “move ’em out.”

Estela Juarez

Yes, of course, Trump’s defenders would decry this as a trick of editing and would maintain that he was speaking of criminal elements in the illegals among us. Still, the images of Estela and her mother speak for themselves.

The evening would also see the wounded heroine, former California Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, survivor of a shooting at point-blank range in the back of the head by a zealot with a gun.

Another survivor of sorts was Hillary Clinton, the party’s 2016 standard-bearer, whose very presence, as much as her words, was a warning against complacency at the polls. It is pedantry of a sort, even nit-picking, to complain about certain kinds of style points, but here we go: “As the saying goes” is not the right way to introduce a certain famous comment by Ernest Hemingway, which, in its verbatim version, in “A Farewell to Arms,” goes, “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” Unmentioned by Clinton, as by most alluders to the sentiment, is the next sentence: “But those that will not break it kills.”

One very live and unbroken specimen is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who took her turn Wednesday night, as did Elizabeth Warren — both of them properly aggressive and examples of the unprecedented prominence of women in today’s Democratic Party.
At one point viewers were treated to a recitation of legislative accomplishments of Joe Biden, one of which was his sponsorship of the Violence Against Women Act. This was appropriate, but also a little brazen, in that Biden, as chairman of the Senate committee looking into sexual-harassment complaints of Anita Hill against then Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, had been regarded as less than properly vigilant.

The night would end with the two biggest moments — a take-no-prisoners address from former president Barack Obama who, from within his customary restrained persona, threw protocol aside and gave it back to his presidential successor, Donald Trump, followed by a This-Is-Your-Life bio of Kamala Harris, and then Harris in the flesh, to accept the vice-presidential nomination.

Obama stood before the cameras as an elder statesman, but you could still sense within him the wunderkind who came from out of nowhere at the 2004 Democratic Convention — the moderate, sensible presence that his political enemies insisted on trying to characterize as a radical Zulu. But Obama’s inner flame never materalized as firebombs; he could provide heat and light but never explosions. So it was this night:

“I never expected that my successor would embrace my vision or continue my policies. I did hope, for the sake of our country, that Donald Trump might show some interest in taking the job seriously; that he might come to feel the weight of the office and discover some reverence for the democracy that had been placed in his care.
“But he never did. For close to four years now, he’s shown no interest in putting in the work; no interest in finding common ground; no interest in using the awesome power of his office to help anyone but himself and his friends; no interest in treating the presidency as anything but one more reality show that he can use to get the attention he craves.
“Donald Trump hasn’t grown into the job because he can’t.”

There was no tit-for-tat to this, no understandable human response to the torrent of verbal abuse he has suffered from Trump. It was, more than anything else, a report card and a severe one.

Kamala Harris

And Harris, when she came on stage, was thereby largely enabled to eschew the tradition vice-presidential role of attacker, so as to complete the job of revealing herself to an America where she is still something of an unknown quantity. Smiling, and not without a fair amount of glamor, she described her scrambled ethnic heritage (part Black, part Indian of the East Asian variety), her stroller-view of the Civil Rights revolution, her rise in the legal world as a professional woman, and her simultaneous persona as a stepmother called Mamala. A homey presence altogether, but still a seasoned prosecutor and very much woke Senator. Someone who could plausibly say, “We can do better and deserve so much more.”

At the end of her remarks she was joined on stage by her husband Doug Emhoff, while the head of the ticket, Biden, stood awkwardly with his wife Jill a good 12 feet away. The two groups waved at each other and at the large overhead Jumbo screen showing a Zoom crowd applauding. No hands joined overhead of the two ticket heads, not in this socially distanced time. With the climactic night to come it all left an air of incompleteness. Or of expectation.

By and large, on the eve of the finale, the Democrats had managed to bring off a passable, even an impressive virtual show. Now, on Night 4, it was up to Joe to deliver. His surrogates, as well as his advance history, had created the profile of a likable, sincere and well-meaning presence. His adversary President Trump, had countered with a gaffe-prone bumbling caricature he called Sleepy Joe.

Thursday night would determine which of those personas would finish up on the stage.

Things didn’t begin all that auspiciously with some cheesy jokes in which Julia Louis-Dreyfus tried to riff on Mike Pence’s “foreign-sounding” name and declared, “I’m proud to be a nasty woman.” Functioning as the evening’s M.C., she would continue to be something of an edgy presence, only fitting into the mood of the Convention at the point later on when she spoke of her bout with cancer, thereby becoming one of the victims for whom Joe Biden is being posited as the hope.

Following a child’s reading of the Pledge of Allegiance, the erstwhile Dixie Chicks — now, post-George Floyd, just The Chicks — did the Star-Spanged Banner, and Sister Simone had to be in there somewhere because Senator Chris Combs thanked her by name when Wolf Blitzer of CNN cued him back in after a station break.

Civil rights icon John Lewis, memorialized upon his death two weeks ago, got one more lengthy reprise, and it seemed appropriate. Still, the evening was mounting toward Joe’s climactic moment, and everything else was patently build-up. Deb Haaland, a Native American member of the House from New Mexico, Cory Booker bloviating, Jon Meacham pontificating, Mayor Pete introducing all the old gang from the Democratic primaries who looked like Hollywood Squares as they traded Joe memories from their places on a Zoom screen.

Michael Bloomberg came on to boost the ticket and excoriate Trump. Smooth and fluent, he went far toward erasing the memory of that flat and defensive debate performance back in the winter that doomed his campaign and prepared the way for the revival of Joe’s.

There was a moment that mesmerized many onlookers when young Brayden Harrington, who met Biden in New Hampshire and was embraced there as a fellow stutterer, worked his way bravely through a reminiscence of the event before what he had to know was a national television audience.

Brayden Harrington

Then we got what looked like a sleepover image featuring the nominee’s four granddaughters, all smiles and fond recollections of their eminent senior kinsman. Steph Curry and his wife and two daughters would add their impressions, and the moment of truth got ever nearer as Biden’s two living children, son Hunter and daughter Ashley, prepared to bring him on with their own recollections.

Ashley is the daughter of second wife Jill, and, Hunter — he of Ukraine fame — is the survivor of two family catastrophes: a car crash that killed Biden’s first wife and a daughter and left both sons hospitalized; and the agonizing death from cancer of brother Beau, an ex-Marine war veteran and state Attorney General in Delaware on his way to higher things when the Reaper intervened.

Joe Biden’s all-too-obvious grief over Beau, coupled with the pummeling Hunter had taken from the Trump crowd, had created inevitably a sense of Hunter as a possible black sheep. He did not appear so Thursday night; in his coming-out before a national audience he looked and sounded like Joe’s son in every particular, more so than Beau in many ways. He was sympathetic and sincere about his dad, and Ashley, a bright presence, was another revelation.

And finally, after we got a filmed bio of the nominee’s life and times, the triumphs and tragedies, along with the curriculum vitae details of his long government service, there he was, all by himself, Joe Biden.

At this point, I am going to presume to borrow from a Facebook post by by former colleague and frequent partner on the campaign trail, Chris Davis:

“Joe did good. Between his lifelong stutter and a real affinity for putting his foot in his mouth, oratory never has been his thing. But tonight’s performance reminded me of the turning point in narrative cinema when filmmakers realized movies were fundamentally different than stage plays. This wasn’t the typical convention where viewers at home watched a public speaking event built to ignite a massive live audience. It has been intimate, if sometimes imperfect. One commentator positively described it as an infomercial, and that’s not a terrible comparison. I’ll continue to hold breath every time I see him on a live mic. But tonight Joe did good, and as several folks have pointed out before me, the medium really worked for him.”

Joe Biden

That’s one way of putting it. And the content of Biden’s speech complemented everything else that had been said and done earlier in the convention — in its concern for the powerless and the victims of injustice, its determination to transcend the Charleston debacle and fat-cat white supremacy and achieve at long last something resembling racial equity; in its defense of beleaguered pubic institutions like the Affordable Care
Act and the Postal Service; in its determination to revive our foreign alliances and confront the adversaries that the Trump administration has ignored or coddled; in its simple avowal that government is meant to serve and protect the American people.

“This is not a partisan moment. This must be an American moment,” Biden said. “This
is our moment to make hope and history rhyme.”

And with that the ticket’s two couples were on stage together again, waving at the applause on the Jumbo Zoom screen and, with obvious delight, turning to face the sky auspiciously exploding in fireworks.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Come On, Lamar! There’s Still Time for Senator Alexander to Show Courage

It seems all so obvious now.

Last January 31st, Lamar Alexander, Tennessee’s senior senator, voted to dismiss John Bolton’s testimony at the Senate impeachment trial of Donald Trump. Had Alexander voted for presentation of further evidence, several others in the Republican Party may well have joined him. And we as a country might be in a very different place than where we are today.

Now that everyone knows the contents of Bolton’s book, The Room Where It Happened, the testimony that the former National Security Advisor was willing to give might well have tilted the Senate toward a Trump conviction, resulting in a Pence presidency.
Six months later, there is no point crying over spilt milk. But it is worth taking a moment to think about what might have been, had Donald Trump been removed from office last winter.

Lamar Alexander

The past six months under a Pence presidency would have been difficult — the pandemic could care less who’s in the White House — but perhaps he would have handled the virus’ omnipresence differently. He’s no favorite of mine, but I believe a President Pence would have approached the crisis altogether differently. He certainly would have listened more closely to the doctors. And he wouldn’t have played so much golf.

Pence would have made mistakes; after all, everyone on the front lines did at first. But he and the governors, I feel confident, would have put together a cogent federal/state pandemic plan. Having been a governor himself, he would have worked closely with others from both parties.

I also believe that a President Pence would consider hourly tweeting beneath the dignity of his new position. And he would know that his new job was way bigger than his ego, well aware of where the buck stops.

By now, President Pence’s policies might have saved 25,000 lives, maybe more. At the moment, he would be in the middle of a closely contested election race, just 77 days away. The outcome would be a toss-up at this point.

The interim President would be well liked, and so would Lamar Alexander, the man who demanded that John Bolton’s testimony be heard. The retiring Tennessee senator forever would be remembered for not letting the Bad Cat out of the impeachment bag.

Lamar Alexander was our governor for eight years in the Eighties, our senator now for the past eighteen. I don’t know a Democrat in Tennessee who hasn’t voted for him a time or three. Alexander’s public service reflects competence, dedication, and civility.

Sad, isn’t it, then, that his distinguished Senate career is ending on an ambiguous note. Sad that all but one GOP senator chose to ignore evidence of the President’s criminal behavior regarding the Ukraine. Shortly after his acquittal, Donald Trump rode a victory lap in his limo at the Daytona 500, and the rest is history. Real history, unfortunately, not what-might-have-been.

Things have gone from bad to worst this past week, with President Trump’s blatant attempt to disrupt the USPS so completely in the weeks and months ahead as to make voting by mail well nigh impossible. This President’s bald attempt to steal the 2020 presidential election goes far beyond what any of his 44 predecessors had ever contemplated. Most contemporary American historians now speak with one voice, already calling Trump’s blatant power grab one of the darkest political gambits in our country’s history.

Here’s how I think our state’s senior senator could achieve a degree of redemption for his January vote. Lamar Alexander could recover much of the integrity for which he has always been admired, if he simply announced his retirement now, rather than waiting until January 2021, and by just stating the obvious: “I have lost confidence in Mr. Trump’s ability to govern these United States.”

He need not say another word; let others whose political futures are in the balance slice and dice Donald Trump’s decidedly dangerous behavior. I believe a one-sentence resignation would be well-received by most Americans, a large percentage of whom remain terrified by this human loose cannon, still rolling around in the White House.

It’s a small gesture, but perhaps Senator Alexander’s resignation would inspire others in his party to stand up to the President’s blatant attempt to meddle with our country’s electoral process. We find ourselves now in a very dark place; our retiring senator has a genuine opportunity to make things inside that place a little bit brighter.

Kenneth Neill is publisher emeritus of the Memphis Flyer, which he helped launch in 1989.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Signs of Political Life as Election Season Finally Kicks Off

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

At long last, and after months of inaction, it can probably be said that there’s an election season on. On the Republican side, GOP members of all stripes were on hand Sunday at a Germantown Parkway storefront that will serve as the party’s campaign headquarters for the duration of the 2020 election year.

Interestingly, the new party headquarters location is on the approximate geographic site — the same lot, it would seem — as the old, sprawling Homebuilders headquarters, razed to the ground some years ago but, in its prime, a complex that contained a generous-sized auditorium/arena area that long served as a meeting place for local GOPers, as well for civic clubs of various kinds.

Local Republican party chairman Chris Tutor, who, because of the resurgent coronavirus, insisted that all attendees wear face masks and do what they could to achieve some measure of social distancing, turned things over to keynote speaker David Kustoff, the 8th District congressman, who pointed out that one final Democrat-vs.-Republican contest loomed on the August 6th county general election ballot: the General Sessions Court clerk race between Republican Paul Boyd and Democrat Joe Brown.

That was something to unite upon, given that others in the crowd were running against each other for positions in the federal/state primary elections to be held on the same day.

In theory, Shelby County Democrats were on the move, too, organizing a series of “forums” involving their candidates for the state and federal primaries, and simultaneously recording for later broadcasting these events, some of them conducted at the old Hickory Ridge Mall.

Jackson Baker

Who was that (un)masked man? At Sunday’s opening of the Shelby County Republcan campaign headquarters on Germantown Parkway, everybody, in accordance with advance instructions, wore a face mask. There was one exception — the unidentified interloper at the very right side of this photo.

Jackson Baker

time for the U.S Senate seat being vacated by Lamar Alexander.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Evil or Stupid?

“We handled it really well for many weeks, even through Phase 1. Then it’s almost like a light switch went off and we stopped taking it seriously.” That was Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland earlier this week, talking about the recent rise in local COVID-19 cases during Phase 2.

Similarly, Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris expressed concern that a move back to Phase 1 could happen if infection rates continued to rise. Harris added that he thought it could be avoided “if everyone will do their part.” That would include abiding by the city’s reinvigorated “Mask Up” program and rigorously maintaining Phase 2 regulations.

Memphis and Shelby County aren’t doing badly in the grand scheme of things, but things could get out of hand quickly. We need to wear our masks in public spaces, no exceptions, even in our red suburbs. And it’s worth noting that the average age of those testing positive in Shelby County is skewing younger: A sample of one week in April, May, and June revealed an average age of COVID-infected persons at 58, 43, and 40 respectively, according to information released earlier this week.

The examples set by other states and cities that have dealt with this health crisis on a much more devastating scale have made clear that there are no shortcuts to beating this disease. So why do so many Americans still not believe in medical science? Why are so many Americans still ignoring precautions, refusing to wear a mask, refusing to pay attention to social distancing?

The answer is pretty obvious. They believe the president of the United States, who has downplayed this health crisis from its inception. He’s said it would just … go away. He refuses to wear a mask or encourage others to do so. He’s said we’re testing more than any country on Earth. (Per capita? Not even close.) In fact, under Trump’s failed “leadership,” the United States is now the world’s epicenter for the disease. His oft-stated plan for reducing the infection level is to not to test so many people: “If we didn’t test so much, we wouldn’t have so many cases.” Genius. Does that work with pregnancy tests, as well?

What kind of idiot thinks this way? During the greatest global health crisis of our lives, the only real question is whether the American president is evil or stupid.

Even worse, leaders of the Republican Party have tied themselves to Trump’s moronic policies, apparently believing that he retains some sort of political magic that may possibly even extend to the curing of a disease? Why else would they still fear him and follow his lead, rather than heed the advice of countless infectious disease experts here and around the globe? Trump’s magical thinking has infected almost the entire Republican Party. Even local Trump sycophant, Congressman David Kustoff, was tweeting gushing praise of the Fearless Leader at Trump’s flaccid Tulsa rally. What do these people use for backbones? Or brains?

Blind faith in Trump — or fear of him — is why the rate of COVID-19 infections in the red states of Florida, Alabama, Texas, Arizona, and South Carolina is skyrocketing. The GOP governors of those states have dutifully followed the president’s lead: Masks are for sissies; virus fears are overblown; open the economy as fast as possible.

How has this strategy worked? Not so great. In a press conference on Monday, Texas Governor Greg Abbott said that recent spikes in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations were “unacceptable … and must be corralled.” Yeehaw. Texas is now averaging 3,500 new cases a day, more than double the average from a month ago.

Unfortunately, Governor Abbott doesn’t intend to actually do anything other than “encourage” better behavior. He offered no plans to scale back business activities or reduce public gatherings. And, of course, he wasn’t wearing a mask during the press conference.

Meanwhile in Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis was saying, “Hold my beer!”

Not really. But in the face of rapidly rising hospitalizations, DeSantis did ask that only patients in ICU who were getting “intensive care” be counted as actual COVID patients. He is apparently unclear on the meaning of “IC.”

Like Abbott, DeSantis shows no sign of retreating from his “keep the state open for business” position, even though, as in Texas, Florida’s cases are rising to new highs almost every day — and even though Florida is home to millions of senior citizens. (Not that being young is much of a protection: In Orlando, 152 cases were just linked to a bar near the campus of Central Florida University.) Hint: That’s gonna hurt business, Ron.

Trump’s magical thinking and his clownish routines about ramp-walking and water-drinking have become the subject of much well-deserved ridicule. But the truth is, none of this is funny anymore.

Categories
Film/TV TV Features

Space Force Falls Flat In Times Like These

Steve Carell as General Mark Naird in Space Force,

Space Force is a new television show on Netflix starring Steve Carell. It was created by Greg Daniels, the veteran writer and producer who started his career with The Simpsons and had a hand in creating shows such as King of the Hill, Parks and Recreation, and the American version of The Office.

The show’s jumping off point is the establishment of the real-life Space Force. President Trump first proposed creating a sixth branch of the armed forces early in his term. It was, like everything else he has farted out of his mouth hole, a stupid idea. For one thing, who is a Space Force supposed to fight? Aliens? The limited amount of actual war-making which can be done in space, like spying, anti-satellite weapons, and watching for incoming nuclear missiles, has been handled by the National Reconnaissance Office and the Air Force Space Command for 40 years. The last thing we need is yet another extremely expensive military branch squabbling with the existing ones for prestige and funding.

Collaborators Daniels and Carell knew a comedy opportunity when they saw one, and got the greenlight from the bottomless Netflix money bin in January, 2019. I’m sure when they pitched the show they thought it would be harmless fun. Surely it would never come to pass that anyone would be stupid enough to actually militarize space. But since we’re apparently living in the stupidest possible timeline, the United States Space Force came into existence last December. According to Wikipedia, it currently has 88 members on active duty. For comparison, the Air Force has more than 320,000. It seems the current administration is immune to satire, because their inanity surpasses anything a writer can imagine.

I have to admit, while I was binging Space Force episodes, I was having trouble concentrating. I was constantly being distracted by videos flashing across my phone screen of police beating citizens who are protesting against police brutality. Maybe satire really is dead.

But I’ll tell you who is dead for sure: George Floyd. He was executed in the street by four Minneapolis police officers. In broad daylight. While they knew they were being filmed. He was accused—not indicted by a grand jury, not convicted by a court of law, not sentenced by a judge—accused of passing a fake $20 bill at a neighborhood store. Maybe he did it, maybe he didn’t. It doesn’t matter. Even if he was guilty, even if he had personally carved the plates and printed a million dollars worth of counterfeit bills, the legal penalty would not have been death. George Floyd was murdered on the street by agents of the state whose job it ostensibly was to protect him. And us.

But there’s more. Before Floyd was murdered by police, he had recently recovered from a case of COVID-19. He escaped the fate of 108,000 of his countrymen and -women who have died from the disease so far this year. And that’s a conservative number.

Why is Floyd dead? Because he was black. The vast majority of people killed by police in this country are black. Counties with higher-than-average, per-capita black populations account for 60% of the COVID-19 deaths in this county. Black people are more likely to live in poverty than any other ethnic group. The list goes on.

Did I mention there’s a economic depression directly caused by Trump’s badly botched response to the worst pandemic in a century? 42 million people have lost their jobs since February. It’s no wonder people have taken to the streets.

And what is the government’s response to these citizens following the oldest of American traditions, holding public demonstrations to petition their government for redress of grievances? They beat them. They use chemical weapons long banned from the battlefield against them. They arrest them without due process. They lock them in crowded detention cells which are ideal environments for coronavirus transmission.

So, excuse me if I find it hard to focus on Steve Carrell’s little ha-ha show.

The first martyr of American democracy was Crispus Attucks, a person of color who may have been an escaped slave. Attucks was the first person killed on March 5th 1770 by British troops trying to “suppress a riot” in an event which Samuel Adams dubbed The Boston Massacre. John Adams was the lawyer defending the troops who pulled the triggers that day. In court, the future American president accused Attucks of provoking the soldiers with his “mad behavior.” Other witnesses claimed he was peacefully leaning on his walking stick when he was struck down by British bullets.

The values of the revolution inspired by the Boston Massacre were summed up seven years later in the Declaration of Independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, among them Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

When those words were written, many of the Founding Fathers thought “all men” only applied to white men who owned property. Among the “property” those white men owned were black people. The glory of the Founders words did not match the shame of their deeds, and we are still living with the consequences.

But the fundamental truth of those words have inspired billions of people to create a better world. Just as Christianity began as an ethnocentric sect and expanded into a religion for all of humanity, so, too, has the American creed expanded. In the 1860s, we had a national conversation about whether those words applied to black people. 650,000 people died before we decided that they did. In 1919, we decided that “all men” included women, too. Expanding our vision of freedom and justice to include all humans is the true American way. If you accept that everyone is “endowed by their Creator” with the rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” then of course black lives matter.

On September 12th, 1962, President John F. Kennedy gave a speech at Rice University that announced America’s intention to land astronauts on the moon. “We have vowed that we shall not see space filled with weapons of mass destruction, but with instruments of knowledge and understanding,” he said. “We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people.”

That’s why Trump’s concept of a Space Force is so repugnant. “It is not enough to have an American presence in space, we must have American dominance in space.” he said.

Trump’s words have no glory, and his deeds seek to undo centuries of progress. This was never more evident than last Monday, when his corrupt, bootlicking Attorney General William Barr ordered American policeman and soldiers to violently attack peaceful protestors in front of the White House. They used tear gas, a banned weapon of war, against clergymen rendering aid on the steps of St. John’s Episcopal church. The President threatened to order the military into American cities to “dominate” the protestors. Then Trump, flanked by uniformed thugs, walked to that church for a photo op. It was the most disgusting performance of fascism I or any other living American have ever seen by a President.

In retrospect, Trump’s dalliance with the “Space Force” was a warning sign of a dangerous would-be dictator who would destroy the Republic in the same way Julius Caesar destroyed the Roman Republic—by turning the military into a machine of domestic oppression. That’s why the humor in Space Force rings so hollow. The very first “joke” in the series sees Carrell’s General Mark Naird, the leader of the Space Force, stuffing a civilian in the trunk of his car and ordering troops to illegally detain him at gunpoint. This is not Chaplin in The Great Dictator taking the piss out of Hitler. This is normalization of fascism. Oh look, Trump’s destroying fundamental American values and seizing dictatorial control. Ain’t he a stinker?

Maybe that wasn’t the intention of the Space Force producers, but that’s how it reads in June, 2020. Notably, Trump’s name is not used, and neither he nor any of his family are seen in Space Force. If it was, you would be either slapped in the face by the banality of Trump’s evil, or triggered into fascist hero worship, depending on your current state of conditioning. The spell of normalization, the “Oh, it’s going to be fine. Let’s have some laughs.” would be fatally broken.

We cannot accept this current state of affairs as normal, or as acceptable, or dismiss it as funny. We must all realize are in a fight not only for justice for George Floyd, but for our Republic, for our lives, and—given the looming catastrophe of climate change—for the future of humanity.

In conclusion, Space Force sucks.