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During his “wilderness years,” Churchill understood Adolf Hitler’s ambitions, presciently shouting to a deaf world the dangers ahead. The Rhineland. Sudetenland. Czechoslovakia gobbled up while appeasers twiddled. England and France could have sent Hitler packing. Instead, they gave him three more years to arm. It was too late. Fifty million died. Stalin, double-crossed by his former Poland-dividing German friend, decided too late that he had to fight. Millions of Soviets soldiers and civilians died because of his dithering. FDR had to contend with America Firsters and could have entered the war sooner; he had third term political considerations in in 1940; but he knew he had to fight, too. Eventually. WE RELIVE THE MISTAKES OF HISTORY AT OUR OWN PERIL, LIKE WILEY CAYOTE CHASING THE ROAD RUNNER. PUTIN INVADED A SOVEREIGN COUNTRY. STOP HIM, GERMANS. STOP HIM, FRENCHMEN. STOP HIM, NATO. STOP HIM, AMERICA. UKRAINIAN CHILDREN ARE FREEZING AND STARVING. PEOPLE ARE LOSING THEIR LIVES TO A RUSSIAN BLOODTHIRSTY PYROMANIAC, A HANNIBAL LECTER. Here’s the rub: using time as his weapon, like Hitler, Putin is conscripting, propagandizing, and gradually conscripting massive manpower—constructing his war machine, gaslighting his people, building support, slowly, craftily, cunningly, odiously. Russians believe his lies about Ukraine as a Nazi haven, a virtual pizza parlor filled with basement dwelling pedophiles, or in this case, jackbooted storm troopers. Despite President Zelensky’s Churchillian appearance before congress, we must move swiftly, because time is on Putin’s side. A war of attrition is not on Ukraine’s side. Even with US Ordinance, rockets, drones, artillery. Western fear is Putin’s ally. Time is Putin’s ally. Wars start slowly but inevitably spiral out of control; aid the west provides the Ukrainians resembles aid the US gave to England in 1940, followed by exponential materiel increase from the great American “arsenal of democracy.” It was not enough. Not in 1940 and not enough in 2022; it will not be enough in 2023, 2024, 2025 as this war drags on. Too many Russians, too much manpower. Too much time. Victory requires a credible threat of NATO mobilization—an army ready to do battle. And an ultimatum. But that will not happen, I fear. Billions of dollars for weapons in a proxy war with Ukrainians fighting Russians has been impactful. Americans can watch Netflix war movies while Ukrainians bleed. They can watch Tom Hanks storm the beach at Normandy. Much less dangerous. Let’s just ship some more rockets to Ukraine instead. Yellowstone is on. Even so, it was heartening to see the bipartisan support for Ukraine in the Congress. Military planners in the Pentagon and in Western European capitals should be preparing for a wider war. It would be malfeasant for them not to do. We just don’t realize it yet. NATO is obliged to tell Putin to get out of Ukraine or face an allied army to evict him. Putin must be given an ultimatum to get out or face military force. Germans and French, British and American, Canadian and Australian. Putin understands naked power. The west must mobilize. He does not understand anything else. Lenin said, “push forward the bayonet. If you find soft flesh, push. If you find steel, retreat.” Putin learned Lenin in school; Lenin is in his DNA. He learned it in the KGB. He learned it in Mother Russia. He wants it all. He is Czar Nicholas, Comrade Stalin, Comrade Lenin all rolled into a painting in the Hermitage, his hometown museum, where he went as a schoolboy, where his parents took him, where he learned of the greatness of Russia. Where the Czar had palaces. Russians never had democratic traditions. Ask Nicholas II and his family, brutally executed by Bolsheviks. Ask the millions starved by Stalin in the Ukraine during his communized agriculture plan. Ask the people sent to the Gulag, or the Hungarians who dared to revolt against the Soviet hammer and sickle. Ask the subjugated Poles carved up by Stalin and Hitler. Ask all of the subjugated and terrorized people who suffered behind the iron curtain. Ask Alexi Navalny, a political prisoner, poisoned once, and now jailed in a Russian gulag. A delusional revanchist KGB agent in the Kremlin tries to raise the Soviet corpse by terrorizing a sovereign nation. A nation which had its own history before Lenin and his desciples created a dark Bolshevik empire. NATO, led by Germany and France and then the United States, face the eventual inevitability of mobilizing an army to kick Putin out of Ukraine and Crimea. The alternative is too grim to contemplate. Trench warfare. Stalemate. Ukrainians under siege. Massive Russian armies. Possibly being defeated. World economic disruption. Continued war crimes. A war of attrition, cold and misery. I hope I am wrong about this.  Western ambitions about this outrageous war ending through negotiation are delusional. If Putin sees that we are serious about the sovereignty of nations, he must face a serious military threat-- mobilization of NATO forces. Only then he will likely back down. Until then brave Ukrainians will bleed, freeze and die bearing the brunt of our fear.

George Bush has his new book out. I have not yet read it, but I have heard him interviewed on TV and have read reviews of the book. This frat boy, this pious peddler of religious virtue, this hypocrite now wants to sell his writing (if he wrote it at all) as though he would be regarded kindly by history. He will not. He lacks no chutzpah. Ignorance surely is bliss. His absence of remorse for sending our young service men and women to fight and die or have a leg or an arm blown off, is an exemplar of hubris and rationalization with which history will be able to evaluate his Presidency for its true worthlessness. Claiming to "protect Americans," he invaded a country that did not present an existential threat to our national security, violating his oath of office to preserve, protect and defend the constitution. Arguably he is a war criminal, having authorized torture and assuming responsibility for the unnecessary deaths of thousands of American youths, as well as around 100,000 innocent civilian Iraqis. Speaking of audacity, the current occupant of the White House could use some. His potential compromise of the Bush tax cuts, favoring the richest of Americans threatens to perpetuate a growing disparity between the super rich and the rest of us. Imposing taxes to implement social policy, despite Republican protestations, is not a new phenomenon. Seems that the American people have been fed and are voraciously consuming the malarkey of the conservatives who, despite evidence to the contrary, still believe that these rich folk are benefactors who create more jobs when they fail to pay their fair share of taxes. These are the same people who spent two trillion dollars on two wars and insist that we need a fleet of warplanes and billion dollar aircraft carriers to fight an amorphous band of illiterate religious fundamentalist terrorist thugs who have to smuggle explosive-laden printer cartridges onto airplanes or fill a truck with explosives to attack us. Now we need to get spending under control, they say. No present day politician, Republican, Democrat or Tea Partier seems to have the courage to tell us exactly what they will cut. Social Security? The defense budget? Veterans Benefits? Medicare? The truth be told, no one dares. It must be the fault of the lawyers

This is my first blog entry, and a fine time it is for it, if I must say so myself. Florida has now elected an ethically challenged Republican governor, who essentially flooded the airwaves with negative ads about Alex Sink, the democratic candidate. People who have voted for him will not be surprised if he disappoints by trying to shut the door to the courthouse to "protect" businesses which despoil the environment, drill for oil in pristine seas off the coast, or manufacture harmful products. On the national scene, people are amazed that tea partiers have gained so many seats in the House of Representatives, by mouthing standard platitudes of how they are going to slash spending. But where? They do not say. Elected to the United States Senate is Marco Rubio, a 39 year old tea party conservative, who has railed against a woman's right to choose, waffled on global warming, and thinks that America is moving in the wrong direction. He expects to cure this problem by slashing the budget and making "hard choices," but has failed to specify which choices. Not social security because his 80 something mother is a beneficiary, but more likely because he fears the wrath of Florida's seniors. He is supposedly a rising star in the Republican party and since the other tea partiers are pretty crazy, he probably won't be around for his full term, unless he keeps his seat while running for higher office a la Joe Lieberman. The selling of candidates like bars of soap continues, and the insulting, demeaning ads are over, but the consequences of the electorate not having to think too much about the candidates or listen seriously to debates about complex issues should be troublesome to any thoughtful person. People in Florida should not be discouraged, however. Now that the GOP has some power, they will be held responsible by the punditry, including yours truly in the next election.

"I have long believed that an experimentalist should not be unduly inhibited by theoretical untidiness. If he insists in having every last theoretical T crossed before he starts his research the chances are that he will never do a significant experiment. And the more significant and fundamental the experiment the more theoretical uncertainty may be tolerated. By contrast, the more important and difficult the experiment the more that experimental care is warranted. There is no point in attempting a half-hearted experiment with an inadequate apparatus." May 6, 1916-March 4, 1997 - Biographical Memoirs, Robert Henry Dicke The Iranian revolution of 1979 brought forth a great schism between the United States and that religiously fervid theocracy. And now the Obama administration is trying to achieve détente with a country that has viewed America as the “Great Satan” for the past 34 years. A nation that, in 1979, violated the international rules of diplomacy by imprisoning US diplomats and is still driven by religious zealotry and intolerance. Whether the American gambit on the geo-strategic chessboard will be successful is one of those questions being debated at the highest levels of government and, at the same time, is causing a great deal of angst among American Jewry, especially conservatives, most of whom now believe, along with the Netanyahu government that Israeli abandonment is the soupe de jour. American interests and Israeli interests, in many respects, are diverging. The United States, realizing, after Iraq, that it is almost powerless to alter events in the Arab world, is seeking to get off the road and let the actors involved determine the hegemonic outcome. Israel, dependant on American military force is possibly facing existential threats from places that may no longer be controlled by American military power. Strange times, these. Israel is in alliance against Iran with Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, and Egypt, now again a military dictatorship over 83 million people. The religious feuds between Shia and Sunni smolder deeply. These divisions have endured for 1,400 years and now have arisen to the surface of a world still militarily weaker than the United States, but increasingly less subject to its influence. The colonialism of the British, French and Germans, who divided amongst themselves, the Arab and African worlds no longer exists. It has vanished with the Raj that left India and Pakistan to their own antipathies. The bipolar power struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union provided a type of stability that has faded away with the twentieth century. States that were the clients of the two former hegemons are now free to set their own agendas, which no longer include the seeking of a protective umbrella from either the United States or the Russians, but do aspire for military support from the great powers against each other. (Iran and Egypt) Our policy makers are now forced into the continual dilemma of who to support and picking the winner is not our great attribute. Those who think that extra US aircraft carriers and bombs are the solution for our problems of loss of influence are deluding themselves in a haze of Theodore Rooseveltian reverie. Most conservatives long for the past, but it is never to return. Instead, we are engaged in a world struggle for the minds of the newly empowered, tweeting, and disaffected youth of countries that have their own agendas that do not necessarily coincide with ours. Israel is not one of them--they are with us. This empowerment has upset the world order, and the great powers are struggling to devise a foreign policy that, to some extent, is mired in the past. New foreign policy in the United States is attempting to move past the old order. "The forces of freedom against the forces of totalitarianism." Existential angst against interests that no longer believe in the same definition of "threat." Our hope is that Iran, a nation of 70 million people and more than half of who are under 35 years of age, will move toward democracy. The same for Egypt, but possibly less likely. In examining the education level of the Iranian population, one could hope that reform will be swifter than we think. Young, educated people are increasingly secular, and more susceptible to democratic ideals than the ignorance and superstition peddled by the Ayatollahs. The present "faith based" Iran is reminiscent of 15th century Europe before the enlightenment, of Marxism before the collapse of the Soviet Union, and even Nazism. The latter two "isms” being religions of their own. This enunciates a new reality for Americans, especially Jewish ones, who fear that any departure from the U.S.-Israel alliance constitutes the seeds of destruction for the Jewish State, which should perhaps pay more heed to the internal forces that threaten its existence: Ultra Orthodox zealotry, continued occupation of the territories, expansion of settlements and the possible incorporation of a very likely, due to higher birth rate, Arab majority into the Israeli body politic should Israel annex the west bank, which seemingly is the intention of the Likud government as evidenced by the expansionism in the settlements. These settlements are clear evidence of religious zealotry among the ultra Orthodox, who claim, without pretense, that God gave them the land of Judea and Samaria. Therein lies the existential threat to Israel. Even, however, if Israel cedes the territories and settlements or does land swaps for peace, there is no guarantee that the arrangement will bear fruit, because the forces that are now sweeping the Arab world are not really concerned with Israel. They are concerned with promoting Shiite or Sunni prevalence. They are engaged in a cultural/religious war, advancing their concept of Allah to the denigration of the other tribe whose Allah is not as genuine as the other's Allah. It is not fanciful to say that generations may pass before the issue is resolved. And now throw another ingredient into this nasty ragout--the incipient complete energy independence of the United States, making its need for middle east oil diminished to perhaps disruption of the entire OPEC economies; perhaps necessitating their own reformation, in education, the rights of women and in globalization. All these forces render the problem seemingly more insoluble than the cold war. It is an increasingly distressing picture that defies even the most creative of minds, except perhaps those who advance the dubious solution of bare American power, a cascade of bombings and war to bring all these forces to heel. On the other hand, those of us who have lived long enough can remember the days when the Soviet monolith threatened to envelop the world in a wicked blanket of communism.

"Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are the only safe depositories." - Thomas Jefferson It is painful, even agonizing, to behold the spectacle of the Republic being bludgeoned by a group of tea party representatives intoning to get their way, a way that has already been set aside by the voters and a way that does not connect on any level with the national interest. These ideologues will have their comeuppance, eventually, but at what harm to the Nation? After all, there was an election, and the President won. The House of Representatives arguably do not represent the people since the elected representatives have been the beneficiaries of extensive gerrymandering of congressional districts and hold office as an actual minority party. More voters on a national level voted for the democrats in the House than the Republicans in the 2012 election. The tea partiers, already in the minority party, are even more of a minority, but a very vocal yet vacuous one. They are the right wing answer to the Abbie Hoffmans of the 60s. They hold no mandate, yet they hold the government in a hammerlock. The injustice of this arrangement becomes more and more obvious by the day. This is a stunning testament to the dysfunction of our present system. Not only is the Electoral College broken, but the methodology of electing congress is broken as well. Somehow we have to reach an accommodation by which the elected representatives are actually representing the people. They clearly are not, because the people, or at least a majority of them when calculated on a national level, did not vote for the tea party to be able to control the House of Representatives. And the House is being led by a mediocre politician who does not stand up to scrutiny as a leader. We have known Sam Rayburn, we have known Tip O’Neil, we have known Dennis Hastert, and although they were all tinged and were flawed men, they knew how to get votes together so that the government could work. Some say the political climate is more divisive these days, but if one looks back at our history, we cannot be so certain of that. Even though we had a civil war, slavery, a union torn asunder, we did not have Fox News and instant punsters shouting and bloviating on the television, infesting the Internet with vitriolic banter. It is not a helpful or thoughtful atmosphere for accommodation and compromise. Most of the voters, although subject to influence of pollsters asking questions of approval about national health care have expressed a favorable opinion concerning people with preexisting conditions being able to obtain insurance and to have access to health care. They have also expressed the opinion that if someone is ill and had lost their job, they should still be covered. Or that their children can remain on their policies until they are more independent. One really cannot argue with that by saying that “Obama care will put the government between you and your doctor.” That is a lie. Insurance companies are always feeding their bottom line and they have come between you and your doctor also, but Republicans do not like to point that out, because those are the lobbyists whom they serve. They advanced those arguments against a single payer, at the behest of those same insurance companies. Most seniors like Medicare and do not think that the government intrudes in their health care decisions. Now we are faced with the spectacle of our government having been shut down by a minion of yokels who are afraid they will lose their primary to the more ideological ultra conservatives. What is even more disturbing is that these conservatives have misread the demographic trajectory on which the country is headed—more progressive, not more conservative. So the electorate will speak again next year and the results will be even more crushing for them in 2014 than they were in 2012. Perhaps then they will understand. Ted Cruz is a McCarthyesque caricature, the embodiment of demagoguery, and if he had been here 60 years ago he would have been railing about Communists taking over the world. When one thinks that the House voted 42 times to repeal a law that they knew would not be passed by either the Senate or not vetoed by President, instead of working to address other important issues facing the country, such as immigration reform, tax reform, passing a budget, education, defense expenditure cuts, and foreign policy decisions, to name a few, it sends a shudder through us all, realizing that our government needs fixing both in the manner of electing representatives, the composition of the House, and of electing the President. We are delayed in our progress in an increasingly competitive world. And time is of the essence. American exceptionalism, if it existed at all, is threatened by knuckleheaded congressmen who belong elsewhere. The arguments in earlier columns expressed in this space concerning a constitutional rewrite become more evident with each passing year, our 18th century constitution creaking and moaning under the strain of 21st century vicissitudes.

“Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.” - Thomas Jefferson The Chief Rabbi An article appeared in today's New York Times concerning the controversy over who will be the new chief Rabbi of Israel. One candidate, an ultra Orthodox and the other, a "moderate." The moderate rabbi seeks to create a dialog among the disparate secular Israeli Jews and the more orthodox that wishes to shutter the country on the Sabbath. There is a growing ultra Orthodox minority that seeks, as in most theocracies, to dominate political decisions in the running of the state. These are the same minions (excuse the pun) who wish not to serve in the army so they can study the Torah, a fourth century text, and as interpreted in the Talmud by various rabbinical authorities throughout the following centuries. The Torah, of course, written when people thought the world was flat and that if one approached the edge in a boat, they would plunge over the edge, sort of like going over Niagara falls in a barrel. This as a predicate for governing a modern state. Really? Modern technocratic Israel in the throes of Ayatollah imitators? A chief Rabbi? A state based upon a burning bush and a staff turned into a serpent? The chief rabbi enjoys a ten year term. The article in the New York Times stated that the institution of the chief rabbi had its origins in the 17th century Ottoman empire, but that he is now paid $100,000 a year to dispense religious edicts and spiritual leadership, including who may marry in Israel, among which, the preposterous proposition of a woman's marital status being determined, among other things, by the husband granting a divorce if she were not a maiden. Women’s equality under Orthodox Judaism? Hardly an issue at all. Many Israelis are now demanding that the state wrench religion away from the rabbinate and from the authority granted by the government. The rabbis argue that in the Middle East, strong religious strictures are required to compete with the antipathetic nature (religious and otherwise) of nearby Arab governments. They argue that only religion provides the cohesiveness to do so. These are the same people who push for more settlements on "God given" land, when in fact, it was the British and French who gave the land to two peoples at the dissolution of the Ottoman empire at the conclusion of World War I. Thank you very much. Mormon disillusionment At the same time, another article appeared this week concerning an elder of the Mormon church who was disillusioned over the false teachings of the church, its doctrine providing convenient mythology concerning Brigham Young and Joseph Smith who were actually polygamists and hucksters. The Book of Mormon holding that Native Americans were descendants of the Jews (the lost tribe) and the translation of that good Book appearing upon golden plates which were buried in upstate New York. This church elder, after believing all the hokum for 30 years has just awakened from a drug induced slumber? See http://nyti.ms/16Rx7GE In reality Joseph Smith, a Mormon founder, was killed by a mob in Missouri after trying to hide his polygamy. He had published many revelations regarded as scripture according to his followers, who regard him as a prophet of the stature of Moses or Elijah. To this extent he probably was, but he did not have the centuries to provide a foundation for his fantasies. Brigham Young, the other Mormon founder, was actually born in Vermont and became a successor to Smith two years after Smith's ignominious demise. Young, aside from his polygamy, believed that those mixing the seed of white people with the African race should be subject to death and banned all black people from the Mormon priesthood. He was also implicated in a massacre of immigrants (Mountain Meadow) passing through Utah. He deserves credit for founding Salt Lake City, however. Miracles and other fantasies (as pointed out by a Roman Catholic friend of mine) The Catholic church requires a formulary of miracles to occur for the foundations of Sainthood, according to Wikipedia: The steps for the recognition of the miracle follow the new rules laid down in 1983 by the apostolic constitution, Divinus Perfectionis Magister. The new legislation establishes two procedural stages: the diocesan one and that of what is known as the Roman Congregation. The first takes place within the diocese where the prodigious event happened. The bishop opens the enquiry on the presumed miracle in which the depositions of the eyewitnesses questioned by a duly constituted court are gathered, as well as the complete clinical and instrumental documentation inherent to the case. In the second, the Congregation examines the documents sent and eventual supplementary documentation, pronouncing its judgment on the matter. The miracle may go beyond the possibilities of nature either in the substance of the fact or in the subject, or only in the way it occurs. So three degrees of miracle are to be distinguished. The first degree is represented by resurrection from the dead (quoad substantiam). The second concerns the subject (quoad subiectum): the sickness of a person is judged incurable, in its course it can even have destroyed bones or vital organs; in this case not only is complete recovery noticed, but even wholesale reconstitution of the organs (restitutio in integrum). There is then a third degree (quoad modum): recovery from an illness, that treatment could only have achieved after a long period, happens instantaneously. Miracles as a precedent to becoming a saint speak volumes as to the rationality of religious belief. Pope Pius XII, about whom books were written concerning his German advisers, his not speaking out about loathsome, grotesque Nazi crimes against humanity, and his pardoning of German war criminals, might prove miraculous itself were he elevated to Sainthood. Under the Reichskonkordat, (the agreement between the Vatican and the Third Reich) Pius made a deal with von Ribbentrop and Hitler. And as Einstein said, “how can you make a deal with God and Satin at the same time?” See Hitler's Pope (1999) by John Cornwell. Pius XII is still shrouded in controversy and Pope Benedict/Ratzinger, before resigning, and German himself, did not declare Pius had met the criteria. Ratzinger was too busy shuffling priests around from parish to parish and spending church money to defend itself against civil and criminal activities, and finally resigning to avoid the intense heat, which is where people go who have sinned, we are told.

The three laws of robotics: 1. A robot may not injure a human being, or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws. - Isaac Asimov, "Runaround" (1942) I know a few people who have interesting theories why American cities and society are in a state of decay, evincing a huge disparity of rich and poor. Some of these technocratic people believe that uneducated masses are not able to compete in an increasingly mathematically meritocratic environment. They believe that because these non-pocket protector dullards are not educated in math, science, engineering or physical science, they will fail, they will be subject to the whims of other societies with more technically adept citizens who can win the coming math-a-thon. There is a superficial element of truth in this premise. But this is only a temporary transitional phase in the journey of mankind. The world of new technology, they say, favors those scientifically trained; the people who lack that education will become increasingly unemployable. But that only forebodes a perhaps even more ambivalent human dénouement. Those who argue that the uneducated will be obliged to inhabit an unteremenschen sector of the economy, doomed to flip burgers or wait tables fail to recognize that even some classes of those educated in science and technology can also easily be made unemployable and probably and inevitably will involuntarily be cast among their more less accomplished brethren. This class of putative elites will be replaced by artificially intelligent machines that are exponentially increasing their abilities to learn, to work--to think. These machines are being engineered to make human technologic endeavor obsolete. They will be inevitably more competent than humans in calculations, engineering, equations, and any process that requires any form of mathematical skill. The skills will go beyond mathematics. In some respects they already do. These machines are our children, our progeny, our descendents. No human can compete with a machine that does not die, that does not fail, that has no biologic or moving parts--a machine that can endure infinitely through self-maintenance, artificially obtained intelligence and self-replication. The precursors to these machines are here already although still somewhat primitive in form. The machines that answer the phone and ask us questions, that asks us to make choices, the robots that assemble cars, and a plethora of devices that have already replaced humans on the assembly line, in the bank, in the hospital and elsewhere. They are more and more ubiquitous every day. Anyone over 50 can remember what it was like before computers. Statements about science and technology requirements for human employment made today will have no bearing perhaps as early as ten or fifteen years from now. Admittedly, one would need that knowledge to get a job today, but we are not convinced that it will do any good as an exponential explosion of computing and robotic power will make the average human mathematician or engineer as unnecessary as a buggy whip. Already machines make medical diagnoses, beat humans at chess, and even play "Jeopardy" better than humans. Playing Jeopardy requires subtle understanding of plays on words, social nuance, and irony. While it is true that scientifically trained humans created these machines, these benevolent Frankensteins will ultimately take over all human scientific endeavor. Cyborgs will be programmed with the total sum of human knowledge; humans may remain their creators, but it is not certain they will remain their masters. Humanities, philosophy, music and art will be what distinguish human from machine and even then we are not so certain. The law will protect us (see Isaac Asimov's laws of robotics, above) and remain even more relevant than ever before. But probably not in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Will machines compose symphonies? Pour their emotions out on great works of art? Feel pain? Be spiritual? Or will that be left to humans? Emotions and feelings are not something in which machines are conversant.

"The fault, dear Brutus is not in our stars. But in ourselves, that we are underlings." - Julius Caesar (I,ii,140-141) "That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness." Thomas Jefferson (The Declaration of Independence) The Constitution of the United States has been amended 27 times, the last of which, proposed in 1789, was not ratified until 1992. The amendment dealt with congress being unable to raise its own pay until an election had intervened. Many Americans are familiar with some of the other amendments, limitation of Presidential terms to two, prohibition, repeal of prohibition, universal suffrage, and of course, the first ten amendments (the bill of rights). Originalists like Antonin Scalia believe that the interpretation of the document should remain as though we all were living in the 18th century, when citizens and a militia used muskets with flintlocks, fighting savage Indians. Amending the constitution is a difficult and lengthy process. It must first be passed by the Senate and the House and then be ratified by the states, taking years. Some amendments just die, not having been ratified, like the Equal Rights amendment. The document serving us admirably throughout our history is in need of some changes. The intense debate over the second amendment and whether it is directed towards a militia or an individual’s right to bear arms has been a continuing subject for constitutional scholars and advocates for either side of the issue. In addition, the rules of the U.S. Senate need revision. We are the only democracy in the world where the majority does not rule. In the old days, the filibuster had actually to be performed to avoid a vote. Now, only the threat of a filibuster prevents legislation from reaching the floor for a vote. And to make matters worse, there need be 60 votes out of 100 to pass important legislation. Two senators from a state representing 500,000 people have the same clout as two senators from a state with 35,000,000 people. Tracing the origin of our federal system is a history replete with slave and free states being admitted to the Union under a system of compromise and discord. Now, we can no longer afford this absurd debate. If Puerto Rico, for example, chooses to be admitted as the 51st state, there will be no issue whether its people, who are already US citizens, will be slave or free or count as 3/5ths of a person for representational purposes. The point of the matter is that a good bit of the constitution is anachronistic.. Except that we are laboring mightily to work our government under its weight. It needs a rewrite. Most of it is still awfully good and should be included in the 2.0 version. And the rewrite should include the bill of rights. The second amendment should be reinterpreted or re written so the blockheads at the NRA and the Supreme Court can understand it. Unfortunately, powerful lobbyists govern and intimidate Senators from the job they must do--pass legislation for the sake of all Americans--not for the sake of the NRA, which for the most part, represents gun manufacturers. Why, for the sake of goodness, need there be 300 million guns in circulation, many of them assault type military rifles designed for maximum killing of other humans? A good plan would be for the government to buy back guns, as the Australians did, who saw an 90% drop in gun violence soon after the buyback. The U.S. Senate, it seems , is populated by set of pusillanimous cowards, who care more about being re-elected than doing what is the greater good. How, then can we possibly rewrite the constitution? Retaining a bicameral legislature would not be harmful to this country. There could still be an upper and lower chamber, but the workings of them need to be governed by a majority vote, not a system designed to ensure gridlock. In this past election, for example, gerrymandered districts allowed representatives who were not elected by a majority of the popular vote to control the House of Representatives. This is tantamount to disenfranchisement of voters who, in a recent poll, stated by 90% that they were in favor of background checks for gun buyers. We need to have the courage to tell our representatives what we really want, and not allow our voices to be submerged by the slick machinery of those who would subvert our liberty for their own financial gain disguised by concern for the ability of Americans who think they need rapid fire weapons to protect themselves. When we lose our voice and our representatives do not represent us, it is our duty to change them, to speak out, to make our wishes known. Our senators and congressmen are supposed to be working for us, but the evidence is that they are not. Some alteration is in order.

President Obama has given a rhetorically flourished SOU address, setting forth much of his legislative agenda for the next year, a year in which he has been reelected under a considerable mandate, both in electoral and popular votes. His message included an appeal for education and tax reform, asking the Congress to create a high tech infrastructure, a report on the troops coming home soon, an appeal to cut expenditures, and for smarter Medicare and even gun control. Many ideas were not new; but still quite necessarily overdue. John Boehner sat stone faced next to an animated Joe Biden, Boehner deciding when and when not to applaud. It was a sort of surreal experience. Time was when the President sent his State of the Union message to the Congress in written form, the live delivery of which did not begin until Woodrow Wilson, and really not annually until FDR began a tradition of a speech to both houses of Congress. Republicans, through some highly creative gerrymandering, have retained control of the House of Representatives, albeit with somewhat less puissance than in the last congress. They are now scrambling to reinvent themselves to a demographically metamorphosized electorate consisting of more young, Latino and African-American voters who do not buy Republican theories of less government, less health care, more military spending and low taxes on super wealthy "job creators," many of whom collect dividends and do nothing in particular to create anything except an unusual amount of bloviation. That left of center demographic grew dramatically between 2008 and 2012. Even people like Newt Gingrich applauded the competence of the democratic campaign for its efficiency and delivery of its message. Following the President's speech, a visibly nervous, hyperactive and perspiring Marco Rubio pleaded for an agenda that sounded like a retread of Mitt Romney's campaign stump speeches. Aggressively accusing the President of trying to wreck Social Security, the National defense and pleading the standard rightist arguments for less government, he excoriated a lack of free choice under Obamacare, unfettered support for the second amendment, and various other shopworn Republican trickle-down bromides. Leaning over for a drink of water as his rapid fire speech patterns betrayed a bit of stage fright, this being his first nationally televised appearance, he seemed, as a CBS commentator said, looked like a light fixture had fallen on his head. In all fairness to young Rubio, who is only 41, and anointed on the cover of Time Magazine as the "Republican Savior" on its most recent cover, he was alone in a room and competing with the President who received a standing ovation every other sentence, and spoke for an hour. Rubio's appeal to prayer and to God is becoming less and less believable to voters as America increasingly secularizes. Marco Rubio, nevertheless, seemingly tone-deaf delivered a message that had been repudiated by the electorate just two months ago. If Rubio is counting on the electorate to move back to the right in 2016, he should do some real hard thinking about that prospect. Telling the story of his humble origins only goes so far. One could reasonably extrapolate that in another 4 years, the electorate will be even less receptive to Rubio's message than it was to Mitt Romney's this time around. The idea that America is polarized is true, but one side of the polarity growing, whilst the other is shrinking. So if Republicans want to win another election they will have to continue to suppress voter rights, keep brainy immigrants out, or send out a different message. Protecting special interests and wealthy donors cannot be part of that message. All of the Super PAC candidates lost despite the efforts of Carl Rove, Sheldon Adelson, the Koch brothers, and others of their ilk. If you watch a rerun of the SOU speech please note that John Boehner did not applaud when the President asked for a law to make it easier for people to vote; he was fearful of not keeping his tea party minions as large a plurality.

"The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun." - Wayne LaPierre, CEO National Rifle Association There have been many articles written this week about renewed efforts to control firearms among the people. Spurred on by public horror of the Sandy Hook elementary being turned into an abattoir by an enraged twenty year old, the U.S. Congress is possibly springing to action in time to lock the barn doors, once again, too late. Such incompetence is entirely reminiscent of a bad play; we squirm in our proverbial seats until the dreadful last act has been agonizingly concluded. Will the fiscal cliff be averted? Will congress pass tax reform? Will assault weapons be banned or controlled? Will we survive their ineptitude? The United States is, in many ways, the victim of its own constitution. A document written in the 18th century the second amendment of which, ratified in 1791, has been subject to interpretation involving the placement of a comma is just one ludicrous example of its ossification. That second amendment, writ large in the time when people carried muzzle loaded muskets, is simply an invitation for boneheaded senators and even more dimwitted congressmen to hawk (no pun intended) their hunting skills and present advertisements of them shooting in some forest in order to impress their gun-toting constituents, who fear that "big government" will revoke their license to shoot whatever or whomever they please. And, of course, the American notion that our freedom will somehow disappear to tyrants should there be some more legislation restricting gun availability, this logic stemming from a mentality of frontier justice that is no longer relevant. In this case, innocent, tender aged schoolgirls and schoolboys whose misfortune is now engraved in the tears of a generation of parents and grandparents, as well as anyone in America whose sensitivity quotient rises above that of a polar bear. The victims childish images stare out balefully from our televisions in a horrifying reminder that they now inhabit the crypt, the victims of Scalia-like logic who is probably right now murmuring, "get over it," as he did when interviewed about throwing the election of 2000 to George W. Bush. United States Constitution Amendment II "A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." Interpretation of this amendment has been the subject of rigorous debate among constitutional scholars, the United States Supreme Court and others. Does the amendment mean that the militia shall bear arms or that the people shall bear arms individually? Do individuals really stand a chance against an army? Do homicidal lunatics who die in a shootout render sufficient testimony to the folly of such privilege? It seems that they always die in the end, after a shoot out with the cops or by their own hand, but only after visiting their terror upon innocents. How then, are we safer, because a madman has access to a Bushmaster military weapon? Perhaps the debate is no longer relevant, since the second amendment was written at a time when slaves were commonplace, women could not vote, and weapons were far more primitive and could not, by hair trigger, slaughter 30 children and their teachers in a matter of seconds. Adam and Mrs. Lanza's legacy should be not a "prepper"(we have to defend ourselves because our government will not) mentality, but laws that will reduce the incidences of this type of grotesquerie. These events can never be eliminated completely, but they certainly can be reduced by appropriate legislation and if a troglodyte Supreme Court does not declare that legislation unconstitutional. Justice Scalia, an avid hunter and Dick Cheney amigo, hunts ducks. Using an assault weapon designed to kill humans has no place in a modern civil society. Arguments that the teachers should be armed and that everyone should tote a weapon ring hallow; the converse to that argument being that we are less free to speak because we fear that someone may easily shoot us for expressing our opinion that may not coincide with theirs. The gun enthusiasts and the prayer in the schools promulgators share the same religious zeal and inhabit the same universe. How would Jesus feel about killing innocent children with a rapid fire Bushmaster?

And it shall come to pass in the end of the year of two thousand and twelve, that a great general shall have offendenth Congressman Eric Cantor for having committed the mortal sin of adultery; It shall also come to pass that the establishment journalists shall scream and shout with rage against such heinous and lascivious sin. And that the great general shall have previously manifested a grand, illustrious and admirable career. That the establishment journalists shall have shown innumerable pictures of the evil sirens who lavished the great general with their favors, as they paraded to and from their automobiles;  And the media shall have basked in its glory of exposing such Satanism. And the sirens shall have waged an email and publicity battle over the great general and with each the other. And the lords of CNN, MSNBC, CBS and the other networks shall have abided in the comfort of grand viewership in the post election sinking ratings aftermath of the election for the Lord President, who he himself abideth no evil; And the political establishment shall have decried the evil the general manifested for his most unsavory, licentious, unwholesome behavior; And the CIA shall be cleansed of its evil leadership that tolerated flying drones that killeth from on high. For the great general, leader an agency of spies, criminals and spooks shall not any longer be a paradigm for such sterling personages that followed his countenance; For he shall not be a leader any longer sayeth the Lord President, who always abideth within the boundaries of his carefully defined and propitious nature lest he betray his trust as Lord President and shall never be casteth as an angry risk-taking black man; And the Lord President shall accepth the resignation of the great spy leader, instead of rejecting in the national interest the great talented spy leader's honorable resignation. And the great spy leader shall repent of his sin by being cast into exile; So that the Lord President may keepeth the fires of the family values hearth burning; lest he be judged as understanding such adulterous and unbecoming pleasures of the flesh. And by accepting the great general and spy leader's manly flaws.

"For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind..." - Hosea 8:7 Houses on the Jersey shore torn to shreds like matchbooks. Homes burned to the ground in the Rockaways. Lower Manhattan flooded, subway tunnels awash, the largest public transport facility on Earth shut down because of weather, millions of people in the nation's most populated corridor still without electricity in late autumn cold, schools with no power, electricity wires strung on poles snagged by falling trees, the list can go on ad nauseum. Politically expedient deniers of the almost universal scientific opinion about global warming have their work cut out for them. They are faced with what Andrew Cuomo says, "a once in a generation storm every two years." Weather patterns are changing. Building codes that allowed frame construction almost everywhere on the Atlantic seaboard are suddenly and unequivocally now subject to hasty revision. No justification possibly exists for such malfeasance. Hurricane Sandy was not, by any stretch of the wildest naysayer's imagination, unforeseeable. Floodgates have protected the low-lying areas of Europe for many years. If people insist on living near the frequently violent sea, they should be prepared for its fury. Global warming is showing the consequences of warmer seas--more violent storms and freakier weather patterns--all to the detriment of our feckless infrastructure, sown by generations of myopic politicians who, in all fairness, clearly did not see what was in store for stricken communities from DC to Massachusetts. Now the wake up call has come. In Florida, there are building codes that have arisen since Hurricane Andrew have strengthened, however, FPL still thinks that burying power lines is economically not feasible; a few years ago, they replaced some of the traditional wooden poles in my neighborhood with higher concrete ones. The trees still overhang the lines anyway. The early Republican debates were a cacophony of voices denying climate change; Mitt Romney still has nothing to say about it, his perfidious calculative demeanor evident. And frankly, the President has not done enough to awaken the public, which mostly cares now about the economy. The tea partiers and fundamentalists are now calculating what a woman should do with her body and if the candidates are sufficiently religious to hasten the erosion of the constitutional wall of separation between church and state, instead of preparing for national disasters like Hurricane Sandy. Deniers of man-made climate change include almost the entire Republican Party, and those who think that government serves no useful purpose except starting wars, nurturing the military industrial complex and transforming primitive Islamists into Jeffersonian democrats. Florida continues to set a new low bar for election shenanigans. The State Legislature, in concocting an indecipherable ballot has struck another new level of loathsomeness. It has composed ballot initiatives, among which is one that is labeled "Religious Freedom." It is fraudulently conceived and evilly promulgated. What it really represents is an attempt to interject religion in the educational system by providing state funding to religious schools, voucherized money that could be used instead to improve public education rather than defunding it. These are the same people who are apostles of the same ilk of creationists in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas who would teach creationism to our children. We are living a 21st century nightmarish re-run of Inherit the Wind. The Presidential Campaign grinds to a lowly end. There was seemingly no end to the negative commercials, the meaningless dialog, the emails during which both parties attempt convincing voters that the other side is going to ruin the country, the economy, the world itself. The campaigns have been financed by copious amounts of super PAC cash coming from special interest groups airing offensive announcements denouncing each other's candidates, adding to a witch's brew of obfuscation, misinformation and distortion. The debates, a glibness and disappointing appearance contest, droned on and on, giving the electorate only a superficial sample of what qualities a leader really requires. Nothing in the end was revealed but a continual and seemingly unending parade of talking points. The debates did not tell us who would be a good President or a bad President. Who would shine in a moment of crisis? Who is a deep thinker? A problem solver? A person who could break the legislative gridlock? A person with a definite agenda? None of this was revealed in the debates, even if it were fact. A two-year, $2.5 billion election cycle slows down the efficiency of government and places politics above the national interest. Our Federal system is severely broken. The negativity of the past two years demeans those who do win and expands the polarized divide. It diminishes the governing ability of the winner, who inevitably suffers diminution by the misinformation saturating the airwaves. The election campaigns should last 6 months beginning to end; the Electoral College should be abolished. There should be public financing of the campaigns and a constitutional amendment shutting down of all the extra money that has distorted the process beyond all recognition.

"Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time." - Richard Dawkins Forty six percent of the American voters believe that religion is the litmus test for political leadership. Many of them believe that Mary ascended to heaven on a white cloud and that Mohammad ascended to heaven on a winged horse. Ultra-Orthodox Jews pray to God morning, noon and night, and relegate their women to wearing wigs and bandanas. They seem inhabit in America, a Saudi Arabian, burka-wearing world of subjugation, including the bearing of a child a year. Some believe that if people do not accept Jesus as a savior they are condemned to burn in hell in perpetuity. They discount the beliefs of others and the Roman Catholic Church has perpetuated the infallibility of church dogma for centuries, and used its dogma as a basis for burning people at the stake, racking heretics, refusing to respect the rights of women and generally promulgating a world view that is irreconcilable with notions of modern science as well as its own dogma by accumulating great wealth, denying basic human sexuality and creating an atmosphere often tolerant of sexual predators. In addition, religious fundamentalists think that men walked the earth with dinosaurs; the bible is the literal word of God, and that those that do not respect its edicts will not be rewarded with heavenly afterlives. “My ancestor was not a monkey,” said one recent Republican candidate for the Presidency. There are people who live in my neighborhood who actually believe that mutilating the foreskins of young males is a civilized practice, conducting religious services to celebrate the event. This practice, now the subject of medical debate, is a throwback to a primitive tribal ritual that binds the male child to its Judaic tribe. The practice was instituted at a time when men believed the world was flat and that the sun revolved around the earth. According to the Old Testament, Jacob died 2255 years after the creation of Adam. Jewish scholars first translated the Torah into Greek in the 3rd Century BCE. They were polytheists, tolerating local gods as well as their own. When monotheism came along, automatically discounting other’s gods, it sowed the seeds of intolerance that continued down through the holocaust, ultimately smiting its originators, the Jews. Dating the world as a few thousand years old cannot, through the stretch of the wildest imagination, be reconciled with modern science. Many of the fanatical Jewish zealots claim that Biblical injunctions prevent them from compromising their settlements with Muslims on the West Bank of the Jordan River. Muslims also claim that the land was given to them by God. The outcome of two distinct groups claiming deified backing cannot, by definition, be reconciled. Religion evolved as an adjunct to tribes being successful against competing tribes, mostly in combat. The origins of Jews and the Exodus from Egypt have never been confirmed by any scientific, archeological, paleontological or genetic evidence. To the contrary, geneticists and primate paleontologists are now debating the origins of homo sapiens, and the general consensus is now that humans emerged from Africa some 50-60,000 years ago. Moreover, a story recently appeared in the New York Times about the debate among scientists and paleoanthropologists as to the origins of Homo sapiens, that modern humans arose in Africa 200,000 years ago and that all archaic species of humans then disappeared, surviving only outside Africa, as did the Neanderthals in Europe. New worlds of knowledge concerning human existence are emerging almost daily. Most of this knowledge is coming from fossil evidence, DNA evidence, the decoding of the human genome, and radioactive carbon dating, which incidentally, states the world, is 4-5 billion years old, not 5,000. What it does not come from is some bronze age tract by which US politicians seem to be bound to hypocritically extol, in the hopes of garnering votes from an ignorant electorate. Mythology still rules our lives and our politics and it is 2012.

Recently, a friend of mine, quite conservative, argued that the Citizens United case decided by the United States Supreme Court has not distorted the political process, but was a reaction to the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law, which was the first serious attempt in ages to restore some sanity to the overwrought process of electing officials of our government. He argued that full disclosure of the source of financing would be the cure-all for the unlimited right of corporations to spend as much money as they wished to ensure the election of candidates that would be less threatening to their bottom line. He also unconvincingly argued that labor unions have the same rights as Exxon, for example and the same amount of monies to spend on their candidates. Perhaps in an earlier time he would be correct in his assumptions. He referred to a political cartoonist, Thomas Nast, of the 19th century who exposed the Standard Oil trust with his acid pen. These days, however, the scene is quite different. There are so many talking heads on the networks that any position is overwhelmed by the breadth and penetration of varied points of view, but especially subject to advertising saturation ads, both negative and positive. The candidates who win are the ones who can raise the most money and feed it into the overwhelming media exposure they can buy. The McCain Feingold Act was designed to address two issues: The increased role of soft money in campaign financing, by prohibiting national political party committees from raising or spending any funds not subject to federal limits, even for state and local races or issue discussion; The proliferation of issue advocacy ads, by defining as “electioneering communications” broadcast ads that name a federal candidate within 30 days of a primary or caucus or 60 days of a general election, and prohibiting any such ad paid for by a corporation (including non-profit issue organizations such as Right to Life or the Environmental Defense Fund) or paid for by an unincorporated entity using any corporate or union general treasury funds. The decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission overturns this provision, but not the ban on foreign corporations or foreign nationals in decisions regarding political spending. In a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Citizens United, ruled that corporations and unions are entitled to the same political speech rights as individuals under the First Amendment. It found no compelling government interest for prohibiting corporations and unions from using their general treasury funds to make election-related independent expenditures. Thus, it struck down a federal law banning this practice and also overruled two of its prior decisions. Additionally, in an 8-1 decision, the Court ruled that the disclaimer and disclosure requirements associated with electioneering communications are constitutional. These were horrible rulings and serve to do nothing more than further distort our political processes. Now, “Super Pacs,” ostensibly not connected or coordinating with the candidates are spending untold millions on media commercials to sell the candidates, or even worse, fill the airwaves with negative information, much of it out of context and misleading. My friend’s full disclosure caveat holds no water, I am afraid. But from a conservative, the 19th century perspective is not surprising.  We live in an increasingly polarized atmosphere, burdened by the disappearance of moderate Republicans who used to be able to work with moderate democrats to accomplish useful legislation. Now we cannot even have that. The Republican party has been hijacked by evangelical and social conservatives, backed by millions of dollars, to convince the electorate to vote against their own interests by using their checkbooks to take stands on gay marriage, abortion, contraception, religion in public places and creationism instead of trying to reach an accommodation on education, infrastructure investment, job creation, and expanding the middle class.

"A nation that forgets its past is doomed to repeat it." - Winston Churchill Among the follies of our foreign policy is the belief that the United States is serving its national interests by continuing its failing attempts to guarantee a democratic solution in a culture so primitive, so alien to our Western mores that it defies the boundaries of our collective imagination. Cultures take centuries to change. Cultures imbued by theocracy take even longer. Afghanistan is such a place. One only need compare the history of our own country to realize that the political and cultural forces militating against change are so embedded in the Afghan people that we are faced with a Sisyphean task so overwhelming, so impossible, that our efforts, no matter how noble, are doomed to ignominious failure. As an historical analogy, the American Civil War ran roughly four years from Ft. Sumter to Appomattox, but actually continued for another 150 years thereafter. Vestiges linger even yet. Those states that seceded from the Union did so not only because they wanted to keep their slaves, but also because they were culturally different from their Northern brethren. Southern agrarian, slave-holding society bore a religious ethos, based upon inequality of the races, not only upon economic disparity between it and their northern countrymen. Southerners believed that white men had the God-given right to hold slaves. The morality of holding slaves was never really open to debate among Southerners. Holding slaves was the droit de seigneur. The South would fight to the death, and did, to uphold its principles. Northern culture was an anathema to it, a base, industrial, immoral society inhabited by crude, irreligious, and yes, heathen Yankees devoid of any pretense or genuineness of refinement, a threat to southern paradigms, virtues and ways of life. Margaret Mitchell wrote about it; we all viewed it in the 1939 classic film of her novel, the name of which does not here need repeating. Evidence of those deeply held beliefs could not and did not change overnight, despite the posting of Federal troops in Charleston, Atlanta, and New Orleans after open hostilities had ended and after Lee surrendered. Nor was the imposition by the radical US Congress of black legislatures in the south which lasted only as long as Federal troops remained stationed there to override the deeply held beliefs of the populace. The sad history of reconstruction, of Jim Crow laws, of lynching, of black post-bellum economic servitude and segregation bears wretched testimony to the excruciatingly slow pace of cultural change. Yes, the south is different now, but it was not so different in 1960, a hundred years after the Civil War had ended. And this in a country with a Constitution founded on democratic principles authored by the founding fathers of all of America, many of whom were southerners. Cultural differences in Europe now, for a further example, threaten to destroy the Euro, pitting hard working Germanic culture against profligate Greek culture. Germans do not wish to pay for Greek irresponsibility, but are forced to do so because the Greeks are their customers. This problem is almost intractable and Greece may very well be printing Drachmas again, rather than surrender to Germanic austerity. And this is a problem between culturally different democracies, a minor problem compared to the problems we face with Islamists and the Taliban, religious zealots all. Space here does not allow a full history lesson, but the British were among the many nations interfering unsuccessfully in Afghan politics, the Brits using a divide and rule strategy between Afghani Pashtuns and Baloch territories. Later, Afghanistan experimented with reform in the 1920s including the banishing of the burqa and establishing co-educational schools, alienating religious leaders. All reforms were abandoned in 1929 when a new leader Mohammed Zahir Shah became king in 1933, ruling until 1973. After that, the United States financed the Mujahadeen religious warriors against the Soviets, who had invaded in 1979. After the Soviet defeat, (after killing 1 million Afghans), the Taliban assumed control of the country, ultimately creating an Islamofascist nightmare, women subjugated, religious police, and a culture that precluded the development of any modernity. Now we delusionally expect that this primitive, Islamist, women-stoning society that executes women for adultery, is to grasp liberty and equality for all? A society that throws acid on the faces of women who dare to go to school to seek an education? A society that has a caste of theocrats that superstitiously believes in practices such as honor killings is going to find its Thomas Jefferson in an abbreviated epiphany under beneficent American auspices? The politicians in Washington are dithering over a decision to abandon that place, a decision that should have been made long ago.

"Verily, men gave themselves all their good and evil. Verily, they did not take it, they did not find it, nor did it come to them as a voice from heaven. Only man placed values in things to preserve himself--he alone created a meaning for things, a human meaning. Therefore, he calls himself 'man,' which means: the esteemer." - F. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Bk.1 Some liberal souls, I understand, have named Rick Santorum as an ideal 13th century president. The particulars of this appellation are well known to those who have been following the interminable Republican debates, some of which have actually revealed the vacuousness of a few of the candidates, including Rick Perry, the governor of Texas whose gaffe of not remembering which governmental agency he wished to guillotine or how many death row inmates in his state have actually met a similar fate, albeit with a needle instead. Then there was Michelle Bachman whose IRS credentials, foster children, and bible-thumping husband presumably rendered her capable of running the world’s most powerful country. After that we had Ron Paul, a libertarian, who plainly feels that the underclass should have their healthcare needs met by their local churches and charities, and that the US should disengage from the rest of the world. In some respects he is correct in alluding to the misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, hegemons do not voluntarily surrender their place in the world and most moderates do not think we should isolate ourselves from a world increasingly globalized based upon a 19th century interpretation of a constitution arguably in need of serious revision. And then that inimitable paradigm of hypocrisy, Newt Gingrich, a miserable human being, powered by his somewhat hard to ignore intellectual credentials and his use of the words “profoundly,” and “fundamentally,” as well as his colossal arrogance. He seems to have learned, moreover, very little, from his ethics violations in Congress and his, to use his words, “profound” fall from grace. His conversion to Catholicism and his abandonment of his cancer-ridden wife for Calista, a helmet-headed blond with whom he prays often and who would, no doubt, be a loathsome first lady. His billionaire supporter Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate, single handedly has prevented Newt’s campaign from plunging over a cliff the size of Mount Rushmore, a place, fortunately, he will never inhabit, although Newt probably believes he should replace George Washington on the prominence. Mr. Adelson apparently has now hedged his bets and is rumored to be giving money to Mitt Romney, a man who cannot seal the deal even with moderate Republicans, let alone evangelicals who think that Mormonism is a devilish and heretical cult. Mr. Romney bases his qualifications for the presidency because he was a successful venture capitalist and therefore understands how to run a profitable government (as though the government were a for profit corporation.) and that he is now a conservative who unsuccessfully denies his fostering a successful (egads! socialist) health care plan for Massachusetts. He is sinking fast, however. We are not sure he will not survive, however, since the Republicans usually pick the next in line. That brings us back to the possibility of a Santorum nomination, a thought I suspect, not without some logical basis, that the American Union may be further infused with theocratic ideals, since Santorum has made pronouncements like President Obama is conducting a war against religion. The White House would be clearly gleeful if that happened, since Mr. Santorum was given the unceremonious boot by blue collar Pennsylvania after his undistinguished time in the United States Senate. Mr. Santorum also denies global warming and believes that he can single handedly cure the economy, but really does not say how. Dinosaurs really do walk the earth with people---Santorum being living proof discrediting the observations of Charles Darwin. How the American public can swallow these arguments is stupefying. Are we back in the 1920s? Why are we even discussing issues like abortion? Birth control? Contraception? Who prays more? Which church is not inhabited by heretics? Are we about to have another Scopes monkey trial? No country in the western world has not left these issues far behind. But of course, the threat these intellectually challenged candidates envision is that the United States will become more like Europe. And Europe has uncivilized and heathen institutions like high speed rail, good roads, health care for all its citizens, and a more enlightened populace that does not tolerate such pandering infantilism in its political discourse.

"Too much cannot be said against the men of wealth who sacrifice everything to getting wealth. There is not in the world a more ignoble character than the mere money-getting American, insensible to every duty, regardless of every principle, bent only on amassing a fortune, and putting his fortune only to the basest uses —whether these uses be to speculate in stocks and wreck railroads himself, or to allow his son to lead a life of foolish and expensive idleness and gross debauchery, or to purchase some scoundrel of high social position, foreign or native, for his daughter. Such a man is only the more dangerous if he occasionally does some deed like founding a college or endowing a church, which makes those good people who are also foolish forget his real iniquity. These men are equally careless of the working men, whom they oppress, and of the State, whose existence they imperil. There are not very many of them, but there is a very great number of men who approach more or less closely to the type, and, just in so far as they do so approach, they are curses to the country.” - Theodore Roosevelt. February, 1895 I have been having a continuing dialogue with some Republican friends of mine, ardent defenders of our capitalist system. And so they should be. It is a system that has provided, all throughout the 20th century, a nation with probably the grandest middle class and the greatest lifestyle the world has ever known. But that lifestyle was not easily won, and is now again under threat by individuals and corporations not unlike the description voiced above by, can you imagine, a Republican President of the United States, who must now, by even the narrowest stretch of any imagination, be spinning in his proverbial grave. These Republican gentlemen, having achieved considerable wealth on their own or by whatever device, now strain mightily to justify their unimaginable insensitivity to the problematic society in which we now live. One of them said that he wished he had an airplane, four homes instead of two, and other needless accoutrements of decadence. I have no problem with that, because he did not achieve it at the expense of the poor. However, such a mentality enables a “scorched earth” policy and a sanctioning of Congressional refuseniks who have been purchased by lobbyists to protect governmental subsidies of banking, corn, oil, and other interests too numerous to catalog in this meager column. We now live in a country that no longer has a growing middle class. The American dream has, through a darkly lit tunnel, departed the station. We live in a country that is increasingly plutocratic, where those inhabiting the strata of the upper one percent control more of the wealth than ever before. The figures, staggering and depressing, advanced by a party that has lost its moral compass, looms as a guillotine over the heads of working people who have lost their homes, been evicted in the street, cannot afford health care, and can no longer buy food. Forty six million Americans are now living in poverty. People are taking to the streets. Nightly news shows a litany of neighborhoods, such as in Cleveland, where Cuyuhoga county has decided that abandoned homes should be demolished, rather than bring lower the homes of those people who, either conscientiously or stupidly, make mortgage payments to banks that will not readjust their financing, even though they are “under water.” These souls, representing the essential staunch character of the American middle class, choose to stay in homes valued at $50,000 carrying $100,000 mortgages. They are faced with banks, which would choose to foreclose, evict and leave the home vacant, subject to scavengers and vandals thereby depreciating the entire neighborhood rather than adjust the financing based upon their diminished value since the housing bubble burst. Of course, banks are in the business of making a profit. But in times like these, does it not make more sense for a bank to collect a lower payment rather than no payment at all? And with no one to whom the house may be sold? These are the same banks, bailed out by taxpayer dollars, too big to fail, that are sitting on hoards of cash and are refusing to lend any money. These are the same banks (Bank of America/Countrywide) that faces Justice Department fines that it charged African-Americans a higher interest rate than whites, purely based on race. The Bank of America's Countrywide Mortgage was required today to pay $335 million in fines for discriminating against Black and Latinos who were steered to higher interest rates than white borrowers. Anthony Monzillo, the CEO of Countrywide earned $531 million during 2003-2008 based upon his misdeeds. This criminal has, to date, escaped prosecution. Countrywide did about 49% of all adjustable rate mortgages in the U.S. in 2008 and engaged in systemic fraud. Republican politicians should fear the next election. People are now aware that they have been hoodwinked by a congress that is not responsive to the needs of its people and are dedicated solely to obstruct the present inhabitant of the White House, who, despite all his faults, including timidity, some pandering, some absence of courage to confront obstructionists, and who, may in this election year, find some way to bring a message to the people that their cause will not remain hijacked. Hijacked by the Malefactors of great wealth.

Miscellanea, November, 2011 I had written earlier about the Presidential debate format being changed to tête-a tête between the candidates. I was wrong. The Republican debates have served a useful purpose, by showcasing the empty suits of most of the candidates, and by highlighting Mitt Romney’s stronger appeal to the general electorate. In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king. Rick Perry’s gaffe about abolishing government departments and then not remembering which one he was going to axe, is not really the important point. It was his lack of a policy understanding and a failure to prepare and be acquainted with policy positions rather than memorizing positions coming from his handlers’ talking point memos. His authenticity quotient swan dove into a media hurricane. Memories often fail when there is only rote memory of the thoughts behind the statement. That is why he could not remember. "All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke (1729-1797) Comments on the Religion of college football. I cannot remember reading anything as loathsome as the Penn State football coach scandal except the ongoing priestly scandals plaguing Catholicism. The idea that men entrusted with the welfare and the education of children could be so callous and even depraved is unimaginable. The idea that football is a more important enterprise than the educational establishment to which it is wedded is evocative of the Catholic Church’s placing its hierarchical power structure before the interests of children, and the shuffling about of pedophilic priests to avoid responsibility for repulsive grotesqueries that would make even the most perverse Hollywood directors blush. You could not make a horror film on this subject. There is no film rating for this. It is just another life destroying mechanism that people will remember, like 9/11 or Pearl Harbor, without the bombs and explosions. That is what the coaching staff including the legendary (now, in my opinion, disgraced) Joe Paterno as well as the sacked president of the University did, placing the University’s $76 million revenue machine ahead of the children whose lives have now been scarred by a monster. The siege mentality of the Penn State football staff—them against us, the lack of transparency, the para-military discipline that robs young men of their dignity, sublimating their individuality to the team and that subjects their bodies to indentured battering in the name of an academic institution, has escorted our society to a new low of moral and intellectual bankruptcy. The fact that college football players are encouraged to take courses that do not demand much study, so they can devote their time to playing football is another indication of why our country is falling behind nations that prefer educating their studentry instead of head bashing them. Most of these misguided souls will not play professionally, and then when they graduate, if at all, they will not be trained in the skills necessary to succeed in an exponentially growing meritocracy. The origins of college football have been distorted and corrupted beyond all recognition. A game that began as an amateur pastime has lost its compass and the Penn State scandal is just another example of the decay, the rotting corpse of American big college football academia. How much Coach Paterno knew, as well as his staff and the higher ups knew, will now be subject to the harsh scrutiny of the courts, both criminal and later, civil. Those who decry the legal system will now see it seek justice once again for those who could not protect themselves. May the wheels of justice grind exceedingly fine.

"O Ship of State Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State! Sail on, O Union, strong and great! Humanity with all its fears, With all the hopes of future years, Is hanging breathless on thy fate! We know what Master laid thy keel, What Workmen wrought thy ribs of steel, Who made each mast, and sail, and rope, What anvils rang, what hammers beat, In what a forge and what a heat Were shaped the anchors of thy hope! Fear not each sudden sound and shock, 'Tis of the wave and not the rock; 'Tis but the flapping of the sail, And not a rent made by the gale! In spite of rock and tempest's roar, In spite of false lights on the shore, Sail on, nor fear to breast the sea! Our hearts, our hopes, are all with thee. Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears, Our faith triumphant o'er our fears, Are all with thee, -are all with thee!" - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow It is inconceivable that the President Obama has, during the last three months, raised about $70 million for his current reelection campaign. The election is more than a year away! The Republicans will be obliged to raise similar amounts of money for their campaigns. We are talking about estimates as high as a billion dollars between the two parties that could be better utilized for more constructive purposes than advertising, negative campaign ads, denigrating other candidates, and waterboarding the hapless television viewer. There is something inherently wrong, something improvident about this cumbersome, agonizing process. It is destructive to our polity. It should not take so long, be so divisive, or be so expensive to run for office. It was not always so. There are more efficient ways to elect a leader and many more useful ways to spend money. Perhaps the old way of political parties picking the candidates in nominating conventions was better. Less democratic, perhaps, but more efficient, and perhaps more productive of good candidates like Roosevelt, Truman, Lincoln, Jefferson, Washington, to name a few. A year ago I wrote that I was grateful that the 2010 congressional and senatorial campaign was over. But wait! Now we are obliged to listen for another year to candidates for the Presidency in an essentially perpetual campaign. We cannot afford a perpetual campaign, diverting resources from the actual governance of the nation. A process that is devoted for years on end to divisiveness is a self fulfilling enterprise, a destructive song without end. The very length of the campaign is productive of even more divisiveness, not the cohesiveness we now so sorely need as a national goal to get us through the great economic global crisis in which we now lie, almost like a tortoise on its proverbial back, helplessly unable to right itself, ready to be devoured by predators. Candidates, questioned by journalists about all manner of irrelevancies, including whether that candidate is a true follower of Jesus, Brigham Young, Mohammad, or is a true Christian. Who really cares if Mormons believed golden plates of Jesus were in New York and they moved to Missouri? Who cares if Jesus ascended to heaven on a cloud? What difference does it make that fundamentalist Christians pronounce fitness for office on how “Christian” a candidate is? These are not questions that should be asked of candidates. How deep and abiding faith guides a candidate is not the issue. Religion and government do not mix. Any candidate, who wishes to force upon the public social issues such as abortion, should be asked whether they also believe that putting people to death is contradictory to that premise. Why is our dialog so rudimentary, so infantile, and so juvenile in its exercise? What is it in the American vernacular that has happened to stunt our intellectual growth as an electorate? The inanity of it all is a stupefying indictment of either the lack of intelligence of the voter or of the politicians or more likely, both. Why do we need Wolf Blitzer and Chris Wallace to moderate debates? Why do we need any moderators at all? The idea of Michelle Bachman giving a straight answer to anything other than how much she is guided by her faith is so fantastical as to strain the imagination of J.K. Rowling. Mitt Romney, a homogenized, blow-dried, fabric softened mannequin, is now vying with the pizza man for front runnership. The “debates” are farcical, nincompoop enterprises, offering only a modicum of insight into who these people really are. And the President, although disappointing, will probably get another term after all is said and done, given his less than courageous posture in standing up to a Republican party that has been taken over by social ideologues, who deny science, climate change, evolution, stem-cell research, instead harping on piety, religiosity and “values.” Our political and electoral system is a broken, rusty, creaking locomotive, chugging up a hill that steepens every year, hampered by global competition, economic challenges, and countries which select their Prime ministers in 6 week campaigns from start to finish. The Electoral College is an anachronism. Its origins, based upon state’s rights, disenfranchised women, slaves, and rural communities is in need of serious reform. We need direct popular election of the President, a dramatically shortened campaign, and a congress that remains in Washington, seeing to the business of governance, not partisanship driven by vote getting. Billions spent to elect candidates and a rational discussion of the issues confronting the country, do not need years of campaigning. Debates should be discussions among the candidates themselves, not howling, applauding audience extravaganzas on Fox and CNN. The discussions should include follow up questions, follow ups to the follow ups and not be a continuum of handler-generated sound bites. People should understand that there should be a depth of knowledge generated by the discussion and a revelation (forgive the expression) of what these people are actually thinking and, more importantly, what they actually know.

“Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.” “The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not.” - Eric Hoffer (1902-1983) Recently, some thoughtful friends of mine have been writing about how the personalities of Presidential candidates and their individual world view are not really crucial to the process of how they manage the economy. These friends equate the economy with all the reasons to elect a candidate. I suppose this is a rationalization of how to support a Texas top gun like Rick Perry or a crazy woman like Michelle Bachmann whose primitive social instincts are fantastically out of touch with the 21st century. The economy is important, of course, but there are other issues that trouble people, including a woman’s right to choose, birth control, education, a safety net for our citizens, and the government’s ability to create infrastructure and an environment in which people can live in safety. Of course, economic policy is an adjunct to this, but it is not the sole thing. I guess my perspective is different: I believe that the socio-religious-anti-science zealotry of some of the candidates, especially on the Republican side of the aisle that unctuously panders to the religious right is a disingenuous manifestation of a hypocritical vote solicitation-at-any-cost mantra. And when President Obama also does the same thing, “may God bless the United States of America,” at the end of every speech, he is no less obsequious. Earlier presidents did not need to wear flag pins or make ubiquitous and gratuitous religious references in order to please the voting public. Abraham Lincoln’s references to God were not done as a matter of course at the end of every speech. And certainly Thomas Jefferson did not do so. I understand the perhaps human genetic need to believe in a supernatural force to provide social cohesion and an ability to war against other tribes, but why must it be a prerequisite to garner votes? Why must every speech be an appeal to piety? Are not Muslim fundamentalists the same as Jewish fundamentalists or the Catholic Church in their a priori discounting of other faiths, claiming their faith is the exclusive path to salvation? At least the Catholic Church is somewhat consistent: no birth control, no capital punishment, and no abortion. But its hypocritical and certainly not biblical 16th century calls to celibacy among priests so that the church could perpetuate its property and estates are no indication of godliness. And there is a cogent argument that the celibacy requirement attracts sexually abusive individuals to its ranks. The Catholic religious hierarchy continues to mystify me. Why is the American public so ostensibly pious? Europeans have already moved away from state religions, but in the United States, there is an almost secular state religion, an unintended consequence stemming from the tolerance set forth in the Constitution. The entire fringe religious fundamentalism in this country has a cult-like tenor to it, an irrationality that is almost indecipherable yet understandable at the same time. I think the candidates should be extensively questioned about whether they expect to govern by divine revelation. Michelle Bachmann has been particularly adept at dodging that question. George W. Bush, born again, took us into two wars costing trillions of dollars, which history has borne out to be unnecessary, given recent events in the Middle East. I still remember the Republican debate in 2008 when the candidates were asked if they believe in the theory of evolution and all raised their hands in the negative. That question should be put to the candidates again. At the same time, the ideological, proto-religious aspect of the economic arguments presented today is undeniable. On the right are the zealots who want to remove government from the economic process, yet wish to include it in the social agenda. Do not abort the child, but once it is born unwanted, abandoned, and neglected, let it inhabit the lower depths of a Dickensian untervelt of deprivation, ignorance and poverty. America must find a rational alternative to this mind numbing debate: Moving beyond piety in its political dialogue, whether it be a religious or dogmatic view of economic solutions or its misappropriated social creed of imposing religious education and its anti science dogma in the public schools. Focusing on the solutions to our social problems through ideology is neither productive nor encouraging of solutions.

The Tea Party, a misnomer from the start, is, it seems, a yearning to return to what it perceives as an America of the 19th and early 20th centuries. It is a faction of disenchanted, negative people who believe that government should be highly limited, a sort of return to the days when people lifted themselves up by their bootstraps, and needed no help from anyone. Days when people lived in log cabins, worked on agrarian lands, and tilled the soil. Those who inhabited the cities lived either in poverty or in monumental wealth. The days when the United States Constitution, a venerable document, perpetuated freedom of religion, non-voting women and, of course, that amazing gift to America—the institution of Slavery, which culminated in a Civil War, killing about 600,000 Americans. After the Civil War, the gilded age and the industrial revolution produced the beginnings of the middle class and a claque of millionaires and Robber Barons. Those good old days were not so good. But people “worked mighty hard for mighty little pay,” and understood no one was going to give them a handout. Along came the labor movement, strikes, and a progressive government that broke the trusts, thanks to Theodore Roosevelt. It was not an easy battle. But it was the beginning of a safety net for its citizens, and an attempt at hybridizing a partnership between government and laissez-faire capitalism. It was the beginning of a just society. We are no longer that country. We have regressed. We are a nation of putatively entitled illiterates, a nation that does not understand its own history, and of politicians who barely understand the complexity of the issues that are overwhelming them. We are a nation with exponentially increasing disparity between rich and poor. Politicians hew to the call of CNN, Fox News, and a strident, brainless debate, taking positions that are not moderate or well thought out. Our government seems dysfunctional because it does not know how to cope with what may be increasingly an ungovernable situation. I admire the optimism of those who think we are going to innovate and rise to the occasion. But I wonder. Now we are engaged in a cultural and economic war, a war promulgated by a coterie of privileged corporations, their corrupt lobbyists, and “job creators,” who, the Republican party now believe, will restore our shattered economy through not having to pay more taxes and by shutting down the court system (so called tort reform) cutting social programs, education, pensions, social security, breaking labor unions, and lowering taxes. Tea partiers believe that more jobs will come out of favoring those who will invest if their taxes are lower and are not held to accountability by the law. Different economic schools of thought cannot agree on whether to tax less spend less or to tax more, spend more on infrastructure and technology. Business might call this investment or capital expenditure. Make no mistake. The debate is more religious and ideologic, and while economists are a valuable resource to tell us what went wrong, they do not seem to be able to predict the future. What most economists do agree upon, however, is that it will take a partnership between government and free markets to perpetuate stability and a climate for innovation and investment. It has always been so and a dynamic market economy needs structure and regulation as well as a safety net for its citizenry. A centrist view of governance has always been America’s strength. The problem is that we are no longer an agrarian or even an industrial economy. We are a post-industrial economy, with less ability to compete because of rising illiteracy, sloth, and a fundamental denial of what is happening beyond and within our borders. We are turning away educated immigrants, and exporting jobs overseas, because there is no one here to do them and because people in more ambitious countries are willing to work harder for less, are more skillful and better educated. A return to the American century (the 20th) is not at all likely. American Exceptionalism? We are withering in a sea of internal discord, rancor and disparity between rich and poor. The middle class, built through years of struggle and reform, if not already vanished, is clearly more ethereal. On top of all that, we have leaders who do not seem to be able to rise to the occasion. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats have anyone who is able to capture the imagination of the people, to motivate them, to seize the moment. The President seems a capable, intellectual pedant who is afraid to be branded an angry black man, so he tries to compromise and form a consensus that becomes more and more illusory. The Speaker of the House is a political hack that caters to his Tea Party minions with a revolting unctuousness—a disingenuousness that is so obvious it is shocking.  Harry Truman we need you now.

Jews, have for millennia, circumcised their male offspring as a ticket to entry into the Tribe. Hitler’s minions, as a means of identification of male Jews, caused men to drop their pants in order to determine who should live and who should be gassed, tortured, or otherwise exterminated. Under those circumstances, it became more difficult for male Jews to escape doom and certainly argued against the procedure. A friend of mine, a Rabbi, recently wrote an incensed article about what he termed an anti-Semitic tract, “Foreskin Man,” (www.kurtstone.typepad.com) which condemned circumcision and seeks to introduce a law criminalizing the practice. Aside from all the medical controversy, the differentiation between male circumcision and female genital mutilation seems, for me, a difficult distinction to make. Both procedures attack the genitalia of the victim. Arguments that males benefit from the procedure and are less susceptible to sexually transmitted diseases do not really address the moral issues of the rights of an infant who is unable to consent to the procedure and must suffer the consequences of the decision of his parents who are usually religiously, not medically, motivated. On the other hand, waiting until one is 16 or even 18 renders the procedure painful and usually not done. This even though there is evidence that there is a reduction in urinary tract infections as well as a reduction in the incidence in penile cancer. Recently the British Medical Association pointed to medical and psychological risks of the procedure, including anxieties, anger and even attempts of those circumcised to restore their foreskins. Some courts in Europe have declared the procedure illegal. There has also been evidence that sexual sensation is diminished because the glans of the penis is desensitized. However, there is evidence to the contrary that no loss of sexual sensation occurs. There is no doubt, however, that there can be medical complications, including, among other consequences, fistulas, cysts, necrosis, and ulceration. One thing is sure: there is little doubt that circumcision arose as a tribal rite and a methodology, according to Maimonides, to control male sexuality. There seems to be an increasing consensus among medical societies that male circumcision “should not be routinely performed.” What is clear is that it is a primitive practice, and rationales by religious people have been carefully crafted to justify its perpetuation. Many Jewish parents decide to do it so that their children are not singled out for having a “different penis” in the locker room. (With no disrespect intended to recently tweeting Jewish congressmen.) I have no answer to this conundrum. On the one hand, it is an accepted and routinely practiced custom. On the other, it is a form of genital mutilation, and when practiced on females, universally and rightly abhorred. Whether the group currently promoting Elders of Zion caricatures of Jews who circumcise and Aryan looking anti circumcision claques who oppose it are evilly motivated are marginal to the issues of whether the practice remains morally or medically justifiable. The growing professional opinion seems to be against it.  And, if one is religious, even devoutly so, and believes that Man is created in God’s image, why the necessity to improve on God’s creation? If one is not religious, would not Darwinian natural selection have eliminated foreskins by now anyway?

I just finished a book by Sam Harris, “The End of Faith.” A disturbing analysis of religion and theology, the book’s focus carries forth a recurring theme of the intolerance generated by all religions, and even sharply criticizes religious moderates. Traditional thinking had always been that religious moderation is an acceptable alternative to religious extremism. Not so, avers Harris, reasoning that religious moderation fosters a climate of acceptance of religious extremism. The acceptance of any religion, ergo, a priori allows an implicit acceptance of the most extreme forms of faith.  In a coolly rational discourse, Harris especially derides Islam, the conversion from which carries the penalty of death. Islam also tolerates the subjugation of women, honor killings, beheadings and suicide bombers; the idea that so sexually repressive a religion offers however many virgins in paradise as a reward for acts of grotesque terrorism speak to its ultimate abandonment of goodness. The idea that in the 21st century such a belief system can be food for any serious rational thought befuddles him. He is no less forgiving of Catholicism, and refers to the Lateran council of 1252 which punished the Jews by removing them from society’s grace, promulgating thousands of years of anti-Semitism, including the blood libel, exploring a gruesome litany of disembowelments, heretic-burnings, rakings, witch-huntings and other nauseating acts of religious fervor, ultimately leading to the Holocaust. Fortunately, he says, the church abandoned such procedures, but not until the early 18th century and not before the seeds of the whirlwind had been sown. Jews receive little less effusive acid pen treatment. Jewish fundamentalists cling to the anachronistic, bronze-age railings of the book of Leviticus, which Harris maintains is an exercise in the misogynistic demands of a paranoid God, who demands complete thoughtless subservience. He calls rigid adherence to primitive dietary laws and circumcision a paradigm of tribalism. Differences among the Arabs and the Jews in Palestine/Israel are still fueled by cultural differences and religious dichotomy, with fundamentalists on both sides stirring a witch’s brew of racism, terrorism, hatred and death. He relegates theology to a non-science and does not even accord it philosophical heft, since he views religion as an evil in the world which denies people the essence of their humanity, the understanding that people do good things because of their own ethical code, giving the example of monkeys and other species protecting their young. Religion is not at all needed to produce morality. He defines love as a concern for other’s happiness and the placement of those values on a level with one’s own well being, without the necessity of priestly or clerical intercession. This, says Harris, is the new ethic to which we should all aspire, an ethic that needs no class of priests to stand between ourselves and our reason or our humanity. In discounting the belief of others by virtue of “faith,” we automatically discount the “faith” of others. In my discussions with others about these undertakings, I have always encountered resistance and reluctance for the faithful to not abandon their sense of reason. The reaction is “I am not educated enough to talk to you about this,” or “I do not wish to discuss it.” People who are content to use reason during the week somehow feel free to abandon their sense of reason on Sunday, or Saturday. Why?

“All War represents a failure of diplomacy.” - Tony Benn Now that the Middle East has been rocked by the latest wave of freedom-seeking, it is interesting to speculate about how little influence we have over what may happen to us. Hosni Mubarak certainly did not. Surely he did not expect to leave office under the circumstances he did. Muammar Gaddafi, the murderous, insane leader of Libya is killing with impunity as the West looks on in a state of befuddlement, the punditry voicing a confused mixture of morality, pragmatism, and logistical analysis. Nothing has really changed in our western, oil-addicted psyche. Washington politicians are ringing their hands about the “potential slaughter” of innocents, but what they are really thinking about is the same conundrum that has plagued them all along. Will pubescent Arab freedom choke off the world’s supply of oil and will the countries not yet in crisis be able to sustain the increased production necessary to alleviate the strangulating effect of oil shortages on the economic recovery in America and in the rest of its energy-seeking competitors? Jeff Greenfield, the political analyst and former Presidential speechwriter, has a new book out that hypothesizes about how twists of fate turn the tide of history. The assassination of JFK, for example. Or the fact that a plot to truck dynamite the new President was foiled in December of 1960 because the assassin did not want his family to be involved when Jackie came to the door of their residence. Not wanting to kill the young President’s family led to a delay in the plot allowing the FBI time to foil it. This little known fact reveals how tenuous political and human fortunes are. A slight change of circumstance, a different leader here and there, matters over which even the most prescient leader has little or no control. The randomness of events, play out at the highest levels of government, potentially plunging the world into ever deepening chaos. Should we do no fly zones in Libya ? Should we have fought in Viet-Nam? Was the removal of Saddam Hussein, empowering the Iranians helpful? Do nations enter wars with inadequate information and are decisions made with poor information, and impulsively misguided leaders? Of course. Decisions rendered in haste are often wrong, but sometimes they are correct. How can so imperfect an operation as government and its leadership really be trusted? Well, in fact, it cannot. Nathan Detroit is rolling the dice. It is very easy to forget the threat of the Soviet Union, an imploded, decrepit economic house of cards, despite having projected enormous military power perpetuating its own empire, threatening Europe, Asia and the United States. How, in retrospect, could we have considered the threat so daunting? During the post World War II years and throughout the 1960s and 1970s, we lived in fear of a Communist takeover of the world. As schoolchildren we hid under our wooden desks, to protect us from a nuclear Armageddon. Others averred: had we not stood up to the nightmarish Leviathan, we would all be Russian vassals. What really are the lessons of history? What can impel us to make the right decisions? Thoughtfulness, prudence, and reflection? The very qualities the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has have caused those critical of him to say he is vacillating, indecisive, and too cautious. George W. Bush was the contrary, embroiling us in two wars, killing thousands, neither of which bloody conflict has really proven its value. Mr. Truman, on the other hand, through courage and decisiveness, prevented North Korean domination of the South, allowing democracy and economic independence to thrive. The questions of which wars are good wars and which are not remain unanswered. They probably never will be.

Events in Egypt still bode uncertain for the West. The fluidity of the situation, now partially determined, has the scent of a youthful, computer-generated revolution, its forces young, vigorous and dynamic, the scenes in the streets of Cairo evoking tableaux of freedom-loving birds learning to fly. The tired, corrupt government ministers who tried to blame “external influences” for their increasingly precarious grip had averred anarchy and chaos, the classically demagogic response to the change that threatened their grip on puissance. This, of course, was the manipulative tool of corrupted political forces and is not a new phenomenon from a historical perspective. Every dictator has, to a greater or lesser extent, utilized this fear to perpetuate their own power. The difference is that this time, it failed. Fear and terror lost to a burgeoning aroma of freedom. We do not now know how this situation will play out. Will the revolution in Egypt and the rest of the Middle East wind up in the hands of Islamic extremists? Will western-influenced youth attain power through some leader who will not become an autocrat? Will a military strongman or fundamentalist Islamists stifle the democratic instincts of the people? Will the reigns of power corrupt whomever it embraces? Will Israel be threatened or find itself at war with the newer forces which might dominate the Arab world? Many other questions still remain unanswered. In the 1960s, the United Arab Republic was a brief, ill-fated union between Egypt and Syria, which only lasted 2½ years, a paradigm of Arab disunity, almost like the scene in the tent from Lawrence of Arabia when Anthony Quinn entered and demonstrated how the feuding tribes could not hook up, even under British rule. Western attempts to amalgamate Arab countries into one monolith have always been a huge mistake. Too many tribes and nationalities, many of which cannot even agree on who is the scion of Mohammed, offer very little unifying potential. The Egyptians do not now, it seems, wish to reject the 30-year peace treaty with Israel. Nor do they seem to be flying to an Iranian smoke signal, Shia-Sunni Arab-Persian discrepancies momentously militating against that frightful result. Interestingly and to his credit, John Boehner, on “Meet the Press,” stated that the President had handled the crisis about as well as he could have. A very risky statement, indeed, from the man who must pacify his tea party minions. Governing is far more difficult and complicated than simply leading the opposition. The lessons taught by attempting governance will face the naifs in the freedom-seeking throngs in Egypt and in whatever other country is next to join them in a quest for democracy. Without a constitutional heritage and institutional foundations of democracy, it will be arduous. Have Facebook and Twitter replaced Thomas Jefferson, Tom Paine and John Adams in Founding Fatherdom?  We are living in exciting, exhilarating times.

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” - Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961 A Republican friend of mine, whom I respect greatly for his intellect as well as his congeniality, recently opined that the Democratic propensity is to hate the military. This notion of a Democratic antipathy to the armed forces is supported by his assertion that the military vote ten to one for Republicans. Perhaps they do, although I have not checked the accuracy of that assertion, but it is a misconception that Democrats hate the soldiers, most of whom are volunteers for a duty others will not do. Today’s military is composed of an elite career officer corps and enlisted men who volunteer, often with the idea that service to their country is noble, sometimes because they are escaping poverty, and often for a secure, structured environment. Many of the volunteers are very young, and have not yet learned of the horror of war. George W. Bush, who himself avoided combat, had very little compunction in embroiling our country in two disastrous wars that still have not proven their value. The fact that these gladiators are supported by war profiteers and legislators both from the Republican and Democratic parties, makes them no less victimized by the illusion that the United States is responsible for making the world safe from rogue governments that spring up around the globe or other threats from amorphous terrorists. These “threats” supposedly justify a $700 billion defense budget, when we as a nation are struggling with underfunded schools, decrepit highways, and a 19th century rail system. This idea of an American colossus, a dynamic hegemonic enterprise straddling the globe has vanished with our manufacturing base, a decaying rust belt of post industrial cities, inhabited by the unemployed, the disenfranchised, the dispossessed. The present Republican leadership believes that fewer taxes on their corporate benefactors will revive our flagging economy, and are busy selling the notion that all Americans will benefit from more jobs created by the effect of the long-discredited “trickle-down” theory. Democrats believe that the government should invest more, publicly fund research, invest in infrastructure and modestly raise taxes to do so. Somewhere between these two increasingly polarized positions should be a solution. One thing is certain—the United States has neither the economic wherewithal nor the moral ability to police the world. Drunk on oil, hypocritically pious and in hoc, it now must co-exist in an increasingly hostile and threatening world. Faster jet planes and more expensive aircraft carriers are no longer the basis for projecting power. We need to turn inwardly strong. More education, better teachers, faster rail, better research, and energy independence—that is where we should be looking. Congressmen up for sale to defense contractors need to be put on notice that playing on the fears of their constituents will no longer get them reelected. One would hope that the H.L. Mencken was wrong when he said that “no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” So far, unfortunately, he has been right.

“In every country and every age, the priest had been hostile to Liberty.” - Thomas Jefferson Religion, it seems, has not done playing its hand in the affairs of mortals, who, despite accumulating scientific evidence, continue to believe in whatever divinities are comforting to their concept of human existence. Because of this hope, men strive to gain some illusory reward after they die, including, but not limited to 73 virgins, floating upon a heavenly cloud, life in a virtual paradise, or whatever other notion they can conjure up. Because man is the only beast who knows that he will die, the other products of evolution are not beholding to a religious undertaking or to nature. Lions, for example, feel no remorse when they devour their prey. Snakes do not wilt when they poisonously bite their victims, porpoises do not tarry when they gulp their fish repast. Man, obsessed with death, believes that if he lives according to the dogma of the church, mosque or synagogue that he will be somehow rewarded in perpetuity. He prays, fasts, renders beseechments, wails, moans, kneels prostrate and goes to confession. He does good turns not for the good in the deed itself, but for the promise of some unearthly reward. This actually diminishes the goodness of the deed, for the deed should, if honestly performed, should be reward enough in and of itself. In the name of religion, men have killed, maimed, tortured, burned at the stake, and brutalized his fellows. In the name of religion, theocracies and true believers threaten the annihilation of other nations and seek nuclear bombs to do so. Only recently has religious dogma allowed for some toleration of the beliefs of others, mostly as a reaction to the information age and the holocaust. First, the holocaust erased institutional (but not all) anti-Semitism in the west, and second, the general diminution of misinformation that had been generated about contrary belief systems. People are exposed to the ways, in a global environment, of others. Ergo, they are less ignorant. Much of this has happened through the rise of television and of the movies, since many younger people do not read books or even newspapers. Even still, the institutional Church of Rome denies basic human sexuality and the need of men for love, fostering a class of prelate who is frustrated and unfulfilled, propelling them toward abuse and depredation. Religious fundamentalists, including Hasidim, Islamists, Orthodox Jews, still indoctrinate their children with worthless, anachronistic dogma, dietary laws and fasts. They deny the right to marriage outside their respective faiths, they stone those who violate the Sabbath and who do not obey the precepts of their religion. Islamists execute adulterers and lop off the hands of petty thieves. They degrade and debase women as inferior beings. True believers inculcate in their children a credo that there is something worthwhile in praying to a god who has not the power to change anything on earth, and if he did, should shoulder the blame for the evil that men do, ostensibly in his name. The only thing that occurs as a result of this “educational” enterprise is hysteria and fear among those who have not been taught realistically to deal with the vicissitudes of life, other than doing dances, praying to the spirits, almost like the primitive souls lost and seeking comfort in the African Savannah, 50,000 years ago.

Recently, a Republican friend of mine (I do have Republican friends) sent me an email, recounting a tale of a Republican father and his hard-working student liberal Democrat daughter who, brainwashed by her profoundly elite college professors, berated her father for his selfishness. The father, giving as good as he got, reminded his prodigal child that Democrats were interested, through some ignorance of the Dickensian realities of life, to surrender all their freedoms; she simply did not understand that the progenitors of individual wealth should not be subjected to redistributionist taxation. Why did she not give part of her hard earned 4.0 GPA to her partying 2.0 GPA friend as a token of her undying friendship? When his daughter refused, he pronounced her a Republican.  The histoire continued in a vein of how Republicans benefited from hard work, self-reliance, control over the self, and how Democrats were willing to surrender all individual freedoms to the common good. Other included pronouncements were that conservatives who did not like guns did not buy them, homosexuals “quietly stayed at home,” (as if there were some shame to that), and how down-and-out conservatives lift themselves up by their bootstraps instead of looking for handouts. Like all exaggerations the tale had some truth to it, but a little truth is as good as a prevarication. Democrats are hard working people, Democrats are not Socialists, and yes, they have social consciences, they believe that society has a duty to help care for those who cannot care for themselves. Is that not what America says in its constitutional preamble? “We the people…promote the general welfare…?” Do conservatives want to ensure the elimination of the middle class, transforming its persona into a 21st century version of 19th century England? In 1970, the top 1% controlled 9% of the wealth. Now the top 1% control 35% of the wealth. It is of these figures revolutions are born. Perhaps conservatives should think of social progressivism as a way of preserving the societal structure we are now fortunate enough to inhabit. Lately, the political discourse in America has degenerated to an almost religious dichotomy of thought. The willingness of right wingers to denounce all efforts to help the unfortunate, and the condemnation of social progressives for trying to do so has become the underlying theme of present political reality. And by the same unfortunate token, the progressives depicting conservatives as social brutes stoke the fires of more polarization.

John Paul Stevens, 90, about ready to retire from the Supreme Court, has recently written a review for The New York Review of Books, on David Garland’s recent book, "Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition." The role of capital punishment remains a barbaric remnant of an earlier time, when public executions satisfied the need for “community gratification and fascination with death.” It serves no useful purpose, Stevens maintains. Had he been able to change his vote in the landmark case of Furman v Georgia, he would have voted to abolish the institution entirely. I frankly do understand the arguments made by death penalty proponents: That some people do not deserve to live, that through the crimes they have committed, they have forfeited their right to life. Serial killers, criminal monsters who have violated every social moray, do not deserve to inhabit the planet; it is hard to argue otherwise. I hold no brief for Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and the like. I am glad they are gone. But it is so complicated—and expensive for the state to put someone to death. If we shorten the appellate process, we risk rushing to a dénouement that no one really wants—the potential death of an innocent. And if we delay the process with individuals on death row for twenty years until they are executed, then we diminish and even make irrelevant the penalty. The argument against capital punishment, therefore, is not the merits of keeping of death-deserving criminals alive; it is, however, the evil that our society perpetuates as a civilized undertaking (no pun intended). It has to do with the ability of our society to administer the punishment fairly. In that respect, we have failed miserably, because it is doled out without rhyme or reason, often for matters of race, or for the convenience of politicians being able to show to voters how tough they are on crime. Blacks who murder whites are 11 times more likely to receive the death penalty than whites who murder whites or blacks. Since 1972, 1,300 prisoners have been released from death row because of newly discovered evidence. We as a nation now inhabit the orb of Saudi Arabia, China, and Iran, to name a few other countries, which still put people to death. Criminality is not reduced by capital punishment. And the likelihood of an innocent man being killed is always present. Death is ever so final.  It is time for us to move beyond this primitive enterprise, and to have some leaders who are politically brave enough to say so.

I am thankful to live in a country where even those who disagree with us are able to express their opinion, no matter how inane, stupid, or ignorant. I am thankful for the Constitution of the United States that has, since the founding, provided a framework for such expression. I am thankful for the knowledge that in order for us to continue such a tradition, we must be constantly vigilant. I am thankful for living in a country that reveres such a sacred document. I am thankful for an understanding of the faults of those in power and for a free press that lies as an underpinning of expression and a watchdog against those who would corrupt the system. I am thankful for our system of laws, courts and trial by jury and for those who labor to make it work. I am thankful for understanding that “power corrupts and that absolute power corrupts absolutely.” I am thankful that religious fundamentalists, despite their efforts to dismantle the wall of separation of church and state, have not been able to impose theocracy upon us. I am thankful to not be living in a place like Iran where governance so antipathetic to human dignity dwells in its most grotesque and loathsome form. I am thankful that religious fundamentalism is marginalized in our society, despite those who would try to inform our daily lives by casting us as flawed human beings in need of some sort of salvation—and a priestly class that arrogates power to itself by promising to “perfect” us. I am thankful for understanding that we must strive to do good on our own volition, that each of us can make the world a better place and that kindness and charitable acts are the sincerest form of human effort if they are done for their own sake, with no promise of reward beyond the act itself.  And finally, I am thankful that I am not obliged to be thankful for anything at all, if I do not wish.

A work of fiction - By David Wieder I. Mack Bronstein woke up, as he did every day, pissed off. He hated his life and everyone who, in his twisted perception, slighted him. Mack had a grudge list, but most of all, he wanted his wife dead. Mack lived in a house that looked like someone had forgotten about it in the 1960s. Several large TVs populated the den and living room; a dated shag rug lay on the floor. His refrigerator reflected his tastes, smelling like an overripe salami. Mack liked to dine at a nearby Jewish Deli, where the food was copious, the prices were cheap, populated by an elderly crowd of ravenous local condominium dwellers. The deli was reminiscent of a Edward Hopper painting except there were many people sitting at the counter, stuffing their faces with kosher pickles, freshly baked rolls and huge cheesecakes. The countertop was trimmed in chrome around the worn, pink, cracking Formica. The changing demographics, causing the deli later to close, much to Mack’s chagrin, forced Mack to go to other less desirable restaurants, like a nearby buffet where he could chomp on frozen all-you- can eat shrimp. He loved Chinese buffets where he could stuff himself with as much food as possible, paying a minimum price and returning for unlimited seconds and thirds. If one would want to join Mack for dinner, it would have to be at a place of his choice, all others being “a rip off.” “They are all a rip-off” he would say if someone were to suggest another place. Cheesecake factory was a big favorite. “good value.” The Mack restaurant rating was based upon the size of the portions, rather than the quality of the food. Most of all, back in 1970s, he loved to dine for free at his cousin Daniel’s father’s hotel, where he would eat enormous portions filling his 250-pound frame. Free food was great, and no limitation was imposed on seconds and even thirds and best of all, no bill. The hotel, filled with religious Jews, its clean environment and kitchen dispelled the parochialism of its clientele, many of whom were Holocaust survivors or down from the Bronx to consume as much food as at a Nathan’s Coney Island hot dog eating contest. To this Daniel’s parents had catered generously, and had made a not inconsiderable amount of money. Daniel was the first cousin of Mack’s wife, Dottie, a somewhat humorless, yet decent woman, who never could find her place, until she and Mack married, and probably not afterwards, either. Dottie and Mack had been introduced by Daniel’s sister, Carole, and the engagement party was held at Daniel’s waterfront home. Carole, a scheming, spoiled woman, generally liked to get what she could out of people, and took advantage of Daniel, trying to sabotage his marriage, and sowing chaos and misinformation, to her and Daniel’s parents, generating familial discord in every manner she could. Daniel was an insecure, poor student, immature, and unmotivated. He sought approval from his Father but it never came. Daniel had some sort of attention deficit disorder and was inconsistent in his schoolwork, and getting through his classes by the skin of his teeth. He needed to be loved but it never really came. When he met his wife, Caroline, and began to work, he finally found his place, but never really overcame the scars of his neglected childhood. Mack had accepted him though, and what came out of that relationship’s destruction conferred enormous pain and another feeling of rejection that ate at Daniel without abate. The mystery of how he could be so casually cast aside by someone he cared for added acid to the witch’s brew of emotional instability that Daniel suffered from all his life. “You know, Dottie, the reason Mark and Jon moved away to distant cities, and never call, is because I was strict and demanding. They knew not to be disrespectful to me, or I would have booted them out the door or slapped their face.” “That’s not the reason, Mack. Or only part of the reason. You never listened to them, always hollering and telling them how they should do things, and not even acknowledging they had their own opinions; all you did was complain to them about anything and anyone who might be their friends, or who did not have money, or did not agree with your demented politics. You expected all your friends to suck upto you.” “Bullshit.” “It is not, and I’m sick and tired of your angry, bullying personality. You fight with everyone, the neighbors, your children, and my cousin Daniel.” “Daniel is a jerk off Democrat who asked me to give him Jon’s number to work on the Kenyan candidate, Obama. “ “So, couldn’t Jon make up his own mind? He needed you to tell him what to do? “He needed my guidance.” “Hardly, Mack. He needed your guidance so much, he couldn’t wait to leave the house. And he certainly did not want to follow you into your dumpster fire law career.” “Fuck off Dottie, you frigid bitch. I wish I were free of you. The only time you pay attention to me is when you put me down. I’m going out.” “Where?” “None of your fucking business.” Mack drove over to his office, three rooms and a receptionist area. Belle, the receptionist was sitting at her desk, chewing Nicorette. “Hi Belle,” Mack said, “glad you’re quitting smoking.” “Thanks a lot. Charlie said he would fire me if I didn’t, because you told him. I need a cigarette now and then, and I always went outside, so why did you insist?” “Because I can’t stand the smell of tobacco and I don’t want my lungs affected. Anyone who smokes is either stupid, suicidal or doesn’t care about others inhaling poison.” “Thanks again Mack.” Belle hated Mack. Charlie was sitting with his feet up on the desk. “Hey, Mack, I thought you were going to bring in some business. Plus, you are late on the rent.” “I know I know, been having a rough time at home.” “Why?” “Well, the boys are no longer around, and I have to be with Dottie too much, she’s always ragging on me, and won’t fuck me, not that I want to.” Charlie was not interested. “Listen Mack, you need to pay rent, you are three months behind, and you haven’t lived up to our deal. You promised some cases, you promised to do some TV spots, you said you had sources for business, and you can’t even pay the reduced rent. “Charlie stop busting my balls, I’ll come through.” Mack stormed out the door. Charlie thought to himself, what an asshole. Mack went to his office and decided that he wanted out of his marriage, his law firm and financial demands he could not meet. But he had a plan. He was fed up with his left-wing associates and his up-tight wife. He knew they all despised him. Robert, the other lawyer in the office, had plenty of business. Cheerful, young, aggressive, and hardworking, always had people coming in and out. “Rob,” wanna get some lunch?” “Mack, I am so busy, not today,” Rob knew lunch would be another tirade about how the world was out to get Mack, the Democrats were ruining the country, and the black president was not born in the US. The time before when Rob did dine with Mack, Mack had a tirade. “Obama is ruining the country, and the Democrats are so soft on crime. We need a law and order administration. Anyone who votes Obama is stupid.” Mack announced. Most of his colleagues ignored his right-wing tirades. “They’re trying to outlaw capital punishment. I say fry them all.” I don’t even speak to my wife’s cousin Daniel because he worked on the Obama campaign and asked me for my son’s phone number to tell him how to vote. He had the nerve to call me an asshole. Obama never even showed his birth certificate.” “Mack, sorry, I have work to do.” “OK Rob, see you later.” Mack was pissed that Rob dismissed him, and felt his blood rising, but held back, thinking Rob might need him in a case later on. In fact, there was no such possibility. Rob was convinced that Mack was a washed-up loser. Rob thought Mack should get a drink, but Mack neither drank nor smoked, confining his beverage to caffeine-free diet Coke. “Welfare manipulators” he would say, causing him to rationalize his racist politics. “Liberals were satanic manifestations of Leon Trotsky. Obama was not born in America, a Kenyan, not fit to be president; moreover, a black person who was not born in the United States.” Mack was Jewish, but acted like someone from the Alabama backwoods. Mack voiced his half- baked opinions as though they were gospel. If anyone disagreed with his rantings, they deserved no credibility. Mack was an iconoclast without portfolio. An Archie Bunker sans humor. Mack’s sense of humor died when he married Dottie, who never laughed at his jokes and evinced a sullen apathy herself. Dottie had lost any semblance of her self-esteem, suffering psychological abuse for 40 or so years. She had taught school many years, achieved a substantial pension, and inherited money from her parents’ estate, as well as from a niggardly uncle who left her a part of his rather large fortune, because Uncle Vincent resided at poverty level, sporting a 50-year-old frazzled leather belt that seemed like it would separate from its buckle at any moment and a worn polyester shirt looking as though it would spontaneously combust. Uncle Vincent, a confirmed bachelor and multi-millionaire, after selling his supermarket to a chain, was a constant presence at Mack and Dottie’s house. He enjoyed the free food, and the large televisions he found too extravagant to buy for himself. Uncle Vincent was gentle soul, though, as was Dottie’s father, Mitchell, certainly not a spendthrift either, a retired dentist who continually catered to his wife, Eleanor, Daniel’s aunt, until the day he died. Eleanor, Helen’s sister, lost her noodles, and mostly sat around Mack’s house in semi-catatonia. She no longer remembered anyone, even her children. “Dottie, your cousin Daniel called me an asshole because I would not give him Jon’s number because he told me he was working on that Kenyan presidential candidate’s campaign and wanted Jonathan to help him. I’m never going to speak to him again,” exaggerating the context of the perceived insult to justify his sangfroid to his wife and sons. “I told him, I thought you were a Republican. Can you imagine, he was a Democrat. I thought he supported Nixon, like me. I think he did at that time. What a dumb move, supporting a schvartza. They’re taking over our country.” “Mack,” Dottie responded, “enough.” “Dottie, shut up. You’re someone who I would have left a long time ago, but we had children. Your opinion is worthless. I’m sick and tired of listening to you, you are just plain stupid. Daniel is a prick, but I guess it runs in your family.” Dottie had heard that all before. She, too, was tired of Mack’s abuse, but she did not want to extend the conversation. She knew she was locked into an unsalvable marriage and could not even bear to sleep in the same room. But she was fearful enough to remain in place. She had no friends either, no place to go. “Listen, Dottie, we have to go to your brother’s son’s wedding in Washington, and I won’t speak Daniel, he’s a left wing socialist.” Dottie did not respond, preferring to keep the peace, and too tired of arguing with a wall. “Don’t answer any calls he may make to you, I won’t forgive you either, if you speak or meet with him. As far as I am concerned, he is dead to me.” “Why do you have to be such a jerk? He’s my cousin. “I am sick of you and your family; I should have divorced you a long time ago.” “My family are good people, and you keep insulting them. Because of them we have money, certainly not through any hard work you did. And everything we inherited came from my family, certainly not yours. All we got from them was a psychodrama, with you playing the lead.” Mack got up, approached her, and smacked her in the face. Dottie, who had always acceded to Mack’s sociopathy, began to weep, hung her head and left the room, Why am I here?” she thought. She wanted him dead, but never would act on it. At his cousin’s wedding in DC, Daniel approached Mack to apologize for calling Mack an asshole, a title which he richly deserved, but that Daniel should not have called him. “Mack,” Daniel said warmly, attempting to give him a hug. Mack repulsed Daniel, who, to Mack, was a serial killer. “No, stay away from me.” “Why?” asked Daniel. Mack did respond, glaring at Daniel with contempt. “I don’t want to have anything to do with you!” he shouted, his facing growing red. Daniel walked away, realizing, but not completely understanding, why Mack had such strong antipathy toward him. He re-approached Mack. Mack started yelling, “get away from me.” “Why are you so angry?” “Get away from me,” Mack shouted. By this time the other guests noticed the disturbance and Mack’s son, came over to separate Daniel and Mack. After that, they had no further communication, Daniel not wishing to disturb the wedding any further, but deeply shaken by the rebuff, the lack of forgiveness. After, Daniel had phoned Dottie, curious as to what was really his offense, asked her to lunch, she accepted, then cancelled. The issue hardly could not have been only one aberrant conversation. It did not make sense. Excepting if Mack had exaggerated the exchange between him and Daniel. Dottie and Daniel had spent much of their childhood together, visiting Niagara Falls with her parents, riding the “Maid of the Mist” under the thundering water, and shared the same fate when Dottie’s father stopped them from swimming with her older brothers and cousins at Buttermilk falls outside of Ithaca New York, where Dottie’s uncle was a professor at Cornell. Daniel had accompanied his aunt and uncle on a trip as a seven-year-old. Daniel loved his aunt and uncle, who had been so kind to him. Daniel felt awful when his uncle Mel had died, and his aunt faded from dementia. Dottie sort of knew this but sublimated her feelings to pacify Mack. That trip to Niagara Falls, burned into Daniel’s memory endeared Dottie to him. She was emotionally detached, almost autistically indifferent to most other people. Dottie had had a hard time connecting with boys during her teenage years. She had crushes on boys, which went mostly unrequited. Dottie, like almost everyone else in the family, worked at Daniel’s father’s hotel for many summers and basically grew up with Daniel and his sister, Carole. Their childhoods were intertwined through the deep friendship of Daniel’s and Dottie’s parents. Hellen’s sister, Dottie’s mother, Eleanor had driven Hellen to the hospital that summer day in 1942 when Daniel was born. Mack had again received repeated calls, emails containing apologies from Daniel after the Obama and wedding incidents, never responding. Mack angrily never wanted to reconcile with Daniel nor his estranged brother whom Mack viewed upon with a not an inconsiderable mixture of envy and contempt. Forgiveness was not in Mack’s vocabulary; he viewed the world as a conspiracy directed at him. Mack’s brother had moved on, but Daniel was consumed by the unexplained rejection. Mack’s younger brother had made a successful career idermatology, finally married, but was able to put Mack out of his mind. Daniel was not able to do that. Mack, some years before, had drawn the will for Daniel’s mother, Hellen, much before his perceived insult from Daniel, making himself the alternate personal representative. Upon Hellen’s death a trust was set up for Daniel’s alcoholic sister, Carole. Daniel remained persona non grata. Daniel had come to accept but not completely understand Mack’s hatred after trying to reconcile with him through emails and phone messages. “Please forgive me,” Daniel pleaded, even though he knew the attempts would bear no fruit. Daniel optimistically thought he would succeed but sometimes apologies do not work. Daniel, trying desperately, could not understand the opprobrium. Some people just can’t forgive. If it is true that forgiveness is more for the forgiver than Mack would continue to suffer, and Daniel felt compassion, even pity, for Mack, yet remained wounded psychologically with Mack’s refusal to even explain why he was hateful. Daniel hurt inside and could not help thinking that there was something more he could do to resolve his pain. Much before all this, Daniel had represented Mack in a lawsuit against an African American man who sued him for assault, when Mack blocked him with a briefcase outside a courtroom trying to collect a debt on behalf of his father’s used car business. The debtor was an ignoramus, who had been a professional prize fighter, who did not accept Mack’s boisterous aggression, and punched Mack in the face, shattering his sunglasses and blackening his eye. Mack went to Daniel to represent him in a lawsuit against the man, George, who had socked him in the eye in the courthouse hallway, all this having been witnessed by a police officer who promptly arrested George. George had pled guilty on the assault charge, and Mack had Daniel sue George for civil assault and battery. The trial judge directed a verdict in favor of Mack, which was later reversed on appeal. Daniel and Mack spoke frequently on the telephone, exchanging family news and pleasantries. They were friends in those years. Daniel also achieved a substantial settlement for Mack in a personal injury case. Mack and Daniel went to Epcot together and celebrated. Mack found some comfort there with a prostitute. Mack’s son, Jonathan was to be married. And the wedding plan and invitations were to go out. Jonathan called Daniel, to explain why he could not invite him to his wedding. “You know, Daniel, my father told me that if I invited you to my wedding, my dad would not come. He told me, “It was him or me.” Jonathan, who also must have suffered from abuse, complied with his father’s ultimatum. Daniel, non plussed said, “sure Jonathan, I understand.” But Daniel was surprised by Jon’s deference to his father who had given him an inappropriate ultimatum. Daniel thought that Jon should have stood up to the bullying. On the other hand, Jon’s gentle nature wished not to be excommunicated too. “He’s stubborn,” Jon said, and Daniel felt even more compassion for the difficult place his father had found for him. Sometime later, Daniel ran into Mack in a noisy restaurant. The restaurant was a kind of an upscale Outback Steakhouse, where full dinners came at an inexpensive price, drawing a mostly elderly crowd in an undistinguished ambiance, the menus adorned with color photographs of steaks, chops and fries. The tables bore no cloths. There was a hardwood laminated floor, with a transparent look of cleanliness. Waitstaff scurried about, feigning familiarity by introducing themselves by name. “How are WE doing today?” Mack was seated at a table with about six others, including Dottie, who sat basically transfixed, almost in catatonia. “Mack, do you have a minute?” Daniel wanted to again bury the hatchet, to clear the fetid air. Daniel, pained by the rejection, wanted to reconcile. Daniel had felt that he had done a lot for Mack, and had more than earned his forgiveness, despite Mack’s impulse to cut him out because he did not agree with him politically, or even worse, made a statement with which Mack did not agree and took hyperbolic defensiveness. “No.” Mack replied. “I just wanted to have a word in private...” “No,” Mack interrupted. Daniel, nonplussed, said “why not?” No response from Mack, speaking as though Daniel was not there. Dottie sat closed mouth and incredulous. Daniel could not believe the immediate rejection. “What kind of man tells his son, it’s him or me for your wedding?” Daniel announced to the group. Mack jumped out of his chair and threatened to punch Daniel in the face. “I’m bigger than you, if you stay here, I will flatten you,” clearly embarrassed by the confrontation that exposed Mack’s nakedly unforgiving, mean-spirited character, Daniel retreated, astonished by the behavior of a bully, who had called the manager to eject Daniel from the restaurant. On his way out the door after dinner, Daniel loudly accused Mack of being Hitler. But Daniel remained pathologically obsessed about what he had really done to create such hatred toward himself. He ruminated about it, but no one from Mack’s family wanted to reveal to him what Mack had thought he had done wrong. The mystery germinated into an obsession and Daniel’s children told him to “forget about it.” They could provide no clarity either. Daniel still agonized and continued to do so. His pain was evident to all who knew him. Rejection without explanation. Mack had achieved his goal, his schadenfreude. II. Mack fantasized about he could get rid of Dottie, but he did not know how. He thought of hiring someone to kill her, or creating an auto accident, running her down in the driveway or the street, or feeding her poison. Then he could find some younger woman who would have sex with him, but he could not get himself to do it. Maybe a staged home invasion with both of them as victims. He had an old client, Cliff, a convicted murderer, with whom he thought he could make a deal. He decided to meet Cliff in a seedy bar near downtown. “Cliff, I can pay you $20,000 to off my wife. “I dunno Mack, you did me a good turn when you represented me in my murder case, but I paid you plenty. I guess I owe you. You got me a really reduced sentence. They could have fried me. “I don’t know either, Cliff, but I have the cash to pay you if you decide. But don’t do anything yet, I’m just thinking about it.” “OK, Mack.” The house was dark when Dottie and Mack arrived home. Mack looked at his bed, his wife and his life and felt a gloomy, existential pain. He found her repulsive. He wanted a way out, a way to be respected—a trophy wife. It was not to be, he thought, not enough money. He craved adulation, which never seemed to come his way. “Dottie, my back is killing me, could you bring me some Advil?” “Sure,” said Dottie. “Why don’t you try to get some sleep?” “I can’t. I hate your fucking cousin. He keeps trying to contact me. I’ll never forgive him. Dottie took a step back, “Maybe you should take some sleep medication?” “Nah, I’ll just lay here. I hate that bastard. The only reason he has money is because his father left it to him.” “That’s not true, he is a lawyer just like you, except he goes to work.” “Shut up Dottie, you are just an idiot. You’re not worth the trouble.” Dottie, tired of Mack’s complaints, left the room to watch television. Since she had retired from schoolwork, she was obliged to spend too much time with Mack. She knew he could explode at any minute. Sitting down on the lounge chair, Mack called out to her. “Dottie, get me some sleeping pills.” Dottie got up and brought Mack some Ambien. She hoped he would take the whole bottle. She returned to the lounge chair. Dottie had compromised her life, she thought. She yearned to have some independence, some time to herself. Mack was in the way. He always complained to her about her lack of sexual desire. In reality, she found him repugnant, his big fat body, almost whale-like pressing her down, squeezing the air from her, making her unable to breathe. There was no tenderness, no intimacy, no love. But Dottie did not feed on those qualities. There was something missing anyway. It could not be found. Whether it ever existed is hard to visualize, given her unloving personality and his bombastic, misanthropic bravado. Their marriage was a psychodramatic, pathological, tragic undertaking. Outside the house, dark skies warned of an incipient thunderstorm. Claps of thunder and lightning pierced the living room. Dottie awoke in a start and went to see if Mack was still sleeping. He was. His loud snoring outdoing the thunder. Dottie thought to herself, how could I be married to this man, this overwhelming bully who has divorced himself from my family? The next morning, the skies cleared, a crisp cold front passing through. The sun shone. Awakening, Dottie still reflected upon her wretched state, married to a boor, isolated from her children, whom Mack had condemned for moving far away, not calling much, asking to speak to. her, not him, when he picked up the telephone. Dottie knew that her sons did not respect their father and it was a cause of continuing worry. But Dottie did not like to face reality; it was easier to just ignore the bad or set upon unchartered waters. Her brow was wrinkled, and her jet-black hair dye job covered her completely white hair. She looked like some surreal feature of a Dali painting. Mack said to her, “What’s for breakfast?” “I don’t know,” Dottie answered. “What do you mean, you don’t know? Gimme some coffee and donuts, I brought them fresh from Dunkin Donuts. I like them hot.” “Get them yourself.” “You’re just like your fucking cousin. I should have divorced you years ago.” Dottie started to weep. Mack did not care, he continued, “You are just a dried-up old bitch. I knew I should never have married you. You were ugly then and you’re worse looking now. And I do not give a shit about your family and that Daniel who is worse than you, but not by much.” And don’t go reconciling or having lunch with him, or you’ll regret it. I have a friend who does a lot of divorce work, believe me, you won’t benefit. Dottie recoiled from the threat. How could this man, to whom I have given two wonderful sons and so many years, be such a brute? I worked much harder than he did over the years, teaching school and raising our two sons, while he “practiced” law, earning next to nothing. The weather was changing, that night, Mack scarfed down some additional salami and eggs, washed down with a Diet Coke. There had been many robberies and burglaries in the neighborhood, a small 1970s Levittown- type development in which their house was bordered by a huge concrete wall in the backyard behind which was a freeway. Dottie felt a fear creeping up her back and the hair on the back of her neck stood up. There was someone knocking on the front door. Dottie approached the front door and opened it. Two men pushed her aside and rushed in. “Who are you?” Cliff stepped in, slammed the door, and slapped Dottie in the face. “Shut the fuck up,” he said, and Cliff had a partner with him. “Shut up, bitch.” Dottie screamed, and Cliff slapped her so hard, she fell to the floor. Cliff and his partner wore black masks. Mack, sound asleep, snoring like a whale, attached to his CPAP machine, heard nothing. Another man, black hooded mask and turtleneck sweater, screamed at her, “Bitch, stay down on the floor.” Another man, similarly attired, who had followed him in through the door, walked by her as she lay terrorized on the floor. Mack awakened in a fright. Cliff’s partner grabbed Dottie, pulled down her slacks and panties, forced her to the floor and penetrated her while she screamed in pain. Then they exposed her breasts and raped her again. When they finished, they cut across her face with a knife, and cut her breasts. Dottie screeched in agony, knowing they would kill her. Mack watched dispassionately. Another person who would no longer annoy him. Cliff said, “give me the combination to the safe, Mack or I’ll kill you, too.” Mack became frightened, gave the combination to Cliff, who opened the safe and found $90,000 inside. “Cliff, we didn’t make a deal, why are you here?” “I need the dough, Mack, and I’ll kill you and your wife for it.” “Cliff, are you crazy? Or high?” Mack said. “Don’t push it Mack, I am gonna do you a big favor.” Mack protested, “No, No, No!!!” Cliff went over to Dottie, pointed a gun at her mid chest and pulled the trigger three times, killing Dottie. Blood exited her mouth and spilled onto the white ceramic tile floor. Mack winced in horror, but strangely was not unpleased. The two then, while Mack watched, emptied the rest of the clip into Dottie’s corpse. Then they walked over to Mack, with the butt of Cliff’s gun, smashed Mack in the mouth, knocking out his front teeth and leaving him with a bloody mouth. They then duct taped him to the bed, hand and foot, cleaned up after themselves, and took their latex gloves, and the gun with them, but replacing the kitchen knife in its holder in the kitchen after thoroughly cleaning it. III. Mack struggled to untie his hands and after 20 minutes, succeeded. He ripped the duct tape from his bloodied mouth and dialed 911 as soon as he could. “My wife’s been killed,” he screamed into the phone. “Please hold,” the robot said. Thirty seconds passed. “Can I help you?” My wife’s been killed in a home invasion,” Mack said almost dispassionately. “What’s your address?” After that, he called his two sons to tell them what had happened but did not talk about Dottie’s death yet. “Geez, Dad, who did you antagonize?” Jon inquired. “Goddamit, Jon, how dare you ask me that?” “Because it seems like you have a lot of people you dislike or don’t talk to” “Listen, Jon, “I have some bad news.” Your mother was killed by the two men who broke in.” “WHAT?” “Your mother is dead.” “You told me a long story about yourself and mentioned nothing about Mom? You just matter- of-factly say she is dead?” “Listen, don’t give me shit, I’ve been through a lot of traumas, and the police will probably not do a thing. And if you were a good son, you would live here in Miami, near us. I never hear from you.” “Dad, what the fuck? You don’t hear from us, because you never expressed any interest in our lives, and you never have anything nice to say. All you do is tell us how to live our lives. And you bring this up in the same phone conversation with the news that Mom is killed? How sick is that?” “All you ever did was complain about Mom and my wife, and Mark. You’re probably glad she is gone.” “Mark and I will be down for Mom’s funeral, but not to see you. You treated her like shit, which she wasn’t, she came from a good family, better than yours. All you ever wanted to do was wallow in your own misery and blame others for it. You are jealous of other family members who did better than you. I hate you.” Mack thought, he’s an ungrateful little spineless shit, not caring whether he came or not with his sniveling little family that sent out picture New Year’s cards to everyone, who probably did not give flying shit about him anyway. Mack then plunged into gleeful thought about having a new girlfriend, preferably quite young. Maybe someone in their 20s and now that hag Dottie was gone, he would be free of all encumbrances. Except he thought that a younger woman would cost him money. “If I were there, I would slap you in the face.” Jon hung up the phone, preferring to say nothing to someone who meant nothing to him. Mack dozed off after they removed the body. Jon sank into despair; he loved his mom, who stood in the way of their father’s bullying. Now that she was gone, he felt like an orphan. His father was a prick and he knew it. Maybe he had something to do with his mother’s death. Maybe he plotted the entire thing. Why didn’t he invite his mother to come with him and Judy, his wife? Judy liked her mother-in-law but not that much. But since she always was quiet and minded her own business, she was tolerable. Judy hated Mack and saw him for what he was: a selfish, narcissistic, bullying asshole. She could not comprehend how quiet and sensitive Jon was, and the psychodramatic relationship with his father. Jon called Mark. “I have some bad news.” “No, about Mom. Sit down.” “What?” “Mom was killed in a home invasion. She opened the front door, and two men broke in, raped and killed her and tied Dad up to his bed, but Dad untied himself and called the police. Mom’s body was mutilated, and she was shot a bunch of times, maybe 8-10. “I wonder why they didn’t kill him too?” Mark said. “Don’t know. We have to go down for Mom’s funeral. Will you pick me up in your plane, and we’ll go together. Too bad Dad will be there. I’m sorry it wasn’t him instead.” “Sure, Jon, I am devastated.” Mark loved his mother even more than Jon and a sinking feeling came to him. IV. Mack woke up the next day to a ringing phone. “Mr. Bronstein, this is Detective Ron LaFarge of the Miami-Dade Police Department. We would like to come by today to ask you a few questions.” “What for?” “We need to know some more details about the circumstances leading to the murder of your wife and your home invasion,” said LaFarge, his voice betraying skepticism when he said, “home invasion.” “What time,” said Mack, “I have some clients to meet.” “We need you to make yourself available.” LaFarge had already done some questioning of neighbors, learning that most of his neighbors had had tiffs with Mack, and characterized him as a very angry man. Some of his neighbors avoided him entirely and had said that they had heard enraged confrontations between him and Dottie. Everyone sort of agreed that Mack evinced a stubbornness and denial of the perceptions of his evident personality flaws gained by Mack’s neighbors. Mack was always angry or complaining about someone or something in a tone that was filled with rage. They thought that he had shouted often at Dottie. Mack had no ability to understand the feelings of others. A sociopathic narcissist. “How about three this afternoon?” “Ok, said Mack, “I’ll shift my meeting around.” Actually, Mack had no meeting to go to at all. “See you at three.” A knock on the door. Mack answered. It was 3pm. Detective LaFarge and his partner, a young woman, Shirley Grant, were at the door. “May we come in?” “Sure, but crime scene forensics has already gone over this place with a fine-toothed comb.” “That’s why we want to talk to you.” Mack grew anxious. “Ok, have a seat. Do you want anything? Coffee, soda, a bagel, something stronger?” “No thanks, Mr. Bronstein, we are good. We want to ask you how all this happened.” “I already explained everything to the uniformed guys.” “Well,” LaFarge continued, “we have seen some inconsistencies in your story and what the lab reported.” “What do you mean?” “There was no sign of forced entry and the gun, which we found on a street nearby, had your fingerprints and DNA match the bullets found in your wife’s body. We ran a check on the gun, and it was sold locally. There is no record of it belonging to anyone else, so we have to assume it was yours. We are now checking gun shops and gun shows and we think you purchased that gun. Also, none of your neighbors saw anything or anyone suspicious going on at your house that night. The knife wounds on your wife match one of your kitchen knives. You untied yourself from the bed and the duct tape came from your garage cabinet. We have no evidence that there was anyone here that night except you and Dottie.” Mack exploded, “are you accusing me of killing my wife?” “Yes, we are. You are under arrest.” Put your hands out so we can handcuff you.” “You must be kidding!” Mack screamed. “Put your hands out!” “NO. I did not do this, we were invaded!” LaFarge drew his gun. Mack then extended his hands, was handcuffed, and led out of his house, with the cops locking the front door. “At least let me turn off the water heater and the air conditioning.” Mack was put in the police car, given his Miranda warnings, and taken to the County Jail. Meanwhile, Mark and Jonathan had arrived in Miami, and went straight to the house. Not finding their father there, called the police to be informed that their father had been arrested for homicide, and was in jail. Mark said, “Do you think Dad could have killed Mom?” “Dunno, he could have,” said Jon. “He was so mean to her, shouting and bullying her. She always wanted to avoid a fight.” “And he was always looking for one. Let’s make funeral arrangements and then go down to see Dad at the jail.” Mark knew his father for what he was, “Let’s just do the funeral arrangements and not go. I really can do without his denials,” evincing his conviction that his father killed his mother. Jon was a thoughtful, sensitive soul, and did not want his thoughts of doubt interfere with what seemed to be overwhelming evidence. Jon reflected a moment, “ I think we have to go down to see him and at least hear him out.” “Well, OK, but I really have no desire to see him. I think he did it,” Mark said. The funeral director sat in his office, behind a muted plain wood desk and wore a dark blue suit with a black tie, his partly bald pate had his hair slicked with some sort of pomade across his head, making him look somewhat like he had been anointed with Elmer’s glue. The room had some pictures of green landscapes, mountains and greenery in the distance, and an azure blue unclouded sky. The office seemed a not unsubtle allusion to a peaceful transition to the afterlife. The desk had a mini-Torah scroll on it, and a gold pen set with a leather blotter. “Gentlemen, I am so sorry for your loss,” he greeted them. “Thank you,” Jon uttered, still not fully believing his mother’s corpse was in a fridge in a nearby room. “Let me show you the selection of caskets.” He led them into another room and there were many polished, finished caskets, but Jon and Mark decided on a plain pine box, as the rabbi had suggested, when they had met with him a bit earlier. A cemetery plot had been purchased at a place in West Miami and the funeral was to take place in a day or so. Jon paid the funeral director, and the two bereft sons headed south to the county jail, where their father was awaiting arraignment. “What took you so long?” Mack said upon greeting his two sons. Mack did not seem distraught, there was a certain relief in his face, almost as though nothing had happened. “We had to make funeral arrangements. Dad, what the fuck happened?” Mark said. “Don’t use that language with me, you are not too old to get a smack. I don’t like your tone of voice.” Mack was behind a glass wall and had to use a telephone to speak, so Jon feared not of fatherly violence, of which he had been a subject of for many years. “Mom’s dead and that is your response?” Jon interjected. “Yeah, I know, I know.” Don’t you care?” “The police said they think you killed her.” Mack sat silent, not surprised by the statements of his two ungrateful sons, upon whom he had wasted his time. “I suppose you agree with them.” “We don’t know, “said Jon. “I ought to smack you in the mouth.” “Go ahead, Dad, it won’t be the first time.” “Get out of here, you ungrateful little shits, “ Mack rose in his seat, slammed the telephone behind the glass window, and left the prisoner’s area with the guard following behind.” The next day Jon and Mark went to see Detective LaFarge. “We think your father killed your mother,” LaFarge said, outlining the evidence. “I guess he needs a lawyer,” said Mark. Walking out into the Miami heat and humidity, Jon said, “should we go back to the house?” “Yeh,” Mark responded. “Remember when we were young, how fearful we were of Dad? I was scared shitless most of the time. I always thought he was going to hit me. He used to talk about how grandpa used to smack him around. I guess he took a page from grandpa’s playbook.” “You think?” said Mark. “He used to hit me all the time. It was like living with an animal trainer. “I couldn’t wait to get out of there. Mom was so fearful of him also, I don’t know how she put up with him.” “And now she’s dead, probably because of him, or some enemy he made. She was not courageous enough to do the right thing for herself. Abused people live in fear and I blame myself for not pushing her to leave,” said Jon. “I can’t really wrap my head around it.” “Why did she stay with him?” “Why do you think? Because of us. Or maybe she was happier not rocking the boat, or out of fear.” Jon was not sure, and his insides were roiling. He called his therapist, who clearly observed Jon’s ambivalence towards his now dead mother. Jon felt like his insides were turning out, exacerbating his already abused, depressed psyche. “I’m pooped, let’s go get some lunch.” They went to a nearby IHOP. The IHOP was a run-down dive. People sat around waiting for one waitress who never seemed to appear. The windows were clouded with a grey film of exterior dirt, and the tables had Formica rimmed with crenelated steel. It was crowded but so noisy that one could not hear conversation at the next booth. The waitress finally appeared, wearing a striped dress and white apron, slightly stained by coffee. “Hi boys, what will we have today?” “Coffee, eggs, over light and bacon,” Mark responded. “What are you having?” Jon grimaced. “Wha,” she said. “Well, you said we,” Mark said. She frowned. Jon Grimaced at Mark’s sarcasm, which completely went over the waitress’ head. “Me too,” said Jon. The waitress, doughty and about 60 years of age, said, “OK, back in a jif.” “She’s going to spit in your egg,” Jon murmured. She slowly waddled off, and clearly the years carrying food weighed heavily upon her as she weaved through the tables, none of which looked very clean. Her wrinkled, ruddy face revealed thinly veiled despair. A desperate life, trapped in a job she of which she had had enough. All around, overweight customers consumed large breakfasts of eggs, pancakes, with faux maple syrup, muffins and food not worth the calories. It was a scene of middle America, flyover country right in North Miami Beach, thought Jon. It was one of Mack’s favorite restaurants. Mark was indifferent. But he did remember going often with his dad and mom, and his father usually having a dispute with someone at the next table or arguing about the service or the check. “Mark, how scared were you of Dad?” “Not that much, but I think you were. He did slap me around, though.” “I was very fearful.” Jon said. “ I never knew how he was going to react. His fights with my teachers. His dislikes of girls I was dating, his always glaring disapprovals of anything I did. I never really knew how to handle him; he was always angry. He always seemed to have some comment of disapproval. I don’t know why, but I was such a wimp where he was concerned. There were so many times I wanted to step in when he was abusing or arguing with Mom. I guess I took after her and didn’t want the confrontation. I should have been more assertive.” Mark looked at Jon, “Assertive? I think you should have told him fuck off. You know, you should not have given into him so easily on things that were important to you. Like not inviting people to your wedding who you cared about because he gave you an ultimatum. What was with that ‘him or me’ bullshit? It was so manipulative. Dad always was always pissed off one way or another. That’s why your wife doesn’t talk to him. And now you are mad at yourself, because you thought you abandoned Mom, but she could have made choices on her own, you know. The two of them were suited for one another, even though they did not realize it. “Mark, you’re so cold and calculating.” “Just realistic, and I feel for you, brother.” “I coped differently,” continued Mark, “I don’t wish him to die, but I can’t say I would shed any tears at his funeral. He really is a son of a bitch. I remember grandpa was a mean old fucker too, who used to slap him around. Never saw him crack a smile. And what about uncle Bart, the dermatologist? Dad hasn’t spoken to him for 40 years because of some twisted competition about Dad’s resentment that Bart did not give enough money to help grandpa and grandma. I spoke to Bart, and he spun a different story. Dad was just jealous that Bart was more financially successful than he was. Bart never got approval and was happy not to have Dad in his life. It was all about money. The sooner I got out of that house the better it was for me. I could not have lived far enough away. And what about Mom? He treated her like shit. I can’t believe she stayed with him.” “She made her choice. Even detesting him she stayed, because she feared the outside world, or was indifferent to it. Her personality was stilted and narrow.” Jon listened and knew that Mark was telling the truth. “Now she’s dead and he probably had her killed, or he did it himself.” Mark said. “We have no proof of that.” “The police think so.” “I don’t know who would stand up for him. I certainly won’t, I hate him. And in a way I hate her for not standing up for herself.” “But she always put us first..” “She just let things lie, she didn’t want to confront him. He was too much of a shit. And now she’s dead probably because of him but we don’t know that for sure.” Jon shed a tear but Mark did not. “I didn’t want her to sacrifice for me, but still, she made her own bed, but I haven’t figured it out. It should have been horrible for her, but I’m not certain that it was. She had coping skills, almost robotic, that allowed her to stay in Dad’s crucible. I watched her at the dining room table, always grading papers for hours, in order to avoid talking to him. She had cousins who was always nice to her, and she never even picked up the phone to say hello to any of them. She had become even more of a recluse than she had been all her life. I think she liked being alone and he proof is, she had no friends. And Dad cut off family members from her. She had no spine, and neither did I,” Jon lamented. “Let’s go to the house and rest. I am so fucking tired,” Mark said. They drove up upper Biscayne Boulevard, a charmless exaggeration of every middle American city, its palm tree sections interrupted by the insipid gentrification of most of the commercial streets in America, yet still Floridian, with palm tree and vegetation in some few areas that challenged the constant stream of big box stores. They arrived at the house of their now dead mother and jailed father and slept 10 hours. V. Mack did not particularly enjoy his residence in the county jail, among those who resembled him more than he could discern. Now in his late 60s, could not physically threaten anyone and feared for his own self. He called the house, Jon answered. “You need to get me out of here.” “I have no control until the arraignment,” Jon responded. “Have you called any lawyers?” “Yes, and they all want 25 grand to take you on. “What do you mean, you have a good job.” “Sorry.” “Let me speak to Mark,” Mack screamed. “Hold on.” I don’t have the cash.” Mark got on the phone. “Hey.” “Jon says he does not have the money for a lawyer, I’ll pay him back. What about you?’ “You killed Mom. I wouldn’t put up a red cent for you. Get a public defender, and don’t expect any help from me.” “You ungrateful shit. Fuck you.” “Fuck you right back, “I hope they put you away for life.” Mark slammed the phone so hard it cracked. V. Arraignments in Florida are pretty brief. “Florida v. Bronstein. Case No. 18-3637. Will the Defendant please step forward.” Mack stood up, his public defender beside him. “How do you plead?” “Not guilty.” The prosecutor, a young woman, Shirley Brown, said, “Your honor, the Defendant is an ill- tempered flight risk. He has considerable funds, probably hidden, and has no reason to stay around for trial. His sons have not offered to assist in his defense and have indicated no interest in helping him. In fact, they have expressed doubts about his innocence during police interviews. They are not in town.” The public defender, Jack Harkness, barely out of law school, said, “Your honor, the defendant is a member of the Florida Bar, has never had any prior issues and we would request release on his own recognizance.” “Your honor, this is a heinous murder, and all the evidence points to the defendant,” Brown responded. “Bail is set at $3,000,000.” The judge banged the gavel. Mack, not having the resources to post bail, was returned to his cell. Neither son attended the arraignment, nor the did they contribute for an attorney. Finally, as Mack would have it, he was on his own. Three months later, he was tried in front of a mostly female jury, including four African American women on the charge of first-degree murder. Mack had fired his public defender, calling him incompetent, conducted his own defense, figuring he could indirectly testify without being cross examined. Mack was convicted. At sentencing, Mack showed no remorse, no one showed up to speak in his behalf, and he received a sentence of death by lethal injection. Mack, who had supported the right-wing governor, appealed to the governor but received no clemency. Mack’s confusion as to how he was denied life, was compounded by the fact that he had given the governor a $10,000 campaign contribution, confounding his understanding of his imagination of “how the system was rigged.” As Jon had left Miami, he saw how the city had changed. The new towers, the cars speeding and honking, the new crowds in his old neighborhood. The manicured lawns and people saying hi to him as he left. It did not seem that any were unhappy that Mack was in jail. Most were indifferent about Dottie also. He was glad he no longer lived in his neighborhood. Jon went home to Philadelphia, to his wife, Judy, suffering pangs of guilt about how he did not help his father. “Judy, did I do the right thing on turning my back on my father?” “I don’t know, Jon, he certainly mistreated you. But are you sure he is guilty?” “Well, I talked to the police, but they were so certain. They had all the evidence, the DNA, the gun, the knife, the crime lab stuff. He certainly was a very angry and violent man. He fought with everyone, and everybody disliked him, including me and even you. You know how he treated you and why you never wanted to visit. And I understood your reasons. They were valid. I just can’t wrap my head around what has happened. My mother did not deserve to die such a grisly death.” Jon called Mark, who had earned a good deal of money in tech and did not seem at all displeased with the result. “The prick got what he deserved. He never did anything for anyone and treated us and Mom like shit. How many times do I have to tell you? He was toxic, and I have no feelings except to say I am glad I will never see him again.” “Come on Mark, that’s so heartless.” “Jon, he was not a true father, he was an asshole, and the sooner you come to terms with that, the easier it will be for you. I don’t want him to die, but if they give him life without parole, I’m good. And if he dies, I’ll piss on his grave.” “Mark, you need to see a therapist.” “No, Jon, I’m fine. It’s you who needs the therapist. Dad really fucked you up.” “Ok Mark, I understand.” Jon was always more forgiving, more empathetic, more tolerant, more understanding of his father, Mark thought, and I guess it’s a good quality to have, but it turned him into something less than he could have been. TEN YEARS LATER Mack’s appeals to all the courts were exhausted, including to the Supreme Court of the United States. Mack had supported in words and voice all of the conservative justices who refused to commute his sentence. The guard approached Mack’s death row cell door and said “it’s time.” Mack complained that the last meal was not up to his expectations. He had wanted a corned beef sandwich from Katz’s delicatessen flown in from New York. Instead, he got an overcooked steak, fried eggs and ice cream. Mack, all the while, protesting his innocence was led to the death chamber, strapped to a gurney, and the needle inserted into his arm. Mark and Jon did not attend. The only witness from the family was his cousin Daniel, still seeking a last word of forgiveness from his cousin.

9.21.21 Martha’s Vineyard is lovely in mid-September. The evenings are cool, yet still comfortable outside, dining in a short-sleeved shirt. We are staying at a house that occupies a prominence of land over the ocean, and the vegetation is still green, scruffy salt-resistant growths that do not resemble their Floridian cousins. The plants do not grow high enough to obscure the view of the sea on this little tip of the western part of the island. The roads are all two lane and there are no traffic lights anywhere. Stop signs govern the passage of traffic, most of which must obey a speed limit of 30 miles per hour. Cyclists further inhibit the time in which it takes to get to Edgartown, the largest village on the Vineyard 25 miles away. Part of our trip there includes a trek down a gravely, ungraded road that tortures the suspension of any car. But it Is worth it. Sitting out on the terrace of this house makes me contemplate the different culture here of the inhabitants, mostly affluent deserters of New York and Boston. Edgartown is a Disneyfied collage of gingerbread houses, dating from the 17th and 18th centuries, carefully maintained, curated, and restored. Some of it seems to be unreal in its reality, like some Hollywood set prepared for a screwball Katherine Hepburn-Cary Grant rom-com. The stores and restaurants exude a come hither feeling for crustacean-stuffed inside some super fattening butter rolls. There are no streetlights on the roads, which host nearby trees that one slip of the wheel could kill. Still, the charm although a bit over the top, beckons one to return. With all its preserved authenticity, it seems surreal and almost disingenuous. Even so, there is no crime to speak of, because thieves would have to take the ferry to escape. Not very practical. Being here helps to not consider all the problems of America. A rogue who wishes to destroy the rule of law, his enablers in the House and Senate who support his maledictions, and state governors and legislators, who, mounting an outrageous attack upon the franchise of the poor and the uneducated by exploiting the ignorance of their base whose attention span and literacy have now vanished into a fetid sea of social media, populism and tribal feuds, a divisive porridge of animosity, exacerbated by demagoguery. Here, on the Vineyard, it all seems so remote. I am wondering how this all will end just as those who, in 1860, saw the Union, a house divided, tumbling into a sanguinary Civil war ripping the nation to shreds. Nations are born and die on a rule of law, designed to temper the passions of tribally impulsive inclinations, many of which are genetically violent. Our history is replete with demagogues preying upon the people for their own benefit, enabled by economic hard times and changes in technology. The old trope of being condemned to repeat the mistakes of the past, is verified by the numerous wars and adventures culminating in failure since the end of World War II. I am not sure that the American public any longer has the capacity to understand the world around them. When so many can believe that suppressing the vote will make the Union better, will provide more democracy, will ensure a better life and keep America white, nationalist and tribal, then we are in for a rough ride indeed. If the Confederacy had won the “war between the states,” what would have been the result? Two nations? One red and one blue? Isn’t that what we have now? Would there have been a civil rights movement in the Confederacy? Was that bloody war killing 700,000 Americans necessary? While our culture is evolving (for the better), some would argue, not that much. Think about it. A southern confederacy of states based upon slavery existed, at least longer than it should have, and a northern industrial behemoth, outstripping it, also based on divisive wealth and inequality prevailed over a southern agricultural economy, the industry of which was supplying cotton to the mills of the north and to Europe, the upper classes of which profited from slavery in the south and economic servitude in the north. Would that have changed if the Confederacy had survived? Alternative histories as much as what really happened, are philosophical/political speculations, but they are instructive. Philip Roth, in his prescient novel, “The Plot Against America” speculates what would have happened if Charles Lindbergh, a Germanophilic, racist Nazi sympathizer had been elected president in 1940, defeating FDR. Jewish boys are sent to work camps, and a rabbi who thinks that he will win personal and political advancement, mistakes patronization and manipulation by Lindberg to him, in order to convince the Jewish community to support Charles Lindbergh. An ironical rabbinic dupe, who through his gullibility misleads his kin into a maelstrom of deceit. At least he was just stupid, not a sociopathic liar. Well, that is for another time. Now it is time to leave this splendid island and return to Miami Beach the other island in my life, it being filled with diversity, excitement, and at my stage of the game hopefully a better year than last.

The election is coming, and I am frightened, yet hoping our nation will pass through this macabre dance with lies and propagandists on social media and right-wing news networks that have gone a long way to prove that telling a lie often enough makes it the truth. Never, during my lifetime, have I seen such rampant, angry, cultural division in this nation. Never have I seen such demagoguery and hatred. Ginned up not only by extremist media, but a rogue former president, and a crew of cowardly congressional consenters. These are not mere policy differences. I cannot, for the life of me, understand how the great arsenal of democracy, martialing its mammoth industrial might, fighting the odious tyranny of Nazidom, the cold war oppression of Stalinism, sacrificing the flower of its youth in two sanguinary world wars and an even bloodier civil war, could now fall victim to scoundrels whose only objectives are power based on the exploitation of the darker aspects of human nature and who now deny the validity of the most closely monitored election in the nation’s history. The big lie. We have come through a great pandemic; the miracle of medical research has saved millions of lives. We are entering a period of exponential technological change, though frightening, that promises to save the planet from the worst outcomes of human despoliation. Humanity will inevitably triumph. Technology will improve human existence; it always has, even though it has often caused displacement, economic tribulation, and fear. Even if it is true that life must be a class struggle, as Marx wrote--class warfare, the arc of history has bent toward justice, as Dr. King said. If human nature causes the remnants of tribalism and reptilian self-preservation to abnegate a more diverse and tolerant society, then the normative, civilized forward motion of society, the rule of law, means nothing. If this is true, then hope dims. Society is destined to a dark Trumpian dystopia. “I have got mine, so fuck the rest of you.” Let the rule of the jungle prevail. Every man for himself. This is not what the founding fathers intended. Even though the curse of slavery was baked into our constitution, this is not what they intended. They intended the Union to become more perfect. They knew it was not perfect—it was a compromise. But they hoped that it could move toward more perfection. Even so, different factions militate to preserve their identity, fearing a loss of self, a “replacement” by those they think less worthy. What is that identity? How does it differentiate us from one another? Cultish religiosity and white supremacy that seeks to impose its rules on others, selfishly assuming that one culture is better than another? Human DNA is all the same. Differences in education and in societal norms are what separate us from beasts. Human sociology confirms this premise. Some believe that theology is the curse of mankind, others believe it is the salvation. The state has no place in this debate. Ignorance is the seed of prejudice, education the seed of tolerance. But perhaps not always, some say, many educated Germans, the nation of Schiller, Wagner and Beethoven gave us Himmler and Heydrich. But that was an education based on lies—geared upon the debasement of human fellows—a grotesque version of Eugenics. Education perverted by lies is not education This behavior is true today of those who feed the public misinformation. The norms of society rather than the capricious rule of men are what holds us above the savage beast. It is not just the written law, it is the understanding and compassion of society that makes it validate our existence as anything other than debased. Diminishing societal norms of decency and tolerance threaten our freedom. Attaching oneself to convenient untruths often provides a path to power at the expense of the less entitled. Something about that resonates today, although institutional anti-Semitism in the 1930s and 1940s, for example, went hand in hand with the racist Jim Crow south. The United States abrogated open immigration in 1924. Before that almost anyone could come, and in coming, helped build the colossus of America—the railroads, the steel mills, the automobile and an ideal that America was exceptional. That reality is still true, if we let it be, moving the arc of history to the better. If the “evil that men do lives after them and the good is oft interred with their bones,” as Mark Antony cynically said in his eulogy to Caesar, then we are obliged as a society to make that not happen. We must strive to make the good live after us. Somehow, I want to believe that we will come through, as “Americans will always do the right thing, after all other possibilities are exhausted,” attributed to either Abba Eban or Winston Churchill, take your pick.  But I still am frightened, in fact, scared stiff.

American exceptionality does not apply to a woman’s right to choose, except in the most negative of interpretations. The Western Democracies have basically settled this issue, and for the last 50 years we thought we had overcome this contentious pinata. If one believes that life begins at conception, the basic argument of the pro-life lobby, then abortion is a sin, an evil, a killing of a potential human being having no choice in the matter. This being will never exist, will never see the light of day, the first suckling of their mother’s breast, their first kiss, their first ball catch, their first love, the warmth of a fireplace, the gentle fall of rain from the heavens. That life has been snuffed out for eternity. If you believe that life begins at viability, 28 weeks as delineated in Roe v. Wade, that a woman is entitled to her own choice concerning an unwanted pregnancy, or whose life is at stake, or that the social implications of back-alley abortions outweigh their moral opprobrium, then Roe should be upheld. Poor and disadvantaged, mostly minority women, will be forced to carry a baby to term, even if she is raped, even if the father is absent, even if she cannot afford to put food on the table or milk in the bottle because enraged political tribes, advocating freedom from government, following a distorted social polemic, wish the government to impose carrying a child to term, unwanted, uncared for, and unfed. The magnitude of the political implications of the decision have been going round and round for 50 years. Jurists agonize whether the constitution specifies a right to privacy, and whether that right is an “emanation from the penumbra” of it. Valid legal arguments exist on both sides of the issue. And the constitution really is what the Supreme Court of the United States says it is, evolving, textual, or original. As I listened to the arguments advanced by both sides, I was happy that I was not going to decide. No matter the decision, a large portion of the population will vociferously disagree, and like, Donald Trump, will stick around like some enraged toxic cement. Analyzing federalism as a determinant of a woman being able to choose whether to abort early on seems like intellectual masturbation. Both sides present valid legal arguments as we know that the decision will be based on the faux sanctimony of the justices own beliefs, just as it was in Plessy v. Ferguson or in Dred Scott depriving rights, rather than conferring them, as in Brown v. Board of Education, noting that “separate but equal being inherently unequal.” Clearly, the right answer is illusive and equally clear will be the consequences if Roe is overturned or eroded, or incrementally chipped away. Poor people living in the former confederate states, for the most part will be deprived of the rights set forth in Roe; economically comfortable people will fly to a blue state to get an abortion. Ross Douthat, of the New York Times argues that laws preventing abortions have resulted in fewer abortions, buttressing his conventional arguments, that killing an embryo is the killing of a human organism and that women can still find work if they persevere despite childbearing, but mentions nothing about the state providing sustenance for unwanted babies. This agrees with most GOP legislators, be they from Alabama, Mississippi, or Texas. And do not forget our former president, although heaven knows how many abortions he financed. Meanwhile Republicans in Congress, still believe that children can carry guns, semi-automatic rifles and large ammo clips to shoot up their schools, kill their classmates, reaping the harvest of death that pro-life advocates decry, with no regard for the social consequences that the prohibitions will evoke. The rest of the world, except some authoritarian states in the Mid-East, laugh at the cognitive dissonance of our political class, including a supposedly apolitical Supreme Court of the United States. We need term limits of 18 years on Supreme Court Justices, and in that way, each President will get two choices for a new Justice, consequently the Stonewalling of a nominee will become more difficult. And Congress should codify national abortion rights, as most of the public favors those rights, despite what they think in Mississippi, Texas and Alabama.

“No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American Public” - H. L. Mencken The end is near; Trump is exiting stage right in an ignominious testament to greed, narcissism, mendacity and ignorance. The very idea of this Richard III presidency is something I have been trying to figure out for the past 4 years. The enigma is a mystery, wrapped inside a riddle, as the Winston Churchill coinage goes. Arguments range from Trump preying on the gullibility of the American public, to the intense rationalization that he was even able to convince intelligent people that he would “drain the swamp,” and clean up the fetid mess of corruption that is Washington, DC, a slog of lobbyists in Gucci loafers and congressmen in a never-ending rotating door, stuffing their pockets with cash in brown envelopes at the expense of the taxpayer. Also, “job creating” plutocrats thinking Trump would improve their portfolios, keeping the stock market high and their taxes low. Only 20% of Americans own stocks. The grift continues, Trump having raised hundreds of millions of dollars, ostensibly for a 2024 run, but which will certainly be diverted to his legal defense as he is pursued by numerous district attorneys, the justice department, and attorneys general. Not to mention his multitudinous oligarchical Deutche Bank creditors in Russia (Putin) and Saudi Arabia. And let’s not forget the rape and defamation suits by various women such as E. Jean Carol. This week, a mob of insurrectionists invaded the Capitol, believing the lies promulgated by Trump, nakedly at a podium, lying to them, that he would march along with them toward the palace of our republic. Instead, he got into his hermetically sealed limo and skulked back to the White House to view the spectacle he had created and delighted in viewing an enraged mob ransacking the place. Trump probably entered nirvana when one of the invaders sat with his feet up on Nancy Pelosi’s desk, almost like his voyeuristic leering at the disrobed Miss Universe contestants in their dressing room. While CNN pundits screeched outrage, “treason and sedition,” Laura Ingraham’s pallid, raspy imitation of Tallulah Bankhead’s voice discussed how the Democrats were trying to impeach Trump “never having given him the benefit of the doubt,” saying nothing about the desecration of the Capitol which Abraham Lincoln rushed to complete during the Civil War, emphasizing the strength of the Union. Where Franklin D. Roosevelt requested a declaration of war upon Japan on December 8, 1941. Where Winston Churchill spoke during a joint session of congress in December 1941, shortly after the United States entered the war against Germany and Japan. Where Woodrow Wilson advocated for the League of Nations after the bloodletting of World War I. Where Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, John Lewis, and other great statesman had lain in state. Our historic Capitol, the seat of our government, the triumph of our democracy, where notables, and the framers enjoy memorialization and statuary, invaded by a mob of rabid rioters stoked by a deranged and deluded president, falsely alleging the election had been stolen. Earlier, Ted Cruz, described as a “serpent covered in Vaseline,” and Josh Hawley, his fist held mob-high, disgraced themselves, turning a ceremonial procedure registering the electoral votes, to their own political benefit, sending fund raising emails. History will not look kindly upon this sordid spectacle. They should apologize and resign. We saw Lindsey Graham, jumping over the side of the sinking Titanic, pushing women and children out of the way, securing his seat on the lifeboat. This, after his demonstrated hypocrisy during the Merick Garland episode, the about face on Amy Barrett, and two switches from Trump denigrator to admirer. Calling Graham a prostitute insults the world’s oldest profession. The power-hungry Mitch McConnell, now minority leader, forgive the cliché, had also sowed the wind and now reaps the whirlwind. His enablement of Trump over the last four years will not sit well with historians, excepting perhaps the example of how power corrupts. Responsibility for this abounds. Fox news hosts and Rupert Murdoch have contributed mightily to the lying and false narrative presented to the public. News used to be a nonprofit enterprise of the major networks, CBS, NBC and ABC, presented as a public service, now transmogrified into a greedy crucible determined by marketers and audience demographics. Ratings avarice on Tucker and Laura and Hannity clearly do not help our country. Orwellian presentation of the news divides the public and shames its progenitors.  Republican house members now see their ranks riven with mutual accusations of who bears the burden for the nation’s disheartening catastrophe. A split of Republicans of principle and those of amoral self-interest dwells on the horizon. Elected acolytes of Trumpian amorality should know that their day of reckoning has arrived.

Been wondering lately about all the haters, negativists, half-baked opinionators, talking heads of whom I have become wretchedly weary in these days of almost post pandemic and post Trumpian cauchemars. Been thinking about the early days of the Republic when there were no restrictions on immigration. Actually, immigration was uncontrolled until 1921. Whoever wanted to come could. They faced sweatshops, unrestricted child labor, and unremitting social Darwinism. These immigrants, Irish, Italian, Jewish, Greek, German, and others all were white, and mostly able to read and write, enjoyed stable family structures upon which to build a semblance of a free life. Let them come again, but they stood on the shoulders of those who came before. They, and the backs of slaves built this country. “Manifest destiny” was a euphemism for stealing land from native Americans and Mexicans. Although whites faced discrimination, they did not inherit the bones of Jim Crow as is manifested still by those who oppose the teaching of “critical race theory,” falsely claiming that it is teaching blacks to be racists, to hate whites. This is simply a bold-faced lie as wretched as the lie that that the capitol insurrection was “just a small riot,” as averred by such “patriots” as Ron Johnson, Ted Cruz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, all of whom supported the big lie and charge Democrat racism based upon a rejection of historical fact. African American immigrants arrived in slave ships, were sold into bondage, their families separated by slavers, who sold children, mothers, sons and fathers to different masters. This stain on our history is comparable to the most unspeakable of human crimes. This grotesque history belies the premise that “all men are created equal.” Now we are engaged in a possible transmogrification of our republic to a frightfully totalitarian dystopia, having a large portion of the population actually believing the ravings of a demented madman, that the election of 2020 was stolen from him, undermining the essential character of our Republic—free and fair elections. GOP efforts abound in Republican legislatures to suppress the vote with restrictions aimed at minorities. When President Biden met Mr. Putin this week in Geneva, Putin shamelessly argued the false equivalence that the insurrection at our capitol, killing 5, trying to send even lickspittle Mike Pence to be hanged, wounding others and threatening senators with death if they did not overturn the will of the people by returning Trump to the White House. Illustratively, Putin’s imprisonment of a political opponent he had poisoned unsuccessfully, successfully murdering other opponents, we see “How Democracies Die,” as the noted political historian Timothy Snyder of Yale has written. The big lie is happening here, just as in Putin’s Russia. It is not only the rule of law that protects us, but also the respect for the norms of democracy that bind us together. Think about Weimar Germany and the rise of Hitler, who was democratically elected but incrementally turned the nation of Beethoven, Schiller, and Wagner to a nation of hate and murderous rage against helpless men, women and children. Leadership matters, as Philip Roth documented in his monumental work, “The Plot Against America,” wherein a Nazi sympathizing Charles Lindbergh becomes President of the United States defeating Franklin Roosevelt, resulting in totalitarian overtones of fascism, sending Jewish children to workcamps. The question that must be asked of all thinking people of whatever caste or persuasion, whatever socio-economic status, is what they would do to prevent an economic and political catastrophe or which policies would best serve our nation. Certainly, Mitch McConnell sees none, his Machiavellian breast to argue in the next election that Biden “did nothing.” Democrats must deliver, abolish the filibuster, before it is too late. Use the power now, because it is fleeting. “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Lincoln famously said. We fell into a bloody civil war. Brother against brother, father against son, families torn asunder, a war killing more than 700,000 on the bloody battlefields of Antietam, Manassas, Gettysburg and Chattanooga, among others. And if we look back, this war took from 1787 until 1860 to develop. The original three fifths compromise, the Missouri compromise, the Kansas-Nebraska act. All attempts to place a band aid over gangrene. We face far greater challenges than how states would be admitted to the Union; we face a changing climate, international competition, rising authoritarianism, and we are anxious, depressed. Jim Crow is alive, still . If, however, identity politics caused wars, it was the economic causes engendered by religion and prejudice that lit the fire. This tribal notion of “others” stealing our homes, our dignity and our fortunes certainly caused more war than religious disputes alone. These two shibboleths are inherent in the human psyche. Identity politics is the bête noir of society. Until we have overcome these demons there will be no peace. But the bad news is that cultures change very slowly; we are in a culture infused war both internally and worldwide. One thing for sure, stilted propaganda TV is not helpful. And we are not even sure that education makes a difference. People may not agree on policy, but if they cannot agree that the sun shines during the day, we are on a runaway train without Denzel Washington to put on the brakes.

This past week, my grandson’s close friend and fraternity brother at U Chicago was shot in the neck by a stray bullet, while riding the L from a summer internship in downtown Chicago. A random bullet severed his cervical spinal column. Rushed to the hospital, placed on a ventilator, his family asked him to blink if he wanted to remain on life support. He was alert and his mother, herself a physician, told him he would not be able to eat, talk, or breathe off a ventilator. He responded that if he had to live that way, pull the plug. A rising junior at a solid institution, died a meaningless death. Recently, a condominium collapsed not far from my home burying alive around 150 people whist they slept. Some of them were religious Jews who probably said a prayer to God before bedtime; some were secular or religious Christians who also said their nightly prayer. Some of those people attended daily religious services, hoping their prayers would be answered. A friend of mine, deeply religious said she would “pray for them.” The first hurricane of the season has passed by Miami; part of an insensitive, uncaring universe, surrounding us in a web of uncertainty. The hurricane will do damage elsewhere, nature randomly choosing another unfortunate destination. People will pray that it does not hit their location, that it goes elsewhere. But aren’t they indirectly praying that other people suffer instead of themselves? If you are a deist, you believe that a force greater than yourself has created a mountain of chaos—the universe where there is no predestination, no plan, only a random lottery that determines where we are born, where our supposed choices take us, what sort of government will govern us, how we do not really understand the choices we make. Like the man who walks down the sidewalk, a plant pot drops from a window above, killing him, or just misses because he has passed by a moment earlier. By some accident of biology, we are born, fortunately not in Afghanistan. Religion offers comfort to those who believe that prayer will cohere friends around them, and the habit of observing primitive dietary rules will cement their beliefs to a ritual that will strengthen their tribe. Catholics eat fish on Friday and a biscuit that represents the body of Christ. Jews will not eat pork or shrimp or mix meat and dairy, because of rules set forth in a Bronze age text of unknown authorship. Muslims will not eat pork. People belonging to organized religious groups thank whatever god they pray to will answer their prayers which are essentially selfish desires to make them stronger, to be protected in war, for victory over the enemy, to survive disease, to have the courage to move on or to be charitable, to help others, to give them a sense of community. Or does it create a parochialism that either anathematizes them to other communities, makes them different, or a likely scapegoat for people in other tribes? When disaster strikes, they achieve solace in thanking God for sparing them. If they die, loved ones say prayers to strengthen their own resilience. Does this delusion really create order in a chaotic world? If one argues about the survival of Jews, one could conclude that Judaism survived as a result of extraneous hate which prevented them from owning property or land, caused them to become moneylenders because the Church prohibited Christians from charging interest on loans to other Christians. Therefore, Jews were the only ones who could do so, ergo the perverse anti-Semitic trope that Jews were greedy merchants of finance. I wonder how many people in the Champlain towers said prayers before going to sleep, how many Jewish children of the two million murdered during the Holocaust said “shema Yisrael,” before being gassed to death, incinerated by unspeakably evil people who had been indoctrinated to believe that those children were subhuman rodents--it was their duty to exterminate them. Those Nazis followed their own religion, that of a murderous cult. They did not evolve quickly; their religious indoctrination having followed 2000 years of church liturgy that said Jews were Christ killers, using the blood of Christian children to bake Matzos on Passover. Generations of Jews guilty of the death of Christ, himself born a Jew and dying a Jew. One cannot argue with the cult of Trump. It has become its own abandonment of reason, its own religion. His adherents believe his lies and attend his rallies as though they were a religious service. Jewish Zealots believe that God gave them the land of Judea and Samaria, when it was the British and French promising the and to two disparate peoples at the dissolution of the Ottoman empire which had ruled the land for centuries. The Ottomans picked the wrong side in the First World War. One cannot argue with religion. Human moral codes historically evolved before religion; polytheistic religions were certainly more tolerant than monotheistic, the latter of which is responsible for the a priori negation of other faiths. Organized religion only evolved in the last 5000 years, on the evolutionary scale, an instant, on a geologic scale, a millisecond. The Earth is 4.5 billion years old. Yet during those 5000 years, it provided the justification for war, pogroms, crusades, charlatans, false prophets, and flocks of lemmings abandoning their sense of reason to hate others. Granted, religion also aspires for people to be good, love thy neighbor, but has it succeeded? Evangelicals made a Faustian deal with a scoundrel and grifter, because they believed he would appoint a Supreme Court that would enforce an abnegation of the Founder’s strictures of separation of church and state, and that more of the country would join their megachurches, hypnotizing their congregations, compelling the flock to give the preacher a bigger house and a Rolex. Politicians fixated on these beliefs, unctuously cater to these fantasies so they can win elections. They do not understand the framer’s intent: Freedom from religion. Ergo, the thriving of religion in this nation, and aspirational tolerance of others. No state religion. Elites like the brilliant Alexander Hamilton, thought that the common people were not able to govern themselves or devise our financial system, so he did it himself. He did not believe that some supernatural force would do it for him. Nor did he believe that evil would be dispelled by prayer. Thomas Jefferson said to keep the preachers away from politics. Jefferson understood human frailty and, for his time, thought that the people should govern themselves, but God should be left to theologians, not politicians; the theologians would keep the illiterate masses quiet, including his slaves. Abraham Lincoln never mentioned the trinity, and some people thought he was a Jew. He was not, but he invoked God in many of his speeches; perhaps he understood that his countrymen were not yet ready to liberate themselves from superstition so biblical allusions provoked loyalty in constituents or contributed profundity to his utterances. Or perhaps he was a deist as many at the time accused him. Religion is an excellent germination point for hypocrisy; giving those who profess it the opportunity to manipulate the flock, to incite people not to think for themselves or develop their own philosophy of life. That is--to think for themselves. They demagogy of theology. As science advances exponentially, religion has become more and more irrelevant, more difficult to reconcile with reality. A majority of young people today do not attend religious services. They engage in the new religions of Sports, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Tinder. They seek meaning in a life that many find meaningless.

TRUMP: All right guys; let's get this meeting to order. BANNON: Mr. President, aren't you going to take off your bathrobe? FLYNN It's true, Mr. President, I know you are stressed out over those fuzzy headed judges icing your travel ban, but as commander in chief, it does not look very appropriate. You should be wearing a Marine Corps uniform to show strength. TRUMP: If you have a problem with my bathrobe, Mike , I can fire you. Civilians control the military, remember? I am not a fascist, even though they say so on MSNBC. We don't need you here anyway. Who wants to listen to your opinions about Putin? I'm beginning to think that he is not as good a friend as I thought. He wants too big a cut on the division of the Arctic drilling rights. I know he has sent troops there in skis to check out the minerals and oil. We need to send a battalion up there to protect the new Trump oil company that my sons are organizing. And By the way, your dealing with the Russians without me is a no no. The next time you pull that crap you are out of here. Understand? BANNON: Listen, Don, I mean, Mr. President. We need to concentrate on the radical Islamic threat to our country. After all the terrorists who have struck here represent a clear and present danger to our world. And all those children from Syria who were gassed by Assad all could be potential terrorists. Plus the democrats are planning demonstrations all over the country at town halls. We need to put a stop to that. Those damned judges interfering with my world view--Why don't you tweet about that? TRUMP: Well, there is no danger coming from the countries where I have business dealings, like Saudi Arabia or Egypt, is there? After all I went through all that trouble with the left wing dishonest press and all those Senators asking to see about my investments and tax returns. It could have cost me the election. Already we are losing money at my golf clubs and hotels. People are boycotting Trump Steaks and Ivanka was ditched by those greedy bastards at Nordstrom's because they said her line was not selling. Can you imagine how embarrassing it will be to find her product at Nordstrom's rack or TJ Maxx at a steep discount when all those foreign dignitaries and heads of state bought retail plus 30% dresses and makeup at the hotel boutique? I mean they like bargains also. GENERAL MATTIS: Mr. President, seriously we have to consider what North Korea is doing and try to convince the Chinese to reign them in. They are working on a missile that could reach LA or San Francisco. TRUMP: Listen, Mad Dog, I am leaving that to you. All those illegal voters in CALIFORNIA who did not vote for me are not my concern. This drop in revenue is harming the Trump Organization. They even don't want me to come to the UK to visit my Scottish golf course. I put in those plaster of Paris statues in front and those unappreciative Scots say it is tacky. They cost me a fortune. So unfair. And now the GSA is going to try to negotiate a higher priced lease on the DC hotel. I may have to fire the administrator and put someone there that will not treat my sons so unfairly. Maybe I will send out a tweet about it. FLYNN: Mr. President, can we concentrate on the Islamic threat? What can we do more than Obama did, by smoking all those leaders with drone strikes? We have to show we are strong and by aligning ourselves with Putin will insure that we win. TRUMP: Listen Mike, I told you to pipe down. Those video fliers in Nevada are really good at remote control bombing. I think if I could just use some of that technology in my casinos we would not have gone broke. Plus I have an idea for a new Trump video game called, "Let's Nuke 'em." Should be a best seller. It will include a free night at one of my hotels. That's not an emolument, is it? But if you want, we can shake things up by moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. That should be good for Lockheed-Martin. I have a large position.

"The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them again in our lifetime." - Sir Edward Grey, British Foreign Secretary on the eve of World War I. Across the world, women and people of conscience have marched in protest to what they perceive as the election of a scoundrel and a liar, a narcissistic, misogynistic impresario of Orwellian dimensions. All hopes between the election and the inauguration of a change in personality, a more presidential and healing persona have already been dashed. Republicans in congress have bent to the will of this force of darkness and pessimism. Our hopes that the separation of powers will protect us from this aberration, a perversion of our democratic government, grow dimmer with each day. The inappropriate cabinet picks, the angry dystopian inaugural address, the rancor and divisiveness pervading this pathologically driven man has already defined the direction in which he intends to take our country. The Presidential powers conferred upon him are a threat to the tired, the poor, the dispossessed. Jobs that will never return, factories increasing the corporate bottom line with one-tenth the workforce, are the new reality, despite his promises. And the Republican congress is rushing to install vouchers instead of health care as a right of all Americans. You will have access and choice, they say. Now, we are faced with how to chase this lying Caligula from office. How does the congress stiffen its spine and do the work at hand? How does the Republican Party reclaim its dignity? Only by placing country over party. The jury is out. But with a proven liar in the White House, how will the world believe our government when a crisis arises? Policy will be the prevailing battlefield, and not one that tweets about the size of the crowds at his coronation. In 1933 Franklin Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler were elected to office. Both the United States and Weimar Germany were in dire economic straits. A world-wide great depression. The streets of Berlin suffered demonstrations of starving people, needing billions of marks to buy a loaf of bread. Germans, overwhelmed by French and English policymakers who devised war reparations unable to be paid, marched Unter der Linden. Victims desperately sought to find a way out. Hitler made promises of a one Volk, one Germany, one Fuhrer. He offered hope but a dark vision of the reasons Germany was suffering. He found his mantra, his dehumanizing of a whole segment of the German polity. Roosevelt, on the other hand, offered hope: "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." No scapegoat, but positive moves to revive the flagging American economy, marred by soup kitchens, starving veterans camping in Grant Park and on the Mall in Washington, chased away by troops commanded by Douglas MacArthur, unemployment reaching 25%. Grown men selling apples in the street, unable to feed their children. Hitler offered scapegoats, the Jews, the Bolsheviks, the conjured enemies. Not unlike Vladimir Putin, the manifestation of a failed one-horse Russian democracy, now an authoritarian kleptocracy. Hitler was able to silence dissent by murdering his critics, and establish a climate of the legitimate fear of being killed or being sent to concentration camps. Roosevelt offered a new deal to America, government jobs, WPA, TVA, CCC, infrastructure projects, public works projects and a hopeful, cheerful optimism, not unlike his successor; Ronald Regan did 50 years later. Hitler offered war, "lebensraum," expansion to the east, and the night of broken glass (Kristalnacht), racial hared and violence, the promise of conquest of other nations to alleviate German yearnings for prosperity and expansion, but through war, prodding internal economic growth. Trump offers blame on the Chinese, immigrants, loose borders, Hispanics, Muslims and thinly veiled threats against minorities and people who are not as fortunate to have been born the scion of a real estate magnate. On the inauguration stage, we saw a white guy with children from three different wives in stark contrast to a dignified African American, the exemplar of class, fidelity, and integrity who became President of the United States. Great credit goes to our citizens for electing him. Did he make mistakes? Surely. But his decency, thoughtfulness and character was a credit to the Presidency and to his country. Throughout history we have learned that character is the hallmark of great leaders. Trump has none. And that is already being demonstrated. When we think of America as exceptional, it is. Exceptional in the antiquity of its system of government and the gullibility of its people. We need to be able to issue a vote of no confidence rather than having an albatross hanging from our stretched necks for four years. The Constitution needs an amendment. And the interstate compact of awarding all the electoral votes of the individual states to the winner of the national popular vote needs to move ahead to abolish the anachronism of the Electoral College allowing a winner who claims a mandate though he received three million less votes than his opponent. This 18th century instrument, based upon slavery needs to be relegated to history's dustbin. Trump's raised fist, his anger, his ego, belies his fragile character, his inability to withstand criticism, and his ad hominem attacks on his critics, rendering him unfit to occupy the White House. He is a boy-man, a privileged, spoiled, tweeting, grotesque caricature and a humiliation to our country. And now, people who did not bother to vote are realizing that they should have.

"The fool thinks himself to be wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool." - William Shakespeare Donald J. Trump, elected President with the help of an authoritarian klepotcratic KGB murderer who had ordered hacking of the Democratic National Committee. Seventeen US intelligence agencies agree and reveal an extensive, detailed, declassified report to the President-elect. Rather than acknowledge the facts of the reports, the President-elect disparages the intelligence professionals upon whom our nation depends, by alluding to the mistakes made in the run up to the Iraq war and intelligence demanded by our most stupid President, George W. Bush, who under the influence of Dick Cheney, plunged us into a quagmire from which we have not yet emerged. Trump uses this mistake to justify and denigrate the dedicated intelligence professionals who have compiled a record of Russian interference in our election. This Trumpian hubris endangers us all because even though the election is over, in his adolescent mind, it partially detracts from his "win." Donald needs to "win," placing his ego above the national interest. The cognitive dissonance of this all resembles the most insane Salvador Dali painting. The distorted clock, the horrified contorted faces, the horrifying improvidence of it all. Americans are gradually realizing that they have a psychologically deranged President about to leave the starting gate. These are remarkable, frightening times. A President-elect who is in denial about intelligence reports, climate change, Nato alliances, and Putinesque wickedness. Many Cabinet appointments harboring a plethora of financial interests yet to be disclosed as required by law and a voting public a majority of whom voted against Trump now scared to death. Congressional hearings possibly to occur without full disclosure of his cabinet of gilded age billionaires. The ludicrous Mexican wall, the failure to disclose tax returns, the failure to divest. Red flags dominate political discourse. Trump has still not had a press conference, communicating in tweet bursts, many of which are dangerous, disingenuous, and self-serving, threatening to undermine the ship of state, now rolling in a dark, tempest-torn sea. Trump exults in misinformation, utilizing classic propaganda techniques of Orwellian dimensions. Dr. Goebbels would be proud. Bypassing the media, yet utilizing it masterfully to pour out hatred, bigotry, birtherism, conspiracy theories; he has, with the help of an antiquated electoral system, stolen the election of 2016. Unconscionable, by any standard, the Electoral College, is complicit in this fiasco. And social media has distorted the landscape even further having been employed by a Machiavellian impresario. A national movement must soon take place to restore our democracy: one-person one vote. All the nonsense advanced by traditionalists, originalists, or what have you, must be seen for what it is. An attempt to disproportionally favor rural America. Those who support the system argue that the electoral college governs space, not population centers and spreads the vote geographically. How preposterous is this notion? People in Wyoming have three times the representation as people in California. Rural America should deserve equal representation, just as should we all. Republicans in congress, including the cowardly, pusillanimous Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell will not know how to handle the hurricane headed their way. They will rue the day that they could not get along with Obama, having sowed the wind, will now reap the whirlwind. As Kathleen Parker noted in her column today in the Washington Post, the conspiracy theorists who thought Obama a Muslim, following the same logic can call Trump a Russian spy. Equally silly theories, yet not without appeal for Democrats who believe that the election was rigged, but not as Trump had suggested. If it is shown that Trump in any way knew beforehand what Vladimir was doing or had planned, here come the articles of impeachment. And perhaps a trial for treason. Why were they jubilant in Moscow when Trump got the 270 votes in the Electoral College? Why do we even retain such a slavery-induced system? Three million Americans have been effectively disenfranchised. Their votes did not count. And Trump is going to be President of the United States. We are engaged in cultural and religious wars both at home and abroad and are now saddled with a President who knows nothing, sees nothing except himself in a narcissistic, distorted, mirror of denial, deception and self-promotion. We must ask ourselves how this all happened? And how could we have allowed our nation to fall into the hands of a latter day Juan Peron?

"I think that God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability." - Oscar Wilde Somehow, the United States has elected a psychologically deranged, tweeter as its president, a man who cavalierly dismisses the Russian hacking of our election as something that should cause us to "get on with our lives." This echoes the voice of Antonin Scalia, who having installed W. as president, saying "get over it." Both of our major political parties have failed us. The Electoral College has failed us. For the 5th time, electing a president who has won a minority of the popular vote and by a stupefying margin of almost 3 million votes, this victor claiming he would have won anyway, had he campaigned differently, by emphasizing that New York and California would have gone his way. This is an astonishing statement, given that he lost by almost 75% of the vote in New York and California. Now an antiquated electoral system is doing irreparable damage to our country, where a few close states make the difference and the will of the majority of the country is subverted. What is democratic about this slavery-protecting 19th century system? Republicans do not want to change it because the more disenfranchised progressives, the better. Here in Miami Beach, we are still saddled with an ethically challenged Mayor, who has gubernatorial aspirations. Some locals feel that he should run and if he wins, we will be rid of him. He cannot be any worse than Rick Scott who was never prosecuted for his Medicare fraud shenanigans, they say. Sorry, fellow progressives. President Obama, a dignified, honest, deep thinker, is responsible for much of the Syrian tragedy. By refusing to engage no-fly zones, he has contributed mightily to the destabilization of the EU, and surrendered US influence in the Middle East to the Russians and the Iranians. The countless lives that could have been saved, European paranoia and nativism minimized, and Pax Americana maximized. Even conceding that we were war weary as a nation, history has taught us that American isolationism has led to European catastrophe two times in the last century. The global forces currently aligning in economics, technology and markets, will not bring the coal miners, auto workers, and other outmoded jobs back, despite Trump's empty promises. 2017 threatens to bring more warfare in the Middle East, and Obama's refusal to back Israel is an unprecedented fit of pique against Benjamin Netanyahu and his right wing coalition, many of whom would round all the Arabs up in trucks and transfer them out of the territories to Jordan ( their country before the 1967 war), and claim Israel now runs to the Jordan river. Of course this will not happen, but a one state solution as Netanyahu wants could mean the demographic demise of the Jewish state. On the one hand, a state based upon a religion is inherently antipathetic to those in other religions (as shown in Iran) and as mentioned by Thomas Jefferson who said that the preachers must be kept away from the wheels of government. But, on the other hand, Jews having been a persecuted minority for most of their past, was given a state in 1948 and Arabs have been fulminating ever since, instead of providing an economic agenda for their people. Nevertheless, Israel could devolve into a secular democracy if all the West Bank Arabs are incorporated into its fabric. After all, that was not so bad for the United States. It might be the inevitable conclusion to a one state solution. This would dismay many Jews, but they may have no choice. Now we have a President coming on board who understands nothing about foreign policy, has no compassion for anyone but himself, and butters up Vladimir Putin, a murderous, kleptocratic, KGB fascist, who has billions hidden worldwide through his cronies and is presiding over a collapsing Russian economy in need of malign distractions to keep its constituency in check. Those distractions might mean threats to the Baltic republics or even invasion. Trump needs to protect these Nato members no matter how little they pay up. Does he know that? Will Trump be able to stand up to Putin? Maybe. Putin is a Russian chess player, not a job seeker on the Celebrity Apprentice. Another cold war could be on the way. Trump now is basking in the Putin charm, but a few missteps by Vladimir might have Trump tweeting a different tune. Skin so thin, and ego so fragile, who knows? General Mike Flynn ( Dr. Strangelove) is the national security adviser. He sees conspiracy theories everywhere, and might soon be out of a job. Trump sure knows how to say, "you're fired." Am I suicidal about this election? Do I think the world is coming to an end? Do I think my Miami Beach home will be inundated soon? Do I like the present mayor? Am I happy Trump will be President? The answers are no to all. But, let us wish our new President well despite his obvious shallowness and deep character flaws and hope that he will not be impeached, leaving us with, Heaven forbid, Mike Pence who believes that evolution did not occur and that men walked the earth with dinosaurs.

Somewhere secret OBAMA: Listen Vlad, I do not appreciate your hacking into the DNC headquarters and fooling the FBI into releasing a report about Hillary’s emails. The next time you do this I will tell the Donald that you have looked into his eyes and seen a Capitalist pig and a lying one at that. VLADY: And I will tell Donald that you are trying to use Nato to keep me from restoring the USSR. His casinos like gambling Russians, and I have assured him that if he plays along by giving me some vig, he will grow his measly $3.5 billion in net worth to approximate mine which is $85 billion, I mean I am almost as rich as Bill Gates and Carlos Slim put together. Plus, I will show him how to successfully hide it all from the nosy journalists, several of whom I have had to dump in the Volga. So do not think that you left such a good legacy. You had the chance to send in the Marines when I annexed Crimea, but you did not think it was worth it. And you did not follow that witch Hillary's advice to create a no fly zone in Syria. Of course we hacked your election. Wait until you see what I have in store for the Baltic Republics. They are part of the USSR. For example, I did a real smart deal nationalizing Yukos oil and kicking that presumptuous oligarch, Kordokovsky out of the country and "nationalizing" his wealth. He even thinks he will be fed polonium in his tea, just like I fed Litvinenko who died a miserable death in a London hospital after my agents poisoned him. No one read about it in the Russian press, fortunately. He never wanted to do business with me and now sits in London, calling me a crook. Some nerve. I am working on this problem with some of my friends at the old KGB. Any fool would realize that controlling the information gives me an 85% approval rating among the Soviet people. But I know that Donald does not drink Vodka or any liquor for that matter. But I do. And wasn't it your Amerikansi comedian WC Fields who said, if you drink before you are forty you are crazy and if you do not drink after 40 you are twice as crazy? Donald was my Manchurian candidate. And now Rex Tillerson at the State Department? My business partner? My medal friendship winner? What a feat. I am so manly and smartski. TRUMP: Hey guys, can I get into this conversation? VLADY: Of course you can. What ideas do you have to deal with US-Soviet (oops Russian) relations? TRUMP: Well I am going to build a beautiful wall on the Mexican border to keep the Soviet Mexican agents out of Arizona and New Mexico. And, by the way Vlady, you did an amazing job in Syria, dropping barrel bombs on school children and hospitals. You are a strong leader. And President Obama, you stood by while Vlad took care of those rebels, destroying Aleppo and killing thousands, causing migrations to Turkey and Europe. Both of you have done an incredible job in destabilizing the EU. Even that German bitch Merkel is paying the price. But you have to be careful with the Germans. If they get angry enough, you could have another Stalingrad. But I have a secret plan. Not even I know how it works yet. I am leaving that to Mike Pence, who is planning a trip to Syria. He believes that all the problems there are caused by the failure of the Muslims to accept Jesus. I am going to change all that with Trump hotels and casinos all over Eastern Europe to employ the Syrian refugees. I have already planned the new Trump Istanbul, to be built with tax credits to me because I might have to sell some of my holdings to prevent the appearance of a conflict of interest. I plan to create jobs for West Virginia coal miners by shipping them to Turkey to build Trump casinos and hotels. And it will save money for Medicare by preventing black lung disease. By the way the new commissioner of Internal Revenue says he will be done with my routine audit after I have run for my second term in 2020 and then I can release my tax returns. Vlad wants to see them before he goes into business with me, so I may have to show my hand earlier. And Rick Perry? The guy, who I said needed an IQ test to be President, will do a fine job at the Department of Energy. I picked him because he was not low Energy Bush and could not remember it when he had a brain fart and did not know which government department he wanted to abolish. Perfect choice, believe me. General Mike Flynn, my new national conspiracy theory advisor tells me that there is a conspiracy here in the US and to use Dr. Ben Carson, the new head of Housing and Urban Development who has a direct line to stop Lucifer from ripping unborn babies from the womb in government housing developments.  We will fix all of that soon. But I cannot tell you both how. It's a secret.

Friends, Americans, Countrymen, and Trumpsters: The evil that men do lives after them; the good is 'oft interred with their bones. I come to praise Hillary, although I buried her at the polls. Even though she got 2.5million more popular votes, I stand before you as the winner of this election, thanks to my newly evolved position on how it protects the yokels in fly over country. I am a winner! Despite the failing New York Time's efforts to defeat me and the fact that I did not receive the endorsement of any other major American newspaper, I stand before you as a testament to the stupidity of the electorate. After all, wasn't it PT Barnum who said that "there is a sucker born every minute?" or H.L. Mencken who said that "no one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public?" All this business of the popular vote? I mean if I had campaigned in California and New York, I would have persuaded all those Hollywood types and Eastern elitist liberals to vote for me, so I would have campaigned differently and won anyway. All this because I am a man of the people. My humble abode in Trump Tower proves that, and you can be sure I will never release my tax returns now. And so what if Tiffany customers cannot get into the store and Fifth Avenue is now blocked. But we have a rear entrance so Melania can buy. New Yorkers did not vote for me anyway. What traitors. Now, I am going to select a junta of generals to run our foreign policy, even though I said I know more than they do. I brought Mitt Romney around to show how magnanimous I am and we had a great meal at that workman's establishment restaurant Jean Georges, to show how we eat just like the people. Neither Mitt nor I drink so we saved some money. I think it is at taxpayer expense, anyway, picking the cabinet, don't you? Frankly, I think David Petraeus would make the best Secretary of State. After all he engineered the surge and was first in his class at West Point, even though he gave out national security secrets and pled his felony down to a misdemeanor, because he was grabbing some hot p***y. He paid his debt to society and deserves a second chance, unlike crooked Hillary who abused her email server and killed everyone in Benghazi. And, of course, I picked Mike Pence as VP to ensure that I would not be impeached. He has a pea-sized brain, believing that people walked the earth with dinosaurs and evolution is just a "theory." After all, I descended from an orange Orangutan, proving evolution is real. Mike also thinks Newton's theory of gravity is unproven. If he becomes president, watch out. And all those pundits who said I have no economic plan? Of course I do. Tax cuts for corporations, and sinking public schools through Betsy DiVos who never saw a public school she liked. After all she rose through the ranks of that great institution, the Amway Ponzi scheme, eminently qualifying her for office. And my new Treasury Secretary? Steven Mnuchin What a gem. The Wall Street Journal (Fox News) loves him. His qualification for the job is of the working class--a hedge fund operator making millions and a trader at Goldman Sachs as well as a Hollywood financier. He has a great feel for the coal miner or the auto assembly worker. And then we have Wilbur Ross a billionaire investor in distressed assets, foreclosing on people and throwing them out of their homes. But he has assured me that his perspective has evolved, as has mine. We will have a great winning team to greaten America. I can't wait to bomb the shit out of Iran and ISIS, scotch the Iran deal and make America great again. Putin and the Iranians are overjoyed on the prospect that we are aligning ourselves with that great humanitarian Bashar Assad who is restoring order to his county by dropping barrel bombs on children and civilians. And Putin does deserve to increase his sphere of influence in eastern Europe. Just like the good old days. So now, my fellow Americans, with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive to bind up the nations wounds (if Melania can plagiarize, so can I).  God Bless the Trump organization and the United States of America.

Election of the President and Vice President of the United States Elections; Term Limits for Congress Election of the President and the Vice President of the United States shall be by the direct popular vote of the eligible voters in the various states of the Union. Said votes shall be counted locally in the states and then transmitted to a central location where they shall be tallied again. The Electoral College shall be abolished and no longer utilized for the election of the President and Vice President of the United States. Election campaigns shall be limited to 60 days and publicly financed with no individual contributions in excess of $2,500. A National primary election shall be effectuated, with all candidates on the ballot. In the event that no candidate achieves a majority of the vote, there shall be a run-off election to determine those two or three candidates with the largest plurality of votes and they shall be the candidates in the general election. Corporations, by the terms of this amendment are not people and shall be limited to the same level of contribution as set forth above for natural persons. United States Senators shall not serve more than two terms, or 12 years. Members of the House of Representatives shall serve no longer than 3 terms or 12 years. This amendment shall become effective 6 years after passage by the Congress and ratification by the states. Congress shall have the power to enforce this amendment by appropriate legislation.

November 9, 2016 Good evening. First of all, I want to congratulate Hillary for winning the Presidency. But I won the election. I am a WINNER, not a loser and here is why: I want all those blockheads who supported me not to make any trouble or claim that the election was rigged. It was designed by me to elect Hillary. I mean, wake up people. Do you think that some of the things I have said were not provocative enough to turn people off, especially women, who are of a lower mentality than men? They just do not have the stamina to figure out what I was doing. I want everyone to know that I am really a Democrat. I was never a Republican. I am an eastern elitist, believe me. Do you think that I live in a gold plated Trump tower apartment and have a gold plated jet because I like people who live in Des Moines or St Louis? They are suckers. Losers. Out of touch with how to get ahead. Most of these yokels would vote for me if I shot Paul Ryan. I am a patriot, believe me. I even display big American flags in my buildings right next to the TRUMP flag. I want everyone to know that there will be a Hillary victory party in all the Trump buildings not in foreclosure tonight to celebrate what I and I alone have accomplished. No one could have pulled this off except me, believe me. I won the whole thing. What a winner I am. If I invited Vladimir Putin, he would come. He loves me, just like all my other followers. Vlad told me what a winner I am. I entered this race and demolished the 16 pinhead candidates who had the nerve to run against me in the primaries. They tried to be politically correct in selling their agenda for the wealthy. The base saw through them and embraced me. All those things I said about low energy Jeb and Little Marco were true. LOSERS! and John Kasich? He is phonier than a three-dollar bill. And how about Chris Christie who will soon go to jail, standing behind me like my puppet? He looked like an overfed beagle. The rest of them were a bunch of religious nut cases who want to get inside women's vaginas, but not successfully as I have. Who cares about abortion? I am pro choice. Just like my hot daughter Ivanka, whom I never dated, believe me. I ran to show how bankrupt the GOP is and, believe me, I know about bankruptcies. The country had to put up with George W Bush, who invited the Iranians to take over the Middle East. And Condoleezza Rice? The worst secretary of state, much worse than Hillary, who is now my friend. Well Condi might have gotten into Augusta National, but never Trump National, get it? Well maybe now that I have revealed my true feelings of liberalism. I live in New York City, come on. After all she did go to college. And I heard she's a pretty good golfer. I heard she plays a pretty mean piano. lots of rhythm. And how about my running mate Mike Pence, who says he is a Christian before he is a Republican and an American? He needs to get a hot date. Spends too much time in church. And what about those spineless losers Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell twisting themselves into pretzels when I revealed all that stuff about my sexual exploits. Sure, I groped a few women, but what's the difference? Bill Clinton was a fat kid from Arkansas who became President so he could get p***y. That is the whole point of being President, isn't it? I gave a lot of money to Bill and when I release my tax returns tomorrow, it will show that. I could have built the wall with my own funds, but every one knows that is dumb. Better to do it with OMP. So do not worry, Hillary, I am now on your side again. You are a real fighter. You do not give up and I respect that. But you are only President-elect, because I paved the way. I am the real winner. I made myself into a Trojan (forgive the expression, I do not use Trojans) horse to show how stupid the American public is. None of them read the failing New York Times, the New Yorker or the Washington Post. They can hardly read at all. I know all this because I did well at Wharton where I learned to play everyone for a sucker. And tuition was not even that high then. It increased my attention span to a full 30 seconds. And believe me, I am not looking for a cabinet position although I would make a great Secretary of the Treasury negotiating 10c on the dollar for government bond obligations. And all those freeloading NATO partners. I never intended to make them pay up for defense. I get a lot of guests in my hotels from those countries. So now it is time to pull together as Americans, respect the fact that I uncloaked the Republican fraud, and stand behind our new President. I am a patriot, believe me. Even though I will not be President, my face should be on the wall on the Rio Grande, just like Mt Rushmore. I want to talk to Hillary about that. So my fellow Americans, God bless America. Let's get together behind Hillary, and come back to my casinos, my hotels and my golf courses. Business has fallen off a bit and I might have to declare another bankruptcy or even worse, lose my tax write offs. We have only one President and she is all of our President., but I am responsible for her election. I won.  I was the one who rigged it all.