Midlife Meditation

This is how I greeted kids arriving at the music room last week. It's come down to which uncle I'd rather have in charge of the country. I'm fond of Uncle Bernie. When there's a family argument, I can always count on Bernie to be on the right side of issues, and to argue his points vigorously and with unshakeable certainty. Bernie knows he's right, and when you're right, why even consider compromise? And Uncle Joe can be a bit foggy at times. He's not always sure what his position on issues is. He's spent so much of his life hashing out compromises that it can be hard to know where he stands on anything. Sometimes his faulty memory leads him to rattle off a story that just isn't true. One would think, then, that given Bernie's rectitude on so many moral and social issues, the choice should be easy. But stop a moment to consider what we're talking about here: the softest of sciences, politics. Even dealing with hard scientif...

I made a meme! (The original word was "God.") I've been seeing versions of this for years. Sometimes it's worded as a prayer: "Dear Lord/Jesus, please protect me from your followers." At other times, it's along the lines of Bill Maher's frequent observation that he's actually pretty fond of Jesus, he just wishes his followers would read his book (i.e. the Bible). It's a meme I tend to shake my head at: half a century of Methodism introduced me to thousands of sincere, generous, tolerant, sometimes progressive and even radical Christians. Unfortunately, there are prominent religious bigots out there giving the faith I was born into a bad name, and far too many of them are fully on board with a president who fits the Biblical description of the antiChrist better than any political figure in modern times (and yes, that's including Hitler). As you can see from the picture at the top of the page, I took the meme and made an adjustm...

Not just another old white guy. This happened in my parents' dining room early in 2008. It was around the time Barack Obama's campaign began to pick up the momentum that would ultimately put him in the White House. There were still several other contenders for the Democratic nomination, not least among them Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton. My mother had just expressed her preference for Hillary, saying it was high time we had a woman in the Oval Office. She was also concerned about Obama's lack of experience. "He's my age," I said (actually, I'm about a month older than he is). "Do you feel ready to be President?" she fired back. My answer, of course, was "No." At 47, my lifelong leadership experience consisted of serving as pastor of several Methodist churches, the largest with a membership of 200; directing church choirs; and teaching public school music. Obama, on the other hand, had spent many years as a community organ...

These jerks have a lot in common. The voters have spoken, and the United Kingdom will leave the European Union. Or perhaps it won't. Or maybe the kingdom will divide, and Scotland and Northern Ireland will remain in the EU while the stump of England and Wales leave. Except London would rather remain. And with the promises used to convince voters to leave turning out to be mostly exaggerations, if not out right lies, maybe they'll take another vote. Or not. It's all so frustrating, so counterintuitive, so irrational, so...familiar. The Brexit campaign was led by two British politicians: Nigel Farage, leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party, and Boris Johnson, former mayor of London and probable contender to replace David Cameron as Conservative party leader and possibly prime minister. In their quest to flush the British economy, and possibly that of the rest of the Western world, down the loo, Johnson, Farage, and the campaign they spearheaded said many thi...

Do a Google image search on "Bernie Sanders," and you'll get a whole lot of this: It's the quintessential Sanders, voice raised, hand up to emphasize the point he's making, hitting on the same points he's made hundreds of times in the last year about the inequities of American politics and economics. Of course, he didn't just start campaigning for these values in April 2015, when he announced he would compete with Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination for the Presidency. He's been an activist for leftist causes since before I was born, and his message has never wavered: equal rights for all people; redistribution of wealth and power; socialism as the cure for all our nation's ills. That stubborn consistency singles Bernie out from the political class, who by and large succeed by adjusting their positions to match or at least work in sync with the shifting views of their constituents. It helps, in Bernie's case, that his entire car...

Sure, he wags his finger at everybody. It's the "shushing" that makes it offensive. Dear Bernie Believers, I admire your tenacity, your devotion, your ideological purity, your passion for transforming this gumbo of a nation into something far more just, compassionate, generous, and responsible. I would love nothing more than to wake up tomorrow and find myself living in the America of Bernie Sanders's rhetoric. With that said, some of you folks need to take a chill pill. I primarily encounter your ideas on Facebook, where some of you share prolifically about your favorite Presidential candidate. On any given day, I'll see conspiracy theories about media coverage (Why aren't Sanders rallies making headlines?), denunciations of the Democratic party's primary system (super-delegates will steal the nomination from Bernie!), schemes to get the Democratic convention to overturn the popular vote (let's use super-delegates to steal the nominat...

Quiz time! Who said it: "...Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And ... moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!" Well? Do you know it? And don't you dare take your eyes away from this blog to Google it. That would be cheating. Anybody guess it was Bernie Sanders? Don't be too embarrassed if you did; after all, he's built his campaign around positions that many in the United States consider extreme: breaking up big banks, making health care and a public university degree into universal entitlements, and paying for it all with redistributive taxation. And he's not shy about using extreme rhetoric. Here's something he actually said:  "We need a political revolution of millions of people in this country who are prepared to say 'enough is enough'!" Anybody guess Donald Trump? He certainly has said some extreme things, all of them related to defending America: waterboarding, targeting the families of suspe...

This photo of the Bernie Sanders rally appeared in the New York Times. Really. Bernie Sanders is a having a moment, and it's not hard to understand why. We who are on the left side of American politics have been living in exile for a very long time. The last President who came close to fully embodying our ideals of government serving the needs of the people was Lyndon Johnson. Yes, that Lyndon Johnson: the misogynist power broker whose rhetoric didn't stir anyone's heart. No President since Johnson has been able to produce anything approximating his massive progressive agenda. Carter and Clinton were moderate squishes, and Obama has been hamstrung by reactionary obstructionism at both the grass roots and Congressional levels. That's almost half a century of progress by fits and starts, with frequent slides backward. Speaking for myself, I'm frustrated. As happy as I am to see so many more people covered by health insurance, the byzantine mess that is Obamac...

Careful, Bernie. Winning these battles could mean everyone loses the war. Risk is my favorite board game. Just in case you've never been exposed to The Game of World Conquest, this is what it looks like: Each player has a box of plastic armies. At the beginning of the game, all players distribute their armies across the board, claiming countries in as strategically advantageous an arrangement as their opponents will permit. Once every country is occupied, players take turns invading each other's neighboring territories, trying to consolidate continents, building up frontier defenses, and eventually eliminating each other from the game. The winner is the player who controls the entire world at the end. Success comes through a combination of strategy and chance: the attacking player rolls three red dice against the defending player's two white dice. The attacker's two highest dice are matched against the defender's roll, with the higher die winning--though t...

Sure, they look like they're having fun, but just wait. This is gonna get ugly. Pity the poor politician. To succeed in politics, one must convince a majority of voters that one will enact policies congruous with those voters' wishes. One must further convince a subset of these voters that one sincerely believes in the principles behind these policies. Simultaneously, one must refrain from engaging publicly in behaviors or making comments, even in error, that these voters will find offensive. Finally, one must appear genuinely warm and friendly to one's voters, while appearing fierce and defiant, perhaps even rude, to interests they oppose. And don't even get me started on donors. It's a rare politician whose mind can be spoken to any hot microphone, and stay in the game for long. It remains to be seen how long Donald Trump can pull it off: with his billions, he's immune from donor decay, but it's extremely doubtful he can attract a real plurality, le...