Midlife Meditation

Torch-bearing "Unite the Right" bigots showing their true colors. "How does legitimate white pride look?" Tony Peterson, one of the people I most respect, posted this question on Facebook twelve hours ago. It's generated a great deal of conversation in that forum, to which I contributed one short response:   "White pride" is for those who don't know or, worse, ignore history. White shame is where pale-skinned Americans like me need to start. I posted an essay yesterday about how integral racism has been to the history of the Americas, with a line traceable to the first European explorers and colonists to set foot in the New World. Today's essay draws on much more recent history: specifically, the direct line of racist policies that runs from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump. Modern racism begins in the 1960s with the passage of civil rights legislation during the Johnson Administration. That's when, for the first time since Rec...

A stunt, not a joke: Donald Trump serves up some verbal abuse prior to shaving the head of WWE chairman Vince McMahon, 2007. "When they go low, we go high." --Michelle Obama, July 26, 2016 Unfortunately, in a cage match, going high means exposing your soft underbelly. We've all heard and read it so many times in the last six weeks it's getting tiresome: we're grief stricken, horrified, furious, depressed, terrified at what the next four years will do to our nation and our world. How did this happen? Are the American people really that stupid? Is there any way to reverse it? Whose fault is it? Why, why, why, why, why? There are plenty of answers to that question. We can roll out tired tropes about voter suppression, the rural bias of the electoral college, FBI collusion, Russian influence, inadequate outreach to the working class and evangelicals, the cyclical longing of the American people for change, and on and on and on. But there's another, more si...

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...

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...

Thanks, voters. Now we get to look at this guy's face even more. Old people suck. I am, at this point, talking about my own generation, as well as the one that came before. Last night’s election was dominated by two generational cohorts: 45-60, 60 and up. Demographically, these are the older voters, the ones who dominate midterm elections, and who are far more likely than the younger cohorts to vote Republican. These are the people who just displaced Democrats from Senate leadership. They also increased the Republican majority in the House of Representatives, returned Scott Brown to the governorship of Wisconsin, and overall made it a wonderful night for Karl Rove, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, and anyone else proudly displaying an elephant logo on his or her lapel. All this despite Congress having the lowest approval rating in many generations, in huge part because of Republican obstructionism, and an economy in better shape than it has been in decades, in large part b...