Tag President

Never Stop! Never Stop Fighting Until the Fight Is Done!

Dusty 1 Comment

Hey. HEY!

Stop being sad. Stop it.

I know: I feel the same way. This was not the result I was expecting. I was growing more and more stunned all last night as I watched  the results come in, and in, and in. I watched the commentators on CNN and then on BBC being just as stunned.

We didn’t think this was possible. We didn’t think this was our country.

It was possible. It happened.

And this is still our country.

It is not The Donald’s country. He did not win us. I know he thinks he did, and at some point today I’m going to have to watch a victory speech from that smug  asshole that is likely to make me vomit. He is going to have to start lying —

Wait. I honestly can’t believe I actually wrote that.

His lies, ongoing and ever more egregious, will now focus on trying to convince people he hates that he doesn’t hate them, right before he begins working to enact policy to prove that he hates them. The hypocrisy, and the assurance of our gullibility, will be infuriating. I’m already annoyed that my Republican friends are crowing over the victory. And I know I’m going to be mad a lot over the next four years, at least.

But this is still my country. And like it or not, that rotten son of a bastard is going to be my president.

My wife says he’ll never be her President. She said she may not be able to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance for the next four years.

Good.

We all know exactly what happened: millions of people looked at their options, and chose what was, to them, the lesser of two evils. Millions more of us think they chose wrong. And millions of us are racists, and sexists, and xenophobic bigots who want walls built, refugees interned, and immigrants deported.

Not everyone who voted for him. Not everyone. Millions, yes. But not everyone.

The thing that makes this worse is that we didn’t expect it. We didn’t realize this was coming. Neither did the media. This should tell us something: the discussions I have  seen of late that say that our world is turning into an echo chamber, where we only hear what we want to hear, where we only communicate with people who agree with us  and share our views, are correct. If you settled the election based on my  own Facebook feed, then Bernie Sanders would be president. If not Cthulhu.

This,  then, is our task. Tasks. There are several.

First, we have to start listening to each other. Even to people we disagree with. We have to be better than the hypocrite that just got elected, who will ignore the needs of millions of people who were not in the demographics who supported him, whom he campaigned against. We have to understand that there are millions of people who thought Donald Trump was the lesser of two (or four) evils. Millions. Those people must be heard, because the biggest reason that they voted for Trump was, I think, that they believe they have not been heard.

So listen. Take them seriously. They are people, and they are important. Not the racists and sexists and xenophobes: fuck them. But listen to the millions of rational, genuine people who believed Trump was the best choice, or at least the least-bad.

Second, we have to fix this government. Millions who voted for Trump, and millions who voted for third party candidates, and many, many millions who did not vote, believe our government is broken. It is. We have to fix it, because Trump won’t. He will take advantage of the breaks to break it more — for one thing, he’s going to nominate a hard-right pro-life conservative to the Supreme Court, and then perhaps another, since the liberal justices are aged and unwell. That means all three branches of government will be Republican, behind Donald Trump. So we must work. We must be vigilant. We must read the news — unbiased sources, if we can find them, because if the surprise on the newsmen’s faces last night says anything, it says that the liberal media bias has some validity, that the news channels, too, are become something of an echo chamber — and we must speak out, and we must organize, and we must march, and we. Must. Vote. 59,000,000 some odd votes  for Clinton, 58,000,000 some odd votes for Trump. 330 million people in the country. 219 million eligible voters.

This is broken. We must fix it. We can fix it.

Last,we have to deal with the worst part of this. Millions of Americans are sexist and racist and bigoted xenophobes. We have, it seems, spent too long considering them anachronisms and harmless cranks, and sweeping them under the rug. We pushed them out of the echo chamber. And then they found a  candidate who was just racist enough, but not too racist — “He was talking about illegal immigrants, not Latinos! He meant Syrian refugees that might be terrorists, not all Muslims!” — and sexist enough, but not too sexist — “He was just talking. He wouldn’t actually sexually assault anyone! He’s got a beautiful wife! He hires women!” — that millions of other people could stand to vote for him.

Remember that. Not everyone who voted for Trump is racist or sexist.

But there are millions who are. And we must deal with them. Not simply demonize and push them away: deal with them. Educate them. Argue with them. Fight them, if necessary: but we cannot continue to ignore them.

 

We can do this. We can. I mean it. We were hoping that Hillary Clinton and the Democratic party could save us, and they failed. They failed. Not us. Not those of us who voted for her, and not those of us who were too disillusioned to vote for her. We did not fail.

The only way to fail is to give up trying.

So don’t give up. Fight. Fight for the country you want, and you believe we can have. Be active: learn, and speak, and act, donate, protest, canvass, join a third party and run for political office. Always oppose Trump’s plans, if he ever actually makes any real ones. Listen to the people who voted for him, who aren’t terrible people. Fix our government. Fight the evil that has reared its head all the way into the White House: the evil of racism and sexism and bigotry.

Do something. Don’t be sad: be determined.

We  can do this.

It’s Time for The Talk.

Dusty 1 Comment

All right: so let’s be clear. Donald Trump is not the problem.

I didn’t want to write about this, you know. I’m trying to keep this blog focused on lighter subjects, funny things, and on books and reading and teaching. And  the Trump campaign is not funny. It hasn’t been since Iowa. Since we found out that people actually wanted to vote for him. People actually want Donald Trump to be the President of the United States.

That’s the problem.

Look — he denies that he’s a divisive incendiary racist demogogue. Who wouldn’t? I deny that I’m an subversive lazy egotist, but that doesn’t make it any less true. And one of the more disturbing things about Donald Trump (May I call him Drumpf? If you haven’t watched John Oliver’s splendid takedown of Mr. Drumpf, do so now. Though for the sake of clarity, I’ll use his actual name.) is that it seems impossible to tell if he is aware of the part he is playing, or if he is being as genuine as he can be. Because it could be that he’s playing a part, having learned how to act in this role of reality-TV-star-and-capitalist-mogul that has brought him fame and fortune; but it also could be that he is one of those lucky souls who has fit perfectly into his specific niche, and this is just who he is. The famed book of Hitler speeches by his bedside could go either way on this.

But it doesn’t actually matter if he really believes everything he says, and if he’s aware of the effect he is having on his followers and on this country, and if that effect is really his intent or if he is, as I have been arguing since the start of his campaign, just trying to increase his name recognition because that is the foundation of his wealth, himself as brand. It doesn’t matter because Donald Trump is not the problem.

The problem is that millions of Americans want to vote for Donald Trump.

And the larger problem is that the rest of us didn’t know this, and we are not doing what we should be doing to fix this.

I’ve argued with a number of Trump fans. And there are three things going on here. The first is the economy. This is the biggest reason why people want to vote for Trump: they believe that the problem with the economy is the government spending too much money, which piles up too much debt, which will bring our country crashing to its knees, just like an individual who owes too much money to credit card companies. They believe that Trump knows how to handle that, that he will stop the government from spending so much money, and he will reduce the debt, because he’s a businessman, and businessmen understand money and how to make a profit. The second thing is that Trump is a bully, and bullies are funny. People like things that make them laugh, and Trump makes people laugh. He also has a reputation for honesty, and honesty is something that Americans can’t make up their minds about.

Seriously. Let me just pause to talk about this for a moment. I ask my students every year, in one context or another, how they feel about honesty and lying. And every year, they say they prefer honesty, but think that lying is just fine in two circumstances: when the truth would hurt someone’s feelings, and when telling the truth would get you in trouble. What does that mean? That means they prefer lies, but don’t want to admit it (So they’re lying when they say they like honesty.). Because what other reasons, apart from those two, does anyone ever have for lying? People lie to spare someone else’s feelings, and they lie to cover their own butts. That’s the vast majority of lies, and if those are okay with you, then lying is okay with you. Sure, there are people who lie for profit, and people who lie for malice; I can accept those as categories of lies that even Americans don’t like. But for the most part: we prefer to be lied to. We like it. We like having our feelings spared.

And then Trump comes along and says things that most of us would never say, and would prefer never be said about us — and somehow he is admirable for doing it. He is “honest,” and we love him for it. My best understanding of this is that people believe that politicians are so dishonest and so corrupt that they lie with every word they say; and we are tired of it. So even though Americans personally would prefer some little white lies, we want a President who would never, ever lie to us. And I get that: I would prefer an honest politician, too.

There is also an impression of courage in the willingness to stand up and say ugly things. Makes the man seem tough. Comes back to the bully thing: we admire bullies. Always have. We like Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and we like mafia dons like Al Capone and John Gotti, and we love fictional characters that follow the same pattern. We like, as another Scarface would put it, a man with balls. And the willingness to offend, particularly in an arena — politics — where offending anyone in any way is shunned, and where people work very hard to twist themselves into knots  trying to please everyone all at once, saying offensive things seems like courage.

These two issues — Trump’s business acumen as a cure for the economy, and his crass rudeness as A) a source of humor, B) a sign of honesty, and C) a sign of courage — are reasonable enough, are understandable enough. Trump isn’t the first guy to earn our admiration for his crass rudeness: pretty much every famous radio DJ and half of the talk show hosts and stand-up comedians we love are exactly the same way. Why do we like Roseanne Barr? Howard Stern? Rush Limbaugh? Simon Cowell? All the same reasons we like Trump. As for the business thing, that has roots that go back probably as far as the United States: we have always believed that there is something special, some secret knowledge, that comes with wealth; we always think that someone who knows how to make money one way knows how to make money all ways. As if that first million — or billion — dollars is a key that unlocks the Midas touch. Carly Fiorina ran on exactly the same platform, as did Herman Cain in 2012, and Mitt Romney in every campaign he ran.

But then there’s the third reason why Trump is winning. And it’s the most disturbing. The third reason is that Trump is a bigot. He denigrates and objectifies women, an attitude that you can see reflected in the malice and bile that Americans direct at Clinton. He treats Muslims and Latinos, and women, like Untouchables: fine as long as they stay in their place and know who’s boss, but needing a lesson as soon as they get uppity and start breaking the rules that are meant to keep them in their place, separate from the nice white Christian American folks (Or, in the case of women, barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.). And that message resonates. It resonates strongly. There are millions of Americans who feel exactly the same way, particularly about those two racial/ethnic groups. Never mind that illegal immigrants (the epithet Trump uses for Latinos, because that wording divides the “bad Latinos” from the “not so bad ones” — you know, the ones that stay in other countries instead of coming to this one) and legal immigrants, which comprise all racial groups and nationalities — but when Trump is talking about building a wall on the southern border, he isn’t talking about Asians coming to California on cargo ships or Europeans overstaying their visas — are actually good for the country, bringing a necessary labor force and a positive addition to the cultural mix. Never mind that Islam is no more violent or dangerous a religion than every other: that is to say, when fanatics use it to convince others to commit violence, it is a staggeringly effective tool; but if guns don’t kill people, neither does Islam. Never mind that women are better than men (That’s right. I said “better.” My wife is smarter and more talented than me. More organized, harder working, more reasonable and level-headed. Better.), and even though I personally support Sanders, I would dearly love to see Hillary Clinton debate Donald Trump. Because she’ll grind his bones to make her bread, and all he’ll be able to do is make a comment about menstruation.

The truth is, millions of Americans believe women should submit to men. The truth is, millions of Americans hate and fear Muslims and Latinos. They fear that Latinos will take over this country and make it different; and they fear that Muslims are terrorists. And they want a leader who thinks like they do.

The problem isn’t Donald Trump. It’s that despite all of the progress we have made since the Civil Rights era, despite all the political correctness and the affirmative action and everything else we have tried to do to achieve racial equality and a just society, we haven’t really done anything. We haven’t really changed anything. But we’ve convinced ourselves that we have: we elected a black President, after all. And the Ku Klux Klan is no longer hanging people by the side of the road in broad daylight. So surely we have improved; surely the problem is less now.

But it’s not. And the problem is still here because even those of us who want to try to fix the problem are not going about it the right way.

I said it above: I’ve been arguing with people who support Donald Trump. I’ve been doing it frequently, on Facebook; my students would never try to challenge a teacher on a political issue: they know how angry people get about politics, and while they don’t mind arguing with their teachers, they don’t want to make us mad for fear of grade-related consequences. And though I argue as reasonably and courteously as I can, people get angry about politics. I get angry about politics. No, that’s not true: I don’t get angry about the topics. But when someone I’m disagreeing with says, “Lol, your a retard. You need to grow the fuck up.” then I tend to get angry.

My wife can always tell. The volume and speed of my typing always goes up when I’m mad, as I start hitting the keys harder and faster. “Are you arguing again?” she asks. “Yup!” I say, pounding away. Telling someone that I don’t need to grow up, they need to learn how to think.

And that’s what we’ve been doing. Those of us who don’t support Donald Trump, who can’t believe that other people support Donald Trump, have begun every discussion with his supporters with “What the hell is wrong with you? Trump? Really? What are you thinking?!?” But they’re thinking what I listed above. They are thinking reasonable things.

You cannot convince people who are thinking reasonable things to change their minds by telling them they are unreasonable. Just like I get mad when someone says “Lol, your a retard.” That is no different from saying, “How can you support Trump? What is wrong with you!” You cannot win an argument by insulting your opponent.

To deal with Trump as a candidate, people need to treat him as a candidate: the people who support him for rational reasons need to be talked to like rational people. They need to be questioned fairly, and their answers listened to, and then, perhaps, argued with if we can do that without losing our tempers. I hope that the two people running against him (whichever wins the nomination) will behave like the long-time politicians they are, and focus on his ideas and qualifications, and refuse to go down to his level and have a bully-fight. If they can stay rational and courteous, I don’t doubt that Trump will lose the general election. The fact that gets lost in the uproar and hoopla is that he really doesn’t know what he’s talking about when it comes to running a country. Because he is not a politician, he is not a government worker, he is not an elected official: he has no experience. He does not know what he is doing. Businessmen can run businesses, but the country is not a business. But that is not our argument: that is either Bernie Sanders’s or Hillary Clinton’s argument.

What the rest of us need to focus on is going back to square one. There are bigots in this country. Millions of them. Our current system of affirmative action and token representatives (“The Oscars/Hollywood aren’t racist! Halle Berry won Best Actress in 2002!”), paying lip service to real understanding through nonsense like politically correct speech, have done nothing. If anything, we have pushed the problem underground, where it can fester and swell. And now it’s bursting out. Which means, as hard and uncomfortable and ugly as it is, now is our chance to clean out the infection.

We have to deal with racism. We have to fix this problem at the root: and the root is not Donald Trump. Donald Trump is not the problem.

We are.

Respect my authority!

Dusty Leave a comment

Okay: that title actually takes me into a different topic than I meant to talk about. So let’s see if I can tapdance my way into a confluence of ideas.

Here’s where I was going to go with this: This story about the drunken Secret Service agents who crashed into a White House barrier. Now, I’m tempted to bash law enforcement in general about this — and I think there’s grounds, because the worst part of this story, for me, is that a senior Secret Service agent overruled local law enforcement that wanted to drunk test and detain the two agents. Somebody actually told some cops to stand down and let the drunken agents drive away — and then they promptly crashed their car right into CNN (Not literally. Though that would have added a nice zest to the story. It’d be even better if they ran over Rush Limbaugh. But then they’d be heroes.). This shows the way our unquestioned “respect” for policemen has damaged our objective judgement, and therefore corrupted the police, who seem to believe they have carte blanche simply because they are police — and in Ferguson and Coney Island, indeed, they seem to have just that.

So I could go there. But I was thinking that the problem I wanted to speak to here is the lack of respect for the office of the President. Barack Obama is a President that has been called a liar, during a State of the Union address, by a U.S. Congressman. This is a President that had to grin and snark his way through another mocking round of applause when he said he had no more campaigns left to run, during his most recent State of the Union. Applause from people who wouldn’t applaud all of the good things the man has accomplished, simply because they don’t like the man. Think about that: they dislike the man so much they are unhappy when he helps the country. This is a President who has had to “work with” a Senate minority, now majority, led by a man who stated, plainly and unequivocally, that his party’s only goal in 2009 was to make sure that Barack Obama was a one-term president.

This is a level of disrespect that nobody, no dedicated professional in any field, should have to put up with. (Well — maybe Rush Limbaugh.) Let alone the President of the United States. Think about that: the man is the pinnacle of achievement, here. Out of 330 million Americans, he has done the best of us all (Except for the other four guys still living who did the same thing. No disrespect meant to Presidents Carter, Clinton, Bush, and Bush. Seriously. I think George W. Bush was terrible for our country, but the man was still the President. He managed to accomplish more than any of the rest of us. And so if he came into the room, I would stand up, and I would salute, and I would be honored to shake his hand. And I wouldn’t say to his face all the mean things I think about him. I sure as hell wouldn’t shout “LIAR!” during his speech to the entire nation.). This is what we tell kids they can do when we mean to say “You can do anything: you can do the greatest thing you could ever dream of.” And what do we say to exemplify that belief? We say You could grow up to be an astronaut, or the President of the United States.

Barack Obama did it. You didn’t. Show some goddamn respect.

Maybe it’s a stretch to say that the recent spate of absurd Secret Service screw-ups is also related to this same lack of respect, but I don’t think so. I think that’s exactly what the issue is. These drunken idiots did not think, “If I get busted for this, it will reflect badly on my office, my country, and my President.” But they should have. The Secret Service is directly linked to the President. That’s why they get respect — even respect from cowed but genuine police officers, who let drunken dipsticks go when they know better (I am presuming about the details of the law enforcement override, but the point remains regardless), and they should be glad the drunks didn’t kill anyone, and they should remember that even though the President deserves respect and consideration, and so too do his people, we are a nation of laws: and the law against driving drunk is one of those that can’t really be debated, unless you want to make it tougher.

Any road: the agents should have been cognizant of how their actions would affect their President. They should be cognizant of that every second of every day. That, as much as protection, is their job. And I think it is a lack of respect that leads to the slackening of personal standards of behavior, in this case. What else? Maybe that LEO carte blanche I was speaking of, and maybe it’s the simple rise of idiocy — but I doubt it. Drunk driving is not quite the same thing as “protecting the citizens,” which the cops in Ferguson, and Coney Island, and LA’s Skid Row, could tell themselves they were doing; and though every generation seems dumber than the last, these were senior agents, so not young enough to really claim “Electrolytes are what plants crave.”

No: I think the point is that they don’t take their job seriously enough. And the reason they don’t is because the entire country has apparently given up on the idea that our President is, for the time that he is in office, the very best this nation has to offer. He is our leader. He is the one out in front, for all of us.

Show some respect.

 

And then there’s this: as soon as I typed that title (My first thought was to use the line “Show Dick some respect!” which is from one of my all-time favorite movies, but it doesn’t work here, since I’m serious, and nobody in this situation is named Dick. More’s the pity.), I was reminded of the fact that today I had to deal with a class that has been disrespecting me as a teacher. This is not a new thing, but it also isn’t that common for me, compared to many of my colleagues: my students like me, and so it is easier to command, and retain, their ostensible respect (Ostensible because they’re teenagers. They don’t respect anyone. Just ask them.) for me than it is for people who work hard and teach well, but maybe aren’t as popular as I am. But still, all it really takes is a class where the good kids are quieter — in this case, the best students are all girls, who are, because this is America, generally quieter and far less confrontational in a classroom than are boys — and some combination of indifference, perversity, or circumstances. And in this class, I have a student who has absolutely no respect for the educational process, who thinks of school as a series of boring hoops that must be jumped through in order to make money, and who is entirely up front about this opinion; and I have a group of students who are computer/math folk, and don’t care much about English; and I have a student who flirts with anything female, during class, before class, after class, and who survives by dimples alone. And the class is the last of the day. It’s enough to make them push a little more than usual to do nothing, every day — which to me, even though I know it is only teenaged laziness, still shows how little they respect what I do, or the effort I put into teaching them — and to try to get me to break rules for them, to let them go early, or let them out of class, or just — watch movies and stuff. Which shows their lack of respect for literature, and for rules. There’s more, too, but that’s enough to make the point.

The point? This shouldn’t be an issue. I shouldn’t have students talking when I talk. I shouldn’t have students packing their stuff up and trying to move towards the door while I’m still talking. I shouldn’t have students groaning when I say it’s time to work, and yelling out, “Can’t we just do nothing instead?” (Okay, maybe that last one is universal. But it’s still annoying. And disrespectful.) This stuff shouldn’t happen. But it does: and the reason is the same. They may like me personally, they may think (Most of them do) that there is value in education, and that teachers deserve consideration for our efforts; but there is a pervasive lack of respect for the entire endeavor of public education in this country, and especially in this state, and the kids pick up on it, and act accordingly.They may know that they shouldn’t talk while I talk — but they don’t really understand why, and so when push comes to shove, when they have something to say while I happen to be trying to teach, then they go ahead and say what they wanted to say.

Those Secret Service agents may have known that they really shouldn’t drink and drive — but they didn’t know why, or else they wouldn’t have done it. (They may have known, but ignored the reason. But that’s not better.) They should have known that their actions not only show respect, but help to create an atmosphere of respect. It’s a positive feedback loop: show respect, and you make respect more common.

My problem, in the end, is this: I have absolutely no idea how to fix this. When that class came in today, I said nothing at all to them. Because what could I say?

How do I teach them to respect me? How do I get them to listen to me when they’re too busy thinking of ways they can get out of my class?

And where the hell is this all going to end?