UPON WHAT MEAT DOTH THIS OUR CEASAR FEED . . .

 "Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed...?

The corrupting effect of power has been recognized for centuries:

Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" metaphorically (and perhaps presciently) posed the question in terms of a tyrant's diet; with Lord Acton's famous aphorism adding the further warning that "absolute power corrupts absolutely."

                                                                   Julius Ceasar

Credit: Vatican Museum

Rarely, if ever, in the American experience have the consequences of unbridled power in the hands of an ego-driven, would-be tyrant, been as readily apparent as in the unhinged actions of Donald Trump in Tuesday night's very un-Presidential debate.

While the President's tendency toward personally denigrating opponents, demeaning rivals, dismissing critics, denying inconvenient facts and demanding 'absolute loyalty' from traditionally independent agencies and individuals has been well known, and even celebrated by his loyal followers, his behavior in the so-called debate reached a new and threatening pitch in Cleveland. It was as though any limits observed by normal individuals do not and should not be applied to President Trump. Bullying both his opponent and the moderator, Chris Wallace, and refusing to respect even the most minimal rules of courtesy or timekeeping, Trump verbally 'invaded' Mr. Biden's space, finding a way to loom over the proceedings much as he physically loomed over Hillary Clinton in their 2016 debate.

                                                     Donald Trump--official portrait

Credit: Gage Skidmore

Nearly four years into his presidency, having again and again been enabled in his assaults on accepted democratic norms by his political protectors in Congress, and following his success in avoiding any consequences from either the Special Counsel's investigation or his impeachment, Mr. Trump has clearly concluded that he really can say or do whatever he wants.

A somewhat shocking rhetorical assertion by a flamboyant candidate about being able to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without losing political support has by now become a terrifying reality in the position of the most powerful and dangerous individual in the country, and possibly the world. Refusing to repudiate white supremacists while signaling a right-wing militia group to 'stand down and stand by' activates his rhetoric in real life and death terms.

Coupled with his repeated and direct assaults on the integrity of the upcoming election, while refusing to agree in advance to a peaceful transition of power should he lose, he is further raising doubts and stoking fears about the reliability of the most fundamental processes of democratic governance. Protected by enablers like Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell and increasingly by enforcers such as Bill Barr, the President's sense of invulnerability, omniscience and entitlement has only magnified.

Trump's willingness to use any and every resource, foreign and domestic, to gain power has never been in question from birtherism to the dark arts of social media manipulation at home to the use of American foreign policy to seek-out 'dirt' on his opponents abroad.

As President, with the enormous resources of the federal government at his disposal, he has shown he will fight to remain in office, seemingly without concern about any potential cost to the country.

What was most nakedly displayed on Tuesday's debate stage was, to borrow Shakespeare's terms, Trump's 'diet'. It was as disturbing an exposure as most Americans have ever experienced to the very consequences a ruthless drive for power can bring. It was exactly what our founders, political philosophers (as well as psychiatrists) have warned against over the years.

Power does corrupt, and a stark vision of its workings was delivered to all of us, isolated in our homes, without commercials.

-----

Les Adler

THE SLEEP OF REASON

The artist and Chinese political dissident, Ai Weiwei's recent warning that "Abandonment of rational thinking leads to a collapse in which fear and joy, ignorance and reason, all blow in the wind" is a terrifyingly accurately depiction of this moment in time with America's President and his followers denying reality and furiously tweeting in the dark.

The Sleep of Reason by Francisco Goya

Credit: Brooklyn Museum

Years of attacks on scientific knowledge, rationality and expertise of all kinds, particularly relating to critical health, environmental and climate-related issues have, tragically, set the stage for just such a destabilized and destructive state of mind. As a consequence, today, with a dangerous pandemic sweeping across the land, and one hundred and fifty thousand Americans already dead, even the most minimally-invasive and 'reasonable' steps to mitigate the disaster such as mask-wearing and social-distancing continue to be met with powerful surges of irrational fantasies and fears, leaving the rest of us, in Ai Weiwei's imagery, and Bob Dylan's prophetic words from the 1960's, "blowing in the wind."

So deep is this 'sleep' of un-reason that violations and distortions of ordinary rules of law and governance, institutional standards, decorum and even measurable facts seemingly pass unnoticed and un-opposed in the night. Swirling in a maelstrom of Orwellian double-speak, "alternative facts," cries of "fake news," conspiracy theories and a continuing flood of blatant lies and denials, the reasoned process of discourse essential to the functioning of democracy becomes muddied and impossible to sustain.

While the President's 'gut feelings' about untested cures and virus prevention are given equal weight against demonstrable scientific evidence, leading scientists and epidemiologists are demeaned and their voices silenced. Widespread national protests in favor of Black Lives and against police violence become distorted into exaggerated and menacing projections of 'anarchism' in the streets. At the point where the most fundamental democratic acts of census taking, voting and delivering the mail provoke radically fearful and polarized reactions, the narcotic has fully taken hold.

Reason seems to have been fully detached from the requirements of fact. Propaganda, passion and sheer misinformation are free to activate the latent fears and anxieties in the mind of a paralyzed and destabilized public. Faith in the electoral process erodes, and in an American first, a sitting President openly proclaims that he might not accept the results of an election that goes against him! 

In just such a moment, some threshold is crossed. It could be the point when the unprecedented intrusion of federal paramilitary units into American cities against the wishes of state and local officials in the name of preserving 'law and order' becomes more than just one more fleeting outrage in the news cycle. Perhaps it will be the moment when the fever breaks.

For there is a point when sleepers do awaken. At times they are shaken into consciousness by the very intensity of the fearful specters unleashed in their own minds; at others by encounters with the rough and unforgiving edge of external reality against which even their fantasies are powerless.

"El sueño de la razon prodúce monstros" (The sleep of reason produces monsters), the Spanish painter Francisco Goya inscribed in his famous etching more than two centuries ago during a similar collapse of rationality in the chaotic aftermath of the French Revolution. Yet the lesson of history is that, inevitably, the darkly demonic forms, wildly exaggerated images, fears and nightmares will fade in the bright light of day: reason reasserted. In a partial reframe of Dr. Martin Luther King's famous words: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward reason."

lka

COUNTDOWN TIMER--HOW LONG UNTIL WE CAN VOTE TRUMP OUT?

HERE'S THE EXACT TIME 
TO ELECTION DAY, 2020

Timer credit: timeanddate.com

CHECK YOUR REGISTRATION.

IF YOU'RE NOT REGISTERED, DO IT NOW.

AND PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE VOTE!

WHAT IF WE HAD A SOCIOPATHIC NARCISSISTIC AS PRESIDENT IN A TIME OF CRISIS?

If, God forbid, we had a sociopathic narcissist as President of the United States in a time of grave crisis, we might get a tweet like this:

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

The LameStream Media is the dominant force in trying to get me to keep our Country closed as long as possible in the hope that it will be detrimental to my election success. The real people want to get back to work ASAP. We will be stronger than ever before!

As usual with Trump's tweets, there's a huge amount of nastiness, divisiveness, us-vs-them-ism, and a whopper or two to unpack. However, let's just focus on ". . . in the hope that it will be detrimental to my election success."

In other words, what we do about the coronavirus pandemic should be determined by how it might impact him. That is pure narcissism.

Epidemiologists--experts who devote their lives to studying, understanding and modeling epidemics and pandemics--tell us that stringent steps now can beat this virus down to a manageable level in a month or two--as the Chinese and a few other countries have managed to do. That would allow our health system to continue to function, and researchers to develop treatments or a vaccine. This difficult-but-necessary choice might mean thousands of deaths in the US.

They also tell us that getting everyone back to work or "back to church" prematurely will let the virus expand exponentially. This is a concept Trump doesn't and probably can't understand, but maybe some of his followers can. Exponential means that today's 75,000 cases and 1000 deaths in a few months could be multiplied not by 10 or 100 or 1000, but possibly by 10,000. That's right, unleashed to rage unchecked through the US population, this coronavirus could kill 10,000,000 people.

You don't have to believe me. You can research this for yourself in these two crystal-clear articles:

https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-people-will-die-f4d3d9cd99ca

https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-the-hammer-and-the-dance-be9337092b56

Any normal person faced with the choice between his own needs and the potential death of millions of people would put all those lives first. But a sociopath wouldn't. Much less a sociopathic narcissist.

But we'd never elect someone like that as President. And even if we did, sensible people, the "adults in the room," would step in to protect us. After all, we have the Constitution, Congress and the  Courts--all those carefully crafted checks and balances--to save us. Right?

Right?

------

REA

DID RAY BRADBURY FORESEE DONALD TRUMP?

Ever since election day, 2016, I've joked about how I (and everyone reading this now) were bumped into an alternative universe, one where Trump became president instead of Clinton. Here's how it happened:

Credit: ABE  Books

A group of us were vacationing in San Luis Potosi, Mexico on election day, 2016. I got permission from the management of the hotel we were staying in to connect my laptop to the large-screen television in their breakfast room so that we could livestream US channels and watch the election results come in.

We settled in with some drinks and were chatting happily as we watched the first returns get posted. As you remember, the polsters and pundits were quite sure that Hillary Clinton would win, and those early returns seemed to point the same way.

Then, without warning, a huge storm blew up. Rain was pouring down, a blast of wind smashed open an outside door and sheets of water blew in, flooding the floor. The downpour continued along with blasts of thunder and lightning, and within a few minutes the electricity and the wifi feed went off.

The hotel staff lit some candles to give us light, and we hunkered down for the next hour or so until the storm gradually abated and the power and the internet came back on.

You guessed it. By the time we could tune into the election results again, the votes from the midwest were coming in and Trump was winning. The storm, it seemed, had blown us into a different universe.

Now I realize that my feeling of having been transported into an alternate world may have been seeded by a science fiction story that I read nearly 60 years ago.

With the help of the internet, it didn't take long to find the story, called "A Sound of Thunder," wirtten by Ray Bradbury and first published in Collier's Magazine on June 28, 1952. I read it a few years later in a collection of Bradbury's short stories, The Golden Apples of the Sun, published in 1953.

The story is set sometime after the year 2055, one day after a US presidential election in which Keith,  a man who " . . . will make a fine President of the United States," defeated the dangerous Deutscher,

"If Deutscher had gotten in," Bradbury writes, "we'd have the worst kind of dictatorship. There's an anti everything man for you, a militarist, anti-Christ, antihuman, anti-intellectual."

We learn that time travel is now possible, and that Eckels, the story's protagonsit, has contracted with  a company that will take him on a  hunting excursion back to the age of the dinosaurs with the aim of bagging a Tyrannosaurus Rex. It's explained that the company has targeted a particular T. Rex that would have died by natural causes seconds later, so as not to change anything in the past. His hunting guides also emphasize that Eckels absolutely must stay on a floating metal pathway, again to avoid making an inadvertent change to the past that could reverberate in unpredictable ways back to the future.

Unfortunately, when confronted by the actual tyrannosaur, Eckels panics and stumbles off the metal path back to the safety of the time machine.

When they get back to the present, things are subtly, subliminally different. In particular, a sign that had been written in good English before the trip back in time is now written in a crude pidgin. Eckels scrapes the mud off his boots and finds a single crushed butterfly. Bradbury writes:

"It fell to the floor, an exquisite thing, a small thing that could upset balances and knock down a line of small dominoes and then big dominoes and then gigantic dominoes, all down the years across Time. Eckels' mind whirled. It couldn't change things. Killing one butterfly couldn't be that important! Could it?"

Eckels fearfully asks who won yesterday's election. The company representative laughs and says, "You joking? You know very well. Deutscher, of course! Who else? Not that fool weakling Keith. We got an iron man now, a man with guts!"

For me, it took a huge thunderstorm. For Bradbury, all that was needed was a butterfly.*

-----

*For a discussion of how Bradbury's story may have contributed to the famous "butterfly effect," from chaos theory, check out this Wikipedia entry.

-----

Robert Adler

THE PHONEY WAR

Everything seems the same. Thanksgiving has come and gone; tables were set, friends and family gathered, turkeys carved and served. Weddings are being planned, babies are being born, children play in the schoolyard. People rush to work, friends chat over lunch, lovers embrace. Life goes on. But, for the 64 million of us who voted for Hillary Clinton—actually for all of us--nothing is the same, or will be.

Norman Rockwell, Freedom from Want, 1943

Credit: Normal Rockwell Museum

Gandalf's Gallery

I think I know now what people across Europe must have felt during the eight months of the Phoney War. Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and on September 3 the UK and France declared war. But between then and May 10, 1940, when the Nazi blitzkrieg blasted into France, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, life went on as if nothing had changed. A second world war was looming, there were weighty conclaves and the pondering of plans in London, Paris and Berlin, forces were marshaled and moved, but during those strange, tense months, nothing much happened. And then, as Winston Churchill had prophesied to a wary America a year before in his brilliant speech "The Defence of Freedom and Peace," the lights went out.

German troops, Paris, June, 1940

Credit: Bundesarchiv

Like then, things appear normal. But in New York and Washington, angry, arrogant men and women are circling like wolves, salivating as their time draws near. For them, life is a zero-sum game that they have won. That makes the rest of us losers, and in their world losers deserve no more than scorn. Women and children, Muslims and Mexicans, journalists and Jews--and who knows who else--beware, because the knives are out.

The newly empowered threaten that undesirables will be registered and tracked, millions deported and the press whipped to heel. People will need to watch what they say. Torture-lovers will be re-empowered; drillers, extractors and polluters will run free, climate and environment be damned. Schools must be privatized. Obamacare must go, along with Medicare, Planned Parenthood and women's right to choose. Discrimination by Christians against the LGBTQ community or others will be legalized along with discrimination against Muslims. NASA will be ordered not to monitor the Earth, but the NSA will monitor us all. The rich will have their tax cuts and sooner or later the deficit hawks will have theirs. We know who will bleed; it will not be the billionaires.

The die was cast on November 8. This strange, tense time--our phoney war--will end with the inauguration of Donald Trump on January 20. The event will be celebrated and reported as if he were just another president. If you believe that, then you'd best hope that God does protect the innocent.

Never have Benjamin Franklin's words on leaving the Constitutional Convention in 1787 rung truer. "Well, Doctor, what have we got--a republic or a monarchy?" a woman asked. "A republic," Franklin replied, "If you can keep it."

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For another commentary on what to expect after Trump's inauguration, click here.

SOBERING STATISTIC--ONE IN SIX AMERICANS PLANS TO BUY A GUN BEFORE THE ELECTION

Steven Rosenfeld, author and political analyst for AlterNet, posted an attention-getting piece today about the threat of violence during or after the coming presidential election. Rosenfeld's post is well worth reading.

Gun Show, Houston, Texas: Credit Wikipedia

As it becomes clearer that Trump is going to lose, he's been increasing his rhetoric claiming that the election is rigged against him, and some high-profile backers like radio host ex-congressman Joe Walsh have not-so-subtly called for a violent response should he lose. With Trump repeatedly claiming that there are millions of potentially fraudulent registered voters, and some followers talking about policing voting places, there's certainly a possibility of intimidation of some voters. And with 31 states allowing firearms to be carried openly, and 13 more allowing open-carry with a special permit, the possibility of violence at voting places can't be ignored.

The rhetoric is having its predictable effect, at least among Trump's core backers, with more than 40% saying they won't recognize Hillary Clinton as the legitimate president.

According to a USA Today poll, half of likely voters expect violence on election day. Let's hope they're wrong.

HEADS I WIN, TAILS YOU LOSE--TRUMP'S VERSION OF DEMOCRACY

In keeping with Trump's incredible refusal during the third debate to commit to accepting the November 8 election results, check out this highly scientific poll on his website.

In case the "poll" is taken down, here's a screenshot:

Credit: Walter Einenkel

To end any "suspense," Donald Trump does not "get" democracy. 

Home of the Brave

 HOME OF THE BRAVE

Dear Mitt,

I’d like you to tell me

when

you became so afraid

of the world

you actually made

where mortgaged lives

polluted skies

endangered dreams

denial schemes, all slipped

half buried beneath your bottom line.

My country tis of thee,

sweet land of voter ID

land of wall street greed

purveyors of endless need

more ostrich than eagle 

head down, furiously

kicking sand into the gears of change

facing facts with fatuous fictions

Beamed right

at that quivering center 

where old fears and rusty saws

are sharpened

for deeper cuts  

Not well-funded banks

and unfunded wars

but right at those oh so

soft and tempting organs

where the most vulnerable among us live.

Land of the hedge fund’s pride 

land where one-percenters reside

on every gated mountainside,

let freedom

from regulation ring

and rally round that highly leveraged flag boys

which 47% of us don’t deserve to own

even

one thread,

one stripe,

one star.

YouTube version of Dear Mitt