The Trump-Biden Debates

Posted on September 18, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, September 18, 2020

The Biden-Trump debates, the first of which occurs nine days from now, will not be as eloquent or long-winded as the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, but they will be equally momentous. They will also be ironically similar in some ways, more so in light of Attorney General William Barr’s bizarre comparison of slavery and mask wearing.

They won’t be eloquent because no debate involving Donald Trump can be. They won’t be as focused, because it’s impossible to stay centered when one participant doesn’t respect truth and shamelessly says anything he believes will throw his opponent off his game. If you’ve ever done any formal debating, you know the worst kind of opponent is an undisciplined, ill-informed one. My father used to say, “Never argue with an idiot.”

Trump will do what he bragged to Bob Woodward about: attempt to enrage Biden and keep him off message, rambling incoherently and sounding like a professional agitator. Biden will have to avoid taking the bait every time Trump lies, exaggerates, or makes wild accusations. We won’t hear eloquence because Trump is a terrible public speaker who can’t complete an English sentence unless he reads it from a teleprompter, and Biden, as knowledgeable and well-prepared as he is, will stumble over a word now and then when he is impassioned.

The similarities between the debates are the issues. Stephen Douglas supported the status quo, a nation split asunder by slavery. Whether or not he believed slavery was a good thing, he argued passionately for the Missouri Compromise which sought to draw a line on the map between states which could employ slavery and those that couldn’t, the 1858 version of blue states versus red ones. Lincoln famously argued that “a house divided against itself cannot stand,” and although he lost the 1858 Illinois Senate election to Douglas, he was proven right three years later, when the Confederacy attempted to secede from the rest of the United States, shortly after he was inaugurated as president.

Therein lies the ironic parallelism between then and now, ironic because the Republican party of Lincoln was established to fight against slavery and were accused of being seditionist radicals; in this scenario they were the Blues. Biden and Trump will face off in much the same way. Trump will continue his attempts to divide the nation because he knows that partisan gridlock offers his best chance of victory in November. Biden will argue that the only way to move forward to defeat the pandemic and restore the economy is to work across the aisle and seek common ground.

Biden and Trump showed us how they will approach the first debate last night. Biden did a Presidential Town Hall at a drive-in theater in Scranton, Pennsylvania in front of a small masked audience with diverse political views, though Democrats outnumbered Republicans. Trump ranted in front of thousands of packed-in supporters who were in close quarters for hours making no attempt to maintain safe distances and mostly eschewing masks. Trump pumped up his angry supporters, lying and making wild, unfounded accusations, sounding incoherent much of the time. Biden answered questions from voters, staying relevant and sounding well-prepared, while attacking Trump’s record as irresponsible and “nearly criminal.”

When they debate face-to-face, it should be good theater for most of us. The real target audience will be the small percentage of voters who remain undecided by then. If Trump causes Biden to melt down, he’ll be able to argue that Biden doesn’t have the mental capacity to be president. But if Biden stays on message and goes nose-to-nose with Trump as neither Hillary Clinton nor fifteen Republican candidates could in 2016, Trump’s goose will be cooked.

Nationally, most Americans view Biden as the anti-Trump, the moral equivalent of a vaccine against selfishness and incompetence that are placing our country at risk to explosive internal forces and foreign intervention. The nation succumbed to those forces in 1860 and nearly destroyed itself as Lincoln fought for our moral future. The country is very much in the same situation today. Our institutions are stronger, but it would be foolish to assume they are unassailable. There are a lot of heavily armed angry people in today’s America, and the coming election has the potential to be a powder keg if it isn’t unambiguously resolved. The solution is to vote early and make sure everyone you know does. Trump cannot win against a massive turnout.

Donald Trump will be more divisive than ever if he continues to trail in the polls. But one thing might restrain him. An election tied up in legal challenges could result in Trump’s worst nightmare. If there is no clear winner by January 20, 2021, Nancy Pelosi will be sworn in as president.

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Campaign Strategy

Posted on September 15, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, September 15, 2020

If you watched any news last week you probably saw coverage of Donald Trump’s indoor rally in Nevada. You probably also saw a maskless, sixtiesh guy wearing a red MAGA hat standing shoulder-to-shoulder, hip-to-hip with hundreds like him saying “I’m not afraid. God takes care of me. If I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die.” Let’s parse that for a moment.

He obviously was aware of the risk of being packed in with thousands of other sardines for hours. Nevada’s state health website (nvhealthresponse.nv.gov) reports that the positivity test rate for COVID-19 in that state is currently over 10%. If 3,000 typical Nevadans attended the rally, we would expect 300 of them sprinkled through the crowd to be carrying the virus. But people who attend Trump’s rallies are not typical. Because they reject mask wearing and tend to ignore social distancing, their infection rate is almost certainly higher. It’s a virtual certainty that those 300-plus Trumpers infected many more around them. We’ll know how many in about ten days.

When Trump was asked whether he felt safe at the rally, he said he was up on a stage far from the raucous, yelling, sweating, heavily-breathing crowd, so nothing could infect him. He said it with total disregard for the people he was putting at risk by encouraging them to be there. One doctor characterized it as negligent homicide, but that’s not fair – it was clearly premeditated.

Last evening, Bob Woodward played one of his Trump interview tapes for Stephen Colbert, in which Trump talked about a meeting in the oval office. When someone sneezed, Trump related, “we all bailed out of there. Me too,” and he was laughing as he said that. Going all the way back to the bone spurs that exempted Trump from the Vietnam draft, he’s more than willing to brag about his own self-preservation. Does he realize how it sounds that he treats his own followers like food tasters, or does he think they love it because by some convoluted logic it makes him sound tough?

To summarize: the unafraid guy in the MAGA hat sounded like a moron. The President sounded gleeful that the crowd was populated by so many other morons.

You may have also heard about two billionaires each promising to spend $100 million of their own money on the campaign. Michael Bloomberg said he would spend $100 million in Florida to assure that Trump doesn’t win there. Trump didn’t say how he’d spend his, but it doesn’t matter, because he was lying. The suddenly cash-poor Trump campaign hasn’t moved the polls at all with its post-convention television ad blitz, so someone drafted a letter to all Republicans begging them for money, suggesting gifts of $2,020. Catchy, isn’t it?

Although Trump signed the letter, we know someone else wrote it for him because it was reasonably literate and used words not contained in Trump’s sixth-grade vocabulary. One of my Republican friends was so disgusted by it, he offered it to me as “blog fodder”.

This gist of the letter is that if every Republican doesn’t ante up to help Make America Great Again, Democrats will do terrible things like repeal Trump’s wonderful tax cut; you know, the one that tossed his supporters a bone of a few hundreds dollars in savings that will go away in a few years while he and his wealthy donors will continue to make more billions with no sunset clause. But there’s much more.

Those damn Democrats will implement “Big Government Socialist Schemes” and job-killing environmental regulations, unfortunately not in time to prevent the entire western United States from burning down. They’ll also defund every police department, abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and promote open borders. They’ll even destroy monuments to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and defame Mount Rushmore. No kidding – the letter really says all that.

Just this once, let’s be clear. Except for a few crazies, We the People who believe Donald Trump is unfit to lead the country LOVE our police, George Washington, and Honest Abe. We LOVE the idea that every American is entitled to affordable health care, even the morons, and absolutely LOVE capitalism and HATE socialism. We LOVE secure borders, but we HATE seeing children in cages. We also LOVE our planet which will likely be the only one our grandchildren will have to live on.

Not coincidentally, Joe Biden feels that way, too.

I agree with one thing in Trump’s letter. If you care who is elected in the midst of the pandemic and our economic crisis, and you can afford it, your money will help. That’s why my wife and I contribute to the Biden campaign every few weeks.

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

A Nine-Eleven Survivor’s Perspective on 2020

Posted on September 12, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, September 12, 2020

I’ve never met Harry personally, but I intend to as soon as it’s safe to be with other people again. I have it on good authority that it will be worth the effort. My sister, who has considered him a dear friend for decades, describes Harry as a wonderful man with an indestructible positive spirit.

On September 11, 2001, the middle-aged husband and father of three headed for his office near the top of Tower #1 of the World Trade Center. As we learned later, to our great dismay, a flaw in the construction of the towers caused the elevator shafts to turn into blazing infernos when the planes hit. Harry was in an elevator when the flames turned his car into a fireball.

He survived, barely. He suffered through years of painful skin grafts to repair the burns he sustained – nearly his entire body had been on fire. But it wasn’t just the outside of his body that was injured. His vocal chords and lungs were also seriously damaged. Harry’s physical recovery was miraculous, but perhaps even more remarkable was that his spirit and loving attitude toward others survived intact. If it had been me, I don’t think I’d have been able to remain as positive as Harry.

Here’s what Harry wrote to his family and friends yesterday.

Every year on this day I receive with gratitude phone calls, emails and texts from friends and family expressing love and gratitude that I’m still here, that I survived the life-threatening injuries I suffered on 9/11. Every year I remember with sadness the dear friends and colleagues I lost that day, and with equal sadness think about the spouses, parents, children and other loved ones they and so many others left behind. Thank you to those of you who call, those who write, and those who just keep me in your thoughts. This day is important.

But this year is different. I wondered as 9/11 approached this year why it seemed so much less consequential than in years past. Today, as I reflected on the meaning of this day and its place in the life of our nation, I understood.

On 9/11, we lost almost 3,000. So far this year we have lost almost 200,000.

On 9/11 the cause was the hatred of a far-away terrorist group. This year the cause is the indifference or willful ignorance of our own leadership.

On 9/11 our leadership faced up to tragedy. This year, our leadership has tried to deny it.

On 9/11 our leadership united us. This year they have stoked division.

9/11 matters. This year matters more.

I honor the memory of all who died on 9/11. But the best way to honor them is to live in the present and build a better world for the loved ones they left behind, a world that is more compassionate, a world that is more concerned about our obligations to each other as children of the same god. We can try to do that in every aspect of our lives, but this year, we have a once every four-years opportunity to honor that obligation in a powerful way, and given what is at stake, almost a once in a lifetime opportunity. In 2016, so many said, “my vote doesn’t matter.”

It matters! Vote!

—————————————————————————————–

See why I can’t wait to meet Harry?

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Why the Woodward Tapes Matter

Posted on September 11, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, September 11, 2020

In 1974, the United States lived through what felt like its worst existential threat since the Civil War. We’d defeated the British twice early in our history, the Spanish in the 1890s, and been instrumental in achieving victory in both World Wars. But those were external threats. Americans always react well under attack, (today is nine-eleven,) but when the threat is internal, we work against ourselves.

The Civil War nearly destroyed the country because half of our great, great grandparents believed it was acceptable to base our economy on slavery. The 1974 crisis was preceded by a decade-long war that wasn’t supported by a majority of Americans and that might never have expanded beyond border skirmishes except for a falsified report of a naval battle in the Gulf of Tonkin that never happened. After 58,000 deaths and years of street demonstrations, Richard Nixon’s attempt to rig the 1972 election and the subsequent lies and cover-up of the felonies committed on his behalf were the breaking point.

We were told Vietnam was a critical domino in the Cold War, based on the wrongheaded notion that North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Min was a puppet of Communist China; if we didn’t hold the line there, all of Asia would fall to China and the Soviet Union. But Ho had no allegiance to China. After decades of fighting against French colonization, which the United States took over by proxy, Ho wanted a united Vietnam free of interference from outsiders.

The war and the Watergate scandal were based on lies, deception, and government cover-ups that cost Lyndon Johnson a near-certain second term. But after months of denials and constitutional crises, Nixon might have gotten away with his unlawful actions, leaving the country in even more disarray than it is today, if not for the White House Tapes on which we heard him incriminate himself.

Journalist Bob Woodward played a major role in uncovering both the Watergate scandal and the lies told to Americans about the war by three presidents, two of whom were Democrats and one a Republican. The state of country in 1974 wasn’t about political ideology as much as deception and lust for power. In addition to the loss of life and the maiming of tens of thousands of Americans, they forever tarnished our image in the rest of the world and nearly wrecked our economy.

The state of our nation in 2020 is eerily similar. As we approach the most important election in our lifetimes, Woodward is again a major player. Most Americans realize Trumpism is a synonym for demagoguery, lies, and lack of respect for laws and the Constitution. Yet, our election system, based on an Electoral College which shouldn’t have survived the nineteenth century could enable another Trump victory.

By appealing to the worst of our natures, Donald Trump convinced two in five Americans that making America great again means turning the country over to White Supremacists, ending immigration, and trusting the good will of unfettered billionaire capitalists to guard the interests of working people. A lie that outrageous can only be perpetrated on a society that has completely lost its way and forgotten how we got here. It’s called decadence, and it has destroyed every civilization that imagined it could dominate the world.

Trump destroyed the Republican Party because its former standard bearers, who understood what Trump was the day he walked down that escalator, lacked the integrity and will to defend their principles. He’s trying to derail the Democrats by claiming they will lead us into an era of socialism in which white people will cower in their bunkers to be safe from black, brown, and yellow people. If not for the coronavirus, he might have succeeded.

The pandemic was Trump’s chance to prove that he cared more about America than himself. Many of us believed he failed miserably from the start. He lied about the virus for almost nine months because he knew the truth could panic the financial markets and cost him re-election. Until now, his ability to twist truth into an alternate reality has kept his base together.

That’s why Bob Woodward’s interview tapes matter. Trump’s own words on tape provide indisputable evidence that he knew how deadly COVID was in January, and that he made a conscious decision to mislead the nation. He failed to take timely actions that could have prevented the deaths of hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of Americans. He knew and he didn’t care as long as he was tested and protected, and he remained in power.

A third of Americans still believe that’s all fake news, but Woodward’s tapes should finally make many of them see the light. The most reliable models predict between 250,000 and 300,000 COVID deaths by Election Day. All of those people have families, friends, and business associates to whom they matter. How can any American hear Trump’s voice on those tapes and not judge him responsible?

Lying to Americans in ways that will surely kill so many of them is a crime that rivals the Nazi concentration camps. It’s time Trump was held accountable.

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Trump and the Military

Posted on September 8, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, September 8, 2020

Trump’s relationship with the military has disparate elements, but that’s not to say it’s complicated. It’s really quite easy to read. It began with the Vietnam-era draft. Due to the unpopularity of the war, the Government instituted a birthdate-based lottery system. Each year, every date in the calendar was put into a randomized bingo machine. Every American male over eighteen cringed as numbers were drawn. If your number came up early, you were most likely going to Vietnam. It was Russian Roulette with a 365-chamber revolver. On the other hand, what could have been fairer than random selection?

Except that random selection excluded people with deferments (employment, marital status, school-related) and those with enough money and political influence to buy their way out. I had a deferment because of my job as a NASA and defense contractor. I was ecstatic over not being shipped out to Nam, but I still spent three excruciating years in the Pentagon as a captive civilian.

All Donald Trump had was enough money to buy a friendly doctor who was willing to “diagnose” him with bone spurs, a conveniently temporary condition timed to last until the end of the war. Trump’s attitude toward average soldiers was clear – only suckers and losers put their lives on the line when there was no benefit to them.

From then on, right through the George W. Bush years, Trump disparaged every military venture, but there was never any mention of standing up for our troops. It was always political. Whether it was Clinton, Bush, or Obama, Trump always new better than either the current president or his military brass. He made a lot of noise, and all of it was uncomplimentary to the military, at least until Roger Ailes of Fox News explained to him that he couldn’t win without support from the millions of deployed military personnel who voted by absentee ballot.

Master panderer Trump began painting himself as someone who reveres our troops. In 2016, it worked; he won that segment of the electorate by nearly thirty points, even while referring to all of his predecessor’s (Obama) Joint Chiefs as incompetent losers. It was the same tactic he applied to the rest of his base. Label a sector of the electorate as downtrodden and taken advantage of and promise to stand up for them by attacking their oppressors. It sounds compelling, until you realize the guy making the promises is a life-long con man who is out only for himself.

Add to that Trump’s disdain for John McCain and his mockery of a mourning Joe Biden for lauding his deceased son’s military service as evidence that he is weak. Knowing what we do of Trump, nothing in Jeffrey Goldberg’s revelations in The Atlantic is either surprising or hard to believe. Goldberg reported that in the company of General John Kelly and Joint Chiefs Chairman Joe Dunford, Trump described veterans as suckers and losers on the way to visit the Aisne-Marne cemetery in France, where many American WW2 soldiers were buried.

Trump flew into a rage over the story that lasted through Labor Day Weekend. That’s notable because of the contrast with his reactions to other accusations. In the past, as with sexual allegations, his rage was pure counterpunch, anger and denial, playacting what he’d been taught by Roy Cohn and his mobster friends. But this was different. He was an erupting volcano. The Atlantic story unhinged him like previous reports hadn’t. It wasn’t about the truth or falseness of the allegation – it was fear of losing the support of those millions of losers and suckers on Election Day.

The main controversy over the Atlantic story was Goldberg’s reliance on anonymous sources. We’d all like to know who they are, but it’s understandable that high-ranking people might feel driven to tell the truth while needing to fly under Trump’s radar. Goldberg said journalists prefer sources who speak on the record, but sometimes, the public’s need to know is paramount. When up to six anonymous sources tell the same story, that’s enough to publish.

It’s not difficult to guess who at least some of them are. Dunford and Kelly and their aides were the only ones who could have heard what Trump said. The absence of overt denial by any of them speaks almost as eloquently as if they’d let Goldberg use their names. And if that’s not clear enough, Trump’s wild rant, accusing top military brass of being in bed with weapons manufacturers who profit from conflict couldn’t be more transparent.

The question that remains is the same one we’ve been asking since 2015. Will Trump’s base finally realize that he couldn’t care less about them except in pandering for their vote? In the case of active duty military and veterans, many of them will. And Trump’s panic tells us he understands that they vote early by mail, and the timing couldn’t be worse.

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Surviving Nine Weeks Until the Election

Posted on September 1, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, September 1, 2020

Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson offered some advice on Tuesday to people who are afraid Donald Trump might lie, cheat, and steal his way to re-election: behave as if you think Biden is trailing instead of up by nine points in the polls. “…be paranoid that Trump’s encouragement of right-wing violence in Kenosha, Wisconsin might tip that vital swing state in his favor. Worry that Democrats are not paying enough attention to Michigan and Pennsylvania; that Biden’s polling lead in Florida might be a mirage; and that states such as Georgia and Arizona might not really be as purple as they now appear to be. Then act vigorously on those concerns, and be confident that if you do, Trump is toast.”

The complacency of the 2016 Clinton campaign that somehow failed to notice Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania slipping away will not be allowed to take shape this year. No matter how incompetent and disorganized the Democratic Party sometimes appears, they won’t screw this up in 2020. Their 2016 Chairperson, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, spent her time rigging the primaries and alienating the Bernie Sanders wing of the party. Tom Perez, who replaced her after Clinton’s defeat learned from her mistakes. He has worked tirelessly to unite the party, no easy task under such a wide tent.

The only thing that unites Democrats is their animus for Trump. You might worry that that’s not enough to sustain Biden’s momentum for sixty-three more days, but Trump makes it easy. The attributes that were successful in 2016 are stale now. His support for right wing groups, his unapologetic pandering to hatemongers have their downside now that Americans have awakened to who and what Trump really is.

He’s playing to his base, more specifically to people who voted for him in 2016, who weren’t really part of the Anger Cult, like the women he likes to refer to as suburban housewives. He knows his behavior in office has alienated many of them, though he apparently doesn’t understand why. None of the suburban women I know think of themselves as housewives. That description worked in the 1950s when Joe McCarthy, one of Trump’s role models, warned that Communists would murder helpless women and children in their beds.

Today’s suburban women are not helpless. They’re well-educated professionals pursuing careers. Trump desperately needs their votes, but he won’t get them by calling them housewives. His lack of respect for women will sink him, something his narcissistic personality makes him incapable of seeing.

Eugene Robinson was right. Although Trump is his own worst enemy in 2020, we cannot be complacent. Contribute what you can to candidates who want to end the sickness that is Trumpism. It’s the most important investment you can make in your children’s future. Pay attention. Stay engaged, and don’t be shy about calling out his lies and insane conspiracy theories. But don’t overdo it.

Be aware of what Trump says and does, but don’t become agitated by it. Trump thrives on attention and television ratings. The way to starve this beast is simply to ignore it. There’s no need to listen to his rants and shake your fist at the TV. The best way to take the air out of Trump’s balloon is to tune him out.

Trump feeds on creating anxiety and rage. If that continues, and it will, the thing most likely to re-elect him is emotional voter fatigue. As Kellyanne Conway admitted on Fox News last Sunday, his campaign strategy is to create so many fights on so many fronts that voters are exhausted and go numb. He hopes they’ll crawl into a hole until after the election and not even show up to vote.

It sounds contradictory, but it’s possible to stay in touch with the essentials of the campaign without becoming totally immersed in it. Treat Trump’s rants and unhinged attacks the same way you deal with your five-year-old throwing a tantrum or your teenager lashing out at authority. It’s just a symptom of his arrested development. Be aware of his behavior, but don’t be sucked into it.

The one thing that will drive Trump crazy during the next nine weeks is being ignored. The fact that the Democratic convention’s ratings were 30% higher than his has him climbing the walls of the White House. His head must be exploding over the fact that a million more Americans watched Biden’s acceptance speech than his. The ratings for both conventions were down by nearly a third compared to 2016. It’s a sign that very few people are undecided in 2020, and they are learning to just block the noise.

When you check your favorite media outlet and see Trump forcing himself into the sensitive situation in Kenosha over the objections of the mayor and governor so he could do his tough guy act and claim undeserved credit for the work of the Wisconsin National Guard, don’t tear your hair. Turn it off.

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Fanning the Flames of Domestic Violence

Posted on August 31, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, August 31, 2020

When my younger son was a high school junior he was attacked in the school cafeteria. Since my son is white, and the boy who jumped on him in front of hundreds of students and three teachers was black, it looked like a racial incident. In our highly diverse county that prided itself on racial harmony, that set off a knee-jerk chain reaction of events. Both boys, who were good students with clean records, were suspended during exams week.

The truth was that the two sixteen-year-olds were friends and teammates. No harm was done and the boys wound up shaking hands. The testosterone-charged incident arose over (what else?) the attentions of a girl at a party the previous weekend. It was a minor thing that would have gone unnoticed and completely forgotten the next day if not for the intervention and over-reaction of a politically motivated school superintendent.

The suspension ruined any chance of either boy earning an athletic scholarship to college. It was devastating to their morale, and increased tension and resentment throughout the school community – to what end? So an ambitious politician could claim he had enacted a zero tolerance policy on racial violence, though the teachers who witnessed the incident testified that no such thing had occurred.

That was my first personal interaction with a lying politician who cared more about his image than the integrity of the institution he was empowered to manage and the welfare of the people we’d trusted him to protect. It taught me that the only way to stop it from recurring was to force people like him to be accountable for their malfeasance.

The carnage these people leave in their wake is often irreversible. Although the offending politician paid a price for what he did, that didn’t mitigate the harm done to the boys. (Fortunately, they both grew into fine adults.)

What we experienced was not an isolated episode. Things like that happen all the time, at all levels of government, and ultimately, it’s up to us to fix them. Whenever politics is involved, the first casualty is truth. The facts were clear for everyone to see, yet they were ignored. In battle, it’s referred to as the fog of war. Once emotions are triggered, the result is usually chaos, the outcome wrong-headed.

Demagogues know this. It’s how they survive and prosper. They know that if they cause enough confusion, no one will ask who instigated it. In today’s world of divisive politics, the greatest crime of our current would-be autocrat is the degradation of truth. Spinning a narrative has become more important than honest investigation and determination of facts.

We’ve made enormous progress in race relations since I was a kid, but the problem remains larger and more deeply ingrained than we realized. The election of Barack Obama in 2008 proved that we had matured considerably as a nation, but it also energized the latent racism remaining in large segments of our population, which became the populist movement that enabled someone like Donald Trump to become president.

One of the tragedies of the Trump administration is that systemic racism among some people in law enforcement is exacerbated by a president who has no respect for truth. People of color being murdered by rogue police officers erupts into demonstrations of civil disobedience, which after dark, attract thugs, criminals, and political agitators. It has always been this way – what’s different now is a shameless president who knows that if he throws gasoline on the fire, the question of who caused it will be lost in the ashes.

If we let him, Donald Trump will continue to spread his own sick narrative. There is no connection between a nonviolent black man being murdered in the streets of a typical American city by police and the security of our suburbs. But in the hands of a skillful distorter of truth like Donald Trump, a racist act of violence committed by law enforcement personnel has somehow been twisted into a narrative that raging hordes of non-white anarchists are planning to ravage our white suburban housewives. Trump’s solution is to have federal police marching in our streets.

Far too many angry Americans cheer Trump on because he seems to get away with things they wish they could. It’s like a Robin Hood scenario in which the folk hero villain turns out to be a depraved individual who keeps the gold and power he steals to enrich himself.

This is not a political debate. It is literally about the future of our country and the minds of our children who are being exposed to it. It’s not about Trump or Biden. It’s about We the People.

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Jackie Robinson Day

Posted on August 29, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, August 29, 2020

When disparate events converge toward a critical focal point my spiritual side takes over. I can’t resist the implications of an unlikely confluence of circumstances.

Every year since 2004, Major League Baseball has designated April 15 as Jackie Robinson Day. April 15th, aside from meaning Tax Day for most of us, was the opening day of the 1947 baseball season, when Robinson made his major league debut as the first black baseball player. But in 2020, COVID caused us to hit pause in our normal routines, and the baseball season didn’t begin until July 23rd. A lot of things fell by the wayside, but Jackie Robinson Day was re-scheduled for August 28th, the date in 1946 that Branch Rickey, the General Manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, told Robinson he’d be in the Dodgers’ starting lineup the following season.

August 28, 2020 was also the day actor Chadwick Boseman died, not from COVID but colon cancer. Boseman was the 21st century embodiment of a handful of archetypal actors, like Sidney Poitier and Denzell Washington, who re-formed the screen image of black Americans. In addition to creating living monuments to Thurgood Marshall, James Brown, and the fictional King T’Challa who represented the highest values of the African culture from which the slaves who worked American plantations were abducted, Boseman’s first major film role memorialized Robinson.

August 28, 2020 was also when thousands of Americans marched on Washington to mark the horrendous shooting of a young black man, Jacob Blake, by a white police officer in Kenosha, Wisconsin. How prophetic that that shooting should have occurred just as two months of protests over racial inequality were dying down, during the Republican National Convention. Speaker after convention speaker touted a return to “American values” while somehow completely ignoring the latest glaring examples of how systemic racism still destroys black families. Worse, in the twisted ideology of Trumpism, people demonstrating against the killing of black Americans are portrayed as criminals and anarchists. Thus, Trump feels justified in claiming America needs a law and order president who can deploy storm troopers at will wherever anyone who doesn’t like him marches on American streets.

On one hand, Trump’s people spent four days fear-mongering on national television, in sharp contrast to the message of the Biden campaign which projected an image of love, unity, and diversity. We’ve been through all this before. Yet somehow, the re-energizing of the Black Lives Matter movement feels different. Thirty-foot-tall letters spell out BLACK LIVES MATTER in permanent yellow paint on a two-block long segment of 16th Street NW in Washington, within sight of the White House, where Trump can refuse to look at it, but he can’t ignore it.

In 2020, black sports stars are foregoing shampoo and car commercials, and instead throwing their weight behind keeping BLM in the public eye, assuring that Trump cannot distract voters from reality with alternate facts and conspiracy theories. Stars of the National Basketball Association, black and white, players and management, boycotted their own playoff games, followed by several MLB teams who refused to play in solidarity. Those games will all be re-scheduled and the players will be paid, but the Players Alliance of more than a hundred black players are donating their salaries for the two boycotted days to aid suffering black families. (The lowest paid MLB players earn $3,500, the highest more than $200,000 per game.)

Doc Rivers, coach of the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers, closed the loop on the confluence of events when he reacted to Blake’s shooting during the Republican convention. “All you hear is Donald Trump and all of them talking about fear – we’re the ones getting killed, we’re the ones getting shot.”

For all of these things to be happening at once, superimposed on television images of two hurricanes simultaneously hitting the same part of the Gulf Coast for the first time in recorded history, it seems like we’re being forced to look at everything in perspective. The COVID virus will have claimed over a quarter of a million (!) American lives by Election Day. Our climate becomes more erratic and deadly every year, while the Trump administration continues to dismantle environmental protections.

This year, Trump’s insistence on returning to business as usual may bite him, as every major sports team will keep the fire burning under BLM, and millions of Americans will see that every week. Whether you believe in God, an Earth Spirit, or The Force, it’s with us this year. Trump will not be able to hide from his failures and his pandering this time.

I didn’t grasp the significance of Jackie Robinson when I cheered for him as a kid growing up in Brooklyn, but I do now. On Election Day, everyone will have a clear unobscured choice.

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Trump’s Latest Gift: Vigilantism

Posted on August 26, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, August 26, 2020

It was no coincidence when David Duke, convicted felon and former Grand Wizard of the KKK tweeted that our new president had their backs, the new president being Donald Trump and “they” being White Supremacists. It was no coincidence when heavily armed militia members in camo garb occupied state capitols in Michigan and Kentucky after Trump tweeted that supporters needed to resist Governors who issued mask orders to prevent the spread of COVID.

It was no coincidence, either, when armed vigilantes showed up to confront demonstrators in Kenosha, WI in the wake of protests over the police shooting of Jacob Blake. That occurred after two days in which the Republican Convention pounded away at the need for law and order, outlining an alternate reality in which Democrats favor lawlessness, Godlessness, and socialism. It was Trump pumping up his base of angry people who support his white-first agenda, whatever he chooses to call it.

In lionizing Mark and Patricia McCloskey, who aimed loaded guns at peaceful demonstrators in Saint Louis, Trump did what he always does. Without overtly saying so, he winks and nods at the worst of us, implying that it’s okay to express themselves with bullets. It was a clear, unsubtle invitation to Americans who do not support the Black Lives Matter movement to take up arms to defend their white suburbs. That kind of behavior is despicable – in other words, it’s typical Donald Trump.

Self-styled militias and vigilante groups have nothing to do with law enforcement. People who take the law into their own hands are criminals. If they injure or kill anyone, they are guilty of felonies. They are more dangerous than looters and arsonists, because their actions are unauthorized and their presence enflames already explosive situations.

Kenosha County Sheriff David Beth unambiguously addressed the issue of deputizing armed citizens:  “Hell no! I won’t deputize private citizens. Deputies must be trained to strictly follow all police procedures and directions. What a scary, scary thought. These people create confrontation. They are not helping.” He went on to decry the role of social media, specifically Facebook, for spreading misinformation and letting itself be used as a vehicle by radical troublemakers to invite vigilantes into situations where they have no place.

Last night, one of those vigilantes, a seventeen-year-old boy who traveled to Kenosha from Antioch, Illinois, egged on by right wing activists and Facebook postings which had no purpose other than to provoke violence, shot and killed two protestors, and severely injured a third. It was all captured on video, and he has been arrested and charged with first degree intentional murder.

The events in Kenosha, this week, are tragic. But the harm done to that peaceful midwestern city is only the tip of the iceberg. Trump not only condones, but willfully incites this kind of violence, because he believes it will inspire his base to re-elect him. Over the last three years many people have warned that Trump is dragging us toward Fascist authoritarianism. Armed vigilantes are a chilling reminder of Nazi Brownshirts terrorizing German citizens in support of Adolf Hitler’s policy of racial purification.

A majority of Americans of all races have been horrified by the continued overuse of violence by law enforcement against people of color. As awful as that it, it is only made worse by a president who encourages more violence by his supporters. It demonstrates in the clearest possible terms that nothing that increases his power and wealth is out-of-bounds. Is there anything he would not do to assure his re-election?

Having lived through the Civil Rights Movement, the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and the rise of right wing politicians, Americans my age have seen our country swing away from the idealism of our youth to angry self-righteousness. I once subscribed to the naïve, complacent notion that America’s values were unassailable, but I failed to take into account the lengths people will go to when they’re driven by greed and lust for power. Rather than speak of equality and racial blindness, Trump is leading us exactly where we feared he would. If he is not defeated in November, we can look forward to more and more armed confrontations between extremists at both ends of the spectrum.

I did not choose the banner for this blog lightly. It lays out exactly what our founders intended when they drafted the Constitution. “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity…” Most of us know the rest, but it means nothing to Donald Trump.

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

A Mentally Deficient Candidate

Posted on August 21, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, August 21, 2020

For months, Donald Trump and his supporters, have been labeling his Democratic opponent “mentally deficient.” Biden has been in politics long enough to have his own folk lore, which seems to revolve around his so-called gaffes. That started in 1987 when he quit his first presidential run amid charges of plagiarism. It was as unfair then as it is today. Politicians rarely write their own speeches; the charge that Biden had quoted from a speech by British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock without attribution was a lesson in placing too much trust in a speechwriter.

In 1987, the bar was still pretty high for politicians. The nation hadn’t yet been exposed to a politician like Donald Trump who revels in lying, misquoting people, and inventing conspiracy theories on the fly. Since accusing his opponent of lying would undoubtedly backlash on him, Trump instead focused on Biden’s lifelong affliction with stuttering and characterized it as everything from mental incompetence to encroaching dementia.

Yes, Biden occasionally stumbles over words or misspeaks. It’s part of his being human. He doesn’t always filter his thoughts or words like other politicians. Some people see that as a character flaw. Others, like me, find it an endearing reminder that he is real and authentic. I am five months younger than Biden, and if I didn’t have my dictionary and thesaurus handy when I write, I’d be known for gaffes too – as would almost everyone I know.

All that aside, the Democrats put on a brilliantly conceived virtual convention that surprised most observers with its intimacy and personal appeal. It was far more watchable than previous conventions with their self-serving applause lines, balloons, horns, and whistles, all of which could be summed up in one word: boring. The only time they were interesting was when a nomination was contested after the first ballot.

This convention wasn’t like that. While there was an occasional minor snafu, and one might argue with the emphasis on some of the content, the convention did its job. Holding my attention for more than eight hours without commercial breaks says a lot. With all that success, last evening it all came down to the last half hour when Joe Biden delivered his acceptance speech. With the world watching, we would all see if the gaffe machine, as he jokingly refers to himself, could pull it off without embarrassing himself.

Biden’s supporters held their breaths as he began speaking, but he silenced our concerns quickly, with a well-written, moving appeal to Americans’ better natures, and a clear agenda for what he will do the moment he takes office to get the pandemic under control and revitalize our economy. The focus was jobs and bringing manufacturing back home, rather than relying on China to keep supply chains running. He was so good, we stopped worrying that he might screw up and just listened, coming away feeling more optimistic than any time since Trump won in 2016.

But don’t just believe me, I’m clearly biased. Let’s see what Chris Wallace, the most professional journalist on Fox News thinks. “After tonight, Donald Trump will have to run against a candidate, not a caricature.” Wallace called Biden’s acceptance speech “enormously effective,” asserting that it blew a hole in Trump’s characterization of him as a mentally shot captive of the extreme left.

That won’t convince devotees of Sean Hannity, but independent voters who are troubled by Donald Trump’s incompetence and divisiveness should have no concern that Biden is not up to the job. He showed himself to be everything we hoped he was: compassionate, caring, experienced, and thoroughly in touch with the existential threats to our nation. At the margins, where it counts in this election, that should be a clear sea change.

It shouldn’t be difficult for clear-thinking concerned voters to distinguish between the man who has taken on the task of restoring America’s soul with the president who has been destroying it for five years. As Trump continues to rail against phantoms like voter fraud and campaigns with hate-filled rhetoric, he looks more like a desperate caged animal every day. As his administration is revealed to be the corrupt creature it is and he uses every ploy he knows to distract from the 175,000 COVID deaths he could have prevented if he cared about anything but himself, it’s reasonable to ask who the mentally deficient label fits best.

I can’t wait for their first debate.

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments