We are nowhere near the end of the Trump-thumping we are taking.. We are not at the beginnig of the end, nor the end of the beginning. We may be at the start of the beginning. And that makes it all even more sad and urgent. We have already lost so much; it is such a great shame.
Towards the end of his life, the great German poet, scientist, lawyer, statesman etc;, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) became very enchanted with the energy, robust freedom and lack of a haunting past in the young American Republic. During those later years he wrote the following poem (here in English translation praising and expressing an important hope about us and our republic:
(If you want to know more about who Goethe was, read my post “Who is this guy Go-ee’-thee (Goethe)?
One of DT’s first targets for negation remains our fragile, wilting ecosystem. We must get it back under control —and fast—. Before DT touched nature with his cold, dead hands, an annual reduction of atmospheric hydrocarbons by 2% would have saved us-but we were barely making that. Now after he has negated our environmental protection, the yearly target for a timespan 4 years shorter than in 2016 is 5%. And we had been barely eking out a scrawny 2%…. If we fail now, there will not be a second chance, the resulting inhospitable, lethal climate will make this planet uninhabitable.
Let us remember the hopes and faith that so many had for us so many years ago.
But we can only get to the end of the beginning by accepting without filtering where we are today. That’s the first step.
To that end, today Goethe’s hopeful poem could only be written something like this:
Amerika, du hattest es besser…
America, you had it better
Than our old continent.
But you failed to save your forests and oceans,
You permanently poisoned pristine waters.
Shame! your present is blighted by leaders of
Useless remembrance and vain strife.
You misused the present in bad faith!
And your children will never write verse,
Condemned by drudge lackeys and their bumbling boss, to
end with a whimper:
as nature winds down in reverse..
Where indeed have all the flowers gone, long time passing? How much pain must good men endure, before they throw off this yoke?
This is the time to be ramping up defenses against Coronavirus. Does it look in the picture above that Donald gives a damn about anything besides his fake tan? Well, he does not and we will pay a huge price for his malfeasance. Just when we face a pandemic with no treatments and need to put on the greatest push, he takes away the funding.
The German Robert Koch Institute reported yesterday that the number of cases of the Coronavirus in China (yesterday 45000 with 1100 deaths) had possibly stabilized. That was cause for tentative, cautious relief. In the same breath, however, it warns that a worldwide pandemic of Coronavirus is still entirely possible.
And today Die Zeit reporrts that a professor at the Berlin Charité said that the worldwide count had reached 60000 with ~1300 deaths from the virus. (ca 2%–about where it has been all along). He also said that a new variant of the disease is spreading, and that experts estimate high numbers of infections worldwide, although for most the infection would be mild and not life threeatening. The major concern was and is Africa where public health institutions are weakest. Africa could be the cannon that shoots the virus around the world and soon. The best estimates are, according to the DIe Zeit reports, that the virus could infect 60% of the worlds population.
From the report yesterday, it is clear tha despite all out efforts around the globe to hold back the virus and then to stop it, help is not just around the corner. There are three or four good candidates for vaccines, but human testing will not begin for ar least three months. And the WHO reports that a working vaccine distribution is probably still 18 months away.
The US had in 2018 a population of 327.2 million. That would mean 196, 320,000 people sick with corona virus. If the death rate remains around 2.1-2.4 %, that means 4,711.680 people dyiing from this. It could happen very soon. And there will be no vaccine.
We, those 327 million people, who rely on CDC and NIH to help us in such emergencies, have been thrown under the bus in the President’s budget proposal. Ir will reduce all Federal funding for just about every aspect of healthcare we have. And as is usual with the Reaganomics infected Republican minds, those least able to defend themselves will be hit the hardest. That means Trumps base still some Evangelicals and the blue collar sector. As they as a group will certainly rely at least as much as the rest of us on Medicare, Medicaid, federal aid, vaccines, hospitals which take Medicare and Medicaid, this time their boy will be goring their ox.
Listen up for once! Your Man on the White Golf Cart threw me and you under the bus so that his rich buddies and controllers can keep on sucking the wealth out of your pockets.
Wake up Red State dreamers! Forget all the blather from the highl paid verbal bullies at Fox News. Follow the one thing that their well greased propaganda cannot hide for long: the money. It is NOT GOING TO YOU OR ME. It is going to those at the top of the wealth pile here who do not need it, who have not earned it and whose loyalty is to their own assets, not us the people who do the work that keeps their systems alive.
Is this what a Great America looks like: 60% of its citizens ill, 2% dying and no resources, no care, nothing at all available to help?
Does a Great country have a President who will sacrifice YOU so that he can set up an economy to do only for himself and his controllers what he has never been able to do: grow wealth–?
What is wrong with your perceptions? Follow the money, it does not flow into your pockets or mine.
The emergency alarms are all clanging frantically. He is letting pollutin slow down cleaning of your air, when we must MUSTR speed it up to save our planet. And if that were nor bad enough, now he wants to cripple your health. Both the budget and its dangerous, callous, dead-soul champion are categorically unacceptable and deserve only maximum contempt . Pray for him, yes: and until God exacts His vengeance onto DT, give Donald the gold treatment: do unto Donald only Donald has done unto you.
Hoodwinked? Anybody with two eyes and a brain can see that the US is divided very deeply, as deeply as it was in 1861 when the Confederacy opened fire on Fort Sumpter.
Funny. I hardly ever meet up with a streetfighter version of Sean Hannity or Dr Rachel Maddow I’ve seen bumper stickers, some window decals, an occasional lawn sign. If you listen to the news and the politicians, everyone in the United States is either angel or devil.
Right, I’m wary of devils being around. You never know these daysif yuou are about to step on yet another political landmine until it is too late unless you are wary and hold back. It is not OK any more to be in error and apologize. So, with some, I parse my words when it comes to politics. But I’ve always avoided talking politics with strangers anyway, it is just that now it feels llike the choice is not mine any more, unless I am willing to pay a large price.. Some may like it hot so to speak, but it is not my cup of tea. Never was. Many do want robust debate but apparently the all-out, no-holds-barred, but we are going to have dinner tonight anyway debating of days gone by is just a memory now.
I can remember my parents’ monthly cocktail party with old friends. I heard afterwards that Bill was upset by what Jane said about his need for status as a Republican (what my parents were) or how Muriel and Jack, devoted New Deal Democrats, thought the Republicans in the group too wary of civil rights, and so forth. They discussed heatedly, but they all kept coming to those discussions at the monthly cocktail parties year after year. I wonder today if I am lucky or cursed to have known that political climate.
But i have a duty to participate. Democracy: use it or lose it. We are already all too close to the latter. I have to speak out about what I think I have learned, about my opinions, but not in attack. It is my duty to conscience, to this country and all who have struggled, suffered, died to keep the experiment alive and moving. It is my duty.
So, in that spirit, just what is our political constellation, once we turn off the 24-7-365 news that needs to attract viewers to stay on the airi and turn off the politicians whom Mark Twain called the only native American criminal class.
While trudging the hopeless, dusty path of the Big DIvide, I stumbled onto proof that the Big DIvide does not exist outside the Beltway.
We do after all know how the political landscape actually is segmented, and we know it in detail, and with very solid grounding. I read about it in Die Zeit online just around the time of the 2018 midterms.
It upset the applecart of all my assumptions about American political sentiment. It gave me hope — but it showed that if we want out of this dreary, dead mess in DC, we the people will have to get up and get going. Now.
It is all there to read, but it has not been talked about very much in the US. Imagine my surprise…. I was unable to google up any US talk about this more than a few sentences no matter how hard I searched. I first read about it in the reputable and very thorough German weekly online paper, Die Zeit (Time or The Times) in an article called Americas Exhausted Majority.
Is it that important? You bet it is. But you judge for yourself from what comes next..generally about these two questions:
The actual political segmentation of our country: what is it and how is it that we are set up to be hoodwinked by autocrats?
What are we going to do about it?
WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO US? PANE 1B: HOODWINKED. How? What is the real segmentation of our country politically? A study published on 1 November 2018 comes to a very different conclusion than the one we are being manilpulated to believe. Instead of a split society, the study, Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape [https: hiddentribes.us/pdf/hidden_tribes report.pdf, documents the US today as a society with highly nuanced political segments. I am summarizing here. The whole study is fascinating and ought to be crucial to political campaign planning. Get it and read it, and then do something — speak, write, volunteer for canvassing, party office work, whatever.
From the study:
The segments have distinctive sets of characteristics; here listed in order from left to right on the ideological spectrum:– Progressive Activists: younger, highly engaged, secular, cosmopolitan, angry.– Traditional Liberals: older, retired, open to compromise, rational, cautious.– Passive Liberals: unhappy, insecure, distrustful, disillusioned.– Politically Disengaged: young, low income, distrustful, detached, patriotic,conspiratorial.– Moderates: engaged, civic-minded, middle-of-the-road, pessimistic, Protestant.– Traditional Conservatives: religious, middle class, patriotic, moralistic.– Devoted Conservatives: white, retired, highly engaged, uncompromising,patriotic.
The Study Summary: from Die Zeit.online
In welche Lager teilt sich die amerikanische Gesellschaft? =
Into which camps does American society divide itself?
Traditional Conservatives+Devoted Conservatives+Progressive Activists: the political leatherlungs, 33% of the electorate
The Exhausted Majority, the rest: 67% of the electorate. The ones who want this to stop, will find common ground and are ideologically significantly more flexible.
“The relevance of the segmentation is evident on a wide array of subjects, from issues of race and prejudice to gender and sexuality. Progressive Activists, the most liberal group, and Devoted Conservatives, the most conservative, show strong degrees of consistency within their ranks, while being almost perfectly at odds with each other. Middle tribes, by contrast, orient themselves incrementally on the ideological spectrum.
Further evidence of the relevance of core beliefs and their associated tribal identities is that tribal membership predicts differences in Americans’ views on various political issues better than demographic, ideological, and partisan groupings. This can be seen on subjects such as approval of President Trump, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), and approval of the modern feminist agenda. On these questions and many others, the differences between the most ideological segments are greater than the differences between, for instance, self-described “strong Republicans” and “strong Democrats” ….. “ Members of the Exhausted Majority are considerably more ideologically flexible than members of other groups. While members of the “wing” groups (on both the left and the right) tend to hold strong and consistent views across a range of political issues, those in the Exhausted Majority tend to deviate significantly in their views from issue to issue.Furthermore, the wing groups, which often dominate the national conversation, are in fact in considerable isolation in their views on certain topics. For instance, 82 percent of Americans agree that hate speech is a problem in America today, but 80 percent also view political correctness as an issue. By contrast, only 30 percent of Progressive Activists believe political correctness is a problem.” ….“
Yet it would be a mistake to think of the Exhausted Majority merely as a group of political centrists, at least in the way that term is traditionally understood. They do not simply represent a midpoint between the warring tribes of the left and right. They are frustrated with the status quo and the conduct of American politics and public debate. They overwhelmingly believe that the American government is rigged to serve the rich and influential, and they want things to change.With that said, there is nevertheless one segment within the Exhausted Majority that matches the traditional understanding of centrism: the Moderates, who comprise 15 percent of the population and whose views are consistently very close to the center of public opinion.The Exhausted Majority may be the key to countering polarization. Traditional Liberals and Moderates instinctively support compromise. Their voices would be strengthened if the Passive Liberals develop greater confidence in the value of their participation. On the other hand, the Politically Disengaged are at risk of being drawn into polarizing us-versus-them narratives, especially given their comparatively high levels of distrust and suspicion.”
The study characterizes these groups as hidden because they seldom occur as part of the daily discourse, the extremes are much more likely to be heard. “The people at the extreme ends of the spectrum are more strongly interested in politics and are more likely to use the social media to announce their opinions.”’ says Miriam JuanTorres, one of the study’s authors. “They understand the political discourse as something binary and perceive the respectively widely separated opposite side often as just a caricature.”
Last night I saw a new documentary on Amazon Prime about the history of liberal and conservative. If you would classify yourself in any one of the Exhaused Majority groups, you must see this. All I will say is that we need to get ourselves loose from the tastemakers because the divide into the concrete of which the political preachers have buried our political feet, does not exist. We have been hoodwinked, and hoodwinked hard.
Read a foreign, well respecrted newspaper. Die Zeit has a good englilsh verson online. The knowledge and insightfulness of their reporters are impressive, without an axe to grind.. And you get to hear a different point of view, see how Germans respond to our doings here, and read a bit about our most important European ally (or now, with the clear distaste that the Germans show for our President and his cronies, an ally at a distance.)
Or google how to handle situations like this–and find the good list in Psychology Today:
Better yet, get a copy of On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder. This is the bible of democratic citizenry wanting to prevcent dictatorship in their own country. Kindle version available.
What if we all decided that we were fed up with the slanting, editorial comment posing as reporting, suggestive innuendo, character assassinaations and lies of the so-called News Media?
What if we in the finely nuanced dispersion of the real USA decided to ask others what they believed, why and tried to find common ground rather than being on attack or defense all the time?
Do we want our country and history back?
Well, what are we waiting for? Any or all of the actions suggested by any of the sources I’ve seen can do the one thing that will turn the tables: energize us, . the Exhausted Majority. Accepting this debacle does not mean being a speedbump. Remember: American ends in I CAN.
COMING UP:HOW OUR CULTURE MAKES US VULNERABLE TO AUTOCRATS.: PANE TWO: OUR CULTURAL INVENTORY, PART 1: SHE’S OUR QUEEN TOO..
COMING UP: OUR CULTURAL INVENTORY, PART 2, THE P-47 THUNDERBOLT SYNDROME
This is a blog about the spirit of the time, the general intellectual and moral state and the trend of culture and taste characteristic of an era. O tempora! O mores! O the times! O the manners!.
