Category Archives: Current Affairs

Big Bernie Rally In Raleigh; Big Trump Rumble In Chicago

Kareem Jones, was outnumbered several thousand to one at the Trump rally in Fayetteville, and he did not strike back or hit anyone.

But what if the numbers were closer to even? That’s how it was Friday: first in St. Louis, where more than 30 were arrested amid numerous fights at a Trump rally there. And then Friday night in Chicago, near the campus of the University of Illinois-Chicago. And we saw what happened: a near-riot, and cancellation of the rally.

Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio immediately started talking about “professional agitators” as behind the huge protest. It looked to me a lot more like a social media enabled flash mob, built with Facebook and Twitter on the accumulated outrage of a diverse, mainly young constituency which was handed their target on a platter, not even a subway ride away.

Hillary In Durham: The Return To Reason

Hillary In Durham: The Return To Reason On the way home from the Trump rally last night, I listened to most of the Democratic debate on the radio; much of it was translated from Spanish. I couldn’t pick a “winner”; they both seemed to give as good as they got. That was both a relief and … Continue reading Hillary In Durham: The Return To Reason →

Trump Is Crowned In Fayetteville NC — March 9

On the way out, when I stopped to take a photo of this gentleman hawking his anti-Trump shirts, as the crowd streamed around him, I asked if he’d had any trouble.

“None so far,” he said. “Kinda surprising.”

But after that evening, maybe not so surprising. An audience: customers. That’s what they were. Not for their Wal-Marts, but instead at one of Trump’s now belly-up casinos. After all, Trump’s career has been built on selling, not only his name, but making his name synonymous with the gambler’s pipe dream of being an instant winner.

And it looked to me like that’s what the crowd came for: to buy (one more time) the promise of making America, not “great” again, but making it (and them) instant winners (“We’re gonna win, win, win!”). Pull the right lever, and the bells will ring, the colored lights flash, and the coins, or the chips, will come pouring out and piling up.

I’m Off To See The (Trump) Wizard – (March 9)

Well, perhaps Lowell was mistaken in the claim that such crossroads-choices come but once in a lifetime. Still, we can do no better than hear some more of his verse,

Through the walls of hut and palace shoots the instantaneous throe,
When the travail of the Ages wrings earth’s systems to and fro;
At the birth of each new Era, with a recognizing start,
Nation wildly looks at nation, standing with mute lips apart,
And glad Truth’s yet mightier man-child leaps beneath the Future’s heart.

So the Evil’s triumph sendeth, with a terror and a chill,
Under continent to continent, the sense of coming ill . . . .
They have rights who dare maintain them; we are traitors to our sires,
Smothering in their holy ashes Freedom’s new-lit altar-fires;
Shall we make their creed our jailer? Shall we, in our haste to slay,
From the tombs of the old prophets steal the funeral lamps away
To light up the martyr-fagots round the prophets of to-day?

New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth;
They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth . . . .

Bernie Sanders, Jack Shafer & The Day After

Sanders has been a fighter who is a gentleman.

This combination is rare enough in our public life; but beyond merely being admirable, it is one that will wear well. Sanders may have been defeated in his presidential run, but he has not been disgraced, nor have his ideas been discredited. He and they will persist.

On the political side, his disciplined focus on economic inequality has been expressed in policy proposals which, whether you like them are not, are rational and plausible. If he wants to spend more than a trillion dollars on infrastructure, education & expanded health care, he is also clear that all this would be paid for, with higher taxes. It would not be a shower of “free stuff”; there is no “voo-doo” in his economics.
Moreover, his stubbornly consistent message of economic justice was timely when he first raised it more than forty years ago, not long after president Lyndon Johnson had declared (and lost) a war on poverty. It has only become more intense through the years, is urgent now, and will remain high in public consciousness thru the next president’s term, whoever occupies the White House. Sanders will still be strategically positioned to affect coming policy debates.