The Political Cave

                                                            

Every day this year it seems there is something to keep your stomach churning, that feeling of acid-reflex burn and your mind yearning for tension relief.   Whether it is tariffs, wholesale government firings, loss of human rights, threats of hostile territorial takeovers of friendly allies by our military, or the economy reeling and baby boomer life savings being drained along with it, angst is in the air. Memories stir to try and find those moments of relief but when you hit the noggin search engine it brings up familiar reminders of today’s constant turmoil from all those places traveled long ago and far away. As one rock group harmonized, “We have all been here before.”

                                                             

 As I examine the memory chamber, my life found me on the edge of continuous upheaval from the time my brain pieced together who I was and where I was in this world in the mid 20^th Century.  As a little guy playing in vacant lots I remember 1957 as a great year for American cars and Hula Hoops, but when Sputnik launched in October that year the world seemed traumatized and changed. Sputnik was bigger than Elvis. I have more memories of crawling under desks and watching scary black & white footage of bombs-away than I do of the Mickey Mouse Club and Howdy Doody.  Many other moments from so far away find myself by myself with little green soldiers, baseball cards or at conflict with many other kids in the neighborhood with dirt-clod fights and other little boy conflicts of the moment.

                                                       

 

One memory has me in the back of a police car being driven down the alley to my home after being apprehended in a vacant tin building on an empty lot which would be Highway 99 very soon.  There were three of us fooling around with hide and seek in an old warehouse, but my cohorts in crime made their getaway unseen and escaped the ride to their loving mothers arms.  This was my introduction to law enforcement in America. It would not be my last encounter. An alternative practical use of how a belt could be used turned out to be my big reward at the time.

                                                                         

 My parents voted Republican. They voted for Nixon three times in federal elections- 1960, 1968 and 1972. They voted for him when he ran for Governor of California and lost to Edmund G. “Pat” Brown in 1962. This was the famous election, for awhile, when Nixon announced after losing, “You don't have Nixon to kick around anymore. Because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference." If only.

While the election for Governor of California in 1962 was in full swing other matters were on the minds of most Americans in the fall of that year. This was the moment when Armageddon was at hand with the Cuban Missile Crisis. The showdown between the United States and the Soviet Union over missile deployment by the Soviets in Cuba was a terrifying public moment for the world to witness, but fortunately live through .  An obscure young folksinger from Minnesota was in New York at the time. The recent movie, “A Complete Unknown”, gives a good account of how the world felt for those tense few days October 1962 while giving an inspirational nod to Bob Dylan for his artistry.

 

                                                                 

 

As 1963 moved along, baseball helped push the tensions of the 1962 nuclear war showdown into the rear view mirror. It was the year of Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale, Maury Wills and the Los Angeles Dodgers who swept the New York Yankees in the World Series until November and a Dallas motorcade blew the year to smithereens.  The Trump administration just released a bunch of the President Kennedy assassination files and declassified them here in March of 2025. At this point in time it has as much meaning to the USA and most of its population as releasing all the documents surrounding President Harding’s sudden demise in August of 1923.

                                                                      

 

I still have vivid pictures in my head of getting the news of President John F. Kennedy’s death over the grammar school PA system with everyone assembled for the news, and then being dismissed for the remainder of the day. The stunned walk home with shocked classmates filled with questions without answers. On the Sunday, three days after the traumatizing event in Texas, found the family getting home from a somber church ceremony. A sports diversion called me to our family den to see the Chicago Bears and the Los Angeles Rams football game. The CBS channel switched to a Dallas police station transfer of the alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, from a local police holding cells to federal authorities. Enter Jack Ruby, and on live television America’s TV viewers across the nation witnessed assassination number two in Texas as Ruby gunned down Oswald and was immediately apprehended.

And so the 1960s went. The low-lights or highlights have been endlessly chronicled over time but with six decades of distance the passion and intensity of the multiple confrontations has been greatly dulled. Major legislative victories for Civil Rights and Medicare were passed in 1965. ThePill appeared in drugstores across the country. With hopes high for equality, and the reality of oppression in the everyday, the fires that burned in Watts and Detroit spread to more than 120 other American cities for the next several years. All the events captured in black & white on our 19 inch television set.

Viet Nam went from a small nation civil war to a full blown US intervention to stem the perceived communist threat. The streets and colleges throughout the US were filled with angry protests and violence over the escalating war and draft at the time.  It seemed the world was on fire, because it was. By 1968 Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated.  Lyndon Johnson declined to run for re-election in 1968. And there came Richard Nixon making deals with the southern state legislators who universally opposed The Civil Rights Act along with Medicare to fill the bill and get elected as President in 1968.

As the decade drew to a close, 1969 saw the US with over 500,000 men in uniforms warring in Viet Nam. The Tet Offensive in February and Hamburger Hill in May set the stage for the gradual withdrawal and defeat in South East Asia from the huge policy mistake by the US government. Broadway Joe “guaranteed” a win over the Baltimore Colts in the Super Bowl and delivered. Woodstock Nation arrived in August at a New York farm and departed in December at the Altamont Speedway in California with a young man dead at the hands of some angry and drunk Hell’s Angels. It was a consequential decade with many conflicts and casualties. Remarkably, the 1960s had far fewer casualties than the 1980s or our current decade. 

 Thanks for the visit.

"The Thrill of Victory to the Agony of Defeat"

 

 

 

 

The 2024 Presidential election is over. I find the result to be a frightening indictment of the American electorate's profound lack of critical thinking skills, but not a shocking one. President Donald Trump, a convicted felon, acknowledged rapist and liar, who also tried to overthrow the 2020 election results by leading an insurrection at the Capitol of the United States, defeated the former Vice President, Kamala Harris by a wide margin. Some might call the election close with narrow margins in swing states across the Great Lakes and Southwest but, truly, this was not a close election no matter what the corporate media and their pollsters wanted to sell you during this exhausting, twisted and tumultuous campaign.  The propagandists just wanted lots of advertising dollars to hoard and to ensure no woman was going to get elected President of the United States of America.

 James Brown sang, “It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World” back in 1966. The lyrics of the song were written by a woman, Betty Jean Newsome. The words ring truer today than they have since 1966. That was the first year after a landmark court case (Griswold v Connecticut) which allowed full distribution of the FDA approved oral contraceptive (The Pill) throughout the United States. This was almost a decade after it had been developed. Seven years later the medical procedure of aborting unplanned pregnancies were guaranteed through the nation with the landmark 7-2 SCOTUS decision in Roe v Wade. Women had finally found a sense of sexual freedom and couples now had choice when to conceive. During that period most of us living then thought these issues were resolved and tried to move on to other matters.

 

During this charged late 1960s to mid 1970s period the term “Politically Correct” emerged. Initially it was used to describe civility and respect when engaged in conversations between the sexes or to power.  Conservatives then set about demeaning the term while describing it as a sign of male weakness and dishonesty. It became a bully term to humiliate those working for compromise and cooperation. Today, because “Politically Correct” sounds a bit dated and wordy, a new term had to be created and so we now have “Woke” to describe both weakness in gender/power conversations, but also those who get screwed and tell.

 Here we are in 2025, and the above referenced cases of settled law have now been completely unsettled and undone by the Roberts Supreme Court. A SCOTUS now comprised of five conservative men and four women. Of the associate justice member women, there are three liberals and one ultra conservative catholic who clerked for a previous catholic SCOTUS member in the 1990s and then worked for the Bush people in Gore v Bush to decide the 2000 election before her Trump appointment in 2020. This SCOTUS has become the most conservative Court in over a century.

 

This is a court where a third if its membership was appointed by President Donald Trump. A Supreme Court currently made up of eight Harvard and Yale graduates with a Notre Dame outlier. A court that today thumbs its nose at precedent and twists language to suit its mood to further religious extremism in government while currying favor with the conservative business elite. While promoting the bizarre concept of “Originalism” in regards to the US Constitution, it turns the US the founding fathers documents and explicit meanings of separating the government from religion into a snake twisted knot of deceit promoting religion at levels never seen in American history.

  

Until the last few months of the 2024 election I thought that the surprising election of 2016 was an aberration, and simply a likely repudiation of Hilary Clinton’s persona. How could the person who so bungled an international health crisis, drove the nation into one ugly violent scene after another over racial profiling with hate filled rants against all minorities and denied the 2020 election results be electable? How do women vote for the man responsible for wiping away their social and medical progress of the past 50 years?

What I failed to realize until November 6, 2024 is that President Donald Trump epitomizes the American fantasy of being able to do what he wants when he wants, to speak exactly, and as profanely, as he wishes at any occasion without any regard for facts or truth. No correctness necessary or wanted. He is THE hero for the hopeless, hapless and helpless mass of the US population who are so upset at their current situation for absolutely no reason, other than the ones a right wing media feeds them 24/7 to divide and antagonize a nation. He is the perfect front man to assault women, minorities, the working class and the curious here in the United States.

 

President Trump remains no friend to most white working class men in the US today, either, but he is the Ringmaster of the Testosterone Circus that parades through American culture every day to bamboozle them.  You witness this male hormone carnival every day through male-dominance-messaging of fear through all media platforms, through sporting events that cannot proceed without a tribute to US military might, through endless shows and movies promoting physical and weapons violence on all manner of humanity, through news streams locally and nationally of daily murders, auto accidents and natural or manmade disasters in every media market of the land. 

Welcome to one Wild World of Courts 2025!