Democratic Leaders: Are You Sleeping?

I don’t feel so good about my country.  I watched a YouTube video. It showed the first portion of Senator Whitehouse (of RI)’s presentation to the Senate about a fifty-odd year old plot layout to have corporations take control of government by subverting the Supreme Court.  It was written by William Powell before he was appointed to the Supreme Court.  His memo is also here:but I have to admit it was easier for me to understand by watching Senator Whitehouse explain it.

Backstep: I’ve always been an avid reader.  When I was a senior and about to graduate from high school, my favorite author was Taylor Caldwell.  She’s written many excellent books and now that I’m thinking about her, I want to go back and re-read her stuff.  I started to read her first novel, Dynasty of Death,  because the description sounded intriguing: two brothers in conflict.  I got more from the story than that! 

Caldwell wrote about a worldwide conspiracy of the CEOs of businesses and corporations to take control of their governments.  The conspirators had a long range plan for accomplishing this.  In addition, they planned wars in different locations at different times.  Wars are very profitable for business and that was the bottom line: wealth and power.  I remember how it opened my eyes.  Fiction?  Yes, but what if this was really happening?

Another book by the same author, Captains and the Kings, was similar in many ways.  To be honest, it felt like a fictional Kennedy story.  The patriarch, Joseph, immigrated to the United States from Ireland.  He worked his way up to the head of his own company, through determination and a definite lack of empathy.  There was a similar conspiracy of businesses with the same purpose: a quiet takeover of the company.  Similarities to the Kennedy family: a “curse” follows the family.  Joseph grooms oldest son Rory to become the first Catholic President of the United States.  However, Rory is too liberal for the conspirators and someone among them has Rory assassinated.

Ok, back to present time:  as I watched the videos, I immediately thought of those two books.  Justice Powell had written the blueprint for GQP behavior today.  The plan had to be implemented very slowly, insidiously, over five decades.  Slowly, slowly the GOP moved to obstruct and block legislation that would “harm” big business or that would help middle class citizens.  Fifty years ago, I had other things on my mind and wasn’t paying much attention to politics.  Except for Watergate, I can’t remember the squabbling between the parties that we’re seeing today.  Soon after Powell sent his memo out, Republicans got hold of it.  I remember that President Nixon nominated Powell for the Supreme Court.

I imagine that’s when the poisoning of the court began.

Then Majority Leader “Moscow” Mitch McDonnell sealed the evil deal of packing SCOTUS with conservatives by refusing to hold hearings for President Obama’s nominee to the court after Antonin Scalia died.  Obama chose Merrick Garland, and McConnell declared he wouldn’t hold any hearings until after the 2020 election.  As a result of this illegal maneuver (that apparently no one tried to stop), tRump was able to pack the court with ultra right wing screwballs.

In the next session, SCOTUS agreed to hear a case that could totally change the way we have elections.  The case is called Moore vs. Harper.  The Rethugs in NC came up with a redistricting plan that only served to profit them and the state court threw out their maps.  The Rethugs sued, claiming that throwing the maps out was a violation of the Constitution’s election clause.

“In their appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, however, the Republican lawmakers argue that the U.S. Constitution's Elections Clause gives state legislatures the power to determine how congressional elections are conducted without any checks and balances from state constitutions or state courts.”

Really?  That means anything goes in an election.  If we don’t like who got the popular vote, we just throw them out so “our guy” wins.  This has the potential of completely overturning democracy.  Voting is our only power.  It’s take away if authorities decide they don’t want a particular set of votes counted.

It would be a total disaster.

But no one is talking about it.  The Democratic leaders are dismayingly quiet or blowing useless raspberries.  Nothing is being done.  It’s going to happen because everyone at the top is sleeping at the wheel.  I’ll have to write to my reps, the Speaker of the House, and the Majority Leader about this.  They can’t sit on the hands anymore, wishing it would all just go away.

It’ll go away, all right, but if no action is taken, no one will be free.

They're Not Here To Hurt Me

 

Over a day later and I’m still trying to wrap my mind around yesterday’s testimony.  It’s not like I didn’t already know a lot of it.  The up-close-and-personal-details were shocking, those little things that have been hidden away until 25-year-old Cassady Hutchinson stood up and swore to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.  I’d never heard of her, but apparently, she was well known on Capitol Hill and was around for a lot of the pre-insurrection talk at the White House.  She was right there as the coup attempt took place, right there with Mark Meadows (tRump’s chief of staff), Pat Cipollone (tRump’s attorney) and others.  She was a top aide to Meadows.

TB and I were already very much aware of tRump’s involvement from the get go.  You had to be a real fool not to realize what he was doing at his speech to his hordes the morning of January 6^th.  He exhorted them that they might “fight and fight hard” to preserve The Big Lie (OK, he didn’t call it that).  We knew he was involved when he did absolutely NOTHING to call off his violent mob for hours and hours.  We heard reports that people at the White House were begging him to call the insurrectionists off and he refused.  One thing he did do was tweet a message that set his followers raging after Mike Pence.  We knew all that.  Reinforcements didn’t arrive until AFTER the President sent his go-home-I-love-you video to the traitors. 

What we didn’t know:  he didn’t even want to do that.  He thought Pence deserved to be hanged.  He believed the mob wasn’t doing anything wrong.  Well, all that seemed pretty obvious.

Hutchinson was stoic but looked frightened all the same.  She’d heard all kinds of stories floating around about January 6^th but she didn’t feel really scared until a conversation she had with Rudy Giuliani on January 2^nd.  Giuliani was all bubbling over with glee about “going to the Capitol” on January 6^th, and she had a feeling it wasn’t going to be good.  She consulted with Mark Meadows, who seems to have been a very detached and cold-hearted character.  He was sitting on the sofa scrolling through his phone and that seemed to be something he did frequently.

She tried to discourage him from getting in the middle of all of that potentially violent shit.  He did anyway.  There was a “war room” at a hotel in DC where tRump’s loyal inside group of screwballs were plotting and planning.  She did manage to convince Meadows not to go in person; he participated by phone.

She was at the Ellipse when tRump was going to give his incendiary speech.  He was majorly pissed because there wasn’t enough of a crowd in camera view.  That’s because most of his traitorous army were armed to the teeth and didn’t want to pass through the secret services’ magnometer machines.  They didn’t want their deadly weapons detected and confiscated.  She heard tRump become irate and profane.  I’m the fucking president, he said.  They’re not here to hurt me.  Get the fucking mags out of here.  Let my people in.

So, he wanted the secret service to allow all those followers waiting outside the Ellipse to come into the circle.  It didn’t matter they were carrying knives, guns, spears and what have you because “they’re not here to harm me.”  The hell with everyone else, right?  Those are the rioters who attacked and injured so many of the Capitol police defending the building.

I wondered about the one statement he made on January 6^th that they were all going to March on the Capitol now.  I’m going with you, he said.  He never showed up, and I remember thinking what a coward he was.  Well, it turns out he wanted to go and had a major tantrum when he found out the secret service wouldn’t take him there.  According to Hutchinson, Tony Orvaldo, a secret service agent serving as the White House deputy chief of staff, told her that tRump became so enraged he tried to grab the steering wheel and also lunged at lead agent Bobby Engel’s throat in an attempt to force them to take him to the Capitol.

Although shaken then, today both men are denying anything like that happened.

Unhinged and shocking.  More along those lines, apparently tRump was wont to throw plates of food and overturn tables when he was irate.  And this was the man with the codes.  We certainly were protected by all the guardian angels in heaven during that awful man’s administration.

After tRump was returned to the White House, he went to the Oval dining room and watched TV.  TB and I were watching coverage of a court case which was suddenly interrupted by live coverage of the incensed mob descending on the Capitol.  They quickly broke through the barriers and steamrollered over the Capitol police.  We couldn’t believe our eyes.

There was equal horror in the West Wing.  Hutchinson tried to alert Meadows but he was scrolling once again, virtually ignoring her.  She said Pat Cipollone barreled in, telling Meadows they had to go talk to tRump.  And Meadows said, “He doesn’t want to do anything.”  tRump had no interest in stopping the violence, in other words.  When they finally did go to confront tRump, they had no luck.  Cipollone was very upset because tRump had said Pence deserved to be hanged.

For 187 minutes, tRump did nothing but watch the coverage.  Finally, he was persuaded to reluctantly release the video telling his supporters to “go home, we love you. You’re special people.”

On January 6, 2021—which was also TB’s birthday by the way, some present! —we realized how close we’d come to a coup of our government.  This was the United States?  That kind of thing didn’t happen in the greatest democracy in the world, but it did.

Even worse, all of those people in the White House that day knew tRump had lost the election and told him repeatedly he’d lost.  There was no steal.  They could have said something but none of them did before or after January 6^th.  The witnesses who testified didn’t speak up when tRump and his cronies carried on (and still carry on) about the Big Lie.  They all knew it wasn’t true.

The witnesses are hailed and praised for speaking up now before the committee.  I am very glad that they’re being honest about what really happened but I still wonder why they didn’t speak up sooner.  Were they afraid of retaliation?

tRump makes me think of Mafia dons.  They led their “families” and often would have other soldiers doing all the dirty work.  And the soldiers and other family members protected the dons.  They had this code of silence called omerta and so it was that no one could figure out just how these organizations worked.  Federal agents were frequently frustrated trying to prosecute illegal activities.  If it wasn’t for people like Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, Henry Hill, Joseph Valachi and others, that whole criminal syndicate of families wouldn’t have been cracked open.

Liz Cheney closed with some chilling information.  Apparently, people in tRump’s world are attempting to interfere with witnesses’ testimony.  She shared two of those messages, filled with fake promises and subtle threats.  It’s illegal to do that, of course, but that was a major tactic organized crime used to silence witnesses.

What is happening and continuing to happen in this country?  Between these hearings and the take-over of the Supreme Court by radical right wingers, I am feeling scared for our future.

Anthem

 It’s hard for me to think of what to say about Anthem by Noah Hawley.  I saw it offered on one of my eBook mailing lists.  Two things attracted me: I knew Noah Hawley created the way-out and successful Fargo movie and series.  I so enjoyed his way of telling a story: lots of darkness with a nice sprinkling of comedy.  The eBook list said this: “An epic literary thriller set where America is right now, in which a band of unlikely heroes sets out on a quest to save one innocent life—and might end up saving us all.”  Oooh, sounds like a fantasy-type!  I wanted to read it and so I requested it from the library.

The back of the cover warned: This isn’t a fairy tale

I disagree.  Fairy tales have violence, monsters, and many times unhappy endings.  I would say this is a dystopian fairy tale, set in our very near future.

I was hooked right away, even though many things upset and disturbed me.  I seem to be reading a lot of that lately, believing one thing about a book and discovering something very upsetting and learning something true and awful.

The very basics are this:  there is a movement among teenagers that starts small and starts spreading from our country to around the world.  Teenagers often learn that their parents and their times aren’t perfect and so they rebel.  This particular rebellion has very tragic consequences.  The other basic information is that a group of teens, kids that don’t fit in for one reason or another, band together to rescue a girl being held hostage by an evil character nicknamed The Wizard.  There are other horror/fantasy characters as well: a witch, a troll, orcs, and other Lord of the Ring races.

The book brought to mind others I’ve read and I don’t mean to say Hawley’s style is better or worse than any others.  The development of characters and use of horror reminded me of The Stand by Stephen King.  A lot of recent social issues came up and, now and then, Hawley wrote about them with no other characters interacting.  That reminded me of The Grapes of Wrath, in which John Steinbeck would insert chapters about the Dust Bowl, the cruelty of people toward the displaced farm families that lost everything, and the struggles one particular family had trying to survive.  Reading this book also reminded me of 1984, Animal Farm, and The Handmaid’s Tale.

So, be warned.  I thought it was an awesome book.  But then, I have an active interest in my future and that of my children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.  What will it be like?

Supporting the Lonely Child

 

There was a topic I meant to write about on my blog sometime last week but then came the revealing Jan 6^th committee hearings and SCOTUS’ wrongfully decision to reverse Roe v. Wade.

There was an article in the Readers’ Digest newsletter I receive every day.  The article was titled “One Teacher’s Brilliant Strategy to Stop Further School Shootings”.  Ah, this would be an interesting one to read in view of the times and the lackluster gun bill just passed by Congress and signed into law by President Biden.  The link to the whole article: https://www.rd.com/article/stop-bullying-strategy/?_cmp=readuprdus&_ebid=readuprdus6252022&_mid=509071&ehid=640dcc195197ba01718c368163bf83f61404b72d&_PermHash=13660bfeb26f12d44f84b122ca5ed8d5f1acd1ca439a25e7fe835ee487c11d11 The essay originally appeared in 2014 but then was shared again after the 2018 massacre at Parkland High School in FL.

The author met with her son’s fifth grade teacher.  During the course of the conversation, the teacher spoke of every Friday activity: she has her students take out a piece of paper.  She asks them to write down 4 classmates they’d like to sit with the following week.  She tells her students their requests might be honored or might not.  Then she asks the kids to nominate one person to receive an award they think has been an exceptional student that week.  The ballots are kept secret and handed in to her.

Over the weekend, she looks at the names and tries to find patterns.  From the article:

“Who is not getting requested by anyone else?

Who can’t think of anyone to request?

Who never gets noticed enough to be nominated?

Who had a million friends last week and none this week?”

The teacher isn’t looking to see who is the most popular or the best citizen.  She’s looking for the kids who are not.  Maybe some of those kids are being bullied.  Maybe they’re ignored because they’re “invisible” (aka as shy or passive).  Maybe a child was “popular” but is now being ostracized.  She finds not only the bullied, isolated, lonely kids but can also figure out who the bullies are.  In this way, she can help the lonely child by providing TLC in the form of support and maybe even tutoring on how to build friendships.  And she can keep an eagle eye out for the bullies, who attack when a teacher isn’t around.

So, the author-parent was amazed and impressed.  She asked how long the teacher had been doing this activity every Friday.

The teacher answered, ever since Columbine (which was in 1999).

“This brilliant woman watched Columbine knowing that all violence begins with disconnection. All outward violence begins as inner loneliness. Who are our next mass shooters and how do we stop them? She watched that tragedy knowing that children who aren’t being noticed may eventually resort to being noticed by any means necessary.

And so, she decided to start fighting violence early and often in the world within her reach. What Chase’s teacher is doing when she sits in her empty classroom studying those lists written with shaky 11-year-old hands is saving lives. I am convinced of it.”

Isn’t that something?

I was a rather lonely child in that I had family secrets to keep.  Friendships had to be kept at arm’s length.  There wasn’t any bullying except for seventh grade but I was isolated and very much alone.  There was an English teacher that recognized herself in me and spoke to me privately.  There was no way I could tell the truth about my dysfunctional family but the fact that she reached out to me meant the world. 

The fact she reached out to one who also suffered probably inspired more empathy.  One thing that was so enjoyable after I retired was reading to young children, kindergarten through second grade.  The children were not the avid readers; they tended to be behind their classmates and mostly unnoticed at home and by their fellow classmates.  I spent an hour with two kids; each got 30 minutes undivided time with me.  We chatted for a few minutes and then they would enjoy having a story read to them.  Some hadn’t ever experienced being read to as individuals.  They began the school year, hesitant and shy.  By the end of the year, you couldn’t stop their enthusiasm.  They loved receiving a book of their own as an end-of-year gift.  Some told me it was their very first book.

There were so many wonderful kids.  I remember one in particular, a sweet first grader who absolutely adored Pete-the-Cat books.  The following September, I went into the office to sign myself out from a reading session with two new students and found this little girl lying on the floor near the secretary, crying.  I asked her what was wrong and a nearby security officer rolled her eyes and indicated the little girl was a PITA (but she didn’t say that).  The little girl cried harder and thrashed around.  I knelt down and spoke to her soothingly and she calmed a little, recognizing me.

The reading teacher came into the office.  Apparently, she’d been summoned to deal with the child, who’d calmed down considerably.  After a few more minutes, the security guard escorted the child back to her classroom while I stayed and talked with the reading teacher.  The child wasn’t adjusting to second grade well.  She was having frequent bursts of temper and tantruming. 

The reading teacher asked me if I’d like to mentor the child.  My role would be to encourage and support the child, meeting with her once a week to have lunch with her.  I said yes and spoke with the school’s social worker to make all the arrangements.  The child’s classroom teacher preferred that I meet with the little girl during class time instead of lunch.  Was it to give the teacher a break?  It didn’t matter.

For the rest of the school year, we met together in the social worker’s outer office.  Sometimes she would be happy, the same little one I’d remembered from the year before.  Other times, there were tears and anger from a recent meltdown.  Most of the time, we talked about her week at school and at home, her interests, and whatever was troubling her.  We would talk about how to deal with conflicts without tantruming.

Her favorite character was Pete-the-cat, and he had a specific quote about staying cool.  It was a great quote to focus on, and I sure wish I could remember it now.  I also read to her and when I did, she would snuggle up to me.  The teachers and even the security guard began to see some improvement with her behavior.  At the end of the school year, I gave her a stuffed Pete-the-cat doll and storybook.

The following September she would start third grade at another school on campus.  There were three schools on that campus: one for K-2, one for 3-4, and one for grade 5.  The reading teacher asked if I would continue to mentor the child at the next school and I said yes.  We tried to set me up at the next school but there was never any follow through.  I lost touch with the little girl.

She would be a junior or senior this September.  How did she fare all these years?  Did that year of extra attention and love make a difference?  I’d like to think so.