One of the things I find so disheartening about Trump’s campaign is how his “message” is resonating with so many people. It’s not just that he’s managed to tap into the anger that so many disenfranchised people feel. That’s bad enough, particularly when I can’t see how he can truly believe any of it himself, but is just cynically manipulating people to get them to vote for him. He’s been a Democrat in the past when it suited him, professed to be pro-women’s rights and clearly has no clue about the Christian Right and what’s important to them (he couldn’t quote a scripture as his favorite and cited “Two Corinthians” which anyone familiar even remotely with the Bible knows is called “Second Corinthians.”) If he gets into office, it’s impossible to know what he really plans to do, as he’s been notably sparse in policy statements. No, the real issue from my perspective is summed up nicely in a commentary by Sophia McClennen and published in Salon. Now before we go any farther, I recognize that Salon is a “progressive/liberal” website, and I’ve written about the dangers of echo chambers and how easy it is to only hear what supports your own viewpoint, but in this case I think the facts that underpin McClennen’s positions are clear. Furthermore, she skewers both Republicans and Democrats, although truth be told the Right presents a much bigger target.
Her title is “I’m with stupid: The entire 2016 election has been an insult to our intelligence.” I’ve written several rants posted here about the importance of critical thinking and the unfortunate dearth of its application, particularly in our political process. For years the Republicans have been taking an anti-science position on climate change, claiming against all evidence to the contrary that global warming is not an issue to be concerned about, and further stating there is not yet even a consensus in the scientific community that it’s caused by human activity (a complete lie).
There are three stages to the acceptance of an idea by someone initially opposed to it:
1) It’s completely untrue.
2) OK, there may be some truth to it, but it’s irrelevant.
3) Of course it’s true, and I’ve said so from the very beginning.
So we find ourselves somewhere around (1) or (2) when we look at the Republican position, and I can only conclude it’s because doing anything significant to change it would hurt a variety of bottom lines in the world of Big Republican Donors.
This has been reflected throughout the current and last couple of election cycles. Starting with Dan Quayle, Dubya and then with that pinnacle of incomprehensible prose, Sarah Palin, we appear to have gone from dumb to dumber. There was an attempt to portray Quayle and Dubya as fairly intelligent guys whose public “good ol’ boy” persona was misinterpreted as stupidity. Although I don’t agree with that, it’s hard to see Palin as anything but stupid. Her speeches are impossible to follow, full of incomplete sentences, tortured syntax and no logical progression. She jumps from topic to topic without any connection; in short, if you read them they seem like the ravings of a lunatic. Yet somehow she “clicked” with millions of voters, all on the far right, of course.
And now we have Trump. I read the other day that he has something like a 200-work lexicon (this from his co-author in “The Art of the Deal”). Evidently Trump didn’t have the attention span to string a sentence together on his own, let alone contribute significantly to the book; it was written virtually 100 percent by the “co-author.” I would think that if Trump actually claims to have co-authored his book he should have, I don’t know, maybe actually written a little bit of it. But hey, that’s just me.
Take a listen for yourself if you question these observations. Trump’s speeches are worse than Palin’s (a feat I wouldn’t have thought possible). I cannot believe this guy is the Republican nominee. And I’m not just referring to his incredibly poor language skills or style; when you get past how he says it and come up against what he is saying, it’s even worse. Let’s take a couple of examples.
“I’m going to build a huge wall between the US and Mexico, and Mexico is going to pay for it.”
OK, this is a classic. First, the simple fact is that it’s impossible to do that from an engineering standpoint. Or next to impossible; take a look at a map sometime. A river makes up the border through most of Texas, so is he saying he’s going to build his wall down the middle of the Rio Grande? Engineers say it couldn’t be done. In any case the cost would be astronomical.
But Mexico is going to pay for it. Oh really? And just how are we going to get them to do that? In his one and only meeting with the President of Mexico, that little detail “didn’t come up.” Yeah, I bet. The simple fact is that Mexico is a sovereign nation and can tell Trump to go pound sand down a rat hole. He can bluster and bully all he wants and they wouldn’t pony up a nickel.
But most important of all, does anyone really think that building a wall between the US and Mexico is going to solve our illegal immigration problem? The fact that we already have a wall in a significant part of California has somehow escaped his notice? (Which, by the way, does almost nothing to slow the current flood)).
The point is that he has proposed a stupidly simplistic solution to a highly complex problem. What’s disconcerting is that anyone takes it seriously. Evidently his supporters are either idiots or naïve.
Another one is Trump’s statement early on that he had seen “thousands of Muslims in the streets of New Jersey cheering when the twin towers collapsed.”
He stuck to that ridiculous statement even after it became clear it was a lie; to this day not one shred of evidence, newsreel or report supports it. Again, the worst part is not that he said it (bad enough on its own), but that a large segment of our population continues to believe it.
And last (but by no means all) is his recent hot microphone debacle with the subsequent accusations and his denials.
This bozo is caught on tape bragging about sexual assault and how he gets away with it because he’s a “star,” and when a dozen women come forward with their experiences of him doing exactly that, he denies it and says “everyone who knows him knows that how he acts!! He should get a prize for sheer hubris. And yet again, the worst part is how many people profess to believe him.
Put this in perspective. Substitute any nine year-old child for Trump. They’d be grounded or sent to bed without supper for saying this nonsense, yet a large segment of our population is accepting it as truth because it’s coming from this excuse for a leader.
I could go on. And on. And to be fair, Democrats have their own skeletons. Not nearly as many nor as egregious, but some nonetheless. The real issue is how we as a society have been unwilling to hold people like Trump to a standard of truth. Or even to simple logic.
It does not bode well for us, methinks.
I’ve written several entries now about the current Presidential race, how Donald Trump against all predictions got the Republican nomination and the effect that is having on the Republican party. I think it’s clear that the party wonks were terrified of what we have now, two weeks before the election: The Donald is the Republican Party’s nominee, and it’s beginning to look very much like he’s going go down in flames. Not only that, but Trump’s probable flameout is endangering the entire Republican ticket; they’re apparently in real danger of losing at least the Senate and maybe even the House. I think they’re all scratching their heads, wondering how Jeb could have failed so early in the primaries, when he was the clear party favorite (or so they thought). I’ve even read a rumor that Mormon Mitt was at one point being pressured to throw his hat in the ring. Given the bunch of crazies in the original Republican lineup he would have been the best of the bunch, and I would have voted for him over almost any of the others that ran under the Republican ticket; and believe me when I say I never EVER thought I’d hear myself consider ANY scenario that would include me voting for Mittens!
One of our tour-mates had been on our same tour several years ago and had taken a photo of a magnificent mature lion in Hwange park, our third camp. He showed the photo to our guide, asking if it was Cecil, which was confirmed. Recall that Cecil (named after Cecil Rhodes), was the lion killed by Walter Palmer, a dentist from Minnesota. This guy paid in excess of $50,000 for the privilege of killing Cecil and got international opprobrium (justifiably, in my opinion) for his trouble. Cecil was probably the best-known lion in Hwange park; he was in the prime of his life (lions live 20-25 years in the wild; Cecil was 13) and he even had a GPS collar. Hunting is illegal in the park, but Palmer’s guides had dragged bait around and lured him out of the park where he was fair game. Palmer shot him with a bow, wounding him; they then tracked him and finished him off with a rifle. Some reports state that it took them 40 hours to finally catch up with him and kill him, although Palmer and his guides say it wasn’t that long. Either way, a pretty brutal and agonizing death for a magnificent creature. There was a hue and cry all over the US for some kind of punishment or prosecution of what was believed to be a crime; it was believed that it could not be legal to kill a lion wearing a GPS tracking collar. But in fact no crime was committed; Palmer had paid a fee to hunt (and kill) a lion; it was just Cecil’s bad luck that he left the safety of the park to follow the bait and became a trophy on Walter Palmer’s wall.
Anyhow, their home compound was made up of several small buildings, each devoted to a different function (cooking and eating in one, sleeping in another, etc.) The cooking/eating building had a thatched roof (with a hole at the peak), an open cooking fire in the center and a bench around the inside wall. They had a handful of cooking pots and utensils hanging on the wall and a single entry way (no door). The floor was dirt, but the inside was spotless and organized. A couple of other buildings similarly constructed for sleeping for other members of the extended family, a goat pen and a small garden fenced off made up their compound. Their “shower” was a small structure with a door and a fixed faucet on a pole, with no roof. Water was carried from either a faucet or a stream a hundred yards or so away.
So it came as quite a shock when one of our guides started talking about “symbiotic relationships between the animals, the migratory patterns dictated by the weather and prevailing wind/rainy season, which itself was a result of the southern hemispheric Coriolis effect, and the occasional autotroph found in elephant dung (had to look that one up!) And he was clearly not trying to impress us; this was a highly educated, articulate and knowledgeable man, not just about the bush flora and fauna, but other topics as well. Another of our guides gave us an impromptu but highly informative lesson in southern hemisphere astronomy, pointing out not just the Southern Cross, but explaining in considerable detail how to calculate both true and magnetic south from the arrangement of the stars. Turns out that most of the guides, even though they came from such simple (at least to us) homes, were well-educated; our friend casually discussing autotrophs had spent time in London at school and was clearly comfortable with his knowledge.
It’s always a bit of a shock to me when my preconceived notions turn out to be wrong. Of course it shouldn’t; many (if not most) do. But I don’t think I’m that unusual; we all create a mental image of an expected experience, and depending upon how strong that image is, when we are confronted by a very different reality it can be jarring.
is our experience seeing the shanty towns in Soweto. Like most of us, I’d seen the newsreels of Soweto, where people are living in tiny one-room huts tar paper huts with leaky corrugated tin roofs. This was such a strong image that when I think of people living hopelessly in abject poverty, that’s what comes t mind. Anyhow, Lorraine Leas (my friend in South Africa) had arranged for Mothusi (a man she regularly uses as a driver for airport runs) to take us around Johannesburg on a free day to see the sights and get a feel for the city. He showed us the more upscale parts of Johannesburg and made sure we got some of the history of South Africa (colonialism as well as pre- and post-apartheid life), and he also took us to Soweto.
Soweto is a quite large section of Johannesburg, and did in fact include the shanty towns I had envisioned. Mothusi drove us to one particular section and asked us to stay in his vehicle while he went to find his “sister.” (I learned later she probably wasn’t actually his sister in the sense of sharing parents, but I wasn’t really clear on their actual relationship. She could have been a “sister in faith,” meaning they went to the same church, or maybe even a half-sister, since polygamous marriages are accepted and common among South African blacks.) Either way, he introduced us to a very pleasant young woman who was extremely polite, articulate (and obviously educated). She was dressed like a tour guide, and took Cathy and me on a short walking tour of this shanty town. It was pretty much exactly like what I had envisioned, at least visually. One room huts made of tar paper, corrugated tin roofs, the whole thing. No plumbing, a single bulb in the middle of the ceiling, a cloth divider screening off sleeping areas, and so forth. So far, my notion of abject poverty.
Jamboree is a major street in central Orange County not far from John Wayne International, the airport I fly in and out of a lot these days. When I was new to OC the history of the county wasn’t all that interesting to me, but as I got more familiar with my surroundings and came to think of them as “home” I discovered that Jamboree was named after a scouting event back in the Fifties. I was never a Boy Scout (not a very long story, but it had something to do with being raised as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses), but I always thought the 
outdoorsy-part of Scouting was kind of cool. Anyhow, it turns out that Scouts have gatherings they call “jamborees” and there was a big one in 1953 in Orange County, for which Jamboree Blvd. in Costa Mesa was named. I envisioned tent camps kind of like this one (above), with rows of tents along the lines of this (right). All in all, fairly Spartan accommodations.
every “tent.” Calling them tents is accurate, I guess, but only in the sense that they were made of 
heavy cloth material (a type of waterproofed canvas, I think). They all had solid flooring (sometimes a concrete pad, sometimes on a raised wooden platform) with doors that lock, ceiling fans and VERY comfortable beds. They were much more like upscale hotel rooms than a Boy Scout tent camp, that’s certain!
I can’t wait for this to be over.
It’s one week away from Election Day. Cathy and I both filled out our absentee ballots last night and they’ll go out in today’s mail. I think it’s pretty safe to say that most people have made up their minds about who they are voting for and most polls show Hilary holding on to a very thin margin in the general election but a fairly comfortable lead in electoral votes, which means that she is probably going to be our next President. I was hopeful that Trump would get a shellacking, and there are still indications that he might, but I’m getting less convinced that will happen. Either way the Republican Party of the past is going to look very different; it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that it would split into two parties. There are a lot of Republicans who are holding their noses and voting for Trump, but the number of party stalwarts who have come out publicly that they are voting for Clinton is telling. Of course, those nose-holders could probably better be described as a vote against Hilary, but that’s true for pretty much every election.
I also predict that even if Clinton wins by a fair margin, the Legislative branch is going to be split between Houses or will stay Republican. And unless Democrats take the White House with a resounding mandate, the unprecedented nastiness of this presidential race does not bode well for a legislature that will be any more cooperative for Hilary than it was for Obama. And that means nothing significant will happen. John McCain has already stated that if she wins he is going to do whatever is necessary to block her Supreme Court nominees. Ironically, it was working with McCain in the Senate that got Hilary her chops early on. And even the unlikely event of a Trump win (an unmitigated disaster for this country), the enemies he has created in his own party in this race are not going to fall all over themselves to cooperate with him in destroying the country with his mix of arrogance, stupidity and hubris).
I do have a small amount of hope that the Republican Party leadership, realizing how disastrous this election was for their brand, will disavow their romance with the nut jobs on the far right (religious whackos, Tea Party loyalists and Alt-Right loons) and try to resurrect their brand of old. Except for his hawkishness, Goldwater is starting to look pretty sane! If they don’t go back to the drawing board and try to rebuild from scratch, we should all remember that it was the anger at a do-nothing government that lead to the Trump candidacy.
Who knows? Social liberal/fiscal conservatives (like me) might even find there’s a candidate or two in that new/old Republican Party they could vote for in good conscience.