Tag: Politics

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I was, like, only 100 feet away from Obama and Merkel last night, and I’m now enlightened

President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel sit on a stage at the Anthem in Washington, D.C., discussing Merkel's new book, German and American history, and current events.

I got to see President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel in conversation last night in DC, and I want to share some thoughts I took away.

Be generous with your curiosity.

Obama and Merkel discussed at length the parallels between Germany’s divisions (literally, in the case of the Berlin Wall, which Merkel grew up on the eastern side of) and America’s. We’re in a time of great division across many lines, but in Merkel’s experience where her country was cleaved in two and then put back together, she found earnest curiosity for the experiences of people who have lived very different lives is the key to understanding and unity. Obama iterated on that idea with regard to the United States where we’re divided across race, class, religion, region, urban vs. rural, and so much more. They both agreed curiosity is the first ingredient in unity, and while it’s very difficult in the face of indifference and hostility, and especially so when it isn’t reciprocated, it’s necessary for good faith public discourse.

Freedom is a responsibility.

This one was more Merkel, but while the sentiment might feel familiar to us, I think it’s somewhat more complex. Merkel said people in democracies tend to interpret their freedom as the ability to do whatever they want, but she said, having lived in a dictatorship and then having effectively led the free world (my words, not hers, but she did), her perspective of freedom is a bit different than ours. She actually said living in a dictatorship wasn’t all that bad. She had a happy childhood, and she and her family had a decent life. However, with the state providing so much to and demanding so much from her, she noticed a void when that authority was gone. Freedom, to her, is the responsibility to build a decent society in the absence of an authoritarian state doing it for you. Freedom, she said, is a responsibility because, if you don’t tend to and nurture it, if you don’t help keep your society thriving, people will lose faith in it, and when people lose faith in their society, that’s when they invite dictators and authoritarians to come and relieve them of the responsibility of fixing their own problems using the systems and resources they have available to them.

The antidote for despair is action.

This one is classic Obama, but Merkel was on board in her own way. Obama said, when he was in office, he would tell his staff, “better is good.” He hinted at the nirvana fallacy in which people tend to despair and reject a solution if it isn’t perfect. Merkel added that, sometimes, when you want to solve a problem, it can be discouraging to find the answer is more difficult and less effective than you expected. They both suggested that, even if we can push toward an ideal solution slightly, improvements are good work. Sometimes, they said, a massive challenge with dire implications, such as climate change—which is stressing global economies and pushing migrants and asylum seekers away from the equator around the world, making it more difficult for people to enjoy the freedoms they may take for granted, and is only getting worse and tempting an invitation for an authoritarian or dictator to solve those problems—can all seem desperate but, with action, maybe we can make something better, and better is good.

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Why This Election Hurts

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about presidents in the stories we tell. I love what I do because I get to create pieces of art that, with any luck, could become a reference point for someone to make sense of our world. Cultural touchstones in art are important because they reinforce or illuminate our cultural and social values, and we can use them for growth, to chart a path forward, or to find it again when we’ve lost our way.

One of the things I love about stories is we can look at a protagonist, acknowledge their flaws, and root for them to use their strengths to defeat the antagonist. More than that, the heroes we cast in our stories reveal the ideals we hold for our own values. We recognize them as the good guys not because we’re told they’re the good guys but because we see the good in them. We can examine the aspects that make them protagonists or heroes, and we can see in them a kind of reflection of that which we hold to be good. 

We can look to President Whitmore played by Bill Pullman in Independence Day to give us hope in the darkest of times when all seems hopeless and lost. We can look to President Beck played by Morgan Freeman in Deep Impact to help us face the worst fate imaginable and to do it all with that voice that makes us feel wise and like everything is going to be okay. We can look to Dave Kovic played by Kevin Kline in Dave to cut through the bullshit, make us laugh, and remind us what’s most important: love. We can look to President Bartlett played by Martin Sheen in West Wing to demonstrate that prime patriotic quality of putting duty and country above all else, even politics. (I’m aware there aren’t really any great woman presidents in popular American culture to cite here, and I think that’s kind of a point worth making, so I’m leaving this list as is.)

In reality, our presidents aren’t like our idealized heroes. I know that. As many idealized presidents as we have in our storytelling, we seem to have more examples of presidents who represent our resentment of politics, and that points to a reality, too. Regardless, I think we should hold our real presidents to those ideals and values, because those ideals and values? They’re real. They’re the truth in the fiction.

The neat thing about storytelling in any culture is the audience has to mostly agree for the magic to work. The audience has to feel the hero is the hero, so we can look to stories to understand what a culture values.

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Re-Reading The Handmaid’s Tale, a Review

At the end of 2018, I re-read Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. After 15 years (and this time picking it up because I wanted to, not because I needed to for a class), I found it extraordinarily powerful and prescient. I then wrote this review but never posted it. Oops. I figured I’d post it now with some edits because these thoughts weren’t doing anyone any good sitting on my hard drive.

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Walking the D.C. Trail of 2020

An image of 10,000 small American flags surrounding the Washington Monument with a sign that reads, "200,000 dead, they deserved better"

Washington, D.C. is known for being the center of politics and power in the United States, but there is a sense of disassociation among the American people. It is a sense that Americans have lost control of their capital and perhaps even that it is hostile territory. This sense sometimes manifests in the city’s streets.

America continues to grapple with racial injustice and police brutality, which remains unaddressed by national leadership. With the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the relative balance of the Supreme Court is at risk. And always in the background of 2020 like a crackling static, the Covid-19 pandemic continues to kill more people in America than in any other country in the world despite a relatively low population density.

On the final day of summer 2020, the 200,000th American died from Covid-19. The next day, I decided to take a walk.

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Demagogues

I’ve been thinking and reading about demagogues a lot this summer. Demagogues are political leaders who appeal through pathos rather than logos. For the non-Greek, feelings rather than logic. Most commonly, demagogues manipulate our fear and anger, and they generally direct those emotions at an other or a “them.” Demagogues require opponents as scapegoats. They require division.

We’ve seen their kind many times throughout history, yet I’m optimistic about them. For every one that has risen to power, I like to think many failed to gain any traction. Recognizing them is simple, something I expect any American should be able to do instinctually, yet if you find yourself caught by their influence, it may all seem a bit vexing and complicated. That’s because some of what they’re saying, on some level, makes sense and is, on some level, true. They require reality distorted.

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On ‘Salute to America’ and Questionable-at-Best Leadership

Despite his country continuing to face a historic pandemic and unaddressed racial tensions, Trump is proceeding with his “Salute to America” celebration tomorrow, and that tracks, considering the kind of questionable leadership he has exhibited not only throughout these crises but also throughout his term.

While I’m seeing talk about how much the event is costing us and the wisdom of holding such an event right now, I’m wondering why more people aren’t more outraged about the principle that he’s once again co-opted our most sacrosanct holiday for personal and political gain. Independence Day used to be a day of unity for all of us to set aside our differences and come together to celebrate the best ideals of America, but Trump has turned it into a divisive campaign rally to highlight the worst of America at our expense. Regardless of politics, this should set off even the most adamantly self-proclaimed patriots among us.

It’s not right, and it’s just one more of the countless reasons you shouldn’t vote for him in November. Of course, it is far less compelling of a reason than the thousands of Americans who have died from Covid-19 due to his poor leadership; his woefully inadequate response to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and the far too many others, and the social movements clamoring for change; and the countless other indicators of his ineptitude and harm; but I digress.

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Healthcare in America

Tonight, I went to the ER because I thought I was dying (I wasn’t, and I’m following doctors’ recommendations; I’ll probably be fine). For anyone who has been to a doctor in America, I don’t have to tell you this was a miserable experience. However, maybe you’re super healthy or have just forgotten how bad healthcare in America is (or maybe you’re one of the about 60 million Americans who can’t really afford access to healthcare). In any case, I feel it’s important we all consider the state of healthcare in America this year because we have a really important vote coming up in November.

I felt inspired to write something about this because it’s something I care about. I felt compelled because I’m a writer and that’s what I do. I care because the flaws in the U.S. healthcare system have harmed me and my family, because we call ourselves the greatest country in the world and can shoot a rocket down a brown person’s throat from halfway around the world using a remote-controlled airplane, but we can’t provide adequate healthcare for our own people.

Coincidentally, John Oliver’s first feature story of the new season, which aired last night, does a good job covering some of our healthcare system’s failures and the potential for a medicare-for-all system. And it’s funny. And you can watch it instead of reading it. You don’t like John Oliver? I’m sorry. Maybe it’s his accent, or maybe it’s his personality, or maybe it’s because he’s often right and persuasive and nobody likes to be proven wrong. My advice is to get over that because, if you can’t accept being proven wrong, you’ll never learn anything or grow as a person. Like our president. Maybe you aspire to that. Maybe there’s something else entirely we need to talk about.

Anyway. Personally, I’m skeptical of medicare for all because it would be a big change, and there are a lot of uncertainties, and that’s scary. But I think one of our primary goals as a society should be to reduce and minimize suffering wherever and whenever possible, and there’s a lot that just doesn’t make sense in our current healthcare system, which necessarily has to balance profits with the wellbeing of people, and no matter how you try to make sense of that, it is and always has been cruel.

Maybe there’s some bitterness in the above. That’s probably because I am bitter. There are many reasons for that, but for tonight, I’ll stick with this one. Maybe I’ll talk about more later. Yay, 2020.

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One Sentence About This State of Emergency

After two years of holding partisan control of the federal government during which border security was not an emergency, a president the American people don’t want is declaring a state of emergency that doesn’t exist to build a wasteful and ineffective wall the American people don’t want, by taking money from the military’s tax-funded budget, not Mexico as he promised, and to satisfy prejudices and assuage fears he helped create with lies and demagoguery, thus sidestepping democracy and invoking autocracy in the country that used to be the leader of the free world where self-proclaimed patriots and champions of liberty used to criticize a black president for using the power of executive order and now are celebrating victory for getting nothing their country wants or needs, because one failed businessman turned celebrity exploits the popular scorn of modern American politics to convince them he knows best and reinforces that belief with propaganda, confirmation bias, and the cognitive dissonance of a generation that stripped future generations of their prosperity and is losing its grasp on the modern world.

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America’s Identity Crisis and Its Need for Liberalism

I didn’t bother watching the state of the union address this week. I figured that, as long as Trump stuck to the speech he didn’t write, stumbled through nine out of ten words correctly, and didn’t wet himself at the dais, he’d be forgiven the falsehoods and misleading statements, and it appears I was more or less right about that.

I did watch Joe Kennedy’s rebuttal speech, and I found it eloquently expressed an idea that’s been weighing on liberal America these last 18 months or so since the GOP nominated a guy who was not only unqualified and unfit to lead its party, but also a desecration to it.

“Constitutional crisis” has been buzzing around recently because Congress made about as unanimous of a decision as it can (517-5) to impose sanctions on Russia for what our intelligence community is in consensus was an attack on American democracy, but of course, the Trump administration is refusing to enforce those sanctions because he’s a traitor (probably) and democracy is dying and the GOP doesn’t care as long as they win, because party over country, and …

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It’s About Time For Honesty and Introspection

Yesterday, the president of the Boy Scouts of America apologized for the political content of Donald Trump’s speech at the National Jamboree.

It’s July 2017. Donald Trump has been in office for roughly six months. Before that, we had about ten weeks to really prepare for his presidency. Before that, we endured his despicable 18-month-long campaign, and before that, anyone who was paying attention watched him transition from a once-failing businessman who saved himself by branding and licensing his reputation and becoming an inconsequential celebrity whose only real chance at relevance was stoking fires and pandering to American desperation and resentment through conspiracy theories, lies, and post-truthism.

My point is we’ve known what Donald Trump is for a long time. Or, maybe you’re just joining us because he’s put on full display the worst of America using the world’s biggest stage. Either way, love him or hate him, you know what you’re getting with Donald Trump.

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