in case anyone cares.
There are a variety of reasons.
Let’s start with the more mundane, or rather, those involved with my personal life.
This has been a very difficult school year, for a lot of reasons. Perhaps when I note that I have been assaulted by students 3 times this year (no injuries and nothing serious), that will give some sense of the issues in our school. Add to that the school being understaffed, an inability to get subs so that teachers often have to give up a planning period to cover a class (which the week before last I had to do 3 times in 4 days) and you get a sense of some of the dysfunction (even though we get a nominal amount of money for covering a class).
Further, I have students who either are absent from school a great deal (including one of my brightest) or find excuses to stay out of classes (not just mine), there becomes a lack of continuity. Without giving all the details, in one class in which I had at the teim 29 students on my roles, when I did grades for 3rd quarter report cards, 11 had 18 or more absences for the year.
School rules are not enforced consistently by all of the adults, so the fact that I do makes for some pushback from my students, and from those with whom I interact in other capacities.
As a result, I have decided to explore the possibility of moving to an independent school setting for next year, but at my age (I will be 73 in less than 40 days) and my recent mobility among jobs, that is difficult. I am open about my age, and that I might teach for only another 4 years or so. I am open about anything that might be an issue for a particular school. One school that called me directly this week decided to stop talking with me because of one such issue, and the one most likely to hire me had to back off because they are not sure they will have enough students to warrant hiring me for the position for which I was being considered, although they want to touch base again in a couple of weeks.
Meanwhile, like lots of middle class taxpayers, i had to deal with the reality that we get screwed by the new tax laws. I will not go into a great deal of detail, because of my wife’s sense of privacy, but it is worth noting that the biggest hit we took was on the limit to state and local tax deductions. We live in Arlington VA where the average single family home has a tax liability of around 7,000/year, and it is not very hard to hit the top marginal tax rate of 5.75% on any additional income. As it turns out, the difference when all factors were taken into account between what we would have been responsible for under the old law and our responsibility under the current law is going from receiving a refund of several thousand dollars to owing the feds several thousand. Fortunately I had anticipated it, and did not have trouble filing my taxes, but it is was another thing to get me irritated, even angry, as I watch corporations paying no taxes, doing stock buybacks, and the wealthy getting collectively billions more with which to further distort our politics and our economy.
But that is not the primary reason I have not been blogging.
You will have to continue to understand why I have not.
Let me start by noting that for much of my teaching career my primary teaching responsibility was American government, often at an AP level. I did so through last school year, and deliberately stepped away from that this year because I was not sure I could justify teaching about a government in theory where what was happening around us was something completely different.
Let’s be clear. My concerns do NOT start with the election and swearing in of an illegitimately elected President whose name I will NOT use, because it demeans the office he occupies and the country whose leader he is supposed to be.
I went there. I said “illegitimately elected” — and I used those words for too many reasons to enumerate, but you can include among them the voter suppression that was rampant in Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, NC, and Florida; the violation TWICE of Justice Department policies by James Comey; the media’s absymal coverage of the campaign, whether the out of proportion focus on emails to the billions of free media given to rallies of the Republican nominee and his commentaries on talk shows via phone without a similar balance on coverage of the Democratic candidate, and so on.
But the problem goes back far further. One could if one chose go back to 1971 and the Powell Memorandum, which provided the intellectual framework for the constructs of the right wing assault on democracy — please note, in saying this I am NOT blaming Powell for what actually happened. That document presented a theoretical framework that was used by the Koch brothers and others to construct an apparatus that went far beyond what Powell probably envisioned. I say that because his track record on the Supreme Court was NOT as extreme as what we have seen from the right.
I could note that the Powell Memorandum was far from the first time the wealthy on the right tried to subvert democracy. We clearly should include as a precursor the attempts by Vanderbilt and other wealthy types (including Prescott Bush) to get Smedley Butler to lead an army to overthrow FDR. That someone like Prescott Bush got some positive reactions by being among the first to oppose Joe McCarthy does NOT forgive what he attempted to do more than a decade earlier. And unfortunately we saw similar patterns of mixed results in the presidencies of his son and grandson.
The election of Reagan, including the loss of the Senate and the effective loss of the House (even though the Dems maintained a numerical advantage) also led to many things that began to dismantle the process we had been making as a country. During his 8 years, we saw the beginning of the destruction of organized labor and under Mark Fowler at the FCC the moving away from fairness, equal access, and control of monopolies in broadcast media. Without those actions, we would not have had to deal with either Fox News or Sinclair Broadcasting. Or, to give an example about which many may have forgotten, Clear Channel’s banning the playing of songs by the Dixie Chicks because Natalie Maines criticised George W. Bush.
I think the most malignant person in American politics in my lifetime is an easy call. It is not the rightwing crazies like Rep. King of Iowa, or extreme ideologues like Ted Cruz. It is not even Joe McCarthy and his “brain” (later shared with the man now in the Oval) Roy Cohn.
No, the most malignant person in American politics in my lifetime is Mitch McConnell.
Think of his abuse of the filibuster when in the minority. Then when Dems cut back some in order to allow Obama to get some appointments through after Obama was elected (and McConnell said his highest priority was not what he could do for the American people but keeping Obama from being reelected), he had the audacity to blame Dems when he further gutted the filibuster in order to cram through multiple appointments to the judicial branch that he had illegally and irresponsibly kept open by denying Obama his right to appointments even though he was reelected, even though Obama was the first President since Reagan to twice win a majority of the popular vote. I would note that gave Trump a campaign issue (particularly in replacing Scalia) which he was able to use to get Evangelical leaders to support him despite his disgusting personal behavior and rhetorical excesses.
As I have watched the continued destruction of what progress had been made in my lifetime on issues of civil rights and civil liberties, as I have watched as the media took far too long to call out the crimes of this administration, as I saw too many in leadership positions among the Dems unwilling to speak out forcefully, and if necessary, even risk personal condemnation and perhaps prosecution that the American people be informed, I wondered what the point might be of my writing here about any of this.
Let’s go back. As a member of the Gang of 8 Harry Reid knew that the FBI had an investigation open into Trump. When Mitch McConnell refused to assent to informing the American people of what the Russians were doing and when Comey repeatedly gave oxygen to the issue of Clinton emails and when Reid intimated in his letter to Comey that there was something about Trump despite the denial by the FBI about any such inquiry/investigation, I think Reid had a moral obligation to go public.
Moral obligations. There are times when we deliberately break laws that distort morality, either because the laws themselves are immoral or because the consequences of not breaking them means we are unable to raise the issues about which the American people need to know in order to make informed decisions. Those of us who participated in the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s (my participation was minor, as I turned 17 in 1963) understood this. We had seen leaders like M L King Junior and James Farmer locked up. But we also saw a Supreme Court with a fair number of Justices who at least at some point had been Conservatives support greater liberalization of American society, who overturned laws aimed solely to restrict Black political participation, who saw the need for empowering women personally, politically, and economically, who saw discrimination against gays as unjustifiable under the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment.
It is protected speech under the First Amendment to be a bigot — racially, religiously, on gender identification, on sexual orientation, on political affiliation, on level of education, on economic status.
But at the end of Article VI of the Constitution we read
but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States
That should apply to all state and local offices as well, although Jews continued to be prohibited from holding public office in Maryland until the Jew Bill was passed in 1826 (and that did not at the time extend that privilege/right to atheists, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, or anyone else).
Any individual voter can use any criteria, however biased, bigoted, non-rational, in deciding whom to support for public office.
No public official who takes an oath or affirmation to support and defend the Constitution can abide by that commitment when acting on such a biased basis.
And for a public official to stand by in silence when another public official displays and acts upon such bias is also a betrayal of the commitment to support and defend the constitution.
In a somewhat different context, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson once opined that the Constitution is not a suicide pack. By that he did not mean we should abandon our constitutional principles, but rather we might need to rethink how we interpreted them in light of current situations.
Our current situation is one of crisis. We are in the earlier (but NOT earliest) states of changing from a liberal autocracy to something far more dangerous and nefarious. We are not YET a totalitarian state, but we have increasing movement towards unrestrained autocracy.
Those who rationalize FOR ANY REASON not opposing the current occupant of the Oval on his continued violation not merely of norms but of actual laws and clear court decisions are themselves complicit in the destruction of our politics, our freedoms and liberties, our system of government.
We can talk about all the very important issues facing our nation and the world. Among those that matter to me are the ongoing environmental destruction of the planet; the unleashing of hate and violence against the “other” not just in this country, but in countries around the world; the increasing economic inequity; the abuse of the legal system to disenfranchise and disempower some in order to make others more powerful, wealthy, and beyond the reach of the laws; the destruction of the right to a meaningful public education; and many more (I did say “Among those”).
But if we do not draw the line right now against the increasing autocracy we are seeing in this country, nothing else will matter, because there will be no meaningful restraint on the sociopathic individual who currently and illegitimately holds the reins of powerl
In less than three years he has turned a party that used to at least in theory be based on certain key principles into one whose sole purpose is to support and validate almost all of his actions.
The media may now be starting to be critical, but they are very late in so doing, and still give too much air time and news print to his bloviations.
Instead we need voices that call out constantly.
We need to hear the following:
- he is a lawbreaker . then give the details .. not merely about the federal laws he is currently breaking, but all the laws broken in the past, tax violations and money laundering being only part of the list, We can talk about his fake magazine covers, his claims about golf excellence and so on
- he is a liar — don’t soft soap that word. He lies about what he has said even a day before
- he is without any moral sense — he never thinks he has done anything wrong
- he lacks empathy — he sees people only insofar as they advantage hime
- he is a coward: he CANNOT face someone and fire them for real. He has someone else do it or does it by tweet
- he is weak — that is why foreign government and strong men from Putin and Russia to MBS and Saudi Arabia can manipulate him.
Perhaps every news broadcast (except of course Fox) should begin like this:
“Good evening. Today the President broke 5 federal laws, violated three ratified treaties, and lied in public 15 times.”
There are others, here and elsewhere, who can far more cogently than can I address the issues I have raised in this rambling piece.
I used to be a highly visible member of this community, opining upon many issues, sharing thoughts, analyzing the work of others.
I have spent several months wondering if there were anything I could do that could make a positive difference, and beginning to despair that nothing I said or did would make any difference.
This has been during a time in which I experienced a great deal of personal conflict from my work situation and elsewhere.
Quite frankly, I lacked the intellectual and emotional energy to do much of anything worthwhile.
I am now on the first of ten days of Spring break, with NO work to do for school
Perhaps I will write more
Perhaps I will just putter around the house, fixing and cleaning, and take some long walks in te woods, and let our remaining cat curl up next to me.
Perhaps I will read books having nothing to do with politics.
Who knows.
I have largely been absent for the past few months.
I don’t think I have been missed.
I am not sure I have anything left to contribute.
But I thought I owed something of an explanation.
Make of this what you will.