reflectivepundit

First the Post-Massacre Playbook; Then the Do-Nothing Nation

By Brigitte L. Nacos

Not all of the ten victims of the Buffalo mass shooting were buried, when an 18-year-old gunman killed at least nineteen children and two of their teachers in an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. Since lethal incidents like those in Buffalo and Uvalde have become as American as apple pie, they are by now followed automatically by the same post-massacre playbook: Flags are flown at half-mast, solemn prayer are services are held, make-shift memorials are established and buried under mountains of flowers, calls to pray for the victims and their families are issued, prominent people visit the venues of grief, shock and anger are expressed.

While the last chapter of the playbook is still open in the aftermath of Buffalo, the first chapter is now devoted to the events in Uvalde. Yes, our hearts and souls hurt. Yes, we are praying for the victims and survivors. Yes, we are angry that within two weeks two 18-year-old adolescents killed a total of thirty-one human beings. And, yes, we are frustrated that both killed with assault weapons, weapons of war, semi-automatic rifles that allowed them to kill a multitude of persons in record time.

The gun lobby and their supporters have a standard slogan: Guns do not kill—people do. What a tragic joke! For the idea that reasonable people with guns can stop crazy people with guns was once again disproven in Buffalo and in Uvalde: In the first case, bullets from the gun of a guard in Tops Friendly Market could not stop the mass-shooter because the latter wore body armor. In the second case, two police officers encountered the shooter before he entered the school but, again, their shots were deflected by perpetrator’s body armor.

No other country in the world makes it as easy as this country to purchase assault weapons and magazines that guarantee the largest number of people killed in the shortest possible time. In the United States, the number of handguns is significantly larger than the total population size. And no other country has as many mass shootings and people killed by handguns than the United States.

Again and again, public figures and regular people will say in response to catastrophic shootings, “This is not what we are!”

Unfortunately, this is what we are.

The Orwellian Truth and Big Brother Trump

By Brigitte L. Nacos

We have heard it all from the White House before. There are no objective facts, there are alternative facts. Think of Donald Trump’s claim that the crowd size at his inauguration was   unprecedented although aerial photos showed clearly far more people at Barack Obama’s first inauguration.

Facts do not matter for Trump and his staffers who deal a lot in alternative facts and post-truth.

What unfolded in the face of Hurricane Dorian deserves mentioning even though nothing coming out of the White House defying fact and reality is terribly surprising.  

It began with the President tweeting that Alabama was among the states threatened by Dorian--perhaps an unwitting mistake. After weather experts assured the public that there was no threat whatsoever for Alabama, Trump could have easily acknowledged he made a mistake. Instead, he continued to insist that Alabama could be affected.Yesterday, from the Oval Office, he displayed a map issued by the National Hurricane Center that was obviously falsified to show Alabama could have been affected by Dorian.

Challenged by news reports, the President issued yet another tweet this morning insisting,  “What I said was accurate! All Fake News in order to demean!”

This all is so similar to totalitarian alternative reality, fact, and truth as described in George Orwell’s “1984;” it is so strikingly similar to what Big Brother’s voice O’Brien tells Winston who has not yet surrendered to the totalitarian dictate:

“Winston, you believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right...But I tell you, Winston, reality is not external...

Whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth.”

In a moment of dissent Winston wrote in his diary, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two and two make four.”

Big Brother knew.

Following a torturous process overseen by O’Brien, Winston does no longer question Big Brother’s complete control over fact, reality, and truth.

When Big Brother says two plus two equals three—or five—or anything, it is the truth.

As the U.S. President continued to claim that Alabama was threatened by Hurricane Dorian against all facts, his message was clear: Whatever Big Brother Trump holds to be truth is truth.

Thankfully, America’s 2019 is not Orwell’s 1984...

Brexit Vote and Populist Failings There and Here

By Brigitte L. Nacos

This weekend, as I was leaving Dublin, the Irish Times’s only front page story was an excellent commentary by Fintan O’Toole  titled “Brexit fantasy is about to come crashing down.” Here are the opening paragraphs of O’Toole’s dissection of the equally surprising as shocking referendum result and its likely consequences:

“Did you ever see a slightly drunk man trying that trick with the tablecloth? He thinks he can whip the cloth off the table with a fast, clean snap, but leave all the crockery perfectly intact. He gives a sharp tug and stands back with a triumphant flourish as the plates and glasses come flying to the ground and shatter all around him.

That’s what Brexit is like. Those who have driven it have successfully pulled the cloth off the table – the underlying fabric of modern Britain has been whipped away with a shocking suddenness.

They stand in triumph, sure that they have pulled off the trick of removing a whole layer of political reality without disturbing all the family tableware. They have yet to notice that so much that was on the table is now at their feet, broken, perhaps irreparably.”

In the Brexit case the imaginary trick that O’Toole describes was not performed by drunkards but by opportunistic populists whose major appeals were not based on fact and truth. The public perceptions they strove for were that an EU exit would mean quick fixes for all the ills in the U.K.--most importantly, a stop of the transfer of huge sums of U.K. taxpayers’ money to Brussels and of the flow of foreigners onto the British isle.

One English woman interviewed by a TV reporter lauded the vote as a return to “normalcy” and to “things like they used to be.”

Ah, well. It took merely hours or days for some leaders of the Exit movement to admit explicitly or implicitly that nothing would change in the near future or perhaps not at all.

As Steven Castle reports in today’s New York Times, the most prominent Brexit populists Boris Johnson, the former London mayor, and Nigel Farage, leader of the far right Independence Party, along with others began to backpedal on their campaign promises that were all along based on misinformation.

The Brexit advocates expected to lose the referendum and win political capital among the divided conservative camp. As their underhanded tricks become increasingly exposed, they are in a pickle. As Castle put it, “Having now ousted Prime Minister David Cameron, they [the Exit leaders] face a political vacuum, with their base demanding that promises be kept. Mr. Johnson, the front-runner to replace Mr. Cameron, has not made any further pronouncements since a subdued statement on Friday that was restricted to generalities. If he does become prime minister, Mr. Johnson will face the task of carrying out a British withdrawal without provoking a backlash from those who believed campaign slogans or sentiments that he certainly appeared to endorse.”

In praising the Brexit decision and comparing its core demands to the fuzzy agenda behind his “Taking Back America” slogan Donald Trump will continue to copy the metaphorical table cloth trick of his British soulmates—regardless of the consequences.

The Shame of a Nation (III): Spineless GOP Does Not Stand Up to Gun-Nuts and the 2. Amendment Myth

By Brigitte L. Nacos

For a moment or two after the mass shooting in Newtown before Christmas I thought that this was a real opportunity to counter the glut of assault weapons in the hands of millions of Americans. Who in heaven would not support reasonable regulations in a nation with far more handguns and far more shooting victims than any other comparable democracy?

I wasn’t naïve enough to think that the National Rifle Association (NRA) and the gun industry that fills the NRA’s coffers would change their tune. But in the face of 20 little boys and girls mowed down by a lone gunman in a short shooting spree I hoped for some leaders in the ranks of the Republican Party to ignore the pressures and threats from the gun lobby and its fanatical followers in the militia and Tea Party movements.

It is now clear that I was wrong. Very wrong.

Yesterday, after President Obama introduced his comprehensive but altogether modest gun regulation proposals,  the chairman of the National Republican Committee (NRC) Reince Priebus issued a statement that called the president’s initiative “an executive power grab” and criticized that Obama “paid lip service to our fundamental constitutional rights, but took actions that disregard the 2nd Amendment and the legislative process.”

As head of the NRC Priebus speaks for the GOP. He is the closest to what one would consider the Republican Party’s current leader. And what his comments boil down to is a sanitized version of what the paranoid wingnuts post on their web sites.

There has not been one Republican in the Congress who has refuted Priebus or those colleagues in their midst whose hate speech endears them to the gun rights fanatics. Not even in the face of those who talk about Obama’s impeachment; and not even in response to those who allude to a new revolutionary or civil war—the very nonsense dominant in far-right cyberspace communications.  

This is what Tea Party darling and 2016 GOP presidential hopeful Rand Paul said even before Obama had introduced his gun regulation plan:

"I'm against having a king.  I think having a monarch is what we fought the American Revolution over and someone who wants to bypass the Constitution, bypass Congress--that's someone who wants to act like a king or a monarch. I've been opposed to executive orders, even with Republican presidents. But one that wants to infringe on the Second Amendment, we will fight tooth and nail.”

Tooth and nail? Sounds like the call to arms in the virtual echo chamber of the militia and Tea Party milieu.  

The Shame of a Nation (II): Outlaw Military Assault Weapons in the Hands of Civilians

By Brigitte L. Nacos

The 20-year old who killed 12 little girls and 8 little boys and six women within a few minutes in Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, carried a .223 Bushmaster semiautomatic rifle and two semiautomatic pistols, including a .10 mm Glock and a .9 mm Sig Sauer. These three weapons plus two hunting rifles were owned by the shooter’s mother who, according to media reports, was a gun enthusiast, a person fascinated with guns.

Her son used the Buckmaster rifle, an assault weapon used by the military, in his horrific attack. It is not known yet, how many bullets were shot. But according to Connecticut’s chief medical examiner, H. Wayne Carver II, all victims were hit multiple times. Moreover, as Dr. Carver revealed, the bullets the attacker used were designed “in such a fashion the energy is deposited in the tissue so the bullet stays in” and therefore resulting in deep damage.

In the renewed gun-control debate, there are demands for background checks, longer waiting times, stricter rules for gun show and online sales.

All of that might help a bit.

But it hardly would have kept the Connecticut mother from buying those weapons and her son from using the most lethal one in his attack.

Therefore, the law provision most urgently needed is the categorical ban of military-type assault weapons in the hands of civilians.

Apart from the military and SWAT teams, nobody has any reason to own killer-weapons that mow down dozens and dozens of targets within minutes.

Later today, President Obama will visit Newtown, the small New England community that experienced the ultimate nightmare.

In the face of unspeakable tragedy, a good president becomes the consoler-in-chief.

But that is not enough. He must now become the attack-dog-in-chief against the National Rifle Association and its allies.

                                                      X

Unless there is a categorical ban of automatic weapons, shootings in public places will be as American as apple pie.

Consider this, in the week of the Connecticut massacre

• a gunman at an Oregon shopping mall killed two people and wounded a third amid a holiday crowd estimated at 10,000 people;
• an 18-year-old student in Oklahoma was arrested for allegedly plotting a shooting and bombing attack at Bartlesville High School the same day the mass shooting occurred in the Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown;
• one day after the Connecticut massacre, a man was arrested after firing about 50 shots in the parking lot of a Southern California shopping mall, prompting a lockdown of stores crowded with holiday shoppers. In this case, fortunately, no one was harmed.
• Also on Saturday, a man in Cedar Lake, Indiana, who had 47 guns hidden in his home was arrested after he threatened to "kill as many people as he could" at an elementary school.

And then this latest incident--today: St. Rose of Lima Roman Catholic Church in Newtown, Connecticut, was evacuated during noon Mass, after a man had called the church and said, “I’m coming to kill, I’m coming to kill.”

Glenn Beck’s Out of Control Bigotry: If the Labor Party’s Political Youth Camp in Norway “Sounds a Little Like the Hitler Youth,” What about the Political Kids Camps of his Own 9-12 Tea Party Project?

By Brigitte L. Nacos

Most of the bodies of the terrorism victims in Oslo were not yet identified, when right-extremist hate monger Glenn Beck shot his mouth off in an unbelievable insult of those victims and their families, friends, and all of Norway.  This is what he told his radio audience:

“Saturday I was following the news of the shooting in Norway and the explosion in Norway, which happened what on Friday…When we heard the explosion everybody was willing to say, it’s Muslim extremists, it’s Muslim extremists. I don’t think we made a comment on it because we didn’t know other than a bombing had happened, and as the thing started to unfold and there was a shooting a political camp, which sounds a little like the Hitler Youth or you know whatever. Who does a camp for kids that’s all about politics? Disturbing.”

Well, Mr. Beck, if you would know more about the world than your narrow but so lucrative niche of divisive demagoguery and hate mongering, you would not insult the long Western European tradition of all kinds of organizations--right, left, and in the middle--, including political parties, to get young people interested in public affairs. This is one reason why the average Europeans tends to be far better informed about public affairs than the average American and would be less likely to be fooled by your tirades.

By comparing the Labor Party’s youth division that organized the camp on the island of Utoya for its members to the Third Reich’s Hitler Youth, Beck wittingly or unwittingly seems to imply a motive for the massacre.

Just as stunning is Beck’s condemnation of camps for kids that are political in nature. He conveniently “forgot” that the 9-12 Project, his own prominent Tea Party initiative, organizes political camps in various state sections for children actually much younger than those participating in the Utoya camp in Norway.

Here is an excerpt from one on-line invitation for such a 9-12 Tea Party camp:

Now It Is Time for the President’s Bully Pulpit: Explaining the Tea-Party-Republican Scheme of Taking from Society’s Weakest and Giving to the Wealthiest

By Brigitte L. Nacos

President Obama can no longer sit on the fence in the battle for America’s short-term and long-term budget priorities. He should no longer speak with a soft voice only but must use the stick. The bully pulpit that the White House provides him with is a powerful and unique stage. And now is the time to use that stage, go public forcefully, and explain in plain language how the Tea-Party-driven Republican budget plan would take from the middle and lower classes and give to the wealthiest individuals and corporations. Appealing for sanity, unity, cooperation, and compromise will not work, when dealing with leaders who are held captive by a fanatic minority within their own party and the nation.

Tea Party extremists and their Republican captives in Congress as well as an assortment of presidential hopefuls have intensified their inflammatory rhetoric to sharpen the partisan-ideological divide. They push their radical, reactionary agenda, not equitable and workable policies. When House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin explained his 2012 budget proposal this week, he proclaimed outright, “This isn’t a budget. This is a cause.”

This cause is not for the benefit of the American people as the populist leaders in the unholy alliance of Tea Party movement and Republican Party claim. On the contrary,  the budget plan is in reality a shocking road map to demolish America’s modest social safety net that was woven step by step since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency to provide a modicum of care and security for the old, the disabled, and the poor—especially children.

The war against what the Wall Street Journal and other guardians of the economic and political power elite call with obvious disdain “the entitlement state” is in reality a campaign to make the tiny strata of the richest Americans richer und the most profitable corporations more profitable.

Apart from some hard-hitting editorials, opinion pieces, and talk show hosts, most of the mainstream media and cable talk shows have not exposed the appalling nature of the Republican budget plan. Instead, Congressman Ryan and his proposal received quite a friendly media reception. The discussions of and comments by generously compensated talking heads, for example on MSMBC’s “Morning Joe,” as they discussed Ryan’s budget proposal and the suggested elimination of entitlements, such as Medicaid, Medicare, have been particularly frustrating as has the benign coverage of GOP leaders’ demands that the U.S. Senate and the White House capitulate.

To be sure, reforms are needed to rein in government spending. But the proposals of the President’s bi-partisan Budget Commission, not the agenda of the right-extreme fringe that has taken over the Republican Party should be the starting point of discussions. The budget crisis will never be solved by not tackling both the spending and the revenue side. The Ryan plan is heavily biased against the vast majority of hard-working Americans and the growing number of those families under or barely above the poverty line.

Paying More for Gasoline to Fuel Alternative Energy Exploration

By Brigitte L. Nacos
Today, for the first time in more than three years, the price for a barrel of crude oil fell below $50 on the New York Mercantile Exchange. In many regions of the country the gasoline price dropped below $2 a gallon in more than 20 states—about half of the cost some four months ago. With unemployment rising and no end of recessionary conditions in sight, many Americans breathe a bit easier when they fill up their cars. Yet, the news about falling oil and gasoline prices is more bitter than sweet because of the direct relationship between the cost of old energy sources and the development of new ones. When old energy is cheap—or let’s say relatively cheap--interest and investment in alternative sources tend to drop regardless of the long-term consequences for a nation mostly dependent on foreign oil.

President-elect Obama has promised to change America’s energy policy that up to now was most of all for the benefit of the oil industry and others in the old energy sector. Even if the future president can convince congressional majorities to sign on to his ideas and funding requests, he must also enlist the private sector and the public at large to support an all-out effort toward new energy sources and energy independence.

Government alone cannot do the job. The private sector is the engine for developing various kinds of alternative energy sources and, in the process, firms and jobs that cannot be outsourced to companies and workers abroad. Unless the price of oil and of all old energy remains at high enough levels to add profitability into the calculus of alternative energy, entrepreneurs will not get involved and car companies and other corporations will not change their ways drastically.

Hillary Clinton: Best Pick for Secretary of State

By Brigitte L. Nacos
I have no idea whether President-elect Barack Obama will offer Senator Hillary Clinton the important secretary of state position. But I am convinced that Hillary would be an excellent choice and indeed the best choice among those mentioned for the post. After Obama and Clinton met on Thursday in Chicago, Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico, also in the run for the job, met with Obama on Friday. Perhaps John Kerry, another candidate, will be next to travel to Chicago. I agree with Gal Collins of the New York Times that Kerry’s personality is not well suited for the diplomat-in-chief position. Richardson would be a far better choice than Kerry because of his different persona and his diplomatic background (ambassador to the United Nations and negotiator who won the release of prisoners and hostage with North Korea, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and Cuba).

However, there is no doubt in my mind that Senator Clinton is best qualified to be secretary of state from day one of the new administration in terms of the depth of her foreign policy knowledge, her extensive traveling abroad, and her positive image around the globe. President Obama’s victory on November 4th has been hailed in most parts of the world. With Hillary as secretary of state at his side, Mr. Obama’s campaign promise of CHANGE would gain more credibility abroad. Just imagine what a compelling message the image of an African-American U.S. president and a female U.S. secretary of state side by side at an international gathering would send to people here and abroad!

Moreover, by selecting Hillary, the incoming president would take an important step in the direction of those supporters of Senator Clinton who did not vote for him or did so reluctantly. This one important appointment would go a long way in reuniting Hillary’s most faithful fans with the Democratic Party under Obama’s leadership.

This Saturday morning, the Washington Post reports that Clinton, Richardson, and Kerry are top contenders for the attractive position. The fact that Senator Clinton has remained silent and not said that she is not interested seems to indicate that she wants the job. If the president-elect was not sure that she was his first choice before he invited her to Chicago, he should not have arranged a meeting that, as he must have known, would be reported. If he now decides in favor of Richardson or Kerry or someone else, it means snubbing Hillary in full public view. At this point, it would not be terribly credible, if Hillary were to declare that she is not and was not interested in becoming secretary of state.

New Medium and New Push to Narrow America's Ideal vs. Reality Gap?

By Brigitte L. Nacos
Throughout American history, when the inevitable gap between the declared ideals and the reality established by political institutions was deemed unacceptably wide, movements emerged that fueled creedal passions in favor of narrowing the disparity. In his book American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony, Samuel Huntington identified four what he called creedal passion periods that produced movements for change--the revolutionary era in the 18th century, the Jacksonian period in the early 19th century, the progressive period in the early 20th century, and the era of civil rights/anti-Vietnam protests in the1960s and 1970s. In all periods, one of the goals was, as Huntington put it, "the opening up of the processes of decision-making to public participation." 

It is particularly striking as Huntington recognized that each of the movements of those times was associated with the emergence of a new type of media. (1)The political pamphlet of the revolutionary period was central to the movement in favor of independence and a republican form of government; (2) the penny press—newspapers cheap enough for the masses—were instrumental in expanding democratic participation--albeit in the limits of the time; (3) the mass newspapers and news magazines with the advent of investigative reporting (muckraking according to Theodore Roosevelt) in the late 19th and early 20th period drove the progressive movement in its fight against corrupt political and business institutions and for participatory democracy; (4) the three national television networks shaped America's attitudes towards the struggle for African-Americans' civil rights and the Vietnam War and protests against.

I have wondered lately whether the new medium of our time, the Internet, would give birth to or facilitate a new popular quest for narrowing the once again widened gap between the promise of America and the performance of its institutions and the leading actors therein.