Category: American Affairs

NOT THE AMERICA WE KNOW IN OUR LIVES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As the voice across the room says of Donald Trump’s 75-minute nomination acceptance speech, the longest in American history: His is not the America I know.

Maybe that’s how it looks to someone whose billions came from his parents and casinos, but to real working Americans?

Ours is not a place overrun with fear and loathing. We’re not rich in worldly terms, barely middle-class, in fact, but we have good friends, neighbors, an adequate income, a comfortable house, health care, decent folks as our police and firefighters; we can talk to our elected officials, the downtown has rebounded into a charming district, we even feel safe in our frequent visits to Boston.

Not that things are perfect. We are appalled by the police shootings of innocent American black citizens, as well as the shooting of police officers themselves, but that’s a consequence of the current interpretation of the Second Amendment, nothing we can blame on the Democrats. And we are appalled by the redistribution of wealth from the middle-class to the richest one percent of the population, but that, too, points to Republican decisions. And that’s before we get to climate change, which the Republicans won’t even admit is happening, much less that its causes can be mitigated. In other words, those who won’t even admit they created the problem aren’t those I’d trust to correct it. Yes, things could be better — much better — but we know there have always been problems.

Trump-Pence keep portraying as America as broken, but from everything I’ve seen, the country’s in much better shape than it was when the Bush-Cheney squad left the White House. And, let’s be clear, for the past eight years Republicans have done everything they can to sabotage that economic and societal turnaround. In fact, for a list of the biggest troubles and their solutions, you need to listen to Bernie Sanders rather than billionaire Trump. When it comes to fixing anything — other than in an underhanded fashion — Trump remains clueless.

If I take my car in for service, I want a mechanic who can diagnose the condition correctly before I’ll allow him to touch anything more. I don’t want him messing with the brakes if the problem’s really the latch to the trunk. I don’t want to be paying to rip good parts away or to do anything that makes the situation worse. You know what to call folks like that.

Bottom line? The Trump-Pence promises are empty, based on largely campaign-manufactured problems.

By the way, demonizing three-quarters of the population is no way to “make America one again” unless, of course, they unite in response — then you might say Trump-Pence has made the majority one again. Just not the way or the agenda Trump-Pence envisioned.

Last night will remain a dark moment in American history. But we’re praying for Light.

JUST FOR PERSPECTIVE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Simply wondering. Does anyone remember:

  • Jeb Bush
  • Ben Carson
  • Chris Christie
  • Ted Cruz
  • Carly Fiorina
  • Jim Gilmore
  • Lindsey Graham
  • Mike Huckabee
  • Bobby Jindal
  • John Kasich
  • George Pataki
  • Rick Perry
  • Marco Rubio
  • Rick Santorum
  • Scott Walker

More specifically, just what do you remember? Anything about their agenda? Or their record? Or has it come down to hair style and bluster?

Miss any of them?

Simply wondering. Just for perspective.

HERE COMES THE HANGOVER … OR WORSE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

We knew it was coming, but it still comes as a shock. As one conservative tweeted last night, the Republican Party has lost its mind. Or another, more bluntly, “voted to die.” Some said the GOP has even endorsed Putin or at least invited him to speak. And those were the ones who were seeing more or less clearly. Compare that to, say, Chris Christie, who’s still lusting after some crumbs from the table. Is it purely pathetic or worse, tragic? Time will tell.

This is nothing like the party I grew up in, where reason and civility were honored and respected. At least on the surface, in our small part of the world, when Dwight D. Eisenhower was in command. But now?

Donald Trump has had pretty much of a free ride up to this point, but now he’ll finally have to start facing the facts, which aren’t adding up to his boasts. Just how much is he really worth? How bad has his business leadership been? Why is he afraid to release his income-tax statements — or, for that matter, how soon before the public demands to see his emails, too? As for his claims to the Art of the Deal? His co-author’s outing him as a phony.

As I’ve previously explained, the experience of living in New Hampshire, with its test-market role in the presidential campaign season, instills an alertness for the unexpected trip-up that fatally rips through a candidate’s mask. Trump evaded that possibility by largely refusing to engage in the face-to-face encounters with everyday voters here. His not-too-frequent events were largely stage-managed shows, rather than the two-way conversations of Granite State tradition. He never exposed himself to anyone to any significant degree.

His big trip-up — the one that somehow unpredictably takes hold or, as we say in the news business, “has legs” — may be emerging from his staff’s attempt to paint him as a compassionate and caring person. The notion of currying sympathy by having his (third) wife come out from her wall of privacy to say something that would soften his image might have worked. Who knows, maybe the thick accent would have been seen as charming and counter his stream of blasts at immigrants and their American-born children. Or maybe it would harden the perception of hypocrisy. That part was a risk, and it’s hard to tell how it functioned. Instead, the discovery of the lines brazenly stolen from Michelle Obama’s 2008 address in what Melania insisted was a speech she wrote herself now casts questions on all of the positive attributes she tried in invoke. After the cruelty of Trump’s attacks on Ted Cruz’ wife and family, few are likely to show mercy on Trump’s, no matter how much privacy she expects. Remember, this Republican crowd hates President Obama and the First Lady, yet Mrs. Trump turned to them as models to emulate. You can’t have it both ways. Let’s be honest, Michelle Obama is a paragon of intelligence, decency, and tasteful style, hardly what’s come out after Melania’s speech on the opening night in Cleveland as it points to organizational dysfunction in her husband’s campaign staff — his blaming Hillary Clinton’s camp for uncovering the plagiarism rather than his own failures is all too telling in its own way. You’re letting Melania go prime-time without the standard safeguards? From there it’s a short leap to falsehoods about her own accomplishments, from the failure to complete college, as she’s claimed, to the success of her modeling career before Donald came along. Oh, how long before the flood of questions of whether she’s fit to be First Lady, especially in comparison with Hillary’s success there.

It will be fascinating, maybe even painful, to watch Melania’s role in the coming months. Her absence from his side will be noted, as will her silence when she’s in public in his presence. And then if she opens her mouth?

This will not be pretty. But then neither is the nomination.

 

ANYONE ELSE PLAYING BINGO?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Leave it to Stephen Colbert to come up with a way of staying awake through the Republican National Convention telecasts. It’s a set of unique BINGO cards you can download and play.

Seriously.

Just look at one and see if his team isn’t covering the bases. Invite your buddies or strong-arm some of the family to sit down and watch the show together. Gee, maybe it’s the one way of making a party out of this political party’s Cleveland circus.

HEEDING THE GHOSTS OF CLEVELAND

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 5 Comments

If anything erupts in Cleveland, we may see smoke harking back to the crowded hotel rooms of an earlier era. Or its blue-gray floating past us might be another specter altogether.

In selecting Quicken Loans Arena for what was supposed to be the coronation of Jeb Bush as its presidential nominee, the Republican Party had no doubt intended to do more than woo a crucial swing state in the November election. The spotlight would have been on the turnaround of a big city not long ago called “the mistake on the lake,” noting its 1969 fire on the polluted Cuyahoga River and the massive 1978 default on municipal loans as well as the struggles of its once-proud professional football and baseball teams. The mighty industrial hub had indeed fallen on hard times, especially as domestic steelmakers collapsed and turned much of the Midwest into a Rust Belt around the same time many whites fled the city for the suburbs, leaving a host of racial challenges in their wake.

Unlike Detroit, Cleveland can point to some progress, which will no doubt be touted. As for manufacturing, it’s bound to be another issue. The city’s once mighty corporations are largely gone. Ghosts of a sort.

There is an irony, though, when we look at the city’s history and the controversy surrounding the presumed nominee, Donald Trump. We’ve already heard rumblings about a brokered convention or of king-makers clustering over cigars in smoky hotel rooms to deal themselves out of a deadlock. Cleveland has a history there, with industrialist Mark Hanna recognized as a key Republican player. Will these ghosts raise their spooky heads?

In the years after the Civil War, Ohio produced seven American presidents. Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, William McKinley, and Warren G. Harding came from Cleveland’s half of the state, flowing into Lake Erie, while Ulysses S. Grant, Benjamin Harrison, and William Howard Taft came from the southern half, dominated by Cincinnati along the Ohio River. Two of those presidents were assassinated. Still, the Buckeye State was a beehive of invention and enterprise, positioned between the East Coast and booming centers like Chicago, Kansas City, and St. Louis to the west.

Hanna wasn’t the only big money player, either. Remember, John D. Rockefeller, co-founder of Standard Oil Co., grew up and lived here, too, and even after antitrust suits broke up his monopoly, the city was long the headquarters of petroleum giant Sohio (Standard Oil Co. of Ohio), before it got gobbled up by BP (British Petroleum).

Cleveland’s proximity to Pittsburgh meant the big players could indeed meet over expensive cigars. It was, after all, steel baron Henry Clay Frick, a Rockefeller aide, who said of Theodore Roosevelt after the 1904 election, “We bought the son of a bitch, but he wouldn’t stay bought.”

There may well be other ghosts. Robert Taft, the conservative standard-bearer from Cincinnati, for one, in his bitter loss to the more moderate Dwight D. Eisenhower – there’s always that question of ideological purity – or of Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare haunting the party and nation.

Of course, the very mention of loans in the convention site name itself will raise other suspicions. This thing keeps circling back to money, to say nothing of an inflated ego that brags of being loaded. Even Jeb and his record campaign treasure chest might be seen as ghosts running through this convention.

This is getting pretty ghastly, indeed. And we’re still a long way off from Halloween.

BEGINNING TO FEEL SOME SYMPATHY FOR CHRISTIE?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

There’s something pathetically tragic in New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s fall from good graces in the Donald Trump camp, and I hope the situation grows in public awareness.

As news stories surface regarding the reason Christie was knocked from the vice president spot on the ticket, it becomes obvious he won’t even be considered for the other top plum he desired, Attorney General.

The reason?

As the U.S. Attorney for New Jersey, Christie successfully prosecuted Charles Kushner, who pleaded guilty to 18 counts of illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering in 2005. Kushner was sentenced to two years in prison. Oh, there were sordid details in what included a nasty family fight for the Democratic Party supporter. All of which might have given the Trump ticket some creds in its upcoming battle with the Clintons.

Alas, Kushner is the father of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared – the husband of Ivanka, a husband-wife team that makes up his two closest advisors. And Jared, by all accounts, adamantly opposed Christie, no matter what he might have brought to the race.

Think about it. Christie is denied a spot because he’s fought illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering. What does this say about Trump himself? His values? His practices? Even, now, his family?

For months now, Christie has been the most prominent Republican official in Trump’s camp. And now he’s cast as a pariah? For acting in the public interest? For fighting corruption? What kind of Justice Department do you think Trump would permit? One based on retribution, no doubt. One-sided, at all costs. Makes me think of Nixon’s back in the Whitewater years. Makes me also see John Kasich as a successor to another Ohio Republican of personal integrity, Bill Saxbe, who had the courage to stand up to Nixon and in the end, helped take him down.

You might see it as a warning to others to stay away from this platform. Why would any other elected Republican want to rally around this ticket? It’s an ominous sign, indeed. Please stay tuned, as they say. To something other than Fox.

THERE GOES THE SURPRISE, TRUMP

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 6 Comments

So it looks like Donald Trump is going with Indiana Governor Mike Pence as his running mate, rather than his hairstylist, as I previously predicted. For now, I’ll stick with “looks like” for the simple reason that Trump is known to flipflop endlessly and loves to cry out, “You’re fired!” Besides, nothing’s set until the convention votes.

More fascinating to watch in the short term is what happens with rumored bridesmaids New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Will Trump file suit against them on some pretext? The mere figure he’d name would be telling or at least amusing. Will they even stick with him in the coming campaign, or will they distance themselves in the name of preserving whatever political capital they assume they still possess? Yes, the glamor of being courted must have been intoxicating, but the rejection would seem to seal their careers as passe and outdated. Tarnished. Well, used merchandise, as folks used to say, back in the constipated era Trump keeps invoking.

As for Pence? All eyes are watching. Well, maybe not at the convention. That part of the story suspense has already been spoiled. There go the ratings. Maybe the networks will interrupt with some big announcement from Hillary Clinton or, better yet, President Obama. Just what was Trump thinking, anyway? Maybe he wasn’t such a great television genius after all. Or does he have some “reality” shtick still up his sleeve?

Pence, uh? Like Trump-Pence? Well, I have been running this year with a political theme of “Trumpets of the Coming Storm,” based on a line by John Greenleaf Whittier. Maybe now it morphs into “Trump-Pence of the Coming Storm.” Or “two pence,” as in cheap.

IN THE WEB OF COLONIAL DISSIDENT HISTORY

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

As I reviewed of Dover’s early (and admittedly tangled, hazy) history recently, I was struck by a reference to several early settlers who had been banished from Massachusetts Bay Colony amid the Antinomian Controversy to the south.

In a flash, my mind leapt from 1638 to 1662 when three Quaker women arrived, preached, and were banished by Major Richard Waldron.

The Colonial histories traced an underlying religious tension in the New Hampshire settlement arising between the Anglican affiliation of the colony’s charter holders and the Puritan convictions of many of its earliest settlers. That, in itself, suggests serious political and social differences as the two institutions of belief and action conflicted. After all, the Parliamentarian armies that would defeat and eventually execute King Charles I were largely Puritan, as was Oliver Cromwell, who ruled Britain as Lord Protector from 1653 to 1658.

Beyond the Anglican/Puritan rivalry for power in New England, however, was another struggle, the role of a trio of dissident voices and their followers in New England in the mid-1630s.

The new readings did change one of my premises. Rather than having all three of the dissident voices being from Salem (closer to Dover than is Boston), their residences were more diverse. Only Roger Williams (c. 1603-1688) had a Salem connection, and that was as a controversial pastor between his tenancies in Boston and Plymouth. He was banished in 1636 for “sedition and “heresy” (note the linkage of politics and religion) and left to establish the colony of Rhode Island and the Providence Plantations to the south, as well as the first Baptist church in the Americas.

Next was Samuel Gorton (1592-1677), banished in 1638 after ministry in Boston and Plymouth. He fled to Portsmouth, Rhode Island, before settling Warwick on the other side of Narragansett Bay. My postings at my Orphan George Chronicles blog about Robert Hodgson and his wife, Alice Schotten, take place largely in Portsmouth, and Alice, as a descendant of a Gorton follower, inherited a large parcel of Warwick. So these histories begin to overlap and even get personal for me.

The third dissident voice was Anne Hutchinson (1591-1643), the daughter of an Anglican cleric and the wife of a prominent businessman. She was banished in 1638 after leading home Bible study groups for women that were both popular (even among the men) and, to the ministers, “unorthodox.” Her theology became the focus of the famed Antinomian Controversy that challenged the conventional Calvinism held by most of the Puritan clergy. Reputedly, the “Veritas” in Harvard University’s crest comes from the cries of the judges, asserting their orthodoxy over her offending testimony, as she was taken from the courtroom at her banishment. She soon settled Portsmouth, Rhode Island, where Robert Hodgson would land in 1657 as an itinerant Quaker minister and remain when many of the Hutchinson’s followers joined in his Quaker faith. Hutchinson, however, had already moved on to the Dutch colony on Long Island to avoid continuing Puritan persecution before she and most of her family were slain in an Indian attack.

All of this ran through my head when I came across the reference in John Andrew Doyle’s 1887 The English in America: The Puritan Colonies, Vol. I: “After the persecution of the Antinomians, some of the victims took refuge at Cocheco,” an early name for Dover. Could this have provided fertile ground for the three Quaker women 24 years later? I think so.

The plot thickens when looking at the history of First Parish Church (United Church of Christ) in Dover, which divided into two hostile camps when one side of the congregation preferred two of the Antinomians as ministers over the more orthodox alternative. This was one the courts had to settle. Add to that an Antinomian leaning in nearby Exeter, and I’m left wondering all the more. Throughout its history, New Hampshire has always been at odds with Massachusetts – and here’s one more example.

The fact is that a third of the population of Dover quickly joined with the Quakers after their initial exposure to the new movement. Resentments do, after all, linger, and those chafing under an imposed authority just may break away, given an alternative. As much as we Friends like to think our early message and witness alone were sufficient to sway new adherents to our cause, I’m left considering how much of the attraction came from altogether different motivations. Think, for instance, of finding yourself always outvoted at town meetings; how much of a threat is actually felt when your right to vote is taken away as a result of your religious affiliation?

For that matter, how much of a similar situation is unfolding in the current political scene we’re viewing today? Are there lingering hostilities that have been buried only to resurface today? I’d say it’s worth considering.

NO ROOM FOR DEBATE WITH IDEOLOGUES LIKE THIS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

The other day, as we returned to our car in the supermarket parking lot, my wife noticed a small magnetic tag stuck to the back fender. It said:

~*~

So you support a Socialist. This means you …

  1. Are stupid. (Which can’t be cured.)
  2. Have been duped, indoctrinated or brainwashed (curable!)
  3. Actually believe in class warfare, entitlement mentality or the failed concepts of Collectivism, Marxism, etc. (which makes you a domestic enemy of the Constitution & the USA)
  4. Are ignorant of the facts – which are readily available. …

~*~

Others were amused by this reaction to my Bernie sticker, but I find myself quietly enraged on so many fronts it’s hard to know where to begin.

The utter ignorance and arrogance of this SOB are the first things to fuel my fire. How dare he call me stupid? How dare he assume any of my beliefs, actually? How dare he try to silence my right of free speech and, I’ll add, religion! How dare he call me an enemy of the Constitution?

I’m deeply bothered by the way he smears one word into other concepts with no room for clarity of definition or precise thinking. Supporting a democratic-socialist does not make me one, any more than supporting a reasonable Republican candidate would make me a racist, gun-totin’ warmonger or right-wing nut job. I see through both Marxism, on one side, and the multinational corporate conglomerates now ruling the world, on the other. (I could claim a college minor in economics, by the way. How about him?) (Oh, my, why do I assume the offender’s male?) And, yes, I do support some collective action – the way politically conservative apple growers in Washington state long ago banded together for united marketing and quality control, as well as the federal water system they realize is essential for their precious irrigation.

As for his “facts,” he could use a class about the perils of propaganda. If anyone’s been brainwashed, duped, or indoctrinated, he should look himself in the mirror. Which leads to an even bigger issue.

There’s no room for discussion in his limited, fear-driven, ideological mindset. He’s cornered in a box. There’s no way to admit error or correct a course of action or even see whose pawn he’s become.

There are times I fear for the Republic, where threats to liberty keep rising from his side of the spectrum.

That’s why I have the Bernie sticker.

~*~

By the way, I’ve read my Bible, complete. Leviticus 25:10 (inscribed on the Liberty Bell) is guilty of all of his charges regarding the redistribution of wealth. (Jubilee is the redistribution of all wealth every 50 years.) Or leap ahead to Jesus telling the rich young man to sell all he has and give it away (Matthew 19: 16-24 and Mark 10: 17-31). Argue with God, if you can. But watch what you accuse the Holy One of being. Good luck.