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Forbes today reported that trump “said Thursday that he’s holding up a stimulus deal over Democratic demands for funding to USPS and for mail-in voting, saying Democrats ‘need that money in order to make the post office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots.’”

Let that sink in for a minute!        

Without delving into all the horribly wrong things packed into that revelation, allow me to point out what is perhaps its most worrisome implication.

That he can be saying such a thing at all without it resulting in an earth-shaking outcry from the public shows how a steady diet of outrageous tweets, utterances and actions designed to inure people to things that would, under normal circumstances, provoke great and rousing outcry, has failed so far to do so. One of the favorite tactics of authoritarian leaders throughout the world, the president has been doing this ever since he took office. The fruits of his labors have been productive up to now, as evidenced by the relatively mild public outcry so far to this latest gambit.

Someone observed on FB the other day that “our democracy is dissolving while we’re watching Netflix.” A sobering assessment if there ever was one, and one that might someday well adorn a tombstone marking our republic’s passing.

For this president to admit, in a public setting in front of television cameras, that he is deliberately holding up negotiations over a stimulus package whose passage could postpone eviction proceedings for, conservatively speaking, hundreds of thousands of people affected by the economic crisis is itself abhorrent by any measure. But for him to do so for perceived political gain betrays not only a poverty of spirit unbecoming of someone in his position, but also an utter absence of common decency, as well as proof positive that he has no interest in the welfare of the citizens he is pledged to look after; it also shows the depths to which he will stoop to win.

What normal person could take pleasure in a prize won through dishonesty and cheating? Yet he and his Republican acolytes continue with their undoing of our democracy as if they believe they will, in the end, receive get-out-of-jail-free cards. And they well might, if his schemes succeed.

He pines for the respect he sees accorded to others he would fancy as peers—if he believed he had any—but he knows nothing of respect or how it’s earned because he’s never earned his own self-respect, much less the respect of anyone else. I shudder to think what it would feel like to be donald trump seeing himself reflected in a mirror if the mirror had the capacity to display, as Dorian Gray’s portrait did, what remains of his shriveled and miserable spirit.

Tim Konrad

2020.08.14

Back in April, I wrote the following:

It feels these days like we’re living in an insane asylum, watching trump’s numbers hold steady despite his impeachment and now, his murderous mismanagement of the pandemic. The Doomsday Clock, all but forgotten after the Cold War arms race drew to a close, has now been reactivated in the minds of many and is ticking away furiously toward its appointed hour. The asylum’s Fox News-fed inhabitants clamor loudly for their God-given  right to infect not only themselves but anyone else unfortunate or ignorant enough to be in their vicinity while those socially distancing observers who correctly perceive the absurdity of the situation look on in disbelief from the safety of their homes, aghast at the prospect of their world fast becoming much like that depicted in the dystopian paintings of Hieronymus Bosch.

When the smoke has cleared and the body count is finally tallied, the numbers of those felled will tell the true story of who scorned science and who ignored the warnings, of whose advice should have been heeded and whose should have been ignored. At that point, there will likely be far fewer people wearing MAGA hats and, tragically, far more families will have been destroyed. Despite the carnage, justice will probably be as elusive in holding accountable those whose corruption made a terrible situation even more so as has always held in prior instances of criminal governmental mismanagement.

Update to today: Not much has changed since I penned those words 3 months ago, unless you consider the still-rising body count; the continuing upward surge in infections across the nation; the continuing unravelling of our economy; the looming, some say catastrophic, end to the eviction moratorium coupled with the, at least for now, termination of supplemental income assistance to those already spread too thin for far too long; the rising parallel infection of the MAGA-minded with its attendant politicization of a totally apolitical virus, thanks to the mixed-messaging of our coarse, buffoonish president; the rising unrest in the streets, first over the George Floyd killing and Black Lives Matter and then in response to the dispatching of hired mercenaries posing as federal agents sent to Portland to quell a fictional uprising whose real goal was to improve the pre-election “optics” for a floundering president; our nation’s loss of respect in the eyes of the world; etc., etc., etc.

Not much has changed, and a whole lot of things have changed, all, arguably, save the president’s falling approval numbers, for the worse!

Twin crises—viral and economic, have now been compounded by ineffective management and woefully inadequate mismanagement. Put in biblical terms, scourges have been visited upon us–and we, the citizens of this once great nation, are the unfortunate “beneficiaries.”

But, beneath all the smoke and rubble lie certain clues, the investigation of which reveals patterns indicative of a theme underlying all this madness. It’s not a solution, by any means, but more like the comfort one receives from learning there’s a name for the cause of one’s symptoms. They may not be totally fixable, but at least  some comfort exists in knowing something about them, that they exist, that they have a name, and in the knowing it confirms the symptoms weren’t just a figment of one’s imagination. Small comfort, perhaps, but it’s better than being left totally in the dark.  

On the surface, it’s easy to see that corruption on the part of many public officials plays a significant role in the current state of governmental dysfunction. Upon closer examination, it becomes apparent that the state of operational error manifest in today’s governmental functioning relies upon a certain degree of ignorance, willful or otherwise, for its survival. And this ignorance is a condition that will continue to maintain so long as the plague of ignorance besetting this nation continues to thrive. For that to change, as entrenched as it has become, would take decades, or more likely generations, of enlightened leadership—something this nation has yet to prove itself capable of.

Now, imagine, if you will, that you’re an alien visitor to our world whose vantage point is not only that of detached observer but also one in which it is possible to step outside of time in order to allow a “long” view—one that makes it possible to see in an instant proceedings that, for those experiencing them, span several hundreds of years of succeeding generations of accomplishments.

Every great societal change enacted by a given generation, as seen from this perspective, is eventually viewed by a succeeding generation as lacking in certain ways that give it cause to find reasons to muck it up and change it.  Regardless of whether the resultant changes amount to improvements, or their opposite, their effects only last until another generation comes along and sets new standards for improvement that invariably dilute or otherwise alter the former gains such as to make them unrecognizable to those by whose labors they were crafted. This holds true regardless of how “improvements” or “gains” are perceived, or, to put it in partisan terms, regardless of which side you’re on. By the time the next generation comes along, the changes are often lost and remain so until a succeeding generation sees fit to revisit them.

Following several such generational attempts to re-define and enact their respective visions of what constitutes acceptable rules of conduct, the cycle, spanning those several generations, repeats itself, with all its attendant twists and turns, until it reaches completion, at which point it begins again.

Any meaningful attempts to overcome the effects of these cycles are invariably hampered by two seemingly immutable facts: a) how people define change lacks uniformity of opinion among those doing the defining, and b) our life-spans aren’t long enough for us to fully grasp the ephemeral nature of cyclical generational change. The difficulties of the former need no further explanation, while the problems posed by the latter make it nearly impossible for their implications to be perceived on a societal scale, which would be necessary if mankind ever hopes to be able to enact meaningful steps to overcome the cycles’ effects on its endeavors. In that regard, we are, basically speaking, fucked!

Yet pessimism is but one of the myriad qualities that are part of the complex soup of ingredients that define our existence. In the mastering of our passions, optimism, hope and the desire to change things for the better are also parts of the picture, even while the labors of Sisyphus cast their shadow over all our earthly endeavors.

Such, in a nutshell, is the human condition. Nobody said it was going to be easy!

Tim Konrad

August 2, 2020

Current number of coronavirus cases in the United States as of July 20, 2020, as reported by the Center for Disease Control—3,761,362—63,201 of them new cases reported since yesterday.

Total number of deaths in the US reported by the CDC as of July 20—140,157—including 498 new deaths since yesterday.

The New York Times reports in this morning’s paper that the CDC says the number of people infected “far exceeds the number of reported cases” in different parts of the US—“anywhere from two to 13 times higher than the reported rates for those regions.”

In a lengthy interview with Chris Wallace on Fox this past Sunday, Mary Trump’s fact-short uncle disputed the statistics, claiming falsely that the United States has one of the lowest mortality rates in the world while repeating his absurd assertion that the increase in reported cases is the result of increased testing. “I heard we have one of the lowest, maybe the lowest mortality rate anywhere in the world, claimed Mary’s uncle, adding the discrepancy shows “what fake news is all about.”

The president’s current approach to the pandemic seems to be, in addition to attempting to conceal the real statistics and downplaying the scope and breadth of the crisis facing us, to blame Joe Biden, blame China—“they should never have let it escape”—and distract us by sending Stasi-like forces to Portland to quell fictional uprisings.

Mary Trump’s superlative-rich uncle’s political sleight-of-hand in employing shock troops to distract us from his woeful failure to lead the country through what may well become the biggest health crisis in the nation’s history seems  so far to be backfiring. Due to his skillful mishandling, the concurrent economic crisis has been made worse by his failure to mount an adequate response to the raging epidemic. His ignorance of basic science in believing that increased testing produces more cases of coronavirus—something a third grader could easily comprehend—has been on full display in the daily news for days now.  And now, his insight-less  bungling has produced a third emergency—this time a crisis of confidence.

For a man, whose approach to governance resembles an affliction more than an administration, no one save the politically brain dead should find this surprising. Successful presidential leadership requires the ability to think beyond the next idea that enters one’s mind—to see around corners. The ability to envision possible outcomes before committing to a particular course of action is essential if one hopes to avoid the types of pitfalls this president routinely falls into.

When, as a private citizen, Mary Trump’s morally bereft uncle was merely plunging his businesses into serial bankruptcies, his ability to do harm was constrained by the natural forces of the business world. As president, his propensity to act impulsively has now had grave consequences not only here in the US but also abroad, where he has morally bankrupted our nation in the eyes of the world. Presidential leadership, once respected far and wide, has now become a joke and our country is now looked upon with pity.

Yet, here in the US, his sycophantic followers have now morphed into psycophants determined to hew to their leader come hell or high water. The cognitive dissonance of his followers is jarring.

Contradictory statements flow freely from those close to the seat of power. Peter Navarro, Director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, writes a dishonestly misleading essay about Dr Fauci, the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, while Mary’s disingenuous uncle soft-pedals, sort of, about Dr. Fauci, just as White House Deputy Chief of Staff, Dan Scovino, endorses a cartoon discrediting him. The White House Press Secretary, Bafflingly Boneheaded Barbie, continues to parrot her boss’s nonsensical utterances in the hope that no one will notice her vacuity, doing so with feigned assuredness that her reportage contains any useful information save to illustrate how divorced from reality it is.   

These and myriad other mixed messages coming from administration officials compound the confusion by transforming simple health precautions into potent and divisive political issues. Mary Trump’s increasingly unhinged uncle, whose own uncle “was a scientist,” declared that he doesn’t believe in mask-wearing; his refusal, until a couple of days ago, to tepidly and grudgingly allow that masks might help prevent the spread of the coronavirus, while also adding that he doesn’t plan to use one, have produced a deadly confusion among the public at large about the effectiveness, or even, depending on who you ask, the need to wear one, and this at a time when mask-wearing is our main line of defense against a contagion endangering the lives of untold numbers of people.  

So, is it any wonder then that certain thought-resistant Republican governors, like Oklahoma’s Kevin (Dumb) Stitt, continue to resist issuing orders mandating mask-wearing in their states, despite having himself tested positive for the coronavirus?

But the public seems to be, at last, awakening, and this is beginning to be reflected in the “numbers.” Fearful of electoral defeat, Republican senators whose re-elections are no longer assured are now beginning to defy their leader’s irrational refusal to fund more testing: Their situations should serve to remind them that, if you dance with the devil, there’s a price to pay.

And speaking of price tags, when the country has been (hopefully) freed from the grips of the meanderingly menacing mobster at the country’s helm, a hard reckoning must certainly be part of the nation’s recovery.

Tim Konrad

2020.07.21

Heather Cox Richardson, in her latest installment in her excellent online series “Letters from an American,” recounted the president’s experiment in social Darwinism in Tulsa yesterday, writing ”he told the audience falsely that the recent spikes in infections are because there has been more testing: ‘When you do more testing to that extent, you are going to find more people, you will find more cases. I said to my people, Slow the testing down, please.’”

In what moronic universe would logic like that find traction? One far different from that most of us inhabit, I reckon, and one, judging by the diminutive size of the turnout, far less populated, a rare sign of hope in a largely hopeless time.

When confronted with information like this, it becomes clearer why the president’s popularity continues to remain higher among the less educated, because anyone with signs of brain activity ought to be able to comprehend the abandonment of reasoning, the absence of logic necessary to draw such a mind-numbing conclusion. Only a three-year old could find assurance in such a word construct; any reflection would immediately shatter the illusion. And that is precisely what defines this man and is the sum and substance of not only his being, but his every doing.  

To say the president is clueless fails entirely to adequately describe the chasm of ignorance from which he proffers his poisonous propaganda, basing his entreaties on nothing more than the rabid rumblings of a man who senses his impending downfall but views doubling down on his failed messaging as his only path to redemption. As the deer-in-the-headlights stage of his decompensation draws nearer, as his already loosely hinged presentation loosens further, a picture comes slowly into focus of a nation whose government has been hijacked by an unreality star, a vision of what it looks like to have a truly crazy person, a bona fide lunatic, in charge of the fort. And, with a nutcase in charge, and one too distracted by his shifting fates to pay attention to what his underlings are up to, what mischief may occur in the gaping shadows thus created?

As difficult as the trump presidency has been up to this point, the next six months will likely pose challenges to our democracy the likes of which we’ve only dreamed of up ‘til now. The rule of law under our corrupted attorney general is experiencing a most pernicious assault at a time when we are engaged in a fundamental re-thinking of the role of authority in redressing rampant racial injustice. Common sense health advice is under assault by a president so obsessed with his lagging poll numbers he can’t manage to do much besides tweet incendiary comments that further fuel the growing fires of social unrest set alight by years of unchecked police brutality. The virus rages unchecked thanks largely to the anti-science stance trumpeted so ineloquently by the unmasked bandit in chief whose blustering buffoonery at the Tulsa Covid-Fest bore greater resemblance to the yipping of an aroused terrier than it did the commanding bark of a big dog.  And meanwhile, the movement to slow global warming languishes.

As the pace of revelations quickens with each successive news drop, the president’s sickness is made more manifest, made all the more alarming by the revelation that we—all of us—are not the unwilling observers we fancy ourselves to be; we are, by virtue of our membership in the social zeitgeist in which we find ourselves, a part of it, a part of the problem, a part of the reason this man was able to attain his position. His sickness is, in a real sense, our sickness, and the way out of our dilemma depends not on external forces aligning themselves to influence the outcome; it depends on each and every one of us and what we do, not just between now and election day, and not just on how we vote when that day arrives, but on each and every day for the rest of our lives.

Our lives are shaped not by external events, monumental or otherwise, but by the little moments in which we continually redefine ourselves, by the choices we make, throughout each day. The pessimist in me says, “we get what we deserve,” while my eternal optimist says “our fate is in our hands.”

Meanwhile, reason dictates, “choose wisely.”

Tim Konrad

2020.06.21

George Conway III notes in his latest op ed piece in the Washington Post that, faced with two serous crises—the pandemic and it’s economic damage and the social unrest following the George Floyd killing—the president is “lacking in humanity (and) has had no idea how to handle either one.”

“The virus of self-absorption,” notes Edward J. Lavin, “is deadly and has only one cure-compassion.”

But when compassion isn’t on the menu, what, then, remains to quell the beast raging inside this singularly insufficient would-be titan of anything monetizable?

One thing is crystal clear: giving him the power he has been given is NOT the correct thing to have done. His very physical presence in the White House itself is a mockery of everything reasonable people hold sacred. The senators who had it in their power to relieve him of his powers during his impeachment failed us miserably. Whether they hold any reservations in their heart of hearts at this point is impossible to detect, given their continued obeisance to this careening car wreck of a standard-bearer, but their silence tells us all we need to know about the “standards” their party has come to represent. We need look no further than the emerging Nazi party of the 1930s to see a fitting parallel, and everyone knows how that turned out.

It is painful to observe the continuing unravelling of this damaged and unhinged man as his tweets grow more desperate, his utterings more erratic and his pronouncements more ridiculous. It is perplexing to witness the growingly absurd explanations his spokespersons devise while attempting to temper his excretory blurts, blathers and boastful buffoonery. Each new bit of “messaging” only serves to further clarify what we all have come to realize all too well— at this point we’ve gone far beyond “the emperor has no clothes.”  It’s now become a five-alarm fire, a crisis of leadership calling for the men in white coats to appear and take him away to some undisclosed location where he can be held for his own protection—and for ours!

Sadly, the Founders never anticipated the need to 5150 a sitting president. It is to our peril that they did not, and it provides a fitting argument against those who hold that the Constitution must be interpreted literally rather than as a dynamic document capable of reinterpretation when the old rules have become outdated or insufficient to deal with developments not envisioned at the time of its creation.

In that regard, the mindset of Constitutionalist “purists,” inflexible, rigid and closed to new ways of thinking, bears comparison to that of fundamentalist Christians, thereby illustrating the wisdom of the Founders in seeking to separate religion from the workings of government.

In fact, the only reason I can see for why anyone would want to interject religion into politics is to attempt to force people to follow religious ideals and rules of conduct they don’t agree with and with which they wouldn’t otherwise comply. When a nation starts to go down that road, it ceases to be a democracy, becoming instead a theocracy, where the interests of the many are sacrificed in favor of the interests of the few. Come to think of it, isn’t that what the current administration is attempting to do?

Tim Konrad

2020.06.06

When did the term “Thank God it’s Friday” become “I can’t believe it’s Friday already?” Since we entered the “shelter in place” phase of our existence, time seems to have speeded up practically exponentially. I would have thought, with less places to go and fewer things to do, that time would have slowed down in the new paradigm, not accelerated the way it has. But no, the days now race by as if they were engaged in a contest to see which one can beat the others to the finish line. Daily routines have now become almost automatic, thanks to their accelerated repetitiveness. Mornings now slide stealthily and silently into afternoons with nary a notice while evenings arrive seemingly shortly after lunchtime.  At this rate, I might be called to that great roundup in the sky much sooner than I had anticipated, if not in real time, at least in perceived time, given the rate at which things are moving these days. If only trump’s remaining time in office could be similarly shortened, the abbreviation of existence afforded by this turn of events would have a decidedly rosier shine to it. Always look on the bright side, I say.

Tim Konrad

2020.06.05