sonora2sonoma

Whether one approves of the current occupant of the White House or is utterly repulsed by him and everything that issues forth from his oval orifice, the time to stand and be counted is nigh upon us.

The choices are starkly different, though it might not seem so if you listen to the latest Republican talking points on their sudden embrace of the protection of pre-existing conditions despite the fact of their multiple simultaneous efforts to undo the provision in the country’s courts. While physicists have now noted that sub-atomic particles can, under certain conditions, exist in two separate spaces simultaneously, I’m aware of no such correlate in the social sciences and, frankly, I seriously doubt conservative think tanks run that deep anyway. If they did, one would hope that little chestnuts like the deliberate destabilization of the social contract might raise a few eyebrows.

What continues to astound me is how the Republicans seem to have altogether lost any sense of decency, dignity or probity in their failure to find some line of demarcation–some level beyond which they are unwilling to descend–in their support of the viral nonsense emanating from this careening caravan of calamity. I’m beginning to suspect maybe they never had a Rubicon to begin with and what we’re seeing now is the revelation of their true nature. If so, that is not only unspeakably sad but also extremely scary! Regardless of their motives, the damage these people are doing to the country, to the planet and to the future prospects of the young people who will be left with the mess they’re creating for them is simply awful!

What is at stake here is more than the integrity of certain public officials, more than the integrity of the nation as a whole, even. What is really at stake is the integrity of our entire enterprise—the integrity (to borrow from the dictionary) of soundness, of solidity—the integrity of being unimpaired or sound in construction. The misogynist, race-baiting xenophobic rhetoric coming from the divider-in-chief is antithetical to this integrity and gives it a foul taint that will endure for decades.

One can only pray that enough of us are sufficiently awakened at this point to deliver a sound repudiation of this insanity at the ballot box come next Tuesday.

November 3, 2018

Petaluma, CA

Regarding the Rob Porter kerfuffle, there is no excuse that justifies domestic violence! That said, the fact the man didn’t have a top security clearance yet he was privy on a daily basis to everything that crossed the president’s desk should be a matter equally deserving of public outrage.

There’s every reason to believe such actions should be not only considered improper but highly illegal, given their implications for national security, or the lack thereof. If this man’s unrestricted access to national security matters crossed a legal line, then why aren’t folks clamoring for a legal remedy? If it isn’t prohibited by statute, then why not?

Perhaps the bigger risk to our nation lies in the ways in which we are becoming inured to executive branch dysfunction, where events once considered outrageous are becoming increasingly regarded as normal and our collective ability to respond with shock and disbelief to stimuli that truly are shocking and unbelievable has been conditioned by repeated exposure such that our responses are dulled and diminished. In such an atmosphere, resistance slowly morphs into acceptance.

For the president to point out, as he did this weekend, that Rob Porter continues to maintain his innocence–forget that not one, but two of his ex-wives say he abused them, and one of them has photos–as if that should mean something, coming from a man who has similarly maintained his innocence of charges of infidelity and more, in spite of evidence to the contrary, speaks volumes about his estrangement from reality.

One should be able to safely conclude that when confronted with a person whose default position is to fabricate, falsify and misconstrue, the prudent course of action would be to disbelieve him or her. Why should it be any different if the person doing the fabricating, falsifying and misrepresenting happens to be the president of the United States?

Tim Konrad

11 February 2018

Petaluma, CA

Facebook reminded me this morning that one year ago today, I wrote

“There might have been a time in the past
when a man’s lies
were more likely to catch up with him
but not anymore.
Today
politicians routinely make the most outrageous claims imaginable
yet go unchallenged.
What has become of accountability?”

Upon reading this today, one year later, I recalled a news show I  watched on tv last night that featured several people being interviewed about a topic in the news. Among the interviewees was a former Republican congresswoman from somewhere on the east coast. Shortly into the conversation, this former congresswoman, or congressperson, made a remark I knew to be factually incorrect, falsely blaming the Obama administration with responsibility for something the President had inherited from the previous administration. The moderator, as usual, allowed the interviewee’s fiction to go unchallenged.

This has become a commonplace experience–allowing what boils down to political propaganda an equal footing with consensus reality–the act of which, in effect, grants fake news, or fake facts the same credibility accorded to evidence-based phenomena.

When fictions are accorded equal status with facts, when liars and the lies they tell are accorded equal footing with truth-tellers armed with empirical facts, and the liars aren’t called out for their lying, people are denied the information necessary to make accurate judgments or informed decisions.

Institutions–be they news organizations or governmental bodies–that allow this condition to stand fail their constituencies in the most fundamental of ways, imperiling everyone involved as they do so.

Tim Konrad

Petaluma

January 6, 2018

In the fallout following the Harvey Weinstein disclosures, one thing has become clear–the tendency among certain male members of our species to exploit positions of power over women for sexual gratification crosses all lines, socially and politically. There is no moral high ground here, regardless of one’s political persuasion, because the root of the problem lies way beneath such demarcations. The problem’s origins are grounded in societal norms that have allowed men to behave badly for generations.

The same societal norms that have allowed the victimization of women are also at the root of commonly accepted business practices that make it fair game to lie about matters of economic consequence in order to exploit the less advantaged, the less educated and the less represented among us.

At a basic level, both these phenomena share a common thread–that it has somehow become acceptable for people to engage in enterprises that they know in their gut–or surely ought to know– to be wrong, be it a man trying to force himself on women in opposition to their wishes, as Charlie Rose has admitted doing, or, in claims put forth by Paul Ryan and his fellow Republicans that the spike in the deficit their tax overhaul legislation will cause will be largely mitigated by the increased growth that lower taxes for the rich will stimulate, while completely disregarding the  lack of any credible evidence in support of their position as well as an excess of evidence disproving it.

The engine driving this cognitive dissonance is fueled by selfishness and stoked by denial, hypocrisy and deception; in addition to the subjugation of women, its products include gerrymanding, voter-suppression laws,  secret offshore bank accounts and a host of similar phenomena. So-called Christian morality is silenced in the service of ‘political expediency,’ as perfectly exemplified by the continued support enjoyed by the likes of Roy Moore and donald trump.

The president himself should be made a poster boy for extremely bad behavior since his actions serve to perfectly illustrate what happens when a person places self-interest above all other considerations–short-term gain followed by a rising crescendo of collateral damage whose effects will bedevil the rest of us for generations.

The only real remedy for all this lies in the ballot box. The question we should all be asking ourselves is why so many of us continue to judge people by what they say rather than by their actions?