20 January 2017
Inoculation Day*
MAKING AMERICA GRATE AGAIN —
Trump and the Rise of the Retro-Zombies
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* Inoculation theory was developed by social psychologist William J. McGuire in
1961 to explain more about how attitudes and beliefs change, and more importantly,
how to keep existing attitudes and beliefs consistent in the face of persuasion attempts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inoculation_theory
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I.) On Wednesday morning November 9, I planned to wake up bored, not scared —-
I had relied blithely on the news polls, and the basic sense & decency of enough voters to finally end the dragged-out dirty joke of the Trump campaign. I thought we would heave a continental sigh of relief and resignation, then count on coaxing and cajoling Hillary beyond her tedious centrist fibs & platitudes for the next 4 years. Instead we were dazed and sickened from the lurid electoral punchline delivered the night before, and the prospect of a vile and prurient American future.
Then came the hand-wringing in the mainline news media, a vague remorse at being so remiss, not seeing this coming. But in typical form they ducked the issues, indulged more gossip about voter views, as they had done throughout the campaign — parsing percentages of vague popularities and divisive demographics. Of course this bears no resemblance to real journalism… if they actually reported facts and informed analysis of what candidates say and do, no election would ever be close.
But this election was different, in a darker way: Clinton and Trump embodied starkly opposed ideas, and public sentiments for inclusive liberal values gave her the early lead. Then it got personal, heated up on questions of ‘character’, and somehow the blatant rude reprobate Trump moved up in the polls. Why?… these were the two most hated presidential candidates in history: Each in their ways, both were disliked by most Americans, about 65% in one survey… in public distrust, they were about even.
The ‘October Surprise’ from FBI Director Comey — leaking the Agency’s renewed investigations of Hillary’s emails, linked to Anthony Weiner inquiries — worked like a charm: On the low-down it linked her to hysterical rumors of a pervert clique of elite Democrat pedophiles in DC, animating Trump’s base in the right-wing shadows of the internet. On the up-&-up, the big networks evaded those innuendos, but they ate up the dirty drama and pall of doubt that pushed the poll numbers toward an arbitrary toss-up, as their business model requires: Of course they clean up on political ads when the electoral odds are even, with paying propagandists vying and lying for a 2% bump.
So somehow they sold this election down-to-the-wire, as a neck-&-neck horse race between a screaming nanny goat and a braying jackass. Lumpen Trumpies were emboldened by the surge in opinion polls that put victory in reach, while limp Clintonites still leaned on their sloppy statistical margins, and many stayed home. Meanwhile, the Voting Rights Act had been eviscerated 5-4 in the Supreme Court, and Repugnican devices of voter suppression were decisive in key states.
Voilà!… disaster — Donald Trump’s Presidential Erection.
II.) Media pundits have presumed to explain the Trump phenomenon, and failed —-
Some have even delved into the sociology of voter blocs, speculating on the “populist” rage and surge of the White Heartland. But still fixated on opinions and buzzwords of symbolic belief, they have never pierced the paradox of so many Americans supporting a rich elitist con-artist antithetical to their values, and voting against their pragmatic interests.
The etiology is not so hard if it’s rude enough:
• Our Primitive Brains —
Start with this fact: Half of Americans are below average in intelligence, by definition. Which side are you on?… this bears on how you process information into ideas, or how easily you believe candy banter occluding the facts. Think-tanks spawned the euphemisms that put Reagan in office, catchy phrases easy to repeat on right-wing radio shows — like glyphs on a cave wall, engaging our most primal ways of forming symbols & sounds into abstract thought, and believing what we think even if it’s wrong.
So Teflon Ron said he would “get the Guvmint off our backs”, while ramping up police powers and quadrupling the National Debt — which is Big Government, by definition.
Then to make it stick, keep pontificating the same stuff for 36 years, this coded dogwhistle language of sanctimonies and double entendres, saying one thing, meaning something else. Sling it at school boards and on Capitol Hill, put it through the echo chamber of the FOX News fops & blondes, make it sound real by the noise and repetition, and maybe 50% of the people will learn it by rote.
• The Limbaugh Limbo —
During the 2012 primaries, Rush Limbaugh railed against contraception in college health programs and impugned a co-ed’s bad morals, calling her a slut. The Repugnican candidates huffed their distaste for such slander, but hastened to concur that this was a big problem — and so his crazed rants made them look sane legitimizing this lunatic non-issue.
How Low Can You Go?… 4 years later this became the modus operandi of the campaign: When the GOP clown-car spilled onto debate stages, the Tea-baggers baited the Regulars on their ‘conservative creds’ — and Trump was the master-baiter, dominating those Game Shows. Commentators & Comics had their day with his ludicrous postures, until it wasn’t really shocking or funny anymore… and we got habituated to a new subnormal in public conduct, and orthodoxies more rabid than ever before.
All this is vexing to media analysts, who seek a rational frame and attribute Trump’s broad appeal to the disaffections of the displaced white working class. If that’s the real reason, the uprising is 30 years too late: Their plump happy hamlets were decimated by plant shutdowns, farm foreclosures, and real estate inflation in the 1980’s, as the predations of ‘supply-side’ economics took hold… that’s when Trump got filthy rich. Since then, another generation has grown up in the vacuum of opportunity, in the hinterlands with nowhere to go, but the real victims might have different political ideas.
Bill Maher recently dispelled the notion that Trump rode a bona fide ‘protest’ vote:
“I’ve read so much crap about how Trump voters are hurting, and we should respect their anger and their pain… it’s a myth that the media swallowed whole. The average Trump primary voter makes $72,000 a year — no more likely to be hurt by immigration or trade, or to be out of work. Donald Trump doesn’t really have solutions, and his supporters don’t really have problems; the only thing poor about them is their judgment.” (1/12/2017)
III.) Trump’s ascent is America’s regression to the foils of an inglorious past —-
The inaugural speech echoed the demagoguery of the campaign, the hysteria for the fallen homeland, the spite and blame for minorities, dissidents, the Left. The same themes may be found in Hitler’s first “Appeal to the German People” upon becoming Chancellor on Jan. 31, 1933.
By comparison Trump is far less literate, but the rhetoric veils the same intent — fusing corporate dominion with government authority, privatizing public interests, pumping up the military and police powers, exalting executive whim, and demanding patriotic loyalty… textbook fascism.
Citizens, this is not a drill… this is real.
An epic irony: During the campaign despoiled by Trump’s divisive antics, the liberal media projected the fracture of the Repugnican Party… now the defeated Democrats are in disarray, sadly but rightly so – not because their civic principles are unworthy, but because their Party has not stood up for them.
This IS the end for ‘Liberal Centrism’, going back to the ploys of the Clinton yuppie clique to appease and triangulate the Reaganites: They staked out delusional ‘compromise’ policies on bank deregulation, mass incarceration, real estate sprawl & perpetual war — and sold out avowed Democratic values of economic equity, civil rights, ecology & peace. American views were already polarized (this is not the latest news)… then for 25 years the Centrists kept playing politics to a ‘middle ground’ where nobody really lives, marginalizing the progressive base. Bernie Sanders finally exposed this rift.
The real rub: Trump was totally right about one thing — NAFTA. Months into office in 1993, Bill Clinton pulled a Big 180 reversal on campaign promises to oppose it, betraying his labor support and buying into GOP polemics on “Free Trade”. This was always just a euphemism for bad economics, a huckster ideology of ‘Growth’ and cheap goods. It was really about shifting corporate capital to unregulated low-wage countries, controlling resources and empowering a privileged class — leading inevitably to the exile of American manufacturing capacities and jobs, and mounting trade deficits.
We can no longer put our own shirts on our backs, or shoes on our feet.
Hillary was complicit in the neoliberal fallacies of that era, and through the Obama years that sustained them. She had no answers, even supported the pending TPP trade pact, then hedged on it; Trump opposed this too as a bad deal, and shifted blame to the Democrats for these failed ideas — even though they came from Reagan’s neoconservatives to begin with.
(“It’s the Economy, Stupid” — in reverse.)
For all the harangues and vain vitriol of the primaries, Repugnican regulars cozied up to Trump quite nicely in victory… of course such ideologues are untethered to any fact-based convictions, and easily coalesce in shades of the same lies, with power in their grasp. Now the momentum rides on the most sociopathic postures & promises of Trump’s campaign, his most corrupt cronies and most gullible sycophants. And Trump’s cabinet picks are most foreboding of big trouble —
Bluntly, they’re a rogues’ gallery of retro-morons… this is not just a rhetorical quip: In any sensate forum on public policies of concern, these are literally the dumbest guys in the room. Their premises, logic & purposes are contrary to America’s most worthy strides through generations of struggle — voting rights, labor standards, product safety, public health, racial equity, environmental protection, sustainable economics, freedom of information & speech, justice reform, human rights abroad, Etc. These hacks are bent on turning back the clock on the last 100 years of evolutionary social progress.
We’re in for a shitstorm of bad ideas. is there an umbrella for that?
IV.) Exhorting hate and exalting power over sense, we are made a Thug Nation —-
The barrage of Executive Orders started on Day 1 — asserting the new imperium, impugning and undoing the good deeds of four generations. Climate denial and killing ObamaCare were foregone conclusions walking in, just the start of the frays. There was nothing new in these diatribes, but where they served to subvert public agendas in the past, now they are loosed to destroy them.
Pundits who parse them for grounded meanings or civic intent are missing the point both ways:
• There is nothing between the lines — on all these issues, the language re-frames common knowledge and consensus by proclamation. Ideology needs no factual basis, founded logic or practical path… the ‘jingo lingo’ is the message, altering our reality & options in the public domain.
• Power per se is the statement — the policy rationales are predictable, passing and irrelevant, where the exercise of power is an end in-itself. ‘The medium is the message’, in McLuhan’s idiom… the enduring outcome is the accretion of institutional powers and the capabilities to abuse them.
The Presidency itself is transformed — no longer the pinnacle of American Civics, it is now a narcissist performance, a ‘reality show’ with daily dramas, rages, hazings and purges, as the Boss sees fit to hound enemies and have his way. The old rules of engagement are out the window, the deliberative process of democracy is now passé. Trump’s inner circle promulgates policy by Agitprop, and enacts it by fiat, with the whole bloc of Congressional GOP bobbleheads in blithe support, compliant and even agitating for more extreme doctrinaire measures in shocking lockstep.
What’s going on is only comprehensible with a grasp of Provocateur Politics: Going beyond old-fashioned deceits & maneuvers to move the lines of debate, now it is expedient to trample those lines, to make debate irrelevant and crumble opposition in the stampede. The strategy borrows from the agent provocateur’s instigations on the street, and escalates them to statecraft — assert the indefensible on “alternative facts”, push controversies to conflict, create pretexts for retaliation, and deploy executive powers to beat down opposition, by threat or force as needed.
Trump’s juvenile snits & preposterations serve these tactics well… it is the modus operandi of the schoolyard bully: Tell a lie, crank up dispute, throw a tantrum, start a fight, might makes right…
imposing fast immigration bans on people from Islamic nations at once gratified his dogwhistle followers and kicked down lots of legal doors — breaking domestic laws & treaties, reneging on prior immigrant procedures and government commitments, violating due process and equal protection rights, infringing on thousands of lives within days. When court challenges arose, Trump’s lawyers argued that the President’s actions were not subject to judicial review, and such rights are moot, incidental. When Federal judges blocked these actions on constitutional grounds, Trump attacked the judges; his police agencies initially ignored the Courts and proceeded per Executive Orders, then backed off some to buy time, to institute the mandate & means to persist with these policies. Dangerous stuff.
Then ICE cops launched a nationwide wave of Latino extractions and deportations, with chilling effects in immigrant communities, and families at-risk. They say it’s just business as usual, but this is clearly a new kind of ‘surge’, and Trump is taking credit for it. And the protocols have changed — where past protections are now nullified… unlawful profiling and targeted enforcement is the norm… and 4th Amendment restraints on personal search, seizure, and ‘probable cause’ are getting stepped on. They also say it’s to get rid of criminals, but ominously, one need not be convicted of a crime to get caught in this dragnet: A cop’s “suspicion” of a possible crime or gang affiliation is enough to be arrested immediately, interned indefinitely, and removed permanently. More dangerous stuff.
It is a Machiavellian ‘Win-Win’: It plays well to Trump’s Teabagger base to mess with poor brown people on the pretext of “keeping our Country safe”… and in deploying these new enforcement powers aggressively, draconian policies are entrenched in the law, as overburdened civil rights defenses founder before hostile judges, and most abuses go unchallenged.
With further measures adding 10-15,000 new Border Patrol & ICE cops to the ranks, and conscripting local law enforcement agencies in surveillance & support, it is a dramatic buildup of Federal police powers targeting disfavored minorities and views — operating on blurred grounds of suspicion and ideological litmus tests conflating dissent with subversion. They overtly abridge the personal rights of others, and spawn fear of Federal power; in truth this shrivels the Bill of Rights for us all… who’s next?
Brought to you by Repugnicans who espouse ‘small government’…
V.) As more urgent protests are inspired, civil rights are more readily attacked —-
Trump’s reactionary policy blitzkrieg has already set off waves of public dissent on all fronts. This may seem to impede his Administration on all these issues with fast pushback for now, but it also serves the Provocateur agenda: It will pay off to provoke the most vocal liberal cohorts into demonstrations subject to incitement, then linked to vandalism, violence & terror — so that opposition can be impugned as disloyalty and swept from the streets. Protests will be pushed into confrontations, deemed ‘Public Emergencies’, and thus create the pretexts to deploy militarized force.
The devices of declared ‘Emergencies’ for speech events are already in place — transferring civilian authorities to law enforcement and mobilizing a multi-agency show of force under an “Incident Command” scheme. This puts cops in full control of applied policy on public assembly, with incentives and means to goad protests, attack and bust them, then exhaust and intimidate them.
The ‘Rainbow Gatherings’ in the National Forests have been fighting the Incident Command schemes of USFS Law Enforcement for 30 years, as the Federal police infrastructure has grown and trained in these expanded powers. Then as ‘Emergency Management’ mandates got passed down to the states, counties & cities, local police agencies gained similar powers: The Ferguson crisis (Aug.-Nov. 2014) was escalated by a regional Incident Command response, infamous for its militarized confrontations and unlawful arrests. And through recent months a State Emergency was declared in North Dakota to deploy multiple police agencies and private security forces against the peaceful “Water Protectors” at Standing Rock, resulting in nearly 1000 prosecutions. The scenario finally played out as soon as Trump ordered the Dakota Access pipeline to proceed, and their encampments were swept from the hills.
Since 911 political speech has been routinely confronted with overwhelming police force, and mass arrests are now the norm. The public is habituated to expect a militarized official response to protest, and piles of petty busts & prosecutions in violation of civil rights. Then realize that legal resources in defense are overwhelmed every time, as individual cases are then isolated and strung out in the courts — such that most victims wind up accepting plea deals just to get out, and few ever persist in constitutional claims. The long-term effect is to constrain public forums, criminalize expressive assembly; instantaneously, it is to take protesters off the streets and quell speech on any given day.
Of course such police actions are illegal and unconstitutional, they know it and don’t care — as arrestees during the ‘Free Trade Area of the Americas’ (FTAA) protests in November 2003 were infamously told by Miami cops, on the way to jail: “You can beat the rap, but you can’t beat the ride.”
These issues are compounded with speech now routinely subject to Emergency Law, at the whim of police agencies taking on peremptory policy authorities. We have observed how probable cause and due process protections are curtailed under Incident regimes. We do not know the factual grounds for enacting Emergency powers against public assembly… or the extent to which other public authorities are altered or other rights are abridged by fiat… or if ‘Incident’ courts are really Executive tribunals where proper Judicial powers & standards of review are negated by secret law.
We have asked these questions, by Freedom of Information Requests and other means, and got no straight answers; lately more of these documents are redacted, exempted, denied, or concealed.
One thing should be clear: Speech is not supposed to be an Emergency in America.
And yet we have the spectacle of Constitution-totin’ Teabaggers cranking up prosecutorial powers against protest — as Repugnican states enact stiffer penalties, broader police powers & heckler immunities, and pretextual charges are being escalated in such Fed cases.
Naturally the most resolutely outraged progressives who take to the streets are the most vulnerable — to the subterfuge, traps, takedowns, interdictions, extractions, and all the tactics of targeted enforce-ment the cops have devised. The effect is the intent, to outlaw dissent, abrogate the right of petition…
in tandem with Trump’s harangues and attacks on the press, the First Amendment is under siege.
Meanwhile as legions of new cops and spooks are added to the ranks of Homeland Security and NSA, the buildup of loyal paramilitary forces and vested infrastructure proceeds apace under color of federal law. Then heed Trump’s threats hearkening to his “Second Amendment People”, readily recruited as a vigilante reserve, easily mobilized and immunized through undercover police channels — much as the “SS” started out, and then took control of Germany in 1933. The most dangerous stuff.
VI.) Nemesis Amerika… the corporate theocracy gains hegemony by crisis —-
This writing started as a snapshot essay on the inception of the Trump presidency; it has turned into a bigger mission, and the wheels of events have rolled fast in these weeks.
The daily lies, dramas, and dimwit postures are part of the big show, saturating our attention and sapping our sensibilities; these mad controversies are duly noted and reserved for other tirades, without distraction here. In this frame it is more crucial to foretell the most ominous mutations that Trump and the Retro-Zombies are spawning — in the political culture of democracy, our economic life and future, and the fragile balance of international peace.
•• Scuttling the Commons…..
Since the Reagan era, right-wing sycophants have inveighed against the burdens of government regulation on business, in the vague name of freedom and on callow theories of beneficent enterprise. Never mind the historical reality that capitalist excesses and abuses made antitrust, labor, health, financial, and environmental regulations necessary in the public interest… by rote repetition they have elevated this polemic to a truism, and the foolhardy ploys of the Clinton Centrists to co-opt it only served to entrench the ideology of deregulation in our public life.
But where such rants served the politics of opposition and obstruction in the past, they are now the stuff of Executive policy: Trump is not just rolling back hard-won protective rules and social programs on all fronts — his appointed cronies are notoriously contrary to the public missions in their care, and they have set out to dismantle these institutions permanently, using the powers of the federal government to self-destruct. In Steve Bannon’s view, it is the “deconstruction” of the liberal state, and all traces of its social purposes. It takes the mundane form of disabling mandated agencies, stripping administrative authorities and purging skilled personnel, but it goes much deeper:
The very idea of the Commonwealth is now at-risk… the vision and means of mutual responsibility as free citizens, of shared legacy in higher public interests, are now under assault. The core premise of American civic life — that democratic government embodies the commons, and might serve all the People with remedies of choice and solutions of good sense for the future — is getting buried.
In its stead, government is made an instrument of unbridled corporate power, as wealth is brazenly redistributed to the wealthy, and the military & police are built up on their behalf.
Policy debates in the public domain become moot if the real decisions are made in the private sector. Transparency is required of our public institutions, by nature and by law — but corporations are excluded and cop agencies are broadly exempt from public records disclosures. If interests in the commons are disavowed and true government forums are disabled, there is no accountability and participatory democracy cannot work. Then there is only what oligarchs decree, without recourse.
•• End-Game Economics…..
Trump scored big bashing NAFTA, and his talk of restoring America’s manufacturing might plays well to his Prairie Home compatriots and the old blue Rust Belt. In fact the flight of our industrial base and soaring trade deficits are crucial issues, and fatal flaws in the economic model of globalism.
In truth this may be the right idea in the wrong hands, propounded for all the wrong reasons.
As a businessman, Trump knows nothing about production, never built a factory… he made his fortune on real estate speculation and fraud. His stakes are in high finance & mega-development contracting, his backers are in high echelons of big business, and his policies serve those alliances. He will make a show of a few repatriated manufacturing plants, only to entrench programs shifting incentives and subsidies to major corporate players. Similarly projects to repair our “crumbling infrastructure” will line up big interstate and transnational contractors for fat deals… then anticipate all the porkbarrel scams that will be set loose on The Wall. It’s going to be ‘crony capitalism’ on steroids, pilfering the public coffers.
It is also a mutant fruition of “Supply Side” theory, positioning corporations in the resource and revenue streams of our society. The stock market is booming on the prospect of a surge in consumption, and by Executive Order the oil will flow through the Dakota Access and Keystone pipelines, and the coal will roll off the mountaintops of West Virginia. The gauzy retro-vision of 1954-style gushing prosperity is compelling in the Heartland — but it’s not 1954 anymore, when the U.S. industrial base was still the ‘last man standing’ among nations recovering from World War II, and our exports were going everywhere. That moment of history and its extraordinary conditions are not replicable in any global market analysis. it is also impossible gluttony in the world economy of today, and wholly unsustainable in the future.
Yet on a deluded mercantile model of perpetual Growth, it is in the interest of the oligopolies to privatize public resources, to maximize their extraction and expand commodification. Of course this cranks up near-term profits, and over time it pushes accessible reserves to exhaustion, sooner than we think. In turn this will force prices up on advancing scarcities, and give corporate oligarchs more galling control of distribution. The marketeers’ incentive is to accelerate economic crisis and competitive strife… It is a global business plan made to fail, to lavishly enrich a few and impoverish the planet.
•• Messianic Conflict, Prophetic War…..
The nostalgia of stolid hyper-Patriots and rabid Neocons is most vivid in the old images and myths of America at war, righteous and indomitable. Trump played to these sentiments in his campaign, promised more aggressive and glorious projections of American power — and he railed against “Radical Islamic Terrorism”, impugning a world religion and conjuring a diffuse demonic enemy to fear and fight.
Of course this fuels implacable Right-wing demands for security and revenge, then feeds into military agendas of enduring warfare abroad and enhanced interdiction across this country.
Upon taking office he has already pumped up military budgets and ramped up deployments in Iraq, Syria, Korea (and the Mexican border). This is only the beginning of the ‘trumped-up’ conflicts that are brewing, driven by neo-feudal bombast and the vanity of this charlatan in disgrace – who will surely use war to look ‘presidential’, to subvert critique and command loyalty.
The most volatile seed was planted when Trump met with Netanyahu and embraced the “one-state solution” of Israel’s hard-line Likud, casually flipping 50 years of studied diplomatic wisdom on the chances for peace. This was the one thing he could say that was most certain to enrage the Arab world, and provoke more ardent enemies from their midst. U.S. support for Israel’s occupation, settlement land-grabs, and Palestinian ghettos behind walls & roadblocks turns that region into a tinderbox.
With our entangled forces and proxies fighting ISIS nearby, and the proliferation of arms on all sides,
it is assured that flames are already lit and burning. The drift of events, blusters and blunders toward wider conflagration seems inexorable… only fools and demagogues speak of heroic outcomes.
And this may explain why the Christian Right tolerates and endorses this flagrant philistine, because his actions are validating their deepest dark beliefs: It’s as if these Mideast policies are scripted by Scripture, playing out the most vehement End-Days visions of the 3 great monotheist religions.
The fundamentalists have gained leverage in Trump’s unholy coalition… they are ideologically bound to their tribal biblical fables, and viscerally driven to see the prophecies of Revelations fulfilled.
They believe Zionist war in Israel to be the locus of inevitable Armageddon, and this in turn to be the necessary predicate for Christ’s return — so they pray for this strife, laud steps to enact it, and would willingly engulf us all in death and devastation to vindicate their necrophiliac theology.
Then if Trump really IS the Anti-Christ, that’s OK — it’s part of the Story.
Of course the lessons of Vietnam through Afghanistan, on the stupidity and futility of neocolonial force in far places beyond our ken, are lost on these zealots. Most profoundly, the meaning of human history is at risk::: our prospects of enlightened evolution, respectful coexistence and even survival are imperiled by these delusions. It is the ultimate `provocateur geopolitics`, with everything at stake, so every possible reckoning and obstruction is necessary to derail this insanity.
VII.) Epilogue: This is our political ‘Night of the Living Dead’ —-
The American experiment in constitutional democracy faces its biggest test in 150 years. Ignorance is still intransigent, and the forces of oligarchy have always been tenacious — but now they coalesce as a crass counterforce to hard-won civilized knowledge and values, and they possess concentrated wealth and technology with a will-to-power over the whole global show.
The political Left and Right of today are no less divided than the North and South of the Civil War, but this struggle is asymmetric in the play of ideas and power: There is no single coherent discourse with two sides speaking different languages and logics — social & empirical on one hand, egoic & ideological on the other. And there is no parity in the conflict for control of our future with the Left carrying signs and the Right carrying all the guns… this is more dangerous than a fair fight.
The pompous white men in blue suits are macabre cartoon throwbacks to bygone times, when great fallacies were hatched to hold back the future. They are risen like ghouls from graveyards of dead-end history, brandishing platitudes and moribund motives, and loosed to shred the flesh from the bones of our republic. The carnage has commenced, and many wounds could be mortal.
This crisis is unprecedented, yet once again outcomes depend on the People: If too many are too gullible, or too few choose to stand, the promised nation in a safe world will be irretrievable… If enough care, they must forge new understandings to show the way forward and heal our civic life.
Compromise with fatal foolishness is for dead fools. It takes hardcore political analysis to foresee political damage, hopefully to intervene and avert it… maybe this tome brings imminent risks to clear focus, and might galvanize able citizens of conscience in this purpose.
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Fini: 4 April 2017 scottie addison
St. Louis, Missouri