Commenter: "Steven Miller is a racist and anti-immigrant first. He learned how to argue this position second."

 Good response to my "debate kids" post. 

Would you still love America if America didn't love you back?

A good question by Peter Weber. I had a conservative friend who disliked the poet Langston Hughes -- who did some of his growing up in the town where I live -- because he wasn't very patriotic. Her attitude stunned me as a failure of empathy and moral imagination. Black people have been patriotic throughout America's history, even if America hasn't always reciprocated the love. But why on earth would you expect a Black man who was living in Jim Crow America to be patriotic?

Here's an excerpt from a story I wrote in 2003, about Hughes' testimony before Congress during the McCarthy era:

In Lawrence, Hughes said, he attended a “nickelodeon” movie theater every afternoon.

One day, Hughes said, “the woman pushed my nickel back and pointed to a sign beside the box office, and the sign said something, in effect, ‘Colored not admitted.’

“My playmates who were white and lived next door to me could go to that motion picture and I could not,” he told the senators. “I could never see a film in Lawrence again, and I lived there until I was 12 years old.”

Not for nothing, one of the chief interrogators of Hughes that day was Roy Cohn -- Donald Trump's future consigliere.  

For so much of our history, Black Americans were treated as property. Then they were treated as second-class citizens, if that. Even now, the way Black people are policed, and the way they suffer disproportionately from society's ills, suggests America hasn't fully embraced them. Expecting people to love when they haven't been loved isn't laudable. It's abusive.

President Trump wants to know: Are you ready for some football?

 

Millions of Americans face potential eviction. Businesses are failing. The COVID-19 death rate is now north of 180,000 souls. Racial unrest is percolating across the land. And this is President Trump's priority:

Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren had a telephone call with President Donald Trump on Tuesday, after a White House representative reached out about having discussions concerning how the conference can return to playing college football as soon as possible.

"I think it was very productive about getting [the] Big Ten playing again and immediately," Trump said. "Let's see what happens. He's a great guy. It's a great conference, tremendous teams. We're pushing very hard. ... I think they want to play, and the fans want to see it, and the players have a lot at stake, including possibly playing in the NFL. You have a lot of great players in that conference.

How very small of him. How very bread and circuses of him.

Starting over, again

A decade ago, fed up with my cratering life and career, I deleted my Twitter account, scrubbed my blog's archives and started over again. Today, I'm doing something similar.

I spend too much time on Twitter, reacting to Twitter, and regretting my instant takes on Twitter. So I'm letting my primary account go inactive later this week -- we'll see if that lasts, honestly, I've tried this before -- and starting a new account that will just be a feed from this blog. I'm not going to follow anybody there.

I am trying to slow my roll.

Twitter is bad for you. It is bad for democracy. I've felt this for awhile, yet I've stuck. Because I want to be a part of the conversation. But that's my ego talking, frankly. If I can't give up a little bit of trying to have an audience in order to do my incremental bit to back away from the trends that are consuming us ... well, that kind of makes me selfish, doesn't it?

Even now, I'm not entirely willing to forego the chance to be heard, which is why the new Twitter account. I am not an angel. And I have to figure out a new way to seek out and listen to voices -- including a number of Black and women writers -- that I previously encountered mainly through Twitter.

Again: I may not make this work as well as I like. And compared to the disaster that is befalling our country -- the pandemic, the economy, racial unrest, Trump -- it's an utterly small, insufficient move to try and change how I engage in discourse. Blogging is probably not going to be a thing again. Too bad. But I can only do what I can do. This is how I start.

PS: If you want to talk back to me, leave a comment! I'll talk back! And I'll curate comments so that angry people don't get to make it a cesspool for everyone! Not that I'm expecting a huge audience.

Are debate kids ruining America?

 

I've been reading excerpts from the biography of Trump advisor Stephen Miller, and the description of his high school years seems familiar to me. He was interested in politics early, and while I don't know if he was on the debate team, he was oh so surely a debate kid.

I was a debate kid for two years in high school, and I enjoyed the hell out of it -- the only reason I quit was because my dad made me, so that I could have an after-school job that also required me to work on Saturdays, which is when debate tournaments were held. The style of debate we used in Kansas (I don't know if it still works this way) required two-person teams to show up ready to debate either side of an argument. There were a couple of ways to win -- just present so much evidence (basically, in the form of cited articles) that you'd overwhelm the other team, or to present so many arguments that the other team couldn't keep track of them all. We used "flow charts" to track the arguments, and leaving an argument un-argued against -- no matter how absurd the original argument -- risked losing the round.

With the benefit of hindsight, I see now that the format encouraged a couple of things: Fast talkers -- because the more arguments you could cram into your allotted time, the more difficult you made it to counterargue. It also encouraged absurd out-of-left-field types of arguments that had little to do with the topic at hand, because your opponent probably had prepared to respond. What it didn't encourage: Solving problems, or thoughtful, civil real-life debate. The object of the game was to create too much noise for your opponent to handle.

Debate kids are the folks who grow up to be lawyers and leaders, as well as insufferable Ben Shapiro-style "debate me" pundits. And now I wonder if the game of debate didn't encourage a few generations of Americans to decide that the best way to publicly argue over our issues was to create an extraordinary amount of sound and fury that signified nothing.

One of the biggest challenges for me in 2020...

 ...is being properly righteously angry about events while at the same time not letting the anger get away from me so that I become somebody I don't want to be.

I am trying to figure out how to talk to my pro-life friends about Trump

 

A common refrain at this week's Republican National Convention was that Donald Trump "is the most pro-life president we've ever had." No matter where you stand on the topic, I think there's a fair case to be made that's the truth. He has appointed judges who emboldened state legislatures to take a fresh run at knocking down Roe v. Wade. The right to abortion may never be entirely stricken from precedent, given how Chief Justice John Roberts likes to operate, but it seems likely to be greatly narrowed into near-oblivion over the next few years. We'll see.

I grew up in small town Kansas. I attended an evangelical Mennonite Brethren college. A number of people I care about -- and love -- are passionately anti-abortion. This makes things uneasy between us: I don't much love abortion and I think the decision carries moral weight, but I think there are substantial issues of women's freedom and autonomy involved. So I end up on the pro-choice side of the ledger. But I respect why my pro-life friends feel the way they do.

This fall, I suspect many or most of them will be voting for Trump.

I think this is a tremendous mistake. Trump's indifference to life beyond the womb is well-documented by now -- his willingness to separate migrant families at the border, his eagerness to downplay COVID-19 testing that could save lives and prevent outbreaks because he thinks the numbers make him look bad, his gleeful defense and pardon of war criminals. Given his history of infidelity and promiscuity, I feel pretty sure his pro-life position is transactional.

Some of my pro-life friends are aware of this. One told me, a couple of years ago, that he knew Donald Trump was a bad person -- "but I also think maybe I should thank him, you know?"

There is no way this friend will ever vote for Joe Biden. I don't think I could ever persuade him too. If you think abortion is murder, how could you ever vote for a candidate or party that supports keeping it legal?

And yet: I am convinced that four more years of Donald Trump will be disastrous. That democracy will be grievously injured and that Americans, particularly minority Americans, will suffer. I'm honestly not sure that's avoidable at this point, anyway, but it feels more certain to me if we have a president who -- it seems obvious to me -- is intent on sowing division for his own advantage over one who might actually cares about things beside himself.

So I want to make the case to my pro-life friends that they should not vote for Trump.

But I am not sure that I can, or that the outcome is possible. They see the same country, the same man, that we do. They will vote for him anyway, because the thing that matters most to them is saving unborn lives. I get that. But I am worried for all of us who are already here. I feel like I share at least 90 percent of my morality with my pro-life friends. But that last few percentage points, whew. Their morality tells them to vote for Trump. Mine tells me to do anything but. I am not sure there is a meeting place between those two points.