On John Bolton, and why 'virtue signaling' is a con

John Bolton is making a big deal of how bad the president is now. Why didn't he say this stuff when he saw it -- particularly to Democrats who were proceeding with impeachment at the time?

This confirms my long-held view that the term "virtue signaling" is a con -- a way to avoid acting virtuously, to hold virtue in contempt, while still preserving an air of superiority.

Don't get me wrong: Lots of people want to be seen as behaving admirably, and that can lead to hollow, performative acts. But a lot of times when people -- conservatives -- use the term, it's is because they disagree with the virtue being signaled (say, acting against racism) and hate to see people acting as though the virtue in question is actually admirable. They're not really against virtue, or acting virtuously, or a lot of people who use the term perjoratively would never go to church again. They just dislike left-of-center virtues.

Bolton's use of the term is even worse. Nobody was asking him to "signal" anything -- they want to know why he didn't take real-time action, potentially effective action, against corruption and criminality. In his hands, an already hollow term becomes an even more hollow slogan to provide cover against doing the right thing. And paradoxically, it becomes it's own signal -- Bolton may be criticizing the president, but he can still use the language of conservatives. He's letting them know he's still one of them.

You can't say #BlackLivesMatter and play college football this year

Slate's Joel Anderson offers up some chilling statistics:

This week, players returned to campuses all around the country preparing themselves for a season that almost certainly shouldn’t be played. Just look at the early numbers. Two weeks ago at Oklahoma State, three players tested positive for the virus. Last week, the University of Houston suspended workouts after six players tested positive. And Thursday at the University of Texas, news reports emerged that 13 players tested positive — an uptick from the six reported the day before.

I've long predicted that American sports leagues probably will try to resume playing soon, but that somebody will get sick, and everybody will shut down for the rest of the year. But it's ironic that efforts to resume sports are happening at the same time as the "Black Lives Matter" protests -- which started out as a policing issue, but have spread to hard discussions about racism and the exploitation of Black people in all sectors of society.

College sports should be one of those sectors. In the major sports, black and other minority athletes provide disproportionate share of the labor with relatively little compensation, considering the money they're generating for their schools. It's already an exploitative system. But now there's a chance that exploitation will lead to illness and, possibly, death. The excuse that young, healthy people don't face as much danger from the coronavirus, but the truth is there's still a lot we don't know -- and we're learning all the time that asymptomatic carriers of the virus might also face long-term health problems.

The coaches and other university officials need to stop this, now, or their words of racial harmony will ring especially hollow. You can't say that "black lives matter" and keep playing the games. Not this year.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, Sam Brownback and the GOP's view of "Sharia law"

Trump-adjacent conservative Henry Olsen writes in the Washington Post says Republicans must defeat GOP congressional candidate Marjorie Taylor Greene, because of her conspiracy-mongering views. Part of Olsen's bill of particulars:

Let’s start with her anti-Muslim bigotry. She has said there is an “Islamic invasion” of the U.S. government and that members of Congress should have to be sworn into office on a Bible. She slurred Muslim men, saying they can have sex with “little boys, little girls … [and] marry as many women as they want.” She said Muslims who “want Sharia law” should “stay over there in the Middle East” and “have a whole bunch of wives, or goats, or sheep, or whatever you want.” She said on Wednesday that “Sharia Law” is “a real threat to our nation,” a blatant falsehood since there’s no effort anywhere in this nation to institute it.

Is opposition to Sharia law out of bounds in the Republican Party? If so, that would probably be news to a lot of Republicans. From 2012:

Republican Kansas Governor Sam Brownback signed a bill aimed at keeping state courts and agencies from using Islamic or other non-U.S. laws when making decisions, his office said on Friday, drawing criticism from a national Muslim group.

The law has been dubbed the “sharia bill” because critics say it targets the Islamic legal code. Sharia, or Islamic law, covers all aspects of Muslim life, including religious obligations and financial dealings. Opponents of state bans say they could nullify wills or legal contracts between Muslims.

Brownback, incidentally, is now the "ambassador at large for international religious freedom," because irony is dead. But Kansas wasn't the only state to undertake such an effort. Less than a decade ago, conspiracy thinking about and efforts to ban sharia in the United States were pretty mainstream among conservatives. At one point, as many as 13 states saw bills introduced to ban sharia. Several states adopted the bans. I can't swear that all the bills came from Republicans, but Republicans were the main drivers of that effort.

Those efforts didn't just fade out. Here's Andrew McCarthy at National Review in 2017, arguing that immigration policy should deliberately shut out those he called "sharia supremacists": " To fashion an immigration policy that serves our vital national-security interests without violating our commitment to religious liberty, we must be able to exclude sharia supremacists while admitting Muslims who reject sharia supremacism and would be loyal to the Constitution."

So the idea that Islamic law is a threat to the American way of life was, and appears to remain, a mainstream conservative position. Henry Olsen treats it as disqualifying. Did conservatives change their minds while I wasn't looking, or is Olsen just trying to make the GOP look less nutty than it really is?

If Trump were merely competent...

... he would be a lot more dangerous. And a bunch of DACA recipients would probably be preparing for deportation today.

SCOTUS today overturned Trump's decision to end DACA because he didn't follow procedures required by the Administrative Procedure Act, which guides executive branch rule-making. If Trump and his lackeys had simply crossed their Ts and dotted their Is, it's a good bet they would've won today.

This is the pattern: 

I'm not sure that it's possible to elected a version of Trump that is more competent and less given to shortcuts -- Trumpism, to a large degree, is a set of impulses more than an ideology -- but just imagine if that actually happened. If somebody with Trump's inclinations and a bit of self-discipline took the White House (say, somebody like Tom Cotton or Tucker Carlson) they would probably be much more successful at turning their inclinations into actual public policy. We're not dodging Trumpian bullets because he's wrong, but because he's so bad at the actual business of governing. That's too close a call.

The pure narcissism of Donald Trump

I know we know this, but still...

...it is remarkable the degree to which this president thinks everything is about him. I don't wear a mask when I go out because I don't like Trump. I do it to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in my community. And the Supreme Court didn't rule against Trump on DACA because of Trump, but because his administration bypassed the legal process for overturning DACA. To the extent that the latter ruling came about because Donald Trump doesn't like to bother doing things the right way, I suppose it is about him. But only indirectly. He could still be Donald Trump, and the court would've ruled in his favor if his administration just had its shit together. He's too narcissistic to understand that.

America is sinning against Indigenous women. Again.

Lot of news going on lately, but I want to make sure this sinks in. ProPublica:

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — A prominent women’s hospital here has separated some Native American women from their newly born babies, the result of a practice designed to stop the spread of COVID-19 that clinicians and health care ethicists described as racial profiling.

Lovelace Women’s Hospital in Albuquerque implemented a secretive policy in recent months to conduct special coronavirus screenings for pregnant women, based on whether they appeared to be Native American, even if they had no symptoms or were otherwise at low risk for the disease, according to clinicians.

Such separations deprive infants of close, immediate contact with their mothers that doctors recommend.

“I believe this policy is racial profiling,” one clinician said. “We seem to be applying a standard to Native Americans that isn’t applied to everybody else. We seem to be specifically picking out patients from Native communities as at-risk whether or not there are outbreaks at their specific pueblo or reservation.”

America has a long - and relatively recent - history of mistreating native women and their offspring. I only became aware of this during the last year.

A study by the U.S. General Accounting Office finds that 4 of the 12 Indian Health Service regions sterilized 3,406 American Indian women without their permission between 1973 and 1976. The GAO finds that 36 women under age 21 were sterilized during this period despite a court-ordered moratorium on sterilizations of women younger than 21.

Two years earlier, an independent study by Dr. Connie Pinkerton-Uri, Choctaw/Cherokee, found that one in four American Indian women had been sterilized without her consent. PInkerton-Uri’s research indicated that the Indian Health Service had “singled out full-blooded Indian women for sterilization procedures.”

This kind of stuff is rightly regarded as genocide: Only one of the five means defined in the Genocide Convention is mass murder. The others are "causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group," "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part," "imposing measures intended to prevent births with the group," and "forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

America's treatment of native peoples has included pretty much all of the above. Forced sterilizations certainly fit the bill. Separating native mothers from their children based on nothing more than their apparent ethnicity does too. This is a grave injustice. Unfortunately, for Native Americans, it's just more of the same.

Atlanta police decide they don't have to 'protect and serve' if they don't want to

WaPo:

Hours after the Fulton County district attorney announced felony murder and other charges against the former Atlanta police officer who fatally shot Rayshard Brooks, a 27-year-old black man, in the back, a number of Atlanta police officers called in sick just before a shift change Wednesday evening.

“This is not an organized thing, it’s not a blue flu, it’s not a strike, it’s nothing like that,” Vince Champion, a spokesman for the International Brotherhood of Police Officers, told NBC News. “What it actually is is officers protesting that they’ve had enough and they don’t want to deal with it any longer.”

Let's be clear what's going on here: Atlanta Police on Wednesday night decided it was more important for them to protect their impunity from accountability than it is to protect the public. That they did so in organized fashion - Champion's denial of such is transparent BS - gives lie to the whole idea of "a few bad apples." Police violence is a cultural problem, aided and abetted even by the "good cops" who stick with their brothers even when they shouldn't.

I have been a critic of the "defund the police" slogan, because I suspect most Americans think the police are necessary and won't sign onto efforts they think will abolish the police. But the arrogance of the Atlanta Police will make the abolitionists' job easier. The cops are acting more like a protection racket - Nice city you have here. A shame if anything happened to it. - than the guardians of law and order.

John Bolton reveals the problem with 'intellectual Trumpism'

Washington Post:

Mr. Trump said so many things that were wrong or false that Mr. Bolton in the book regularly includes phrases like “(the opposite of the truth)” following some quote from the president. And Mr. Trump in this telling has no overarching philosophy of governance or foreign policy but rather a series of gut-driven instincts that sometimes mirrored Mr. Bolton’s but other times were, in his view, dangerous and reckless.

“His thinking was like an archipelago of dots (like individual real estate deals), leaving the rest of us to discern — or create — policy,” Mr. Bolton writes. “That had its pros and cons.”

This has been obvious for some time - Trumpism is Trump - but that hasn't prevented a cottage industry of writers like Henry Olsen and Victor Davis Hanson or pretty much anybody on the roster of the Claremont Institute to offer an intellectual sheen and overarching consistency to the president's lurching from one crisis to the next. Some of this is to give something undeserving of respect a respectability, but I think some of it is also an effort to steer Trumpism for their own desires. The former effort is spin at best, a lie at worst. The latter effort is probably a doomed project - Trump will be Trump, and if he decides its in his interest to dump his putative allies and propagandists to adopt a different agenda, he most certainly will. 

Did progressivism cause the Tulsa Massacre?

Not going to link this. But still worth understanding the Trumpist perspective.

A couple of thoughts:

* AmGreatness is pretty closely associated with the Claremont Institute, a conservative outfit whose primary role these days is to provide an intellectual sheen for Trumpism. There long-term project, though, sees the original sin of America mostly in terms of the rise of progressivism in the early 20th century, along with with the "administrative state" it helped enable. Some of these critiques have merit -- Woodrow Wilson was really a racist asshole! -- but it is also the proverbial man with the hammer who sees the whole world as a nail. The errors of Herbert Croly explain everything bad in the United States, even when they don't, really. Ascribing the Tulsa massacre to progressivism is ridiculous. 

* Why? Because Americans were enslaving and killing African Americans long before progressivism reared its head in the United States. The KKK was not a left-leaning outfit. Americans didn't need ideology to kill black people. It's what we've always done. 

To be fair, AmGreatness acknowledges that, but only in throat-clearing fashion. 

* Anyway, for the AmGreatness crowd, racism doesn't seem to exist, except in that A) it can make the left look bad, or B) when it does happen, it's actually "multiculturalists" criticizing and opposing white conservatives on college campuses. Meanwhile, the AmGreatness crowd is pretty terrified of the influence of minorities in the country's culture. Make of that what you will.

I can honestly say that racism in American life has come from the left, the center, and the right. I don't think Trumpist conservatives are willing to make the same concession. I'll leave it to others to decide whether that position is held in good faith.

A fun thing to do when you're watching a great movie...

...is to look it up on Wikipedia. A lot of times, you find out stuff that enriches your understanding of the film, or gives you new movies to check out.

For example, we're watching TOKYO STORY this week.

Wikipedia:

"Ozu and screenwriter Kōgo Noda wrote the script in 103 days, loosely basing it on the 1937 American film Make Way for Tomorrow, directed by Leo McCarey."

Which got me interested in MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW.

Again, Wikipedia:

"Orson Welles said of Make Way for Tomorrow, "It would make a stone cry,"[2] and rhapsodized about his enthusiasm for the film in his booklength series of interviews with Peter Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles. In Newsweek magazine, famed documentary filmmaker Errol Morris named it his #1 film, stating "The most depressing movie ever made, providing reassurance that everything will definitely end badly."[3]"

MWFT is not available on any streaming service. Which means I have to hunt it down on DVD.

The generals are ignoring Trump. That's bad.

This isn't good for democracy. Josh Rogin, on President Trump's decision to withdraw some troops from Germany:

One reason it will take time is that, according to multiple senior administration officials, the Pentagon won’t submit the options for implementing the withdrawal that Trump wants. Trump’s request for such plans was communicated to the Pentagon in a classified Cabinet memo signed by national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien and initialed by Trump, officials said. But the Pentagon is treating Trump’s demand as if doesn’t carry the authority of an actual presidential decision. The generals are effectively ignoring it.

“Whatever you think about the specifics of withdrawing troops from Germany, there’s nothing heroic about deliberately ignoring the president’s expressed intentions,” a senior administration official said.

There's a temptation to figure that if Trump is for something, anybody opposing it must be right. But that's not the case here. The generals are substituting their own judgment for the president's -- and that's not how it is supposed to work. They are supposed to obey the president's lawful orders. As far as I know, his order to withdraw is lawful.

And this doesn't just happen to Trump. Here's something I wrote in 2010, during the Obama presidency:

Bob Woodward's new book reminds us of an important proposition: American democracy and long-term war are a bad mix.

It's certainly bad for democracy. One of the most disturbing revelations is the lengths that President Obama went to in order to ensure the military obeyed his orders in Afghanistan -- dictating a six-page single-spaced document dictating the terms of 2009's surge of 40,000 troops to that country. Why the detail? Because the president felt sure his generals and admirals would find "wiggle room" to violate the spirit of the order setting a 2011 deadline to begin drawing down troops there.

The American Constitution is clear: The president is the commander-in-chief. He makes the country's big decisions about how we fight war. Generals and admirals give their best military advice, and then execute the decisions the president has made. But top military officials clearly see themselves as political players in the process, lobbying the president and circumventing his orders. Woodward reports Gen. David Petraeus told his staff Obama was "(messing) with the wrong man." Such reports should concern anybody concerned with Constitutional order.

Nothing has changed. We're overdue for a reset on civil-military relations. The generals need to remember who is the boss. It's not them -- not as long as we can plausibly claim to be a democracy.

I miss the blogosphere

The blogosphere, back in the day, made me feel smarter and more informed.

The Twittersphere occasionally does that. Mostly, it makes me feel like it's really easy to get into a fight -- that it invites the forming and hardening of opinions, rather than creating a space to try to understand situations, or arrive at conclusions that don't adhere to a binary pole.

I'm still trying to figure out how to manage myself on Twitter. I would love it if I could find a read-only version of the website, but that doesn't seem possible. Self-control is required. Which, online, is not my specialty.

What I'm going to try to do:

* Spend less time reading Twitter.

* Use it, when posting, as a sort of RSS for my blog and Instagram. I'm hoping the time taken to explain myself better will A) keep me from knee-jerk posts, slow me down and B) thus make me use my brain more.

In other words: I'll do less responding directly to tweets. If I can't take time to craft a thoughtful comment that's blogworthy, then it's probably not worth the 10 seconds it takes to dunk.

I've tried and failed before to find ways to make Twitter work for me better. This may also fail. But I feel like I have to try.

The Democratic Party is very against* sexual harassment.

News:

The Democratic candidate challenging Republican U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse in Nebraska lost the backing of the state party Monday after it was revealed that he had made graphic sexual comments about a campaign staffer in a group text.

In the messages, obtained by the Associated Press, candidate Chris Janicek asked a group that included the staffer whether they should use campaign dollars on “getting her laid.”

“Our Democratic Party has no tolerance for sexual harassment,” NDP Chair Jane Kleeb said in a statement on the party’s website. “Our Party will not extend resources or any type of support to any candidate that violates our code of conduct and doesn’t treat men and women with the dignity and respect they deserve.”

This is frankly an easy stance for the party to take, since Janicek probably has no real chance of beating Sasse. Call me back when senior party officials stop regretting that Al Franken is no longer in the Senate.

Amtrak begins its abandonment of the hinterlands

This isn't really a surprise, but it is sad:

Amtrak is ending daily service to hundreds of stations outside the Northeast, and you can blame the coronavirus pandemic, the railroad said this week.

Starting Oct. 1, most Amtrak long-distance trains will operate three times a week instead of daily, the company said in a memo to employees Monday.

Among the routes getting cut: My beloved Southwest Chief, which I've taken several times from the Kansas City area to Chicago. The last big trip I took before the pandemic, in fact, was a long weekend to the Windy City -- I gifted my dad with the trip. He had once worked on a track crew, and his father retired from Amtrak, but he had never taken a long train trip before. We spent the entire ride there in the observation car, kind of zen experience of meditating on the countryside in Missouri, Iowa and Illinois that can be breathtakingly beautiful at times.

It beats the hell out of air travel, that's for sure.

'I am not a racist.' Jimmy Fallon - and me

This is relatively minor in the scheme of things, but it is also very connected to the current moment, so I want to take a second with it.

Monday night, Jimmy Fallon apologized on air for the 20-year-old SNL in which he performed in blackface. It was fine as far as it goes, but he said one thing that stuck in my craw:

“I’m not a racist. I don’t feel this way,” Fallon explained.

I think this is something we white people should avoid saying when we commit racial fuckups. It's a kissing cousin to "some of my best friends are black" -- it reflects an effort not just to apologize for screwing up, or learning a lesson, but to assure everybody who can hear that the speaker (whatever stupid, mean or hurtful thing he or she just said) is really a good person.

And honestly, who cares?

Let me back up. I have fucked up on racial matters, in a way that drew national attention. It was painful -- but worse than that, much worse, it created pain in a community that I valued and treasured. Rightfully and understandably nobody cared if I thought of myself as a good person. They only cared what I had done. 

It's possible that if you search, you might find that younger version of me online somewhere telling people I'm not a racist. I remember making a conscious attempt not to defend myself in such a fashion, but the the temptation not to be a bad person -- and we see racism, rightly, as an indictment of the character of its practitioners -- that it can overwhelm the desire to simply apologize, to take your punishment, and to realize that in some people's minds you are forever tainted. 

Shame is not fun, but it is also much less pain than a lot of black Americans have to live with, dealing with oppressive and even deadly policing in their communities. So the best thing to do, in my mind, is to offer an unqualified apology, then put your head down and do the work of being better, and making it better. And do it quietly, instead of performatively -- because that is simply another way of letting everybody know that, no really, you're a good person.

Other people can't see our hearts. They can only see our deeds. So we white folks need to stop boasting about the content of our character and instead live it in everything we do. "I am not racist," isn't an apology. It's self-affirmation.

Trumpist Christianity isn't Christianity

McKay Coppins writes about President Trump's photo op at the church:

As I’ve written before, most white conservative Christians don’t want piety from this president; they want power. In Trump, they see a champion who will restore them to their rightful place at the center of American life, while using his terrible swift sword to punish their enemies.

If you believe in Christianity, you believe in a God who sent his son not to overpower his enemies, but to die at their hands. It is really that simple. And that is the opposite approach of Christians who seek to dominate their neighbors rather than love them.

Trumpist Christians aren't Christians, at least not in a religious sense. Sure, they may attend church. But mostly, they're another tribe -- a tribe that wants little more than what other tribes want. Power. Profane power.

It will not lead to salvation.

The president's "dominance" ideology

The president is talking a lot about "dominance" today.

It would be one thing if he was talking about "restoring order" in the wake of protests that have -- to some extent -- morphed into violence. (Some of it is real rebellion, some of it is simple looting, and some of it instigators trying to create disaster. I don't know how much of each go into the mix.) If the president simply was trying to bring about calm, that might be welcome.

Instead, he is talking about dominance.

That's different. It is undemocratic and authoritarian. But it reflects Donald Trump's truest ideology. More than appointing conservative judges, more than stopping immigration, his real goal is dominance -- those other goals simply help him achieve the thing he desires most of all.

We can no longer save democracy. But we can reclaim it.

A few weeks ago, I wrote for THE WEEK that democracy was slipping away, and I wondered if we would notice if and when we hit the tipping point.

Many Americans understand that Trump and his allies have given the country's norms and institutions quite a beating, but they may not realize how close our democracy is to outright failure. The breakdown will not come all at once, in a single moment. Instead, constitutional governance might die a death by a thousand cuts. The shutdown of the Michigan legislature is a warning sign: American democracy is still alive, for now, but the end could be nearer than we think.

That was before George Floyd.

Tonight, the president threatened to send the military into American cities if protests over Floyd's death continue. He seemed to offer praise to peaceful protesters -- "we cannot allow ... peaceful protesters to be drowned out by an angry mob" -- but his words were immediately belied by his actions.

Simply put, the president of the United States unleashed state violence against peaceful demonstrators outside the White House.

And he did so ... for a photo op.

Moments earlier, just outside the White House, federal authorities used rubber bullets, flash bangs and gas to clear peaceful protesters from the area.

Trump then walked across Lafayette Square to St. John’s Church, where a fire was set Sunday evening. The president held up a Bible and nodded to media cameras, before being joined by Attorney General Bill Barr and others to pose for photos.

I would submit to you that the tipping point has been reached. The rule of law -- of a Constitution that guarantees the freedom of expression, and to peacefully assemble -- has been replaced, for now, by the rule of dominance. That is not democracy. 

So I believe we can no longer save democracy.

But I do believe we can reclaim it. Or, at the very least, we should make every effort to do so.

How? Uh, that's where I come up short. I think there are some dark days ahead. I think it will be easier to go along to get along because the costs of not going along may be high indeed. All I'm left with, really, is the final words from Anne Applebaum's new piece in The Atlantic:

In the meantime, I leave anyone who has the bad luck to be in public life at this moment with a final thought from Władysław Bartoszewski, who was a member of the wartime Polish underground, a prisoner of both the Nazis and the Stalinists, and then, finally, the foreign minister in two Polish democratic governments. Late in his life—he lived to be 93—he summed up the philosophy that had guided him through all of these tumultuous political changes. It was not idealism that drove him, or big ideas, he said. It was this: Warto być przyzwoitym—“Just try to be decent.” Whether you were decent—that’s what will be remembered.

Just try to be decent.

The War on Terror comes home

Republicans are starting to sound scary. This is a sitting congressman:

And this is a senator who stands a decent chance of being president someday.

The first tweet advocates "hunting down" American citizens as though they were opponents in the misbegotten "war on terror." Cotton, meanwhile, served in the Army in Iraq, which was was war-on-terror-adjacent.

One thing that was notable about America's war on terror efforts is how cruel they often were. Dick Cheney told us we'd have to work the "dark side," and so we did -- at Baghram, Gitmo, and at secret torture sites around the world. Civil libertarians opposed these actions in real time, and a few low-level soldiers were prosecuted. But nobody in a position of real responsibility was held accountable, and indeed, pundits like Marc Thiessen made their names and careers defending the torture regime. When Barack Obama took office, he declined to prosecute the war criminals in his predecessor's administration, citing a need to "look forward." Admittedly, I thought that was the right approach at the time.

Now, though, the chickens are coming home to roost. Some leading American conservatives don't want to merely unleash the worst techniques of the war on terror against foreign terrorists -- they're ready to bring those techniques home.

Who's gonna stop them?

Why I'm not calling on Trump to resign

Because he won't.

Official White House photo, via Flickr

At The Atlantic, Michael Steinberger sees the dearth of calls for the president's resignation as a flaw in the body politic, a failure to get angry enough about this awful president:

Zelizer, of Princeton, thinks future historians will be astonished that Trump’s failure was tolerated to the point that his resignation wasn’t even part of the conversation. “I think we will look back and ask why people weren’t more furious,” he says. “Where was the outrage?”

I don't think that's a fair question. People are plenty angry! Before impeachment, there were lots of calls for impeachment. Mainstream columnists even suggested that the 25th Amendment should be used to remove him. Lots of folks want to seem him not in office, it's clear. 

So lamenting the lack of calls for resignation is a very narrow way of looking at this moment.

It seems clear to me that Trump would never heed calls for his resignation, even if it pitted him against the Republican Party and every single one of the country's voters. But that's not the condition that exists. Demanding his resignation is like begging fish to jump in your boat so you can eat them: He's not going to listen, and he's not going to comply. Thought leaders should push for effective, possible ways to seek his removal -- say through this November's election -- rather than taking empty stands that will go nowhere.

There is rage in the land. Just because it doesn't take a certain, expected form doesn't mean it's not there.

Coronavirus diary: Life goes on, brisket edition

My dad and his father both loved to make homemade BBQ sauce for Sunday roasts and briskets. I've never really done that. 

Today, my son made my dad's sauce recipe for Mother's Day brisket. 

I am proud and humbled.

Coronavirus diary: A letter to my son about values

Dear son:

The COVID-19 pandemic, and accompanying economic disaster, have made me think a lot about your future.

I believe that you will grow up in a tougher, meaner world than I have. It’s possible that survival, and not just self-actualization, will be the challenge that you face. Do not let this scare you: We are privileged that survival has not been a problem in my memory, nor my parents'. But people all around the world and across history have spent lifetimes much closer to the edge than we have. They have accepted the challenge and persisted — because that is what life is all about. What alternative, really, is there?

But I worry. I am a man who has made a living by talking and writing. It’s not made me rich, but for the most part I have been able to provide food and shelter on the income those skills provide. I am not sure such opportunities will be as widely available in the future. And I don’t have the experience, skills or tools to do much else. What can I teach you that will help you, practically, as you grow up and move out into this meaner world?

Your mother reminds me that we are giving you the tools to acquire those skills yourself. You’re smart, inquisitive, an obsessive reader and collector of facts. I could not be prouder of who you have already become. And I think we’ve modeled other values that we hope you’ll take on and carry through life.

Even so, I want to be explicit about the values I hope you embrace.

HONESTY: Telling the truth - even when it has a cost - is good in its own right. But there are practical reasons for embracing honesty as one. To use one, currently pertinent example: Our leaders were not honest - with us, certainly, and perhaps with themselves - about the dangers presented by the coronavirus. That failure to embrace reality, to embrace the truth, and to give that truth to the public, probably made the pandemic wider and more disastrous than it had to be.

Embrace honesty, son. Embrace the truth. 

COMPASSION: There is a temptation, during hard times, just to look out for yourself and those closest to you. It’s understandable. Nonetheless, I ask that you look for opportunities to be kindhearted to — and helpful — others. They will need your help at times. And you will need theirs. 

This is even true even when you find something detestable or off-putting. We didn’t raise you in the church. I know you’re skeptical of religion. But these verses from Matthew 5 in the Christian Bible have have stuck with me, informed my sense of what I should aspire to, even as my own faith wavered and diminished:

43You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor’ and ‘Hate your enemy.’ 44But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. 46If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Do not even tax collectors do the same? 47And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even Gentiles do the same?

Other religious traditions — and traditions outside religion — have similar teachings. Like I say: I believe the world you encounter will be a mean place. The temptation will be to let it make you mean in response. I hope with all my heart that you can resist that temptation.

JUSTICE: I think this is a corollary to compassion. Both values recognize the humanity of people other than yourself and those closest to you — and demand, as a result, that you treat them the way you would want to be treated, that you advocate for people who are treated unfairly for any reason. When people are treated unfairly, work to help them be treated fairly.

This is an unjust world, and I suspect that it will only become more so. (Or maybe it’s just that people like us will be more exposed to and subject to its injustices.) Have the courage not to shrug at those injustices, or to take advantage of them, but to be a voice against them.

There is so much more to say about each of these ideas. I don’t think I have defined them well in this writing. I must hope that your mother is right, that you already have the skills to equip yourself with better knowledge and wisdom about what these values mean and entail.

A warning: You may find that these values are in tension with each other — that to ensure justice for one person makes it difficult to be compassionate to another, or that compassion to one person makes honesty difficult. I can’t give you a hard-and-fast rule to solve those conundrums — only: Let your conscience be your guide.

I am confident of that conscience, and of your heart. I am sorry that I cannot simply protect you from what is to come, only to prepare you as best I can. I love you, now and always,

Dad

Minorities, sports and getting started again

I'm aware of a study showing the shutdown of sports is taking some $12 billion out of the economy. And I love to listen to a baseball game as much as anyone.

But I guess I can't help but notice that the push to reopen professional sports -- at risk to the participants, even if fans are kept away -- is going to have a disproportionate impact.

Here's a 2018 report. First the MLB:

With people of color making up 42.5 percent of MLB players, the league has one of the best diversity scores among the four major sports. Last year saw the highest percentage of Latinos, 31.9 percent, in the last two decades.

The NBA:

With 80.7 percent of players being people of color, the NBA takes the lead among men’s sports for player diversity.

And the NFL:

The league is primarily composed of African-American and white players. The percentage of players of color has slowly risen to over 70 percent since 1997; the percentage of white players reached a new low, 27.7 percent.

The health burdens of the pandemic are falling disproportionately on minorities. Restarting sports over the next few months might be part of the same phenomenon.

Grasping at truth: Three examples of good writing about difficult topics

One thing about quarantine: It has given me time to think about how I practice the craft of writing.

I'm lucky: I've been able to make a living at writing -- both reporting and opinion writing. For most of the last decade or more, I've had a regular outlet (newspaper syndication, PhillyMag, and The Week) to express my opinions before large audiences. I don't take it for granted.

But I always know I could do better. And I sometimes suspect I'm doing a two-dimensional version of something that might better contribute to the public conversation if I could somehow express it in three dimensions.

I want to point to three pieces of writing done in recent years that I take as a model -- not just for writing, but for thinking, and maybe even doing this job in a way I consider to be moral.

And here are the lessons I've learned from them:

Is Joe Biden 'no better' than Trump?

At The Week, Damon Linker discusses how the Trump campaign can use the sex assault charges against Joe Biden.

The Biden campaign's effort to portray itself as a moral reset from the debasement of the Trump years will run into this counter-message like a power sander. The Trump campaign will strip it away with a barrage of paid ads, prime-time cable news diatribes, and a hailstorm of tweets — all of it repeating the message (illustrated with clips from and about the Kavanaugh hearings) that Biden and his fellow Democrats are every bit the BS artists that Trump is, only they won't admit it. They'll lie about it, right to your face.
 To Democrats this prediction may sound implausible. 

There's no way that Trump, a man whose mendaciousness is well established and total, can possibly succeed in portraying Biden as more dishonest than he is. But he won't have to show that Biden is worse, just that he's no better.

Emphasis added.

One of our last dinners hosted before the quarantine was with a very old friend of mine -- smart, in a position of considerable community responsibility -- who didn't say how he voted. But he wasn't all that concerned by Trump. All the politicians were corrupt, dishonest and evil, he said. At least with Trump, there are no illusions.

It's troubling that Trump's appeal is rooted in cynicism. What's scarier is: That cynicism might not be entirely misplaced. 

Three ways Mike Pence's refusal to wear a mask sums up Trump-Republican ideology

More about this:

To me, this sums up Trump-Republican ideology pretty neatly, in three ways:

* Trumpist Republicans don't have to play by the rules. The president ran his 2016 on a law and order campaign, but has notoriously been the most lawless president in living memory -- and that includes Nixon. Rules are for other people, not for the powerful elites and their friends.

* Trumpist Republicans disdain those they see as "weak." The GOP’s general attitude toward the vulnerable members of society is: "I got mine, you can go to hell." Mike Pence believes he doesn't have the coronavirus, so why should he act in a way that protects others from from the disease? And he can buy health insurance, so why should Republicans worry about ensuring that poor people can afford medical care? Or food? Or anything else?

* Trumpist Republicans are willing to let those weak people shoulder the consequences of their actions. Of course, people can be asymptomatic and still spread coronavirus, which means there is a chance that Pence's refusal to wear a mask increased the chances that patients and staff at Mayo were exposed to the virus. Not a significant chance, but still. Similarly, the GOP project largely is about protecting corporations from dealing with the consequences of their actions -- which is why environmental and worker safety protections have been gutted under Trump.

Pence's refusal to wear a mask is in some ways a small act. But it speaks volumes.

About the Blue Angel flyover

I've seen a couple of Blue Angels shows in my life and found them utterly thrilling.

But.

I'm concerned that we as a country can't seem to honor hospital workers without resorting to displays of militarism. It's supposed to look strong. But it seems like it is probably a weakness.

The toxic masculinity of GOP elites

C'mon, man.

I'll wager Trump and Pence don't wear masks because they see sickness -- and concessions to it -- as weakness. That's macho strutting at its most foolish. But it's also par for the course.

A Biden versus Trump debate will get very ugly

I'm reading this Peter Beinart piece about the sex assault allegations against Joe Biden -- I'm neutral on whether they're true, but think the utmost effort should be made to try to find out if they're true -- and a thought occurs:

If there is a presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, it will probably end up with fierce, ugly dueling accusations of sexual assault between the two. 

Greatest country in the world.

Coronavirus Cinema: TOOTSIE

Three thoughts about TOOTSIE, coming up after the trailer:

* TOOTSIE is a fantasy about a bunch of New Yorkers who act like they've never seen a drag queen before.

* Sydney Pollack is one of our great directors, and you can see his command of craft here. One example: We do get a montage of Michael Dorsey's transformation into Dorothy Michaels - but not until we've already met Dorothy. Pollack is confident enough that we have Michael in one scene, cut to the next with Dorothy, and he knows the audience can follow along without a big buildup. You don't see that often.

* That said, I saw this in the theater in 1982. It was the first rom-com type movie where I was confused at the end. Dustin Hoffman's character had betrayed Jessica Lange thoroughly - and her father - and yet at the end both grudgingly accepted him back in their lives? I call bullshit.

 That's why they call it a fantasy, I guess.