The other day I read an article which pointed out that all of these
columnists and commentators who are so critical of Trump and so smug, might
remember that while Trump is voicing all sorts of objectionable rhetoric, it
is just that, rhetoric. But our government is actually reigning death and
destruction on Muslim countries throughout the world. We are killing people
whom, we think, might be our enemies in the future, and their families and
their villages. We have incarcerated Muslims here in prisons in special
units for very questionable reasons. We've imprisoned and tortured people in
black sites, and we are now imprisoning and torturing people in Guantanamo
who never did anything to anyone. Some of them were sold to the CIA by
people who just had a grudge against them or didn't have a grudge, but
wanted the money. Today, there was an item about a Muslim family who was
prevented from getting on a plane in Great Britain, to travel to Disney
World. The US didn't want them on that plane and the airline refused to
return the cost of their flights, $13,000. We have been involved in the
bombing of three Doctors Without Borders hospitals. I could go on and on
with our atrocities. What all these commentators hate about Trump is that he
makes our sins explicit. He voices the worst in us. But he isn't the guy
going over the kill list every Tuesday.
Miriam
________________________________
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Bob Hachey
Sent: Tuesday, December 22, 2015 4:18 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] A Crisis in White America
Hi all,
Here's a thought provoking opinion piece from last week's Boston Globe. IT
makes a good deal of sense, but I'm not as sure as the author is of whether
or not Trump will be our next president. I know plenty of folks who fit into
the description of white America depicted here. My wife Donna falls part way
into this group in that she is always in pain, living with less and not very
happy in general. In the beginning, she liked some of what she heard from
Trump; Good thing I talked her out of that nonsense.
I guess the real question here is will we learn any lessons from the Trump
Campaign, or are we on the verge of a truly fascist America?
Bob Hachey
opinion Niall Ferguson
Donald Trump pounces on the ills of white America .
Maybe last week wasn't the week to start watching Amazon's dazzling new
screen adaptation of Philip K. Dick's "The Man in the High Castle. Or maybe
it was. Dick's 1962 novel imagines a fascist America - or, to be precise, an
America partitioned between the Axis powers after a Second World War that
has ended in defeat for the Allies. The east of the country is under the
thumb of Nazi Germany; the Western states are colonies in the Japanese
"co-prosperity sphere. Like Philip Roth's more recent book "The Plot Against
America" - which imagines a Nazification from within after the pro-Hitler
aviator Charles Lindbergh becomes president in 1941 - this nightmare vision
is compelling precisely because it has what the comedian Stephen Colbert
calls "truthiness. We know it didn't happen. But we can (with a shudder)
imagine it. After all, the fate of defeat and oc'cup'ation by the Axis
powers was suffered by a great many countries. And there was no shortage of
American sympathizers with the Nazis. On Sept. 11, 1941, in a speech in Des
Moines, Iowa, Lindbergh accused "Jewish groups in this country" of
"agitating for war. Two years earlier a Fortune magazine poll had asked: "If
you were a member of Congress, would you vote yes or no on a bill to open
the doors . . . to a larger number of European refugees? Eighty-five percent
of Protestants and 84 percent of Catholics answered no. Scot Lehigh: Trump
masters the art of demagoguery Joanna Weiss: Disinvite Trump from the
debates Michael A. Cohen: Republicans have enabled Trump's demagoguery So
here we are again. Like Lindbergh, Donald Trump combines racism with
isolationism. He wants to make America "great again" by keeping it out of
foreign wars. And, like the far right of the 1930s, Trump also wants to keep
out refugees on religious grounds. Last Monday, responding to the San
Bernardino massacre, he called for a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims
entering the United States. Time and again this year I have been told that
Trump has jumped the shark. Yet the latest national CBS News/New York Times
poll shows that he has the support of 35 percent of Republican primary
voters, far ahead of his nearest rival, Ted Cruz. What is going on? The
conventional answer is that many Americans, dismayed by their deteriorating
economic prospects, are experiencing a surge of populist rage - much like
National Front voters in France. But it is not immediately obvious that
standard economics can explain this. Unemployment in France is twice as high
as it is here. A second answer is that this is a revolt against widening
inequality - an argument bolstered by the news that, for the first time
since 1970, middle-class households are outnumbered by lower- and
upper-class households. Yet people do not become racists just because they
drop out of the middle class. The nearest thing to an answer I can find is
in an astounding new paper by the Nobel laureate Angus Deaton and Anne Case,
which exposes what can only be called an existential crisis of white America
- to be precise, badly educated white America. All over the Western world
mortality rates are declining and lifespans are lengthening. But not in
white America, and especially not among those white Americans whose
education didn't go beyond secondary school. For this group, the mortality
rate from poisonings (mostly drug overdoses) rose more than fourfold between
1999 and 2013, from 14 to 58 per 100,000. Mortality from chronic liver
diseases including cirrhosis rose by 50 percent. If the white mortality rate
had continued to fall at its pre-1999 rate of 1.8 percent a year, nearly
half a million deaths would have been avoided in the period 1999-2013. The
white underclass is not so much mad as hell as sick as hell. One in three
white people aged 45-54 report chronic joint pain, one in five neck pain,
and one in seven sciatica. Presumably, it's the most miserable who drug or
drink themselves into early graves. The rest just exit the workforce, opting
for disability benefits. Small wonder labor force participation in America
has declined so steeply, even as it has risen in other developed countries.
Small wonder Trump is polling so well. He is the sick people's sick
candidate. "The Man in the High Castle" is fiction, not history. The Axis
powers could never have beaten America, even with a president inferior to
Franklin Roosevelt. In the end Trump will turn out to be fiction, too.
Either sanity will prevail between now and the Republican National
Convention, or Trump will be beaten by Hillary Clinton, much as Wendell
Wilkie (another maverick businessman) was beaten by Roosevelt in 1940. The
lesson of real history is that candidates such as Trump are the Democrats'
best friends. Niall Ferguson is professor of history at Harvard and a senior
fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford. Related: Evan Horowitz: Trump
blazes a European path in American politics The Word: Why Donald Trump
trumps Donald Drumpf Michael A. Cohen: We're just living in Trump's world
Scot Lehigh: Donald Trump, the unrivaled braggart Jeff Jacoby: Trump is no
champion of the little guy
