The No-Win Scenario

The United States was Admiral James T. Kirk in "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan," right before the near-fatal encounter with Khan aboard the Reliant. Spock makes the following observation: "There are two possibilities. They are unable to respond. They are unwilling to respond." At that point, he has given Kirk a clear warning: this is accidental or on purpose.

We all learn shortly thereafter which it is.

We are now James T. Kirk after the attack on the Enterprise. the turbolift doors have opened, and there is Chief Engineer Scott, holding the plasma-burned body of his nephew, Midshipman Preston. The shock envelopes the bridge leading to audible gasps and a pained expression on Spock's face.

You might wonder why I would talk of the country in these terms. Not everyone may be familiar with the movie, and while "Star Trek" is a global phenomenon, many people would not think to imbue it with more than entertainment value. But the many series and movies have always been about telling the story of the human species (and other species) from a distant perspective, to highlight the issues we face in the current centuries.

Right now, is our Wrath of Khan moment.

We seem to be dealing with the No-Win Scenario, mentioned as part of reminiscence about Kirk's days in the academy, taking a character test called "The Kobayashi Maru," in which cadets are faced with a situation which has no practical solution. Kirk, deciding the conditions of the test were unwarranted, reprograms the simulation to "win" the no-win scenario. Rather than being expelled, he gets a commendation for "original thinking." Even in the 23rd Century, a white man can fail upward.

Our no-win scenario is this: we cannot trust the Democratic Party to fight for us with all the necessary vigor and fortitude, despite their best of intentions. We cannot get the Republican Party to care about us at all. Given the outcome of the 2024 Presidential Election, it does not appear we have anywhere to turn. All the signs and portents indicate that we have stepped off a cliff, to plunge into a chasm of Fascism, from which we cannot recover. We are enveloped in a miasma of hopelessness that has rocked so many of us progressive stalwarts to the core.

As we know from the movie, Kirk eventually defeats Khan, with guile, trickery, and the use of knowledge and skills Khan, despite his intellect, does not possess. He harnesses everything in his power to bring about a successful conclusion to the adventure... but at a heavy cost, that of the life of his friend and first officer, Mr. Spock.

This is what we face. In order to turn back the tide of White Christian Fascism that threatens to overwhelm and undermine our Constitutional republic, we are going to have to tap the deep veins of knowledge, experience, and original thinking that we possess, to beat our opponents at their own game. They have had the advantage of time, time to plan, time to be outraged, time to plot their vengeance, and we are left with very little. But those of us not subsumed by the darkness of our situation have energy, determination, knowledge, and healthy dose of cunning to use in order to rescue ourselves from the situation. To do this, we're going to have to set aside the preconceptions of what the election represents, and focus on the future, and what steps we will need to take.

We may very well face hard sacrifices, and there will be casualties. No fight against Fascism is ever free of them. We have an opportunity, if we play our cards right, of stopping the march toward autocracy before it gets too far down the road. There are always possibilities. Now we have to find them and exploit them to arrest the slide of democracy into the void.

31 Days

 We are in the final laps of the race. We have focused, we have concentrated, the finish line is in sight. But one small lapse, one mistake, a moment's overconfidence is all it takes to put us into the wall.

I use an auto racing metaphor, because, in essence, that's what this election, above all others, has been. Unlike a horse race, where there is a jockey and a horse and a limited amount anyone else can do during the race, an auto race of most types involves not just the driver and the car, but a pit crew, a strategy team, team principals, and support staff. A lot goes into making a race car go, even when the car is out on the track. There are people monitoring every part of the race, feeding that information to the driver, attempting to put them in the best position to win.

We're thirty-one days out from the most consequential Presidental election... since the last one. And the one before that. The fact is, we've slid into a skid that we are desperately trying to turn into and pull out of. We're trying to maintain control of the race, to bring home a win and seal the trophy for ourselves and our team, America. This race has been tight, it has seen attrition, it has seen wrecks, and it is seeing it's fair share of swapping paint.

I'd love to have political discussions about the future of the country that were not so monopolar, but it really is down to a binary choice right now, of Freedom vs. Fascism. There isn't much more to be said about either major party Presidential candidate. One is clearly deranged, the other clearly determined. One is completely self-centered, the other, completely selfless. One is a convicted criminal, the other convicted criminals. To be honest, talking about policy seems like a detour from the real issue: Who will guard freedom and democracy in America?

I think we all know the answer.

But many don't. Over a hundred million people did not vote in the 2020 Presidential election. The reasons are legion, but at the end of the day, irrelevant, because by not voting, they made their voices heard loud-and-clear: they simply don't care. They've been so beaten down by what they consider "politics," that they have benched themselves, and left the decision making up to others. They chose not to decide, and in doing so, made their choice.

It should come as no surprise that everyone who is a pundit or prognosticator seems bent on proclaiming this race close, but the fact is, not yardstick currently available can measure the true disgust many now have for the convicted criminal running as the Republican nominee. That alone should have caused the vast majority of people to vote every Republican out of office, but their hold remains firm because 100+ million people sit on the sidelines. If even a lousy 3 to 5 percent of them woke up, saw reality, and voted, there would be no doubt who would win on November 5th.

So, now we wait.

We have 31 days to do what little we can, as individuals, and as organizations, to trumpet the cause of freedom and get people to see that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are the future we need and want. The checkered flag is in the distance. We cannot allow our concentration to fail.

Straining At Invisible Chains

There is no Emancipation Proclamation for bigotry.

There is no Civil Rights Act for hatred.

There is no Civil War for racism.

No matter the extent of actions taken to drive out slavery and tamp down the racism behind it, it will not die. It may be strangled, it may be driven under rocks, it may be forced from the light of day, but it rests below the surface, sits quiescent in dark corners, and it waits.

The Black portion of America is straining at invisible chains. Ephemeral, insubstantial, but as strong as the strongest irons that ever held their ancestors in the bottom of ships bound from Africa. Chains forged in racial supremacy, scientific impurity, and patriarchal psychology, by a White race that has done its level best to make every effort to prove its inherent superiority while simultaneously proving Black inferiority. No amount of blood on the battlefield nor ink on paper has rid America of the scourge of systemic, endemic racism.

We can proclaim progress, we can point to a Black President and a museum dedicated to the African-American experience, we can point to all the walks of life where Blacks can now be regularly found, and still there are the invisible chains. No Black person may be made to dance on the auction block, but they are still for sale in the marketplace of ideas, and the idea that they are a threat, that they are lazy, that they are expendable, are all bought and sold in blood and rhetoric.

Police still routinely shoot Black people who pose little threat to them, claiming "imminent danger." GOP Congressmen regularly denigrate Blacks as dependent on government, and a GOP Presidential nominee has lumped all Blacks into the category of having little or nothing to show for their efforts.

We can see, in the clear air of the 21st Century, the biases that wove the bonds of slavery, that built the self-reinforcing system that perpetuated the idea of racial superiority. We can see the tricks and obfuscations and tyranny used to continue to hold the Black race in thrall to the White race. Even with all the steps taken by so many, Black and White, to scour clean the stain of slavery and bigotry from the nation, like Lady Macbeth, we curse that apparent inability to blot it away. It seeps out from the pores of a nation that has defective cells in its marrow that perpetuate this cancer.

Where will the day come that a Keith Scott, or a Sandra Bland, or a Tamir Rice, or a Mike Brown, or an Emmett Till, might walk down the street and not be the subject of the depredations of police? When will legislators understand that affirmative action is the redress for a system that was designed to prevent Black inclusion in colleges and universities? When will the Voting Rights Act no longer be necessary?

Right now, our nation seethes, as one man has brought into the daylight the bigotry and racism most decent Americans have tried to hold down for decades. Donald Trump's atonal ignorance on matters of Blackness is only superseded by his willingness to overlook the overt racism of many of his followers. He cannot see the chains that still bind Blacks to centuries of scorn and sabotage and slavery through White supremacist attitudes. It easier to claim on one hand that no one has helped them, and on the other that they need to help themselves, and that somehow, he alone, can be their emancipator, though his history is strewn with his own racist tendencies.

Now, in our nation, we finally have a chance to deal a severe blow to racism. We can take the Republican response to a Black President, the odious and fatuous bigot that is Donald Trump, and thrash him at the polls. Every decent American has a chance, through their ballot, to proclaim what we know in our hearts: there is no room for racism anymore. We can repudiate Trump and the minions who follow him, and deal them a death blow of seismic proportions. We can ring the bell of freedom for all Americans loudly and fully, by showing our Black brothers and sisters that we will no longer tolerate their being bound to the past. We can, once and for all, take up the hammer of justice and break those invisible chains.

Oafs Of Office

Any Progressive may think it's cute to poke fun at people like Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Chris Christie, Carly Fiorina, Scott Walker, et. al., as one by one they enter the arena to do vainglorious combat to determine which of them will represent their party in the race toward the Presidency. Derogatory terms such as "clown car" and memes with Republican candidates in grease paint and big shoes might tickle the funny bone, but they detract from the real fear that should pervade the 2016 Presidential Campaign: that one of them might become President.

This idea should frighten you. It should leave you in cold sweats at night in bed. It should make you run out to find the nearest Progressive candidate of your choice and volunteer.

It doesn't.

Progressives, unlike their Conservative counterparts, don't seem to be in a lather over what is the sure threat to the country: another run of big spending, grandiose defense budgets, and cuts to entitlements, all put on the already overwhelmed American credit card. The meddling in the affairs of nations and the trashing of America's credibility as a world leader by bowing to pressure from "allies."

We should be afraid. These people have made it plain that, given the power of the Presidency, they will implement strategies and ideas that have led to economic, social, political, and global calamities in the past and will do so again in the future. They represent poor planning, bad management, ineptitude, and politicking on a grandiose scale. Every one of them has black marks on their record that would make them problematic candidates for a loan, let alone the Presidency.

But right now, social media is filled with tittering and ribbing and tomfoolery, as Progressives laugh at them and take the threat as little more than pompous chest-thumping. "They'll NEVER be President!" is the common refrain, from a pack of Progressives who sat by and watched as the 2014 mid-term elections went to some of these self-same "clowns." And why? Because Progressives COULD NOT BE BOTHERED TO VOTE. Not all mind you - I did. Many I know did. But the fact remains: too many DID NOT. End result: a Congress that is now even more dysfunctional that the previous one.

Are you willing to just sit there and think to yourself "it'll all be OK," when history has proven how fallacious that argument is? It is now a year before the first round of primaries. The Republican host will spend it scratching, clawing, and spouting in a vain effort to provide a coherent candidate. For now, everyone has anointed Hillary Clinton the Democratic front-runner, even though she is not necessarily the best person for the job. And the vast majority of Progressives have taken the "Bull Run" approach to politics, riding their carriages out to watch the spectacle, only to have the war come at them at a feverish clip and drive them home running.

We have time now, fellow Progressives, to organize, lay in ammunition, and prepare to lay siege to Conservatism's blight on our nation. We can, in fact, turn the Republican extravaganza into the sideshow it is shaping up to be, if we act now. We cannot sit idly by and simply hope the Republicans will self-destruct; we have to everything in our power to make it happen. We have to set the records straight. We have to show the American people just what these ne're-do-wells of the GOP represent to our nation: a return to policies we have barely lived through in the past. America's Progressive center must assert itself and soon, or in 2016, the "joke" will be on us.

The Conscience of the King

There are nights, no doubt, that President Obama has a hard time sleeping. The wearying weight of a nation and the world seem inconveniently thrust upon his shoulders. Hercules knew as great a burden, but held it for far less time and without the hounding of the press or an opposition party.

One is in the uncomfortable position as President of the United States, of being called upon to serve many masters and many needs. Over three hundred million Americans, of disparate backgrounds, look to him to run the country, and have widely varying degrees of opinion on his work. He is at times savior, at times pariah; sometimes a champion, many times a loser. He no doubt knows the dastardly truth: there is no success in being a President in our modern era. It will not be until fifty or more years hence that America fully realizes what it had in him, beyond his race.

Mitt Romney: The Man Who Would Not Be King

You may know this situation, from one side or the other: a child faces an adult. The adult asks the child questions. the child is evasive. The adult is insistent. The child lies. The child hides things. The child is evasive. No parent is truly fooled by a child who is seeking to hide their transgressions. It doesn't stop the child from trying; they have no idea that their parents probably played out the same tableaux when they were children.

In the Digital Information Age, there really is no hiding anything. Though the Internet has yet to absorb the sum total of human knowledge over the centuries, enough exists in great enough detail for the last fifty years that hiding what you have said and done, if you are a public figure, is nigh impossible. Every utterance on tape, every expostulation before the camera, every missive in newsprint, can now dog you wherever you go. The track of your career can be plumbed in great and gory detail, mined for every iota of potential inference as to your character or position, not just by those who seek to know more about you, but by those who wish to tear you down.

Mitt Romney is in the unfortunate position of having much of his life laid bare, and not just in his biography, but by all those he has interacted with throughout the years. In his business capacity, or as a Mormon leader, or as Governor of Massachusetts, or even trying to rescue the Salt Lake City Olympics, he has left a trail of evidence to be followed in now accessible records. Very few parts of his life are truly closed to prying eyes.

In his second go at becoming President, he has attacked the problem of disclosure by not -- not, that is, disclosing anything. Not answering questions. Not outlining detailed plans. Not releasing tax information. Limiting interviews, and in those few, remaining evasive. On top of this, he seems to have surrounded himself with a staff whose main function is to attack every fact with a thousand counter-charges, to muddy the waters as much as possible, or to distract through impudence and irreverence.

While one can point to any number of positions he holds -- or does not, as the wind blows -- as a reason to avoid voting for him, no specific set of facts is really necessary beyond the fact of his ability to lie with seeming impunity, even in the face of facts to the contrary, and his desire to keep so much of his life hidden from the citizenry, the very people he is attempting to cajole into voting for him.

Mitt Romney is a child. He is the child who has broken his mother's favorite lamp, hidden the pieces, and now stands before her, questions being hurled at him left and right, tossing off rejoinders, spewing evasions, and clasping his hands behind his back with fingers crossed, even as he denies all knowledge of the lamp and what happened to it, a slight smirk barely perceptible.

It does not matter what his tax plan is, though it would appear to be nothing different than that which got us into our financial mess. It does not matter what his immigration policy is, because it is whatever it needs to be depending on your heritage. It does not matter that he wishes to repeal the Affordable Care Act on Day One of his presidency, failing to realize that he can do no such thing. It does not matter his stance on same-sex marriage, because it will come and he will not be able to stop it.

No. None of that matters.

What matters is that the man is slick, he is evasive, he prevaricates at the drop of hat and is unrepentant about it. What matters is that the man is seeking the highest, most public office in the country, and he still tries to hide behind his privacy, as if people have no right to know who the real man is, that they should just elect him on adulation and "trust" him.

A President who chooses to keep secrets is then a slave to them. A President does have secrets to keep, national secrets, but those are things in the interest of the nation. To have personal secrets, which may or may not have value to someone with ill intent, or to be hiding some sort of malfeasance that might considerably darken his already dim character, or trying to paper over some financial embroilment that would reflect badly on him personally, is not the mark of a person we should trust with the keys to our military and our country. While we cannot hope to find perfect paragons of integrity running for President, we can expect those people who do run for the position to be completely open with us. If they cannot do that, they have no business sitting behind the desk in the Oval Office.

Mitt Romney is the man who wishes to be king, to be seated upon the throne before the adoring masses. He runs a campaign that is part inept circus sideshow and part homage to what he clearly feels is a fait accompli. He is busy taking his victory lap before the race is even run. A man with such a sense of entitlement, combined with his obvious detachment from the world he flits through, makes no sense as President of the United States, a position which has aged and torn down more than one man with its rigors. Mitt Romney has gone as far as devil-may-care conservatism can take him, and America is not looking for a king.

We Vote For Them

The United States of America was founded on the idea that, given the opportunity, the citizenry of that nation could -- through elected representation -- govern itself in accordance with the doctrine of unity and mutual interest. So it was that an electoral system was devised to ensure that every person who was a United States citizen could vote and that their vote would count equally across all the States. A larger State could not necessarily monopolize the election of a President by turning out all its voters, and thus overriding the votes of smaller states. It presumed that anyone wishing to be elected President, would have to show each State that they carried that State's best interests -- and those of the nation as a whole -- to heart.

The idea of One Person, One Vote and all it implies, is pertinent now more than ever, with a modern Presidential election awash in 'soft money,' as rich benefactors with hidden agendas and secret motives look to manipulate public opinion by pouring money into so-called "social welfare" organizations and having them run advertising seeking to paint the current President in the most unflattering light possible in the name of "saving" America. "Saving America" is a code for saving the current system, whereby the wealthiest elite benefit at every turn by the sweat and tears of those "beneath" them without having to care about their welfare.

No matter what this tiny fraction of American society thinks it can accomplish by flooding the election with its money, at the end of the day, it can only buy so much. True, it may have bought patronage from some local and state legislators, in the form of means to suppress the turnout at the polls through execrable "voter identification" laws, though they are always subject to appeal to Federal power. It may have bought hours and hours of radio play and TV commercial time, reams of newspaper advertising, and blocks Internet traffic in which to pour half-truth, innuendo, and outright lies couched as fact, but people are under no obligation to listen, read, or pay attention to any of it. At the end of the day, the one thing they cannot do, under any circumstances -- is use the money directly to do the one thing that would have the greatest impact: buy actual votes.

For if we are to be serious about it, the only way to really influence an election to any great degree, is to pay people to vote for your candidate. But, of course, not only is that patently illegal, it is folly to believe that not one of those so bribed would be able to keep their mouth shut about it. As we have seen, with the era of social media, when a figure crosses a line that they did not see but we as Americans always knew was there, they are exposed to a virulent counter-reaction which leads to the loss of that they so rightfully believe is theirs. Were any scion of wealth to attempt the transparent and buy votes, it would spell the death-knell of corporate "free speech" in elections and bring a tidal wave of condemnation akin to the march of the villagers waving torches and pitchforks as they seek the destruction of the monster in their midst.

It comes down to this: we hold our own counsel and we hold our right to our vote. It is not a light burden, this decision. Many cannot bring themselves to do it. They sit on the sidelines, content to leave the decision to others, some convinced they can't take the chance on voting for the "wrong person," others refusing to "waste" a vote on the "lesser of two evils." It is actually harder to avoid voting than it is to simply accept that it is your responsibility, because to do so means that you do not believe in your fellow American. Now, for some, it easy for them to look at other Americans as impediments, free-loaders, or to dismiss their plight by fobbing off all the responsibility for it on them, as if each American operates as an independent island, connected by no bridge to any other, which is simply fallacious. We are the "United" States of America, and were so from the very beginning, when disparate groups of Colonists came together to fight for and support a worthy cause: their independence from a foreign power and gaining the right to govern themselves.

Our vote is not just a vote for ourselves; it is a vote for each and every other American. We may certainly decide that a candidate holds for us the key to our happiness, our personal wealth, our future, but that cannot be enough of a consideration. When we vote, we vote for our friends, our neighbors, our local business owners, our civil employees, our military personnel, and every American of every stripe. Our vote does not just influence us, but influences everything that happens to every other person, known or unknown to us. We may like what a candidate says or does -- and in the end, it is what they say and do, not what their proxies say about them, that should matter -- but we should keep in mind what effect those policies will have on people who are not us.

Voting is our responsibility and like so many such responsibilities, taking it seriously is paramount. The only vote truly wasted is the vote not cast. But before we so willingly commit that vote to permanence, let us take a moment to look beyond our own interests, at the broader spectrum that will be influenced by our vote. Let us ask ourselves if what is best for us is truly what is best for others. While we may not suffer the ill effects of a poor choice of candidate, so many others may. We are part of a larger collective, an integral whole, that owes its existence and gains its power from all of us. When we vote, we vote for us all... it pays for us to consider that before we step behind the curtain.