Slavery and the Bible

It’s not a great commentary that both Christian abolitionists in antebellum America and slaveholders in the deep south used the Bible to justify and defend their positions.

White agitator John Brown, who led an attempted slave insurrection at Harper’s Ferry, W. Va., was a fire and brimstone, washed in the blood evangelical, yet, he, with biblical passages never far from his lips, was willing to die alongside his black brethren for the cause of abolition.

Meanwhile, bishop Stephen Elliott, of Georgia, and many others like him, including most southern elected officials and Confederate secession leaders, thought slavery was a positive good for Africans ripped from their communities – and often from their families – to do the work of the white masters:

Here is the very long-winded Elliott: Opponents of slavery should “consider whether, by their interference with this institution, they may not be checking and impeding a work which is manifestly Providential. For nearly a hundred years the English and American Churches have been striving to civilize and Christianize Western Africa, and with what result? Around Sierra Leone, and in the neighborhood of Cape Palmas, a few natives have been made Christians, and some nations have been partially civilized; but what a small number in comparison with the thousands, nay, I may say millions, who have learned the way to Heaven and who have been made to know their Savior through the means of African slavery! At this very moment there are from three to four millions of Africans, educating for earth and for Heaven in the so vilified Southern States—learning the very best lessons for a semi-barbarous people—lessons of self-control, of obedience, of perseverance, of adaptation of means to ends; learning, above all, where their weakness lies, and how they may acquire strength for the battle of life. These considerations satisfy me with their condition, and assure me that it is the best relation they can, for the present, be made to occupy.”

Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass saw clearly the cognitive dissonance that was so pervasive in this debate:

“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”

Jesus never spoke a word against slavery, and Yahweh, of Old Testament fame, was practically complicit, so modern Christians, attempting to soften the blow and do their own interpreting, have claimed the slavery mentioned in the Bible amounted “merely” to indentured servitude, but nearly everyone, including the most learned biblically faithful readers of the entire 17th and 18th centuries, disagree with them.

‘We teeter at the brink of a fully deceptive world’

I’ve become increasingly concerned at how much my fellow humans have seemingly adopted and accepted artificial intelligence programs that emulate human creativity and output. It’s here, they say collectively. There’s no stopping it, so we might as well play around with the technology and have fun. We now have programs that can write lyrics, poems and essays, churn out songs, emulate famous singing voices and create photography and artwork that so closely resembles manmade projects that many people can’t tell the authentic works from the rendered ones.

Indeed, German artist Boris Eldagsen fooled judges when he submitted an AI-generated image to the Sony world photography awards and later admitted the picture was not a real photograph.

This is not a photograph. Image by Boris Eldagsen.

And a band named AISIS recently wrote a record’s worth of songs in the manner of real British rock band, Oasis, using a computer generated voice of singer, Liam Gallagher. Since I’ve been an Oasis fan since the early 1990s, I could definitely tell a difference between the computer voice and Gallagher’s, but the singer himself said the project was “mad as fuck” (whatever that means), and he said that he sounded “mega” on the recording. I guess that means “good.”

While AI-generated artwork, poetry and music is in its infancy, the music industry has been using computers to “fix” defects in live vocal and instrumental performances for the last two decades, starting with the advent of Auto-Tune in 1996, first made famous by Cher’s 1998 song, “Believe.” Starting in the early 2000s, music producers have used a tool called quantization to “line up” drum hits and musical notes along a grid so that the instrumentation perfectly matches the beat in rhythm. Used too heavily, Auto-Tune can make vocal performances sound robotic or otherworldy; even used conservatively, it gives voices a bizarre-sounding “sheen” that does not exist naturally. Likewise, quantization takes the nuance out of live instrumentation. When used together, as is almost always the case in studio recordings this day and age, the music comes out sounding too perfect, too sterile, too sanitized.

Modern music production tools used in the last couple decades aren’t exactly AI, but they prefigured what we are seeing today: human creativity and achievement either being improved or replaced by AI. Chat GPT can generate high school level essays and poems on nearly any topic imaginable. Programs like Midjourney and others have the ability to render extremely detailed and fantastical landscapes or “portraits” of celebrities. And elsewhere in the AI-sphere, pop songs imitating the voices of Drake and The Weeknd can be fashioned out of nothing more than prompts and code. One of the songs in question, “Heart On My Sleeve” —  one struggles to imagine a less imaginative song title — fooled millions of listeners and was eventually removed from all streaming services by Universal Music Group when word spread that it was a fake.

For now, humans are still behind the wheel of all this faux-creativity, but in the future, given the rather loaded implications of artificial intelligence, this will surely not always be the case.

As a musician, songwriter and a fan since before digital music production when every vocal performance heard on the radio came from a natural recording — vocalists simply stood in the booth and sang their parts until they got it right — I am particularly interested in the use of computers in music because it’s my contention that even before AI veered us closer to the precipice, something valuable had already been lost.

The mainstream public often can’t tell when a song is excessively autotuned because of more than two decades of conditioning, or, listeners just don’t care whether it was or not. In general, so long as there is a beat — apparently any beat, no matter how much the same beat was used in countless other songs — an uber repetitive melody and vapid lyrics, the public will happily consume it. And now, it is nearly impossible to find a studio recording, in any genre, that isn’t quantized to the hilt and soaked in Auto-Tune.

Further, because many, if not most, mainstream pop songs use very simple, repetitive melodies and beats, people can’t tell the difference between manmade and computer-made songs either.

We teeter at the brink of a fully deceptive world, where truth, creativity and authenticity crumbles and we can no longer trust our senses.

In the age of AI Oasis, there’s no point being ordinary,” NME

This quote was a rare moment of self-awareness in an article that I thought was otherwise severely short-sided in its view that, while AI may be able to make pop music that is at least as good as its human counterparts and may even take over the streaming industry, there will always be space for manmade musical innovation.

Writer Mark Beaumont imagined a few pathways toward human flourishing in this area. Volume-based streaming services would either become a very large collection of bland human and computer generated pop, catering to people who don’t care which is which, and the “real” songwriters would be free to rise above and make better music:

The established platforms, then, could shrug, tacitly embrace the fact that their sites have become a hyper-speed circle-jerk of robots making music for robots to listen to and eye up their fifth superyacht. If most humans decide they’re just as happy listening to AI music as human music then the streaming dream will have fulfilled its foundational purpose to provide a truly limitless source of cheap, characterless background muzak ringing out across every night bus in the land.

Another potential scenario in this new landscape, according to Beaumont, is that listeners might grow weary of AI content, but if users already can’t tell the difference between computer generated music and human-created works, I find this option to be implausible. Alternatively, record labels might eventually give “preferential treatment” to real artists. I would hope so, otherwise the music industry as we know it would cease to exist.

Beaumont’s rosy grand finale:

In either scenario, one thing actually rises in value: human creativity, and all the inventiveness, imagination, unpredictability and star power it entails. …

If Spotify goes full-on AI, alternative platforms will spring up championing nothing but human music, where the most innovative artists reimagining what music can be will flourish above more formulaic fare that computers are doing better elsewhere. …

Only the most visionary will survive. Music is about to enter a magnificent new phase of man versus machine – it’s time to blow their hive-minds.

While admirable, the optimism here is misplaced and premature.

Judging by how accepting, acquiescent and complacent everyone seems to be about AI, in a man versus machine scenario, the machines — and the machine — will most likely win, and there isn’t a scenario, financially or creatively, in which humans come out on top.

Creativity wont pay in an ai world, if it can be knocked out in cheap mass production line fashion by (effectively) robots. As time moves on the human input level required to create these things will get less and less too. It will be pushed by the execs at top as it will mean less outlaying on labour an maximising profits, which is basically all ai will ultimately benefit… top end profit!

Thomas Hodge, Facebook comment on the NME article

And as far as creativity itself, if AI is currently able to pull off assembly line pop music as well or better than actual human creators of said pop, who’s to say it won’t eventually be able to replicate music on the level of “Dark Side of the Moon,” “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness” “Are You Experienced” or Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos?

How does human creativity rise in value if AI becomes capable — and it will — of being just as innovative and inventive as we are? The Beatles, fully human as they were, created new genres of music. Who’s to say AI won’t also fashion new genres of music and push the boundaries harder and faster than humans, in all of our tinkering slowness, ever could?

I worry for our creative future, especially when so few people, hardly anyone, as far as I can tell, is voicing the kinds of concerns I’m raising here. It is true that so far, AI currently needs human beings to input prompts and to tell it what to do, but this will surely not always be the case. And what then? Self-sustaining AI uploading its own music to the streaming services or its own rendered artwork or photography to galleries? Picasso V6.1 Build 10.4.874040a becoming the first AI program to get a plaque in the Louvre or MOMA alongside the greatest human pieces of all time? It’s all light, fun and games now, but this slope is slippery and steep, and it’s probably already too late to pull back the reins. I have a grim feeling that AI will win, and in our acquiescence, we’ll let it.

Washington and the Supremacy Clause

Years before the Constitutional Convention of 1787, which led to the establishment of a strong central government, with its checks and balances on power and the critically important Supremacy Clause, elevating federal over conflicting state law, here is George Washington in his last circular as commander-in-chief from June 1783 (first quote marked in red):

“Washington and the American Revolution” by Esmond Wright (1962)

Three years later, on Oct. 31, 1786, he wrote this to “Light-Horse Harry” Henry Lee (second quote):

Let us have (a government) by which our lives, liberties and properties will be secured; or let us know the worst at once. … Precedents are dangerous things; let the reins of government then be braced and held with a steady hand, and every violation of the Constitution be reprehended: if defective, let it be amended, but not suffered to be trampled upon whilst it has an existence.

Washington was no politician, but having had first-hand experience from the war of how chaotic, unpredictable and ineffective localized leadership could be in providing necessary resources to his army during the American Revolution, he seems to have been wise enough to anticipate that if we, as a country, were to have a national government at all, it should be robust and should be able to stand above often-conflicting and self-serving sectional biases to meet the needs of the whole nation and that certain issues, especially those establishing civil “liberties” affecting the entire body politic, must be decided and enforced at the federal level, lest any individual states go rogue and try to adopt their own laws that subvert federal authority.

“Let … every violation of the Constitution be reprehended.”

The Supremacy Clause was a protection against the latter. An early notable example of its invocation was McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), in which the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government had the power, under the “necessary and proper clause” of the Constitution, to establish a national bank, and Maryland did not have the right to tax the bank, pursuant to the Supremacy Clause and Congress’ enumerated right to tax and spend as it chose. The Supremacy Clause has been used many times since to establish the preemptive nature of federal law pertaining to civil rights, same-sex marriage, immigration, gun rights, marijuana legalization and more.

Esmond Wright, author of “Washington and the American Revolution,” notes that the general never wrote down a “coherent theory” on how the country should be run, despite being a key founder of it, and he obviously did not have the Supremacy Clause in mind exactly — there weren’t yet any states to have supremacy over to begin with when Washington wrote to Lee in 1786 — but the roots of it may be found in the above passages, for if the people did not have a government by which “properties and liberties will be secured,” if the central government did not have “supreme power” over the states, then its ability to enforce the securement of those rights would be tenuous at best.

The importance of the Supremacy Clause is hard to overstate. If states were allowed to subvert the Constitution and pass laws that ran counter to it, then the authority of our founding document would be nullified. Further, if states were allowed to pass any and all laws as they saw fit, regardless of their constitutionality, a chaotic, patchwork of statutes that may vary wildly depending on where one lives in the country would result. Worse still, without the clause, state legislators could threaten liberties that had already passed federal muster and potentially roll back decades of civil progress.

What would become the Supremacy Clause was later presented by Washington’s fellow Virginian Edmund Randolph in May 1787, but I can’t find another mention of the idea, or the germ of an idea, that predates Washington’s from the summer of 1783 and fall of 1786. John Locke refers to the legislative branch of government having “supreme powerwithin the government and the people having supremacy over the legislative, but the relationship between the fledgling nation and the individual colonies was completely unique at this point in world history, a dichotomy Locke could not have anticipated from his perch across the pond in the 17th century. And so here, in Washington’s early and rather unlettered political musings, even as the young nation was just then in the process of winning its independence from the mother country, lies one of the essential tenets of American political theory that has stood the test of time.

Jay Briscoe and the path to redemption

Well, I didn’t really think that professional wrestling was going to be the thing that would pull me out of my blog sabbatical, but here we are.

To the right is wrestler Jamin Pugh, who went by the in-ring name Jay Briscoe. He died two days ago in a car crash when an oncoming SUV came into his lane and hit his vehicle head on. His two daughters, who were in the vehicle with him, were in critical condition after the wreck. He also left behind a wife.

In 2013, Briscoe made a homophobic comment on Twitter. In the days after the tweet, he apologized, and his company, Ring of Honor, said he was going to donate his next two event paychecks to an anti-hate charity. In the ensuing decade, he has apologized multiple times for the comment and has emphasized how wrong he was for saying it. He said his tweet was actually informed by his faith in Christianity, noting that he thought he was “taking a stand for the lord” at the time. He said it was “the most dumbest, immature, obnoxious shit I’ve ever done.”

Despite this, he had been essentially canceled and blacklisted by executives at Warner Bros. Discovery from appearing on any of its wrestling programs, namely AEW on TBS and TNT. In addition, AEW owner Tony Khan was prevented from putting together a tribute show for Briscoe this week. Khan was only allowed to air the above picture at the start of the most recent show. Briscoe was mentioned on the air a couple times and some wrestlers chose to wear “Jay Briscoe” arm bands by way of a tribute. AEW is being forced to relegate a tribute show for Briscoe to its YouTube channel.

Jay, with his brother, Mark, wrestled as The Briscoes tag team and developed an underground following among the wrestling community as part of Ring of Honor. The team gained some national notoriety last year when Khan purchased ROH and booked a series of matches between The Briscoes and former AEW tag champions, FTR. The Briscoes, who played amplified versions of themselves as self-described country boys, were known for their hard-hitting matches, in-ring psychology and old school promo work recalling a nearly bygone era in which wrestlers did not break “character” in public. Thus, some defenders of Jay have argued that he was “in character” when he wrote the offensive tweet, but even if that were true, some lines should never be crossed, and the tweet was just as inexcusable in 2013 as it would be now or at any other time. Jay apparently recognized it as such, saying that The Briscoes have tried to follow the example of their faith and love everyone.

Before I continue, let me address any concerns someone reading this might have as to my bias, either related to the Briscoes or wrestling in general because this site is written for a general audience, not a niche wrestling crowd. Yes, I’m a wrestling fan and have been since the mid-1980s. Yes, pro wrestling has a troubling history of homophobia, sexism, misogyny, steroid and hard drug abuse, untimely death related to said abuse and even suicide and murder. A popular TV show titled, “Dark Side of the Ring,” explores all of them and more in detail. Fortunately, most of those blights on the art form that many of us have come to love, with a couple notable exceptions (See: Vince McMahon and the MeToo movement), have largely been relegated to the past. AEW, which is run by Khan, a millennial of Pakistani-American heritage, has a diverse roster full of millennials and Generation Z members, including multiple members of the LGBTQ community. Many or most of the roster would probably identify as “woke.” Like society, professional wrestling has matured to become more inclusive and more accepting of people from all walks of life and from all continents.

Jay seems to have grown and matured alongside the business that he cherished, and he deserved a chance at redemption. Warner apparently didn’t think so. They have a reputation to uphold, after all, which is why — I’ll add, with heavy notes of sarcasm — Dana White of UFC fame, who made news recently for having a slap exchange with his wife in a bar, was nonetheless allowed to move forward with his new show, Power Slap, even though it was delayed a week because of the bar incident. Power Slap, which features contestants simply slapping each other from a standing position, airs in the 10 p.m. timeslot after, you guessed it, AEW Dynamite on TBS. White and his wife getting into a domestic altercation wasn’t enough for Warner to distance itself from White and his show, but an offensive tweet from 10 years ago was beyond the pale.

Warner refusing to let indie wrestlers like The Briscoes onto their TV programs or to let AEW honor the team’s achievements in the ring and Jay as a father and husband, was on odd hill to die on, especially after Jay apologized and seemed as if he had become a better person. Do people inside Warner really think no one else under their very large umbrella have skeletons in their closets and have said or done things that they wish they could take back?

I’ve been writing on a specific issue between Warner and Briscoe, but the larger consideration is this: What good is it to cancel someone for making an offensive comment if there is no path to redemption? Once people are branded as homophobic, is there even a path to redemption among the woke crowd?

Jay Briscoe deserved every bit of criticism and sharp rebuke he received for his tweet. But did he deserve it indefinitely? Some people may truly be irredeemably bigoted, but perhaps those who apologize numerous times for an offensive comment should be given the benefit of the doubt that they actually have become better people. The entire philosophy behind the justice system in America, broken as it may be, is rehabilitation, not perpetual punishment and banishment. If we can’t at least live up to that ideal in civil society, if we can’t give people a second chance to prove that they have grown, to show that they are better today than they were yesterday and if cancel culture is as closed off to redemption for contrite individuals as racists and bigots are to true acceptance and equality, then we’re in real trouble as a society.

Following are comments from two people who knew Briscoe. The first is a drag queen performer, columnist and wrestler named Paul E. Pratt, who goes by the stage name, Pollo Del Mar. In addition to the tweet below, he recently reposted a photo of himself in the center in full drag, with Jay and Mark smiling on each side with the text, “Those smiles were all genuine.”

The second tweet is from a gay wrestler named Effy.

As far as I know — I just checked — Anthony Bowens, who is an openly gay member of the AEW roster, has not commented on Briscoe’s death. Nyla Rose, a trans member of the same roster, tweeted, “Damn.” with a tear emoji.

The Grand Old Party of Sedition

News outlets are now reporting that about 140 Republicans in the House of Representatives and at least 12 GOP senators, who were voted in by a democratic form of government and who swore to uphold the Constitution of the United States, plan to defy the will of the people and object to the 2020 election results on Jan. 6. Without evidence, and parroting one of the most dishonest presidents in the history of the nation, they claim that Joe Biden’s victory was fraudulent.

The election results have been affirmed by election officials, state governors, lower court judges and the Supreme Court. No significant malfeasance has taken place. Yet, in a desperate and undemocratic attempt to apparently stage a coup and reseat Trump, Sen. Josh Hawley will raise a complaint and force both houses of Congress to take a vote on the election. To their credit, Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, with whom I agree on almost nothing, and Sen. Ben Sasse voiced their strong dissent in going through with the measure.

According to Sasse:

The president and his allies are playing with fire. They have been asking — first the courts, then state legislatures, now the Congress — to overturn the results of a presidential election. They have unsuccessfully called on judges and are now calling on federal officeholders to invalidate millions and millions of votes. If you make big claims, you had better have the evidence. But the president doesn’t and neither do the institutional arsonist members of Congress who will object to the Electoral College vote.

Likewise, Sen. Mitt Romney called the efforts of his Republican colleagues “madness.”

The other word for it, of course, is sedition. Here is how the Constitution defines it:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress … who … having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress … to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same (.)

As this article from The Week outlines, the voting process, which has remained unchanged election after election, confirmed, after holding the line against all sorts of nefarious lawsuits and unfounded claims of fraud, that Biden won the presidency in a fair election both by the popular vote and in the Electoral College. Few people on the left or right disagree that Trump and Republicans did not have the right to question the results. They certainly did. But the results have been vetted over and over, and Trump lost handily.

To now float a bunch of conspiracy theories in the face of no substantive proof that any of them carry any weight whatsoever is a disgrace to Congress, our government, our nation and the people who went out of their way, in the throes of a pandemic, no less, to have their voices mean something, to participate in their greatest right as an American citizen. To have all of that put into question because Trump and his lackeys in Congress are sore losers and can’t bear to cede power to a competent administration, represents failure failure as human beings and failure to be keepers of the democracy for which they pledged allegiance.

Once the fiasco is done next week, the remaining members of Congress who still believe in the process actually have the right, as The Week has said, to “convene a traitor-free Congress” and to prevent these seditious men and women from taking their seats. I don’t believe that will actually happen, but make no mistake, they don’t deserve to hold the seats for which they were elected, and they don’t deserve to stand as representatives of this democracy.

Whatever happens, their names should be plastered all over the Internet so that in two or four years when their names are on the ballots again, voters can remember that when they had a chance to stand up for democracy, they stood against it, and they stood against the clear and unequivocal will of the American people.

Here are all the names that have been released thus far, etched and cached online for all to see:

U.S. Senate

U.S. House of Representatives

  • Rep. Mo Brooks (Alabama)
  • Rep. Jeff Van Drew (New Jersey)
  • Rep. Joe Wilson (South Carolina)
  • Rep.-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene (Georgia)
  • Rep.-elect Madison Cawthorn (North Carolina)
  • Rep.-elect Lauren Boebert (Colorado)
  • Rep.-elect Diana Harshbarger (Tennessee)
  • Rep. Brian Babin (Texas)
  • Rep. Andy Biggs (Arizona)
  • Rep. Ted Budd (North Carolina)
  • Rep.-elect Jerry Carl (Alabama)
  • Rep.-elect Andrew Clyde (Georgia)
  • Rep.-elect Byron Donalds (Florida)
  • Rep. Jeff Duncan (South Carolina)
  • Rep. Matt Gaetz (Florida)
  • Rep. Louie Gohmert (Texas)
  • Rep.-elect Bob Good (Virginia)
  • Rep. Lance Gooden (Texas)
  • Rep. Paul Gosar (Arizona)
  • Rep. Mark Green (Tennessee)
  • Rep.-elect Yvette Herrell (New Mexico)
  • Rep. Jody Hice (Georgia)
  • Rep. Clay Higgins (Louisiana)
  • Rep.-elect Ronny Jackson (Texas)
  • Rep. John Joyce (Pennsylvania)
  • Rep. Fred Keller (Pennsylvania)
  • Rep. Mike Kelly (Pennsylvania)
  • Rep. Dan Meuser (Pennsylvania)
  • Rep.-elect Barry Moore (Alabama)
  • Rep. Ralph Norman (South Carolina)
  • Rep.-elect Burgess Owens (Utah)
  • Rep. Scott Perry (Pennsylvania)
  • Rep. Guy Reschenthaler (Pennsylvania)
  • Rep. Lloyd Smucker (Pennsylvania)

On Life, Death and Pro Wrestling

Brodie Jr., center, Jon Huber’s son, receives the TNT Championship from AEW Executive Vice President Cody Rhodes, second from right, and AEW CEO Tony Khan, far right, this past Wednesday on AEW ‘Dynamite.’

I will try not to make what I’m about to say here feel disjointed, but I believe that in talking about a professional wrestler who died way too early in life, some common themes about how to move forward in 2021 might emerge. But first, here is a brief look at the life and career of Jon Huber.

***

Although professional wrestling’s sole purpose is to entertain fans and to “put smiles on people’s faces,” as WWE CEO Vince McMahon never tires of saying, those inside the industry and its loyal fanbase have had to grapple with a disturbing number of untimely deaths the last few decades. Whether the conversation inevitably comes back around to complications from steroid abuse, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, wrestlers enduring untold hours of physical abuse in the ring or just bad luck, we wrestling fans somehow find ourselves mourning a new round of fallen superstars year after year. Some of these are the result of the natural progression of time, and some are more shocking.

The death of Jonathan Huber, 41, known as Luke Harper in WWE and Mr. Brodie Lee in AEW, on Dec. 26 shook the wrestling community seemingly to the core. Huber, who is listed at 6-foot, 5-inches tall and 275 pounds, recently succumbed to complications from a “non-Covid related lung issue,” according to his wife, and his death, almost two weeks later, is still being mourned across the industry, as fans, colleagues and friends share memories of the man many say was a genuinely good person, a loving husband and father of two children and a loyal friend.

‘We Fought Like Brothers’

Huber began backyard wrestling in 2003 before debuting with the indie promotion, Chikara, in 2007. Huber bumped around in some other indie promotions up until 2012 when he signed a developmental deal with the WWE to work in the company’s NXT developmental promotion before being called up to the main roster.

On WWE’s main shows, Huber was part of the hugely popular Wyatt Family faction and the Bludgeon Brothers tag team as the character of Luke Harper, and in AEW, he was the leader of the Dark Order under the name, Brodie Lee, which is a combination of his name on the indies, Brodie Bruce, and actor Jason Lee. While he, along with his partners, Bray Wyatt and Erick Rowan, had a lot of success as the Wyatt Family in WWE, perhaps punctuated by the stable’s feud with one of the greatest factions in the company’s history, The Shield, beginning in 2014, the common thought among wrestling fans is that Huber was not given a chance as a singles competitor in WWE.

In AEW, however, he was put at the head of his own group and was given the freedom to shine on the mic and in the ring. He took part in a dog collar match in October against Cody Rhodes, which was one hell of a contest, and he was then taken off TV. This would turn out to be his last match. Fans simply thought he was injured. Much to our dismay, however, the truth was much more saddening, and the reality of such a robust superstar stricken down in his prime has forced a lot of us to reevaluate life once again in the face of our own mortality and the humanity of larger-than-life heroes in the ring that we sometimes mistakenly think are invincible.

His friend and leader of the Wyatt Family, Bray Wyatt — real name Windham Rotunda — penned a touching send-off that deserves a full airing:

You were my best friend. My brother, my partner, my Terry Gordy. We changed this whole game because we refused to do it any way but OUR way. We were always at our best when we were a team I think we both knew it. We fought like brothers because we were. I’m so goddamn pissed. This isn’t how it was supposed to be, it was supposed to be us fat, bald and useless running Wyatt Family spots in high school gyms in our 70’s. Where do we go now? What do I do knowing I’ll never hear your condescending sarcasm as I am riding high.

I miss you so fucking much already. I would do anything just live through our worst moments again I can’t believe you’re gone. I’m so sorry brother. I’m so sorry. You will always be a part of me, whether I like it or not without you everything is different and I hope Amanda truly knows that I am here not just to say it but because I love them too. I will make sure your son knows the incredible man you were. Not the legends people will tell but the real you that very few people got to see. I promise I’ll put him over clean in dark matches when he’s old enough just like I promised. I’m hurting so bad. I wish I had a chance to say goodbye. But then again, it’s Saturday and you know what that means…. save me a seat next to you wherever you are, that’s where I belong. I’ll be there when it’s my time. Goodbye forever Brodie. I love you.

You will always be a part of me, whether I like it or not without you everything is different. — Bray Wyatt

I wasn’t the biggest Luke Harper fan in WWE, but when he came to AEW this past March and I got to see the full breadth of what he could do on the mic and in the ring if given the opportunity, I began to appreciate his body of work and was looking forward to seeing him progress in the company. He had incredible potential.

This past Wednesday, AEW gave one of the most touching and emotional tributes to a wrestler I have ever seen. The entire episode of AEW’s show, “Dynamite,” was devoted to Huber. His son, Brodie Jr., picked all the matchups, and a member of Brodie Lee’s old group, the Dark Order, came away with the victory each time. Brodie Jr., who was in attendance donning a Dark Order mask, was named an honorary member of the group earlier in the week and now holds the name “-1” because each member of the group is assigned a number and that is their in-ring name. The child was also given Brodie Lee’s TNT Championship, and he became the lifelong titleholder.

Begin Again

As I listened to multiple colleagues and podcasters talk about Huber’s life, I teared up more than once when I thought about the fragility of life and that it doesn’t matter how robust a person is, time can claim any of us in an instant. As I have said, his death rocked many people in the wrestling community, and I was certainly not excluded. And for it to come at the end of 2020, a year in which more than 330,000 Americans died from the pandemic; a year in which hundreds of businesses were either shuttered or have struggled to remain open; a year in which the wrestling business, sometimes to a fault, tried to keep people entertained in the mist of so much suffering; a year in which the wrestling world had already lost at least 15 notable superstars, including Pat Patterson, Rocky Johnson (The Rock’s father), famous ring announcer, Howard Finkel, Shad Gaspard, La Parka, Road Warrior Animal, Kamala and others; was all the more stultifying.

Suffice it to say that last night, Dec. 31, 2020, I didn’t much feel like celebrating. I slept a lot. I vegged in front of the TV. I gazed with something like contempt as gleeful partiers cheered and danced in front of screen with a lot of hope but not much else, as if a pall of death and stupidity hadn’t just been unleashed in 2020.

I gazed with something like contempt as gleeful partiers cheered and danced in front of screen with a lot of hope but not much else, as if a pall of death and stupidity hadn’t just been unleashed in 2020.

Like almost every other New Year’s on record, we had high hopes for 2020. But we were quickly disappointed as winter bled into spring. Our great and fearless leader was one of the most heartless presidents in the history of the country who contributed to more human misery than he prevented. Beyond the 330,000 people who are now dead because of Covid-19 and the incompetent federal response, millions of other family members have been directly impacted by the virus and are currently grieving for those who will not be around to celebrate this “joyous” holiday season.

And what of the rest of 2020? Many more unarmed, innocent black people were killed by police this year, and despite protest after protest in states all across the nation, only some modest reforms have taken place thus far. Despite a fucking Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the struggle for civil rights well into the 20th century, America is still defaulting on Martin Luther King Jr.’s promissory note and simply cannot wrap its collective mind around that little independent clause, “all men are created equal.” Seditious Republicans are still, more than a month after the election, attempting to subvert the Constitution and our democracy. And finally, something like half of this nation has exposed itself as deeply selfish, unloving, racist and conspiratorial.

So, no, forgive me, given the wreckage of 2020 and Huber’s untimely death, if I was not in a festive mood yesterday with these realities still in view.

Personally, I have spoken to friends about 2020 as a bittersweet affair. I, like many, have gone through bouts of depression, loneliness and anger. As an immunecompromised individual, only in the last month or so have I gotten to see my girlfriend and my family. I have been able to make some good things happen this past year. I have tried to strengthen my relationships. Creatively, I have written about 10 new songs since the quarantine, my most productive single year to date. I have begun recording some of my original songs in a studio in the hopes of releasing some singles and either an EP or full album sometime in 2021. I have listened to about 100-125 albums that I had never heard before and have tried to expand my general music knowledge. Even as I have been limited in where I can go the last nine months, I have taken a considerable number of nature photographs by simply driving around my neighborhood and staying away from people as much as possible. And through all of the Covid scares, I have remained healthy during quarantine by following medical advice and staying cautious and diligent, and no one in my immediate family has been impacted by the virus.

I didn’t want this piece to be all doom and gloom, and I hope it has not been. I’m cautiously hopeful for 2021, but I simply could not forget, or erase from my mind, even for a few hours of enjoyment last night, the severe losses that we have suffered, the immense challenges that we still face and the anger that still bubbles to the surface when I think about the wanton intolerance and ignorance that still threatens to cripple the progress we have made.

Joe Biden is going to take office with or without the support of the seditious House Republicans, and under his leadership, America will renavigate our onward path toward science, reason and progress. Covid will eventually be defeated, and we will slowly get back to normal.

Tragically, though, it’s too late for Huber, and it’s too late for 330,000 Americans, but it isn’t too late for we who remain to set a different course, both personally and nationally, as we strive to heal a broken nation and a lot of broken hearts.

If the events of 2020 have taught us anything, it is that we have the chance to right the ship. The chance to bend the arm further toward justice. The chance to love our neighbors and to care for each other. The chance to really listen to and learn from each other. The chance to reinvite bipartisanship into our public discourse. The chance to bring this nation ever closer to the imperishable ideas outlined by the Enlightenment principles that inform our Constitution. The chance to grow, love and live. The chance to hope when hope was once out of reach. The chance to tell the people we love how we feel, not later, but now.

The chance to start over. The chance to begin again …

‘Everything Trump Is Not’ (or the Case for Biden)

In the previous post, I outlined what I considered to be the most important reasons for standing against Donald Trump in the upcoming election. It is a long list, for sure, but I also pointed out the president’s numerous successes, or at least perceived successes. In this piece, I will take a look at the recent and past record of former Vice President Joe Biden, which includes both hits and misses.

***

Liberals and conservatives who do some digging into Biden’s 44 years in national politics — 36 years as a United States senator from Delaware and eight years as vice president — will find some troubling details. Before getting into those details, I will say from the start that any analysis of someone’s past has to take into account the fact that people’s thinking often evolves over time, such that it’s not necessarily enough to write off politicians out of hand for something they said 40 years ago. The important point, in my view, is how they reconsidered their previous positions because what often separates ideologues from intellectually honest, critical thinkers is the ability and, indeed, the willingness to change one’s mind when new information comes in or to admit errors in judgment. Trump’s behavior these last five years has been so rife with dishonesty and anti-democratic rhetoric that digging into his past to try to get at the center of the man wasn’t even necessary, but since the president has insisted that he has done more for America than Biden has in more than 40 years of public service, I will give the claim a full airing here.

Joe Biden is the Democratic candidate for US president.Credit: Alex Wong/Getty

Biden began his career in national politics in 1972, when he won a senate race against incumbent Republican J. Caleb Boggs, running on a fairly typical Democratic platform at the time centered around environment, pulling out of Vietnam, increased taxes for the rich, greater access to health care, and of course, that most familiar of political catchphrases, “change.” Biden’s position at the time animated young people across Delaware, and his victory against Boggs, who was known as “dear old dad,” marked a big surprise victory for the young underdog. The irony now, of course, is that while Biden is probably not the underdog in the current race against Trump, he is even older than the other old man, and on top of that, while Biden may have been viewed as something of an outsider in the early 1970s, today he is as tied to the “establishment” as one can get.

While Biden may have enjoyed the support of young liberals in the early 1970s, presumably the support of black liberals as well, his record on civil rights and race, in particular, is a mixed bag. Biden has said that even though he did not march for civil rights in his youth, he did take part in a sit-in at a restaurant and a movie theater. Dubbing himself a “surburbanite,” he wasn’t extremely involved in political activism and didn’t have a strong position on the Vietnam War as a young person. His main experience with the black community seems to have been working for a period at an all-black swimming pool in Wilmington, where he “got a dose of what was happening to black Americans,” as he said in a news conference in 1987.

This Atlantic article does a good job of covering what Biden has said and done on race during his career, so I’ll just cover the highlights. Biden did not support using federal dollars to bus children back and forth to school as part of desegregation, although he claims to have supported busing itself on principle. This seems like a distinction without a difference. When Biden was pressed about this issue during the 2019 Democratic primaries, Sen. Cory Booker, who is black, was taken aback by the former vice president’s stance, which apparently hasn’t changed, or at the least, he hasn’t apologized for it. According to Booker:

I think that anybody that knows our painful history knows that on voting rights, on civil rights, on the protections from hate crimes, African Americans and many other groups in this country have had to turn to the federal government to intervene because there were states that were violating those rights.

The second troubling thing about Biden’s record on civil rights is his all-too-friendly relationships with segregationalists and racists like Strom Thurmond. I, myself, was taken aback to learn that Biden delivered a glowing eulogy on Thurmond, comparing the late Dixiecrat senator from South Carolina to Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, no less. Here is Biden’s quote about Thurmond as it relates to Lee:

(Thurmond was, like Lee, apparently) an opponent without hate, a friend without treachery, a statesman without pretense, a soldier without cruelty and a neighbor without hypocrisy.

And Thurmond was, like Jackson, apparently:

… an avalanche from an unexpected quarter, a thunderbolt from the sky, and yet he was in character and will, more like a stone wall than any man that I have ever met. …

That seems to me to sum up Strom Thurmond: He is like a thunderbolt from the sky. He is a man who lives by his principles and a man who has gotten all of us to understand what they are.

And then, there’s the following, from an interview conducted in 1970 before Biden’s first Senate run. Biden’s self-proclaimed position as a middle man or a “bridge builder” has certainly got him in trouble over the years.

I have some friends on the far left, and they can justify to me the murder of a white deaf mute for a nickel by five colored guys. They say the black men had been oppressed and so on. But they can’t justify some Alabama farmers tar and feathering an old colored woman. …

I suspect the ACLU would leap to defend the five black guys. But no one would go down to help the ‘rednecks.’ They are both products of an environment. The truth is somewhere between the two poles. And rednecks are usually people with very real concerns, people who lack the education and skills to express themselves quietly and articulately.

As The Atlantic noted, Biden has had trouble explaining himself on race, and the former vice president has said that his work on extending the Voting Rights Act and advocating for establishing a national holiday commemorating the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. shows where he stands, although one source said he was a “second fiddle” player on the former issue.

Biden has drawn criticism for working across the aisle with segregationalist senators while in office. He apologized last year for comments he made about those politicians:

Now was I wrong a few weeks ago, to somehow give the impression to people that I was praising those men who I successfully opposed time and again? Yes, I was. I regret it. I’m sorry for any of the pain or misconception that I caused anybody.

But did that misstep define 50 years of my record for fighting for civil rights, racial justice in this country? I hope not. I don’t think so. That just isn’t an honest assessment of my record. I’m going to let my record and character stand for itself and not be distorted or smeared.

As Biden pointed out, the Senate, when he started the job in the early 1970s, was “full of segregationists,” so logically and in his defense, not working with them at least some of the time would have been nearly impossible.

In 2019, Biden said, “I’ve been involved with civil rights my whole career — period, period, period,” and his campaign added that he “literally ran for office against an incumbent at 29 because of the civil rights movement.” According to a Delta Democrat-Times article from 2007, Sen. John Stennis of Mississippi asked Biden why he got into politics. “Biden looked him in the eye and said, ‘civil rights,'” according to the story. Biden has also pointed out that his association with Barack Obama, being positively vetted as a running mate alongside the first African American president also supported his case that he was a strong advocate of civil rights; otherwise, the implication goes, Obama would have had second thoughts about partnering with Biden.

Issues of race are deeply entrenched, especially in the South but elsewhere in the nation, as we have now seen many Black Lives Matter demonstrations following the murder of scores of black people, who were not afforded their rightful due process under the law, by overzealous, white police officers. Now, more than ever, white supremacy cannot be allowed to gain anymore footholds, and Trump has only served to stoke the flames of racial unrest. It was important, then, as a show of solidarity with the black community, for Biden to select Kamala Harris, who is extremely qualified in her own right, as his running mate. I should note that in doing so, Biden is the only white person to have now conducted two presidential campaigns with black running mates.

***

Since Trump keeps claiming that he has done more in his short stint in politics than Biden has done in more than 40 years, what of Biden’s record on other national issues beyond civil rights?

Biden’s full voting record as a member of the Senate can be found here. To say that Biden has done next to nothing or less than Trump during his time in Washington, D.C., is categorically absurd.

The following chart — viewable in detail here — provides a snapshot comparison of senators who were serving in 2008, Biden’s last year in office, based on their ideologies and their leadership score. Leadership score is the total number of bills a lawmaker has sponsored or co-sponsored while in office. Biden was the main sponsor of 42 bills that went on to be enacted. If we look at total pieces of legislation introduced in the Senate, Biden is near the top, just under former Nevada Sen. Harry Reid. Obviously, just based on the sheer length of time Biden was in office, his bill count is likely to be relatively high, but in any case, this squashes any notion that Biden wasn’t busy in the Senate.

But what consequential pieces of legislation did Biden oversee while in office and in what other ways did he contribute to governance? Perhaps the most important piece of legislation, and one that has been criticized for increasing prison populations and damaging inner city community, is the 1994 Violent Crime Controls and Law Enforcement Act, or also known as the Biden Crime Bill. Among its many provisions, it allocated funding for 100,000 new police officers, provided a little less than $10 billion for prisons and $6.1 billion for crime prevention initiatives, expanded the federal death penalty and required that states establish sex offender registries.

According to factcheck.org, the crime bill had a “modest effect on crime rates,” and although mass incarcerations did not begin with the enactment of the bill, the legislation certainly made the problem worse. In July 2019, former President Bill Clinton conceded that parts of the bill were a mistake. “I signed a bill that made the problem worse,” he said. “And I want to admit it.” Clinton said the bill as having contributed to a drop in crime after it was initiated, but the Government Accountability Office reported that that was only part of the story. As per factcheck.org:

The GAO concluded that between 1993 and 2000 the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) funds “contributed to a 1.3 percent decline in the overall crime rate and a 2.5 percent decline in the violent crime rate from the 1993 levels.” Still, the GAO concluded, “Factors other than COPS funds accounted for the majority of the decline in crime during this period.”

What were those other factors? Increased employment, better policing methods, an aging of the population, growth in income and inflation, to name a few.

“He (Clinton) may be able to claim some credit, but the jury is very much still out on this,” John Worrall, a professor of criminology at the University of Texas at Dallas, told us via email. “Criminologists and economists are in no agreement as to the causes of the crime declines we’ve seen. Could be economic, demographic, a civilizing effect, possibly because of abortion or lead paint, tougher sentences, etc., etc. A dozen or more explanations have been offered and no one agrees.”

The other crucial bill to consider under Biden’s leadership is the 1994 Violence Against Women Act, which provided $1.6 billion for the prosecution of those charged with violent crimes against women, and it set up the Office on Violence Against Women inside the Department of Justice. Biden said he was “proudest” of this bill than anything else he worked on during his time in the Senate, and indeed, the legislation seems to have made an impact on reducing the rate of domestic, relationship-based crime by 64 percent from 1994-2010, according to the DOJ. Lawyers who helped draft the bill said the legislation produced a “profound cultural change, and has encouraged Americans to take gender-based violence seriously,” according to Time. Here is Rutgers Law School professor Sally Goldfarb, who oversaw the drafting of the bill:

The Violence Against Women Act, precisely because it was a federal law that took this issue seriously, created an unprecedented level of visibility for this problem. The very existence of this federal law shifted public perception of the problem.

As for his other contributions to governance, Biden sat at the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for four years and was chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee for eight years. He oversaw the confirmation of six Supreme Court justices.

As vice president, he oversaw numerous efforts, starting in 2009, to bring the nation out of the Great Recession, including the sweeping stimulus package of 2009, the Tax Relief Act of 2010, the Budget Control Act of 2011 to fix the debt ceiling crisis and the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012. He headed the Gun Violence Task Force after the shooting tragedy in Sandy Hook, Conn., and he assisted in drawing up the United States’ policy toward Iraq following the troop withdrawal.

Although Biden didn’t do a great job of articulating these in the last debate with Trump over all the interruptions, the suggestion that the former vice president was just asleep at the wheel for 40 years is categorically false, a claim that Trump will probably repeat during the upcoming debate tonight.

The Trump and Co. can mock Biden for his age and make allegations about his mental acuity ad infinitum, and they probably will. The undeniable fact, however, is that Biden, while he has not always been perfect, has been a leader in Washington on both domestic and foreign issues during some of the nation’s most harrowing times — the Rodney King beating and many other instances of police brutality against black people; the Sept. 11, 2001, tragedy and the aftermath; the invasion of Iraq, which Biden supported, and the troop surge in 2007, which he did not support; the hunt for Osama bin Laden, his capture and killing; and the Great Recession and the economic recovery.

If all of this doesn’t make Biden more than qualified to take the helm now, when we find ourselves in another deeply troubling period of American history, I don’t know what does. He deserves respect for owning up to his past mistakes and past associations, which shows a willingness to grow and a willingness to learn. This, it seems to me, is the true measure of a person. Perhaps most important of all, what we as a nation really need the most in this moment is empathetic leadership, which has been utterly lacking these last four years. Biden has known no shortage of personal tragedy and loss, and this makes him sensitive to the pain and struggle of others.

Ruth Conniff, an opinion writer with the Wisconsin Examiner, said it was Biden’s “radical compassion” for everyday Americans that the country desperately needs. Put simply:

The argument for Biden is an argument for someone who is everything Trump is not — a leader who treats people with empathy and respect, who puts others ahead of himself.

Normalizing Civility and Reason (or the Case Against Trump)

[Note: The following is the first of a two-part series on the presidential candidates. Feel free to leave a comment and let me know what you think.]

I have tried to be fair in my political commentary over the years in newspapers and on this blog — criticizing those on both sides of the aisle when I thought it was warranted — but these are unusual times when we have a narcissistic authoritarian in charge who is challenging to overthrow the very founding principles of this nation unlike any other president in American history.

That can’t and won’t stand.

The trespasses by President Donald Trump on our collective decency, on our civility and on our democracy are unconscionable. In this post, I will lay them out in unequivocal terms. Whatever Trump voters might think about the standard Republican platform sticking points — tax cuts for the wealthy, businesses and corporations; strong military funding; faith-based policymaking; standing against abortion and for the “right to life;” less federal government intervention and increased control at the state level; support for the Second Amendment; a general disregard for the rights of the LGBTQ community and other marginalized groups; etc. — we, as a nation, are way beyond bickering about these individual points of contention, at least for the time being. That can, and will, come later once a return to normalcy, a return to the center, emerges amidst the rubble.

President Donald Trump arrives for an ABC News town hall at National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. (Evan Vucci/AP)

But right now, the heart of this nation is on the ballot Nov. 3. Trump and his supporters, both in Washington and out in the heartland, have threatened to rot it out from the inside, and I believe it’s incumbent on friends on the right who genuinely care about core American principles, and who care about people in general, to come together in solidarity to help the nation heal and go in a different direction toward more honesty and compassion in politics. Many Republicans have already done just that by denouncing Trump and coming out in support of former Vice President Joe Biden, including John Kasich, Colin Powell, Chuck Hagel, Christine Whitman, Anthony Scaramucci, Carly Fiorina, Jeff Flake and others.

This is not going to be a cheerleading piece for Biden, although I think most people support him because he has almost five decades experience being a public service, whereas Trump had zero experience before his inauguration in 2017, and the president has apparently learned little on the job. If Trump has a campaign platform, we have heard scant little of it from the president himself during the recent debate and town hall. Biden can competently answer questions in minute detail, and he puts forth an economic philosophy that should right the economy and bolster the lower and middle classes, as it did when President Barack Obama took over and began to repair the economy after the George W. Bush years. Biden shows a level of compassion for all Americans that has been completely and utterly lacking from Trump the last four years. That is, for the moment, all I’m going to say about Biden.

***

Before getting into the case against Trump, lest someone complains that I’m glossing over what the president has done, let me highlight what he has accomplished these last four years. Folks on the left will see a few of these “successes” as being bad for the country and not successes at all, but they are, nonetheless, some of the things that his spokespeople will point to as wins for the president.

Job growth — On this crucial metric, Trump’s record on job growth was pretty good for the first three years of his presidency. The country more or less held steady with an annual job growth of 2.5 percent, which was similar to the job growth during Obama’s last three years in office. The pandemic, however, sent the jobless rate into a freefall, which was almost certainly exacerbated over time by Trump’s mishandling of the crisis.

Stock market — As the chart to the bottom right shows, the stock market saw significant gains under Obama, and it continued to rise under Trump, albeit, with some fits and starts.

Tax reform — Trump’s signature bill cut the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, but it did little to bolster the lower and middle classes. This, of course, is just the gazillionth iteration of trickle-down economics that has never worked in this nation and never will. The theory goes that corporations will reinvest that extra money in the community and create jobs and higher wages, etc. Predictably, this did not happen. And why is that? Because corporations, like rich people, are mainly concerned with making more money. So tax cuts only boost their coffers, and there is no particular moral imperative for companies to suddenly turn benevolent and pass along that wealth to their workers. The tax bill did shave the rate for people making less than $200,000, so that is a plus.

First Step Act — This justice reform act was a step in the right direction to address mass incarceration and offer more corrections services and job-training opportunities for inmates. It also reduces mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses, among other provisions.

Ending the ISIS caliphate — While Trump did not defeat ISIS, as he continues to falsely claim, he did oversee the military in breaking up the caliphate that was entrenched in Iraq and Syria. In fact, ISIS has been regrouping and expanding its violent operations in Africa.

The judiciary — Trump has seating two Supreme Court justices during his time in the White House and could potentially oversee the installment of a third in Amy Coney Barrett. He has named more than 200 federal justices to the bench.

Space Force — The introduction of this agency was roundly mocked as a “space farce,” but this historic sixth branch of the Armed Forces is supposedly designed to protect U.S. equipment hovering in space.

Unfortunately for Trump, while he could have been pointing out these accomplishments during recent televised events that drew millions of viewers, he has rarely mentioned them, instead preferring to take a combative, defensive tone with his interlocutors.

***

Now to return to the case against the president. Trump, the most powerful person in the nation and the world, is also one of the most incompetent. From the start, he has hired unqualified people to sit in high offices within his administration. More times than not, these people have been woefully inexperienced and uninformed about the departments in which they were charged to lead. So far, as of August of this year, 40 or more former members of his administrations or his associates have been charged or indicted. Dozens of others have been forced out of office because they did or said something that raised the ire of the president.

He has committed impeachable offenses, including abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. He has lied to his own constituents on a daily basis, and he has shown an inability to speak or act intelligently on any issue of importance.

In the standard authoritarian style, he has threatened to rewrite the Constitution itself so that he can stay in power beyond his legally-allowed two terms if he was to win in November. This offense, refusing to leave office and refashion the rules in his favor, as if he was a king, is so egregious that it, alone, notwithstanding all the other offenses, makes the man unfit to call himself an esteemed member of a local school board, much less president of these democratic United States, and it makes him unworthy of anyone’s respect or vote.

As a further assault on the Constitution, he has waged a yearslong war against the media and the free press.

He has cast a pall over the upcoming election, refusing to say that he will concede the election if he loses, thus setting up the framework for potential litigation if he doesn’t get his way. He has thrown shade over the mail-in ballot process, during a pandemic, no less, when many Americans are scared to physically go to polling locations. He has installed an extremely pro-Trump director to run the U.S. Postal Service, thus further muddying the waters between what, in normal circumstances, would be a fair voting process and a subtle, but insidious, flirtation with voter suppression.

While he has, when pressed, denounced white supremacy multiple times, he has nonetheless, courted the vote of the KKK, the Proud Boys and other white nationalist groups, and he has stoked racial unrest, which suggests that his denouncement was not sincere and that he was saying what he thought he needed to say in the moment.

He has refused to utter a negative word about Russia and Vladmir Putin, meanwhile almost certainly benefiting from Russian tampering in the 2016 election and no doubt hoping for more Russian influence leading up to Nov. 3.

He has insulted nearly every voting bloc, except rich, white men, in the body politic, including veterans like the late war hero John McCain.

He has, in short, brought shame to the once hallowed institution of the presidency. He has disgraced the nation, and the shame has been laid bare before a mocking and jeering world.

The late author Christopher Hitchens once cited the “ultimate wickedness and ultimate stupidity” of religion. Those words apply in the case of Donald Trump. Indeed, Trumpism has taken on a kind of religious, cultlike quality, as his supporters, eschewing mounds of evidence for his trespasses on common decency, refuse to acknowledge that the man, brilliant as he might have been in duping half of all voters in America, doesn’t care about them, their god or their country. He is only in it for himself.

Much like the decision of The New York Times, CNN and other news outlets to stop mincing words when it comes to Trump’s dishonesty, it is a moral imperative for those who actually care about the truth, who care about science, who care about freedom and equality and who care about the well-being of other human beings, to fight against anti-intellectualism and dishonesty wherever it rears its head. Presently, the head of the snake sits, probably tweeting out more lies at this very moment, at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

After four years of Trump’s presidency and another year before that on the campaign trail, here is what I have surmised about the person and character of Donald Trump. 

He doesn’t care about anything or anyone other than himself and his family (maybe). This first point more or less encompasses all the rest, but I’ll elaborate.

He doesn’t care about the Constitution or the democratic principles of the United States. See these stories: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

He thinks the office of the presidency is his own personal sandbox.

He doesn’t care about Mexicans or immigrants from other Hispanic countries.

He doesn’t care about black people. 

He doesn’t care about the LGBTQ community.

He doesn’t care about the autonomy and agency of women. 

He doesn’t care about poor people, and once called them “morons.”

He doesn’t care about uninsured, sick or disabled people, and even mocked the latter.

He doesn’t care about low-income workers and families.

He doesn’t care about his own supporters.

He doesn’t care about the KKK or all the other white nationalists who support him, only insofar as he can woo them to the polling booth.

He doesn’t care about Christians or any of the evangelicals who support him, nor their theology or conservative social causes.

He doesn’t care about the case for or against abortion. In fact, he changed his position on abortion when he decided to run for president, showing that he has no conviction on the topic one way or the other, but shifts with the breeze to whatever position is convenient. My inclination is that he is, at the core, actually pro-choice. He isn’t religious, and he certainly isn’t Christian.

He doesn’t care about the 220,000 people who have now died from Covid-19, nor does he care about their grieving families. He has flouted basic guidelines about wearing masks, and thus by example, he has encouraged his supporters to do the same, which has resulted in more loss of life. He himself contracted Covid most likely because of this disregard. He knowingly downplayed the virus, whereas if he had taken diligent and swift action, he could have greatly reduced the caseload and death count, thus coming away looking like a strong and compassionate leader who steps up when times get tough. But Trump dallied and never had a comprehensive plan for testing or meeting the challenges of the virus. What did he say about the monstrously tragic death toll in the United States? “It is what it is.” This does not sound like a “pro-life” president to me.

He doesn’t care about those in the White House who are in his inner circle, who almost certainly came into contact with him while he was contagious with the virus, as he insisted on parading around in a car just days after testing positive, to assure his most ardent supporters that he was strong and fighting back against the illness.

He doesn’t care about veterans or their families. He doesn’t even understand why veterans would bother to put their lives at risk because, in Trump’s egotistical mind, there is nothing in it for them.

He doesn’t care about the truth. He doesn’t care about authenticity. As of July, he had issued more than 20,000 lies or misleading claims.

The only thing he cares about his own power and self-preservation. As I have said elsewhere, you can only insult the intelligence of Americans for so long before the gig is up. The sun is setting on Donald Trump, and sadly, in a kind of pathetic way, he will not live to see the day in which he is free of lawsuits and indictments once he leaves office.

***

We stand at the crossroads.

The United States, and particularly the far right contingent of the body politic, has been flirting with nationalism and white supremacy, at least since the rise of the Tea Party in 2009, but in actuality, long before that point, going all the way back to the founding. White Christianity, in fact, has always had a strained relationship with black Christianity in this nation — even though their similarities are more pronounced than their differences, which are solely based on skin color — and with the black community in general. In “White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity,” Robert P. Jones said that Christians have traditionally focused on an “individualistic view of sin” and having a personal relationship with Jesus. They have more or less ignored institutional racism that has obviously existed for the better part of 2 1/2 centuries. Thus, the Tea Party and current Trumpists have included a troubling mix of the old “Lost Cause” adherents who are still trying to wage a war that was conceded long ago; Christians who put God and country above all else, including the interests of blacks and Hispanics, and the interests of the gay and lesbian community; and straight up white nationalists, who want to return to a time when whiteness itself was the law of the land. And then, there are simply the traditional Republican supporters who will vote along party lines no matter what because the GOP generally stands for social issues they care about. But when the party and their leader is this far off the rails, it may be time to reconsider this allegiance, just for this once, for the sake of the country.

Since most GOP lawmakers still support Trump, they obviously, by their cowed silence in giving him free reign to lie with impunity, do not care about honesty and integrity, so blind allegiance to this party simply on ethical grounds, makes no sense and is, rightly, causing no shortage of cognitive dissonance in the minds of more than a few conservative voters.

After the election of Obama, the right-wing collective, including FOX News and right-wing talk radio, released the hounds in what amounted to an unrelenting and merciless attempt to disparage the character of Obama and to even delegitimize his status as an American citizen. Trump, who is well known to have waffled between the Democratic and Republican parties over the years, was on board with the so-called racist birther movement against Obama, and thus began Trump’s place at the head of the far-right, white supremacist table. This has been shown to be true over and over by the insistence that KKK and white supremacist voters are casting their lot with Trump.

We have a decision to make as a nation. We can either let Trump win and maintain a sizable foothold for the dangerously racist, anti-intellectual contingent, a contingent that includes the current president; or we can return to the center and to reason, to put our common humanity over party and do the right thing for this land that we call home. We have to get on with the business of improving the health and well-being of everyone. In the year 2020, there is simply no room for exceptions and provisos on that point. That all Americans deserve to be valued as human beings who are on equal footing with everyone else is not a controversial or progressive statement.

Collectively, the only place for us to go at this point is toward the center, our last and best hope for a renewed sense of cooperation and conversation between people in both parties, and we should run there as if our lives depended on it.

Because, frankly, they do.

Assessing the Car Crash: Trump-Biden Debate No. 1

I keep up with national politics because the decisions lawmakers make in Washington, D.C., have real-life consequences for everyone. What they say and do really matters. Political debates, on the other hand, are largely theater, and they always have been since the first one in 1960 between Kennedy and Nixon. They are about perception. They’re about how well candidates can deliver their messages. They’re about likeability, and they’re about how knowledgeable candidates are about domestic and international policy. Obviously, when people vote, they are supporting a certain political philosophy, but they are also voting on the individual they think can best run the nation.

That said, I felt like a masochist watching the debate Tuesday night between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden. It was a train wreck of massive proportions, the likes of which I have never witnessed in American politics, and it was painful to watch all the way through. It really did feel like I was watching two professional wrestlers cut competing promos on each other. It lacked decorum. It lacked a sense of mutual respect between the candidates, and it lacked control.

One candidate looked angry and full of contempt the whole time. He was loud. He looked cold and distant. He never once looked at the camera. He was combative, both with his opponent and with the moderator, Chris Wallace. He was void of facts and heavy on lies and misinformation. Trump continued to make unsubstantiated claims about the mail-in voter process and refused to say he would concede the election if he lost. He gave a chilling nod to so-called “poll watchers,” who he thinks should be allowed to stand around voting sites and intimidate people. He was provided with a clear opening to once and for all denounce racists and white supremacists in his own party, and he demurred, telling the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” whatever that means. A day later, he claimed that he didn’t know who the Proud Boys were. His reference, then, was oddly specific for a man who isn’t familiar with the group. And perhaps, most disgusting of all, he attacked Biden’s son, Hunter, for previous substance abuse issues that Biden said his son had subsequently conquered.

For his part, Biden did not give a great performance either. He stumbled over his words and looked as is he was struggling to get out what he wanted to say at times. He did provide a couple brief moments of substance when he outlined a plan to help the economy while creating jobs in the process and gave some ideas for managing the Covid-19 crisis. Trump’s answer to the environment and wildfires seemed to be limited to forest management, as if he didn’t realize that the U.S. Forest Service already has forest managers charged with proper upkeep of the national parks.

Wallace, meanwhile, lost control of the debate in the first few minutes. Trump relentlessly talked over Biden and Wallace and continually flaunted the rules allowing for uninterrupted talking segments. At several points, all three were trying to talk over each other, and it quickly became a complete boondoggle. Wallace should have had the power to cut one of their microphones mid-sentence if one of the candidates went off the rails or violated the terms of the debate. It will be interesting to see how the networks and the debate commission address the rules going forward.

I wish there was more to say from a substance perspective, but there really isn’t. There were numerous insults thrown in both directions — Biden calling Trump a “clown” and the worst president in American history and Trump claiming that he had done more in 47 months than Biden has done in 47 years in government — and the most interruptions and talk-overs than I have seen in any debate. Trump interrupted Biden an astounding 73 times.

In all, Biden had the best performance because he at least tried to offer a little substance, and for that, he’ll probably pull some votes away from Trump, whereas the president, while brash and combative the entire time, which I’m sure his supporters loved, at least didn’t trip over his words. It was more like a continuous stream of bile. I will say that the big plus for Biden was that he repeatedly talked to the camera and directly to us. Trump, by contrast, didn’t address the American people a single time.

In one of the most consequential and crucial times in American history, we needed more substance. While the theater aspect of it was certainly entertaining, this debate was a sad affair of two old white guys — make that three old white guys — bickering for 90 minutes while the nation’s collective jaw stood agape.

The Sins of a Nation

The United States is not the greatest nation on Earth. It’s not a great nation among many. In moral or ethical terms, it’s not even a good one. While there is indeed much that is positive about who we are as a nation and what we stand for — personal liberty; democracy by the people, for the people; hard work; perseverance; and innovation — from the context of history and current events, we are and have been, a failure.

And I am going to elaborate on this troubling reality, not to needlessly slam the country and its legacy, but because I genuinely want us to be better: more compassionate in our societal and political policymaking, more accepting of and loving toward everyone without exceptions and provisos, more open to progress, more concerned with leaving behind a bright future and a cleaner planet for future generations, more interested in science, more welcoming to immigrants and, perhaps more importantly, more embracing of our central axiom, “all men are created equal.”

Is America a Christian nation?

One of the main ideas that bring many to conclude that America is, indeed, a great nation is the set of principles that many hold dear, namely that the nation was founded on Judeo-Christian values, and by extension, this must make us inherently good. The idea comes mainly from Christian members of the Republican Party, but plenty of Democrats also believe it. Inherent in this argument, of course, is that the country is, by extension, morally upright because, well, how can a nation be founded on Christianity and not be moral?

I could make a completely different post arguing that the central tenets of Christianity, which include scapegoating, or letting someone else pay for the sins of another; compulsory love, God the father demanding that people love him or be threatened with eternal hellfire; and human sacrifice, are, in fact, hideously evil and come down to us from a barbarous age. You can click the links for more of what I’ve already written on the subject. Take these three evils, along with the Bible’s shameful record on mass genocide and slavery, and powerful evidence to conclude that neither Christianity or its god are a source of goodness. It’s actually the other way around. It is the people who believe in Christianity who are good in spite of what their religion teaches in a holy book. Yes, of course, Jesus supposedly said some nice things, but oddly enough, the Republican Party, which routinely claims for itself the moral high ground, has abandoned most of them.

Our second president, John Adams, rejected the idea that the United States was founded on Christianity, and so did our third president, Thomas Jefferson. And so do I.

The Founding Fathers were a mix of deists, Unitarians, Presbyterians and other denominations. The Declaration of Independence, which is not a legal document and shouldn’t be construed as such when arguing about the religiosity of America, contains only a couple vague references to a deity and has no mention of Jesus or Christianity. Almost every public document in this time period contained similar nonspecific references to God. The Constitution includes one reference to God, the customary “in the year of our Lord” sign off at the end, and anyone who claims this — the vaguest reference of all and the closest one can possibly get to having no reference whatsoever — as proof that we are a Christian nation or that the country was established on Judeo-Christian principles is grasping for straws in the dark.

Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration, outright denied the wonderworking power of Jesus, going so far as to reconfigure the Gospels to his liking, leaving what he considered the good parts and cutting out all references to miracles and the supernatural. The other founders were mostly churchgoers, as was pretty much everyone in the 18th century, but nearly all of them hewed to a rather subdued brand of faith than what has been considered evangelical Christianity in the 20th and 21st centuries.

The First Amendment statute to protect people’s ability to worship, or not, as they saw fit was important to Jefferson and the other founders. As Jefferson said in a letter to Elbridge Gerry in 1799, “I am for freedom of religion, and against all maneuvers to bring about a legal ascendancy of one sect over another.” Jefferson was said to have rejoiced when a proposal to insert “Jesus Christ” into the Virginia Statute preamble was defeated.

In his autobiography, he said:

(Freedom of religion was) meant to comprehend, within the mantle of it’s (sic) protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo and infidel of every denomination.

It is incontrovertible that we are now, as we were then, a Christian-majority nation, but the United States is obviously composed of many other religions and faith traditions, along with an increasing number of atheists, agnostics and non-churchgoers. According to the Pew Research Center, the number of people in America who are irreligious has grown from less than 10 percent in the 1970s to 26 percent in the last couple years.

Nonetheless, it is still very difficult for anyone who does not openly profess their Christianity to get elected to public office. Even John F. Kennedy, who took a lot of heat just for being Catholic — in the mind of many evangelicals, he wasn’t the right “kind” of Christian — refused to allow his faith to influence his public duty to the nation.

During a speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in 1960, Kennedy said:

I am not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for president, who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me.

So yes, Christianity is still the dominant religion in America, and probably will be for decades to come, especially in the Republican Party. To this day, while many Democrats are certainly Christian, they tend to deemphasize their faith when it comes to making decisions, except in vague references to God in speeches or prayers, whereas Republicans usually wear their faith on the sleeves and openly use religion to influence how they govern, even though many of their own constituents do not follow the same faith.

To say that we are founded on Christianity full-stop, however, is to deny reality. Not only were we not established as such — our founding had more to do with the Enlightenment, governing principles from the motherland and political philosophy far predating the Revolutionary Era — we’re not a particularly moral nation either, and we never have been.

Make America … Good Again?

I have outlined why we aren’t a Christian nation or a good nation based on the dominant religion. What about based on history? I’m afraid the nation also gets an F in that category. Here’s a far-from-exhaustive laundry list of our “sins” (The word “sins” is in quotes because the idea of “sin” is a construct of religion, but it has value here in showing the seriousness of our collective crimes).

The United States and the founders protected the extension of slavery for 20 extra years in the Constitution. Many of the founders owned at least one slave. John Adams, bless his soul, owned none.

Our government subjugated native Americans after the colonists arrived and killed off many of them with guns and European diseases.

The nation fought a bloody war over the right of the South to continue the institution of chattel slavery, on which its economy was built, and at one time, the entire national economy, which was largely built on the backs of black folks. The North as well as the South profited from the “peculiar institution.”

After Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman and Co. crushed the rebellion, slavery by a new name called the Reconstruction was established by which many black people in the South returned to their previous subservient positions.

On Good Friday, of all days, Abraham Lincoln, the man who brought emancipation to 4 million black people, was murdered by a racist named John Wilkes Booth, thus punctuating the fact that bigotry and sympathy for the Southern cause was alive and well after thousands fought and died for four years defending both.

After a brief flicker of democracy in the late 19th century when black men in America got the right to vote, Jim Crow took root. A full 100 years passed — replete with voter suppression, segregation and lynchings — from the end of the Civil War to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 when discrimination at the polls and segregation in schools and public places were officially outlawed, much to the chagrin of racists everywhere, like Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who would be revered by conservatives in my home state for decades to come.

One of the brightest beacons of love, hope and equality the nation had ever seen was extinguished on April 4, 1968, handing racism yet another victory in the long, frustrating and bloody march toward ultimate emancipation. Martin Luther King Jr. brought a message of peace and solidarity among all men and women, and he was killed for it.

Americans watched and laughed at shows like, “The Jeffersons,” “Sanford and Son” and “Good Times,” and perhaps some people secretly thought, “We’re making progress on race” now that all these black folks are getting high-profile spots on television. Meanwhile, systemic racism took hold across the next five decades, no longer the bold, firebrand bigotry of old, but the more insidious, viral kind that seeps into schools, police stations, courthouses and public seats of power. The federal government, state governments and local municipalities were all complicit.

America watched with either horror, vague sympathy or apathy as Rodney King was beaten in the early 1990s by cops in Los Angeles. In the subsequent years, Americans watched as unarmed black person after unarmed black person was either choked out or gunned down by overzealous or racist police officers. Many of us stood with Black Lives Matter and demanded change in the justice system. Many of us, far too many of us, however, did nothing. Many of us, like the current president, stoked racial tensions, and many of us dug in our heels on how our whiteness was superior to their blackness. Many of us turned our backs on our fellow Americans, and we abandoned whatever moral compass we thought we had, and by doing so, we abandoned our own humanity. No less than 21 race riots have occurred in this country since 1978.

At the same time the BLM matter demonstrations have been occurring, we have seen the true colors of a disturbingly large segment of the population, most of them claiming to be Christians and Republicans, yet apparently caring little for their own health or for the safety and well-being of their fellow citizens by refusing to wear face masks. Racism has brought the nation the most shame throughout history, but anti-intellectualism and selfishness is closely behind.

These grievances and trespasses against morality and ethics, among a people who declare so vigorously that faith, which they say is at the very center of morality, is such an important part of our lives and the national conscience, only cover issues related to race.

If we, as a nation, actually cared about people, we would have already made sure to take whatever steps necessary to end or drastically reduce hunger, poverty and homelessness.

If we, as a nation, actually care about people, we would have already happily accepted a little more in the way of taxes to ensure that every person has access to free health care. We would have already neutered the unfair and grossly mismanaged insurance industry. We would have already placed stop-gaps on the pharmaceutical industry’s runaway price-gouging practices.

Like Canada and many Western European nations, we would have already put in place a string of provisions that improve the health of well-being of every person in the country, not just white people or privileged people or rich people. If we, as a nation, actually cared about people, we would have already rooted out each politician, Republican or Democrat, who did not support the basic rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that every American should enjoy. It is a near impossibility to pursue any of them without fundamental things like safety, health and a fair wage.

That said, imagine Jesus looking out over the multitude of 5,000 hungry people before him, which, if the story even took place, was probably more like 10,000 or 15,000 because women and children didn’t count as people. Imagine Jesus seeing the people holding out their baskets in quiet desperation to sate their gnawing appetite. Imagine that he opens his mouth and says, “I can help you, but I won’t. You will have to fend for yourselves,” as he turns away and leaves them to languish in starvation and destitution. From a political standpoint, by failing to meet people’s basic needs with all the resources in the world to make it happen, this is essentially what we have done.

In ethical terms, we’re starving. We are supposedly the richest and most sought-after nation in the world, yet we routinely fail the most vulnerable among us. We fail the working class. We fail the poor. We fail the sick. We fail the uninsured. We fail immigrants. We fail children. And most of all, we fail black people. And we have failed every single one of these groups of Americans under the leadership of people who say they are Christians. This is even more true with evangelical Republican politicians, many of whom have presided over some of the most callous and harmful pieces of legislation the nation has ever seen in our 244-year history.

How good are we, really? How much do we, as a nation, actually care about people? I don’t mean some people. I mean all people. How has our status as a supposedly “Christian nation” moved the needle? It has not, and in some cases, it has moved the needle in the wrong direction.

I don’t offer any easy prescriptions; I am simply diagnosing the illness. The cure can be found in doing the opposite of all that I have laid out: in continuing to fight systemic racism, firebrand racism and subtle racism; in establishing compassionate economic and sociopolitical policies that raise all of the boats in society; in following the path of science and free inquiry; and in abandoning anti-intellectualism once and for all. When religion in the United States peters out or becomes irrelevant — and it will one day — the path forward toward a more just and ethical society will be found in secular humanism.

[Cover photo: A modified version of “Cross” by DeviantArt user Steinn-Hondkatur.]