Category Archives: Politics

The War Against Hope

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“Let no joyful voice be heard! Let no man look to the sky with hope in his eyes!” says Davy Jones in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest as his captives slave away on his ship. “And let this day be forever cursed by we who ready to wake…the Kraken!”

Alexei Navalny, 2011 photo from Wikipedia.

This well-known quote from a surreal character in a popular movie is a remarkable fit for the mood unleashed in Russia by President Vladimir Putin with the death of 47-year-old Alexei Navalny, an unparalleled advocate of Russian democracy, who suffered for his commitment with confinement in an Arctic prison after repeated attempts to end his life with poison. Putin, who has no apparent compunction about eliminating his opponents in any way possible, seems determined to become not only the Davy Jones of Russia, but of the world. If there were any doubt that his minions operate across the globe, consider that just yesterday (February 19), Maxim Kuzminov, a Russian pilot who defected to Ukraine with his Mi-8 helicopter last August, was found shot to death in Alicante, Spain. There is a long history of such assassinations by Russian agents of known dissidents abroad.

But the most compelling visions of his intended dystopia are those of the arrests of hundreds of Russians doing nothing more than laying flowers at memorials for Navalny. They are not even allowed to mourn their dead in peace because that would allow them to look to the dreary Russian winter sky with hope.

Hope for those with love in their souls, and passion in their hearts, is forbidden in today’s Russia.

If you have any doubt on that point, consider the position of Metropolitan Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church, who has supported Putin in his quest for conquest of Ukraine and once described Putin’s rule as “a miracle of God.” The church has actively suppressed opposition to the war against Ukraine among its own priests, recently expelling one for his refusal to read a prayer for Russia’s success and for his anti-war remarks. The position of the Russian Orthodox leadership, securing its own comfort from oppression through complicit support for Putin, denies spiritual solace to those who seek a better day in their homeland and whose consciences are troubled by the unnecessary death and destruction he has unleashed. The church has sold its soul in a historical quest for sovereignty under an evil regime. (There are echoes of such behavior among certain churches in the United States that have aligned with Donald Trump as a matter of transactional convenience, but let’s save that discussion for another day.) In this sorry role, the Russian Orthodox Church has degenerated into a mere arm of the state, enforcing social conformity in the face of powerful demands for a voice of conscience to lift the morale of the Russian people.

Image from Shutterstock

It remains for courageous advocates like Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, to brave the foul winds spreading from Russia and keep the candle burning. It remains for the rest of us outside Russia to recognize and confront the dangers posed not only by Putin, but by the “useful idiots” who continue to justify autocracy.

Jim Schwab

When Every Vote Matters

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As a general rule, I am not about to tell people that the fate of the world depends on someone’s election to city council, even in a large city. On the other hand, some people climb the ladder to higher office after winning at local levels. But if candidates have commitment and staying power, one loss is unlikely to deter them in the long run. Barack Obama famously lost a Democratic primary election for Congress to U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush in Illinois’s First District in 2000, only to win a U.S. Senate seat by a landslide in 2004 and the presidency by a decisive margin against Sen. John McCain in 2008. People often learn vital campaign lessons from losing once or twice.

Meanwhile, aside from the question of who is positioned to run for higher office, most city council members, including aldermen in Chicago, have important jobs to do for their constituents. In Chicago, it is not a small job, as the city’s 50 wards average about 56,000 people, more than the population of all but a few suburbs. They are legislating for the third-largest city in the nation and handling constituent concerns about city services. Who holds these positions has some bearing on quality of life and civic satisfaction with city government. Collectively, the aldermen have considerable power and influence over property taxes, local environmental policy, land use, and development.

But this blog post is not a history or civics lesson. It is about the process of choosing these representatives who play a visible role in shaping the city’s future, and more importantly, about why participation matters. It is about the current Chicago election for mayor, other citywide offices, and 50 aldermen. In the bargain, Chicago is electing members of 22 new district councils that will work with the police department on law enforcement policy.

Chicago and all Illinois municipalities use a system created by the Illinois legislature in 1995 in which all candidates for local office run in a nonpartisan primary in late February. If any candidate for a particular office, such as alderman or mayor, wins an outright majority in the primary, that person is elected. If no one gets a majority, the top two vote-getters move on to a run-off five weeks later, and the winner takes office.

In Chicago, until 2011, either Richard M. Daley or Rahm Emmanuel won a majority overLori all other candidates and became mayor after the primary. Some wards had runoffs because no aldermanic candidate had a majority. That state of affairs ended in 2015, when Emmanuel, running for re-election, failed to win a majority and faced Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, now a member of Congress, in a runoff, winning against Garcia in a closer election than many people had thought likely. By 2019, the “old way” in Chicago was on its deathbed, with 14 candidates vying for mayor. Two African-American women, Cook County Board President Tony Preckwinkle and political newcomer Lori Lightfoot, a prominent lawyer and former federal prosecutor, led the vote, both with less than 20 percent. In a major voter rebellion against corruption, Lightfoot won the runoff with 73 percent of the vote, carrying every ward in the city. She became not only the first Black female mayor of Chicago, but the first lesbian mayor as well.

Daniel La Spata, Alderman, 1st Ward, City of Chicago. Photo from https://www.the1stward.com

The plethora of candidates was not limited, however, to the mayor’s race. Aldermanic races also saw far more entries than had been typical in the past. Progressive candidates became much more popular and prominent. In the 1st Ward, where I live, newcomer Daniel La Spata, a progressive with a city planning master’s degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago, uprooted incumbent Alderman Proco “Joe” Moreno by a 22 percent margin. Moreno was weighed down by a scandal after he was charged with filing a false police report and insurance claim after police stopped his girlfriend, who was driving his Audi A6. She told police he had lent the car to her. He had claimed the car was stolen. Later, out of office, he was again arrested after hitting numerous cars on a side street in Chicago’s Gold Coast late at night during what police said was a case of drunken driving.

I met La Spata during that campaign and liked him. I had a slight acquaintance with Moreno but was turned off by his legal problems. I felt La Spata offered an intelligent alternative at a time when the ward needed one. Over the past four years, I have had a number of opportunities to interact with La Spata. I found him responsive and thoughtful. In one email exchange, we discussed his advocacy in city council of increased availability of public restrooms, which are often scarce in Chicago. I pointed out that this was an issue not just for homeless persons who often lack access to such facilities, but for elderly people and those with disabilities or medical conditions that could make access an urgent need. I saw it as a public health issue. As a planner, I see public health as a serious local government responsibility that faces too many detractors—even without considering the controversy surrounding COVID-19 issues.

La Spata ran for re-election in the February 28 primary. He faced two political newcomers, Stephen “Andy” Schneider and Sam Royko, and Moreno, who was seeking a comeback. Royko, son of the late newspaper columnist Mike Royko, was a serious candidate driven by a concern about rising crime after his girlfriend was carjacked in the ward last year. Schneider is a community activist with a decent following. As for Moreno, I felt strongly that, while I believe in second chances, they do not need to involve public office after the sorts of problems he had created for himself. There are many other ways he can find to prove his commitment to the community without being entrusted with public office, and I suspect he will be able to find those opportunities. In any event, he garnered less than 7 percent of the vote, finishing fourth. It seems clear that the overwhelming majority of voters in the ward agreed with my assessment: Sorry, Joe, find another line of work.

The real question was whether La Spata or anyone else would win a majority on February 28. Knowing the outcome was less than certain, I volunteered, helping with his petition drive for ballot access. Aldermanic candidates need 750 signatures but often collect two or three times that number to ensure they have enough even after signature challenges by opponents, a common practice in Chicago. I spent one very chilly evening in November knocking on doors in the Logan Square neighborhood, not finding enough people home but adding slightly to the signature totals. During the campaign, I aided with phone calling on a Saturday but did less than I had planned closer to the election because of personal and family distractions. La Spata’s campaign staff was gracious about whatever time I could spare. He seemed to have enough volunteers to be highly competitive.

At one unfortunate point in the campaign, someone vandalized the La Spata campaign office. It remains unclear who did it, but a campaign organizer told me Schneider and Royko offered condolences and sympathies to La Spata over the situation. Democracy should function and thrive unimpaired by such behavior.

On election night, the importance of all that effort became clear. La Spata led the four-person field at one point with 49.44%, with Royko trailing with about half that number, and Schneider in third with less than 20 percent. La Spata appeared to be about 100 votes shy of a majority, although the numbers fluctuated through the evening. If that situation prevailed, Royko would face La Spata in a runoff.

But it is not as simple as it once was. More people vote early, more vote by mail, and all those ballots must be counted, systematically and precisely. By law, the Chicago Board of Elections must count all mail ballots that arrive within two weeks after the election, in this case, March 14, although they must be postmarked by Election Day, which was February 28. People who obtained mail ballots, which can be done by request to the board, can also turn them at early voting sites, which I did.

In the interest of full disclosure, I will note that my wife has served for several years as an election judge. I respect what these people do because I have watched her go to the nearby polling place the night before to set up, then retire early to wake at 4 a.m., arriving at the polling place by 5 a.m. to set up, not returning home until about 10 p.m. That is an exhausting day for a person of any age, let alone someone in her seventies, as we both are. Readers may fairly surmise that anyone wishing to question the honesty or integrity of election workers, as has become the fashion in many right-wing circles, will win no support or sympathy from me.

As the days followed, there was a noticeable drift in favor of La Spata as mail ballots were counted. La Spata jokingly referred to this situation as a “mail-biter.” This is not some mysterious or nefarious development, as former President Donald Trump might allege, but simply the process of allowing late-arriving ballots to be counted. The post office is not always efficient in delivering election-related mail. My wife had to visit the post office the previous Thursday in person to retrieve a bundle of undelivered mail that included the election board’s letter of authorization that she needed in order to pick up an equipment key from the board by that Saturday to fulfill her function as an election official. People’s ballots should be not be disenfranchised simply because the U.S. Postal Service does not always deliver mail in a timely manner.

By March 15, however, the die was cast. La Spata had exactly 15 more votes than needed to avoid an April 4 runoff, winning the primary outright with 50.11% of the total vote. In Chicago’s First Ward, every vote had mattered. Royko, who appears to have much to offer the community despite his loss, conceded quickly and congratulated La Spata. I hope they can cooperate and collaborate on issues important to the ward over the next four years. But it was also just as well to bring resolution to the contest.

As for the mayoral race, the world knows by now that Lightfoot did not survive her first challenge for re-election. Nine candidates competed, including Garcia, but the runoff this time belongs to two men, Paul Vallas, a frequent former candidate and former schools chief in not only Chicago but New Orleans and Philadelphia as well, and Brandon Johnson, an African-American Cook County Supervisor. Johnson began his career as a teacher and has strong ties to the Chicago Teachers Union, which often tangled with Mayor Lightfoot. Vallas has the support of the Fraternal Order of Police. Both candidates have other union endorsements. I will not comment further on that race, nor will I venture any predictions for April 4. Chicago, however, simply is no longer the machine-run city that Sam Royko’s father once wrote about in Boss, his famous biography of former Mayor Richard J. Daley, who died in office in December 1976.

Sometimes, things really do change.

And every vote really does matter.

Jim Schwab

Moving Against Gun Violence

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Candlelight vigil for the 10th Annual National Vigil for All Victims of Gun Violence. All photos provided by Kyle Duff.

On Friday, December 16, our grandson Angel was attending a biology lab class at Malcolm X College, one of the City Colleges of Chicago, where he is currently aiming to lay the foundation for a health care career. In his first quarter in college, he has not yet established the exact contours of that career. His world is still full of possibilities.

While he was in class, someone else’s life possibilities came to an abrupt close. The 36-year-old driver of a car moving down West Jackson Boulevard, right in front of the Malcolm X campus, slammed into a tree after being shot in what police say was a gang-related shooting. His 29-year-old female passenger was taken to a nearby hospital in critical condition, having also been shot. She later died as well. The campus was placed on lockdown as police cars descended on the area, establishing a crime scene investigation and collecting evidence. We learned about it initially from Angel in a phone call. I checked online to find out what had happened.

That evening, I watched for more news. After all, Malcolm X is near downtown Chicago and less than a mile from a training center for the Chicago Police Department, also on Jackson. It is just two blocks from the United Center, home of the Chicago Bulls and Chicago Blackhawks. It is near a major combination of hospitals, one affiliated with the University of Illinois at Chicago. On a Friday afternoon, this is a highly visible location.

But the event was superseded in journalistic importance that evening and in the next morning’s newspapers by a mass shooting at Benito Juarez High School that killed two students and wounded two others. To some, including this year’s Republican nominee for Illinois Governor, St. Sen. Darren Bailey, it probably helped justify his description during his recent losing campaign of Chicago as a “hellhole”—never mind Bailey’s long-standing opposition to gun control of all sorts. To others more aware of the larger social context, it provides more proof that the nation needs a better grip on the sale and ownership of firearms, including assault weapons. After all, Chicago is far from alone. In 2020 alone, more than 45,000 Americans died of gun-related injuries. Homicides from firearms have increased 14 percent over the past decade, while suicides by firearms have grown by 39 percent. We recently marked the tenth anniversary of the 2012 mass murder of dozens of children and teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. What we have is a nationwide epidemic, in which two shootings in one day in a large city like Chicago are an increasingly common occurrence.

These occurrences are among many reasons the voices supporting meaningful gun control legislation, including a ban on assault weapons, are rapidly growing louder and more insistent. In fact, just a week ago, on Sunday evening, December 11, Augustana Lutheran Church of Hyde Park, on Chicago’s South Side, hosted the 10th Annual National Vigil for All Victims of Gun Violence. With indoor and outdoor displays of the

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot addresses the crowd.

U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin speaks to the audience.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

names and faces of more than 630 people killed in Chicago this year, the gathering included a representative of Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who missed the event due to illness, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, among others. Many of those attending were survivors of gun violence including relatives and friends of those whose portraits were on display. Many also represented or spoke on behalf of organizations of survivors such as Mothers of Murdered Sons and Chicago Survivors.

The issue, as has long been the case, is how to turn the pervasive, ongoing grief into action that matters in the face of an obnoxious and defiant gun lobby. It is not that gun owners do not have some legitimate rights and the right to air a point of view, but that the leadership of the gun lobby has made so many so resistant to accepting facts or considering the impacts of their positions on thousands upon thousands of innocent victims. Their diversionary tactics, such as both Bailey and former President Trump painting Chicago as some sort of living hell (it is not; I live here and know otherwise) resulting from liberal values and hostility to police, are not only unhelpful but fail utterly to offer intelligent, evidence-based solutions to complex problems that are in no way aided by the free-flowing traffic of firearms across state borders and city limits. Say what they will, the mere fact that someone as troubled as Robert Crimo III was able to acquire both an Illinois Firearm Owner Identity (FOID) card and an assault weapon at the age of 19 is symptomatic of a gun culture that is blatantly out of control, and dozens of people attending a July 4 parade in Highland Park, Illinois, paid the price with their lives or with serious injuries. Yet the response of the gun lobby and its defenders fundamentally has been to double down on opposition to any reform of gun laws. Bailey, for instance, remains opposed to even having the state FOID requirement at all.

Forefront, Pastor Nancy Goede in the Augustana narthex.

But the momentum is shifting, the tide is turning.

At the federal level, Congress finally acted this past summer by passing the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which has been signed into law by President Joe Biden. Among other provisions, many related to mental health services, it expands background checks on gun buyers under 21, provides funding support for state red flag laws, and restricts straw gun purchases. It authorizes $750 million over five years for crisis intervention programs. The Wikipedia article linked at the beginning of this paragraph contains a full list of other appropriations established in the law, and explains the law in greater detail. Click here for a full text of the law, which resulted from multiple compromises between Republican and Democratic senators. The law does not come close to solving all gun-related problems, nor is any law likely to do so, but it is a step forward.

In Illinois, as of this date, action is pending on the Protect Illinois Communities Act, which would ban assault weapons in the state. The bill got a committee hearing in Springfield the day after the vigil at Augustana Lutheran Church. Bridging a gap that has often concerned activists against gun violence, the hearing brought forth as witnesses not only Lauren Bennett of Highland Park, a relatively affluent North Shore suburb of Chicago, but Conttina Phillips, a victim of Halloween gun violence in Garfield Park, a predominantly Black and low-income neighborhood on the West Side of Chicago. While the bill aims to ban assault weapons, Phillips advocated for further action against other types of guns because assault weapons are only one factor in the gang-related violence afflicting Black and Latino neighborhoods.

Sponsored by State Rep. Bob Morgan (D-Deerfield), who marched in the July 4 parade in Highland Park and represents that district, the bill aims to ban the sale, manufacture, or delivery of assault weapons and other high-caliber firearms in Illinois and would require current owners of such weapons to register that ownership with the state. It would extend current red flag restrictions from six months to one year. It would also bar the acquisition of a FOID card for anyone under 21 unless they are active in the military. Pritzker just the week before the hearing had called upon the General Assembly to pass and send to him such a bill before the anniversary of the Highland Park shooting.

We can only hope. Well, actually, we can do more. We can lobby our legislators. We can speak out. We can attend rallies. We can make clear that such action and more is long overdue.

Jim Schwab

Do We Need a Gun Victims Memorial Day?

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VOA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Memorial for Robb Elementary shooting victims.

I am going to keep this short and simple for two reasons. One, I am writing on the morning of Memorial Day, and I want to celebrate the holiday and spend time with my family. Our grandson Angel, who is graduating from high school on June 6, and from a Chicago Police and Fire Training Academy program on June 1, is coming with his father to earn $20 from me for assembling the brand-new outdoor grill I bought Saturday at Menard’s, and we will plan his graduation party. So, there is all that. Two, the coverage of the mass murder of school children at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, has received nearly wall-to-wall coverage in the news media, so it’s not clear I need to add to all that, other than to note that the tragedy of gun violence was perpetuated just yesterday by some shooting in downtown Chattanooga, Tennessee, that wounded six teenagers and sent yet more police officers into a scramble to sort out who did what and to rescue the victims. Gun violence comes in various forms, not just mass murders, but one wonders when it will end and what it will take to wake up the most stubborn defenders of indefensible views of Second Amendment rights. Those rights are real, within limits, as all rights are, but they do not and should not tower above all other rights in a civilized society. If, that is, we are willing to consider the United States of America in 2022 civilized.

It is all getting old, very old. Consider the lineup of just some of the major incidents with mass murders in the past decade:

The Mother Jones site from which I pulled the above data lists 129 such events dating back to 1982 with three or more fatalities, of which I used only those since 2012 where the dead numbered in double digits. Although Mother Jones does not offer an overall tally, the numbers climb well into the hundreds of dead and hundreds of injured, and well, at some point, what’s the point of counting. There may well be more next week. There were only ten days between the most recent incidents in Buffalo and Uvalde, Texas, which alone produced 31 deaths and 20 injuries. It is a terrifying tally.

America’s problem, moreover, is not limited to mass shootings, which unquestionably produce the most news coverage. But gang shootings in cities big and small (yes, including but hardly unique to Chicago), domestic violence, suicides, arguments in bars, and heaven knows how many other circumstances involving people with firearms produced, according to the Pew Research Center, more than 45,000 deaths from gun violence in 2020, the most recent year for which complete data have been compiled. Add that up over a decade, and we have numbers that rival the sacrifices of American military heroes in the largest and most violent wars this nation has ever fought, including both World War II and the Civil War.

That leads me to a modest proposal, probably one that is well ahead of its time, but the fight for a holiday to honor the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., took three decades to become a reality. On Memorial Day, however controversial my suggestion may be, and I expect some pushback, I must wonder if the time has come to begin to consider a Gun Victims Memorial Day. Someday, if we are in fact the civilized nation we imagine ourselves to be, we will look back in amazement that we tolerated all this for so long, listened to inane arguments against even the most basic proposals for gun control, such as banning assault weapons or at least raising the age requirements for purchasing such weapons, or instituting universal background checks, and wonder, as other nations do, as we still do regarding racial equality and civil rights, why we ever had to fight so hard for something so sane and so simple. And a Gun Victims Memorial Day would help us to tell each other at that time in our future, “Never again.”

It does not matter what day we choose. Gun violence happens every day in America. The dates of various mass murders pile up almost weekly now. The National Rifle Association, governors and senators and other public officials enslaved to the NRA, all repeat the same tired assertion that guns don’t kill people, people kill people, as if just anyone with a butcher knife could rain down terror on a school or a concert in mere minutes, as if . . . . well, one could go on, but as I say, what is the point of repeating the obvious? Let’s get to work removing the obstacles to justice from public office. That is the first step toward honoring the memory of so many who have died so unnecessarily, so gruesomely.

Jim Schwab

Modern Links to Lincoln

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Abraham Lincoln Museum and Library. Library is across the street, on right side of photo.

It was spring break in the Chicago Public Schools this past week (April 11-15). Despite busy lives, I thought my wife and I should do something special with Alex, our 13-year-old grandson, so I proposed a visit to Springfield, the Illinois capital, to visit the Abraham Lincoln Museum, which we had never seen. The museum is part of a complex, opened in 2005, that includes the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, an invaluable resource for students and scholars on about Lincoln, the Civil War, and related historical topics, and the Illinois State Historical Library, founded in 1889. Across the street sits Springfield Union Station, which now contains an exhibit about the 2012 Steven Spielberg movie titled Lincoln. The library and museum are connected by a walkway above the street.

Springfield Union Station

From Chicago, Springfield is a fairly easy day trip, about three to three and a half hours each way, depending on traffic. The Lincoln Museum and the State Capitol are popular field trip destinations for Illinois schools, particularly those in central Illinois. Even with many schools out on the day we came, the museum was an obvious magnet for smaller groups of teens and for families. Lincoln, despite nearly 160 years’ distance in time from us today, remains one of the most fascinating figures in U.S. presidential history. The museum notes that only Jesus Christ may be the subject of more biographies than Lincoln himself. It is interesting to contemplate that both had more obscure beginnings than most major historical figures. Does that add to the fascination? I suspect that may well be the case.

Others have written about the museum and library since it opened, but this is a unique time to visit, given contemporary events in Ukraine, where war is ravaging an entire nation much as it did our own in the 1860s. One is almost compelled to make comparisons, and guests were asked to use flower-shaped paper cutouts and glue to write messages on blue and yellow strips that will be displayed to communicate messages of support to the Ukrainian people in their struggle for freedom against a Russian invasion. Blue and yellow, of course, are the colors of the Ukrainian flag. Jean and Alex both wrote their own messages; I wrote mine in Russian, which I learned half a century ago at Cleveland State University in classes half filled with Ukrainian American students. Мир, I wrote on half of the petals I glued together; Свобода, I wrote on the overlying petals: “Peace” and “Freedom.” Unfortunately, I do not know any Ukrainian, but most Ukrainians know Russian. The message is clear enough.

Depiction of antebellum slave auction

But back to Lincoln and his own times, when a battle raged for the unity of the nation in the face of slave holders determined to maintain white supremacy at any cost in a war that soon enough led to the liberation of more than four million enslaved African Americans. Nothing is ever simple, and Lincoln was not perfect, but his saving grace, unlike a recent American president, is that he never thought he was. He was simply an elected leader who was determined to find a path for his nation through its darkest days, and somehow succeeded. But he was also assassinated by John Wilkes Booth before he could ever see some of his most important gains for equality sacrificed to political myopia and expedience with no opportunity to do anything about it. His own vice-president, Andrew Johnson, proved not only inadequate to the task but riddled with racial bias. Vice-presidents in those days were often mere ticket balancers with little thought given to their abilities to lead the nation. Sometimes, one wonders how much has changed in that respect.

The intriguing thing about the museum is the way in which its designers have chosen to convey to visitors the realities of Lincoln’s life and times. This is truly a modern museum. After taking advantage of the opportunity to “get a picture with the Lincolns,” standing among their images in the lobby, we attended a short holographic presentation called “Ghosts of the Library,” in which a young researcher named Thomas helps people envision how the thousands of documents and historical items in the facility can come to life and share their stories. We realize that every item in the collection has its own story, so many that one could spend a lifetime hearing them all, but, of course, we had only a few hours to get the gist.

But that gist then, for us, moved to another theater, in which another narrator walked us through Lincoln’s life from a deprived childhood in a wilderness cabin to the peaks of power in the White House, surrounded by turmoil and controversy, until a gunshot rings out, and we know that Booth has struck at Ford’s Theater, and Lincoln at that point, as Secretary of War Edwin Stanton famously stated, “belongs to the ages.”

Paralleling that sequence are two very different displays, one small, approximating the size of the cabin in which Lincoln grew up, showing him reclined before the light of a fireplace, book in hand, educating himself, for he had only two years of formal education in his entire life. But his absolute fascination with books, and his ambition, served him well. In those days, one became a lawyer through such self-study under the aegis of a practicing lawyer, and it gradually became clear that Lincoln was an intellectual match for most of those around him. He served in the Illinois legislature in the 1830s, in Congress during the Mexican War, and despite periodic defeats including two Senate races, finally won election as president of the United States.

For Alex, seeing the cabin in which Lincoln grew up seemed to make an impression. Although Alex’s life had its challenges before we were awarded custody, he now lives in our three-story brick home with three bedrooms and modern furnishings. Yet, here was Lincoln, teaching himself to read and ultimately making one of the most profound impacts on human history. As I said, perhaps that is what makes the story so compelling.

Depiction of Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln

Across the hall was a replica of parts of the White House and a sometimes-noisy presentation of the Civil War years, with holographic figures in one part of the passageway speaking aloud what was often said in print, in letters, newspapers, and other forums of the time. Some are angry men denouncing him as incompetent, but another is a young woman writing to the president about her brother, serving in the Army, who, in her view, did not need to serve alongside “Negroes” who would be unlikely to fight. The comment is even more compelling in light of our historical knowledge that Black troops, who joined the Union army in the second half of the war, were among the bravest, perhaps in part driven by the emerging news that Confederate forces who captured Black soldiers simply executed them instead of placing them in prisoner camps, although plenty of white troops died under inhumane conditions in such camps before the war ended. What comes across most clearly from this mode of presentation, in a way that written words cannot convey so well, is the sheer nasty divisiveness that infested the country in Lincoln’s time. It makes me wonder what impression this makes on anyone who still approves of the January 6 insurrection at the nation’s capital, inspired by a president who refused to acknowledge loss. When one thinks about Lincoln’s losses on the way to the White House, and the high cost of political division during his presidency, the lack of political grace by some today is even more appalling.

All of that is already compelling enough for a museum visit, but the museum offers one more powerful witness by including what docents warn is a display that visitors may find deeply disturbing. This new exhibit, “Stories of Survival,” opened at the Lincoln Museum on March 22 but was developed by the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center. It displays artifacts and photos from the Holocaust in World War II, but also more recent events such as the migrations of refugees from Middle East hot spots such as Syria. The stories and images are heart-wrenching. In my mind, they force two compelling questions: What is different today from the slaughter of the Civil War, and how does that contrast with events in Ukraine?

The biggest single factor, it seems to me, is that those who were resisting the Union in 1861, and who started the war, as Lincoln anticipated, by shelling Fort Sumter in South Carolina, were doing so not to advance human freedom but to preserve the domination of one race over another. In Ukraine, a sovereign nation, Ukraine, although an offshoot of the politically depleted former Soviet Union, is seeking to preserve its gains in building democracy and freedom. It is the commitment to its own independence and the attraction of a more dignified and promising political system that drives the impressive Ukrainian commitment to fight so well against the odds. The outcome remains in limbo, the destruction remains appalling, but the desire for a free and better life could not be clearer. In other cases, such as Syria (which has been aided by Russia), the power of an oppressive system remains the driving force in continuing genocidal warfare now into the third decade of a twenty-first century that we might have hoped would bring an end to such conflicts. Instead, we find ourselves confronted with evidence of a continued determination by strongmen throughout the world to enforce their will and of the ability of all too many to follow such leaders and excuse their behavior.

It is a sobering realization that the struggle for human freedom, dignity, and equality remains the compelling work of our time.

On the way home, I asked Alex what he felt he had learned from his visit to the Lincoln museum. Sitting in the back seat of the car, he thought for a moment and then said, “Being president is a very difficult job, and lots of people will be against you or criticize you.”

If he got that much out of it at his age, I thought, this trip was well worth the time. I did not ask about the “Stories of Survival” exhibit. It’s a bit much for the most mature adults to take in, let alone a seventh grader.

Jim Schwab

No Time for Cowards

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Crowd at Daley Plaza in Chicago, March 6

This past Sunday, I attended a rally for Ukraine at Chicago’s downtown Daley Plaza. I am no expert at crowd counts, but it was clear that hundreds attended, filling most of the plaza. The point was painfully obvious: People were hugely upset with the unwarranted Russian invasion of Ukraine that began two weeks ago.

It is hard not to notice such things in Chicago, particularly on the near North Side. We live about one mile from a neighborhood known as Ukrainian Village. Chicago hosts the second-largest Ukrainian population in the U.S., estimated at 54,000. Many of us know or work with Ukrainian-American friends and colleagues. One of our daughters has a long-time friend from her junior college years. She talked to her recently and reported that, while Ivanka had talked to her frightened grandmother in Ukraine, she subsequently learned that her grandmother died in a Russian attack on her apartment building.

Welcome to Hell on Earth, Putin-style. Nothing is too brutal or inhumane if his personal power is at stake. Despite this savage reputation, well-earned in places like Syria, he has his admirers in the U.S., including a recent former president who shares an inability to put morality ahead of self-interest. Trump’s willingness to sacrifice Ukraine for the mere bauble of finding supposed dirt on Joe Biden surely provided a signal to Putin that Ukraine was fair game. The infamous telephone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zalenskyy, of course, led to Trump’s impeachment, followed by a highly partisan acquittal in the U.S. Senate. Both Trump and Putin have massive amounts of blood on their hands. With more than 2 million Ukrainian refugees so far flowing into Eastern Europe, this is no time to be polite in saying so.

My own awareness of the crisis is heightened by having been a political science major at Cleveland State University, where I indulged in Soviet and Russian history and learned a modest dose of the Russian language in a class half full of Ukrainian-Americans. That enabled me to read some of the signs at the rally that were not in English, though most were. One caught my eye: Русскийй Военный Кораблъ: Иди Нахуй. It was the challenging anatomical assignment that a Ukrainian commander on Snake Island threw back at a Russian warship that demanded his troops’ surrender. It seemed to sum up the sentiment on the Ukrainian side of the conflict.

Why was I there? Along with having donated $100 that Trip Advisor offered to match to support the efforts of World Central Kitchen to feed the mass of refugees at the Polish border, I felt it was the least I could do in a nation of comforts while millions of Ukrainians were being forced either to flee their homes or fight for them against a massive invading Russian army. That army has been finding, to Putin’s surprise, that Ukrainians are not inclined to surrender their sovereignty, especially in the face of massive human rights violations and war crimes. What awaits them if they surrender may be worse than the fight itself, so they will fight.

The issue is that, after reaching seemingly comfortable accommodations in recent decades with autocratic and authoritarian regimes in major nations like Russia and China, we collectively underestimated the potential malevolence of such leadership anywhere. It is certainly true that the United States alone, and even NATO and the European Union collectively, cannot hope to convert every nation in the world to democratic principles. Those are societal features that must be internalized by any culture that wishes to share a more enlightened world view. Whole books, particularly but not only by political scientists, have explored the necessary conditions for fostering such systems. In the past decade, even in the U.S., we have seen just how fragile democratic systems can be when faced with an onslaught of disinformation and the personality cults of those who offer simplistic answers to complex questions.

But the problem for Ukraine is different. Ukrainians had been steadily and deliberately working to steer their own society toward those principles, and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy represents a remarkable commitment by new and talented leadership to those ideals. The problem is that Ukraine is a former Soviet republic with an extensive Russian border, led by a neighboring leader who suffers from profound paranoia and a delusional belief in the glory of the former USSR. Putin is remarkably lacking in moral principle and empathy, and thus, it should be no surprise that, at the same time that he refers to Russians and Ukrainians as ethnic “brothers”, he is willing to kill his alleged brother in order to save him from Western-style democracy. It is the classic bear hug of an abusive older sibling whose only real concern is getting what he wants, no matter the cost in human lives and suffering. If they don’t love me, the thinking goes, I will make them wish that they did.

The concept of doing the hard work required to create a Russian society that is actually attractive to the outside world escapes him. After all, he does not even trust his own people with the truth. If he did, the Russian Duma would not have rubber-stamped legislation to impose 15-year prison sentences on those who tell the Russian people anything the Kremlin does not want them to hear—such as the simple fact that Russia has launched an unfathomably violent attack on a peaceful neighbor.

The challenge for America and the democracies of the world is to rise to the occasion and accept whatever sacrifice may be necessary to squeeze the Russian war machine dry of whatever resources it needs to maintain its grip on Ukraine, which could easily be followed with a bear hug of Moldova and other former Soviet republics and allies, possibly including some that have already joined NATO. That, of course, could trigger the insanity of world war. It is certainly the case that direct military confrontation between NATO and Russia may be highly inadvisable at the moment, given Russia’s nuclear arsenal and the possibility of increased irrationality by Putin if he senses that he is a trapped man. The stakes for the world in such a case are extremely high.

There are, nonetheless, numerous ways in which we can help and indeed already have helped, including provision of military weapons like anti-tank missiles and other vital supplies.

The sudden withdrawal from Russia of major Western companies can also send a signal to Russian citizens, otherwise deprived of legitimate information, that the world is unwilling to tolerate Russian aggression. At the rally, for instance, one speaker noted that McDonald’s was still doing business in Russia. That is no longer true. Dozens of major U.S. corporations, including McDonald’s, are suspending business in Russia, although McDonald’s is paying its workers while the stores are closed. That move may be more powerful than simply withdrawing completely, by causing numerous workers to wonder about the logic of an American company paying them to stay home. Even AECOM, a major infrastructure and engineering consulting firm with which I have had some experience, has chosen to suspend operations in Russia. Eventually, Russia will have a difficult time replacing such expertise.

No discomfort for America and even most of Europe, however, can even begin to approach that of the struggling, fighting Ukrainians in this moment. The last time the United States saw large numbers of war refugees wandering its own landscape was during the Civil War. Even the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, killed nearly 3,000 citizens in places of commerce or government, but those who fled returned to homes physically untouched by conflict. If we muster the will, we are capable of far more support for Ukraine in the present situation than most of us imagine. Are gasoline prices higher as a result of banning imports of Russian oil? Let’s find a way to handle it without turning it into a partisan cudgel over inflation. In the longer run, we can only benefit from expanding our commitment to electric vehicles, renewable energy sources, and other ways of escaping the nagging noose of fossil fuels. A world that needs fewer and fewer resources from corrupt petro-states is a world that already is better prepared for peace.

It is one thing to expand world trade as an avenue toward peace. It is another to be fatally dependent on fundamental commodities that put us in the death grip of authoritarian states. We have the means, the wisdom, the diversity, and the creativity to find our way out of that death grip. Let’s get busy, stop bickering, and commit ourselves to a more democratic and less violent world.

Jim Schwab

FOBOTS

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Over the past weekend, two legendary quarterbacks who may be outlasting their time in the spotlight went down to defeat with their teams. Neither Aaron Rodgers, of the Green Bay Packers, nor Tom Brady, recently with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, will be headed to the Super Bowl. At their current salary level and respective ages, there is also the question of whether they can find a National Football League team that wants to spend what is necessary to keep them on the field. If not, retirement may be involuntary for either or both.

Rodgers earned some well-deserved opprobrium when he dishonestly claimed to have been vaccinated, even though he was not, putting his team and others at risk because of his own arrogance. The NFL probably buttressed that arrogance with a modest penalty that was largely a slap on the wrist for a man with an eight-figure income. He has enjoyed a secondary stage hawking State Farm insurance, but for superstars, such ads are merely an auxiliary revenue stream. They can, however, last a lifetime. Just ask Joe Namath. For some, there is a new career in sports announcing, a legitimate second career for people like John Madden. Such alternatives require a different set of talents from sports itself, so not everyone can make the transition. Honorably, some athletes have used their celebrity power to advance charitable causes and social justice; LeBron James comes to mind. Endorsements, of course, require little more than lending one’s name to a product or project, a process commonly known as branding. But that does not always put one in the limelight, at least not directly.

That is the question I wish to raise here because the desire for attention is a matter of personal psychology. There is nothing inherently wrong with continuing in a position as long as one is capable. However, there are issues involving personal maturity and perspective that are worth exploring. For example, does your reluctance to step away from the limelight betray the lack of any larger focus in life than simply being the center of attention, or do you have a larger sense of purpose? Conversely, is your determination to remain on stage a function of narcissism or an oversized ego?

Merriam-Webster states that the earliest known use of the acronym FOMO—fear of missing out—dates to 2004. Merriam-Webster defines FOMO as “fear of missing out: fear of not being included in something.” Because I jokingly refer to myself as a “compulsive extrovert,” I can relate somewhat to the idea, which long ago went viral, but emotional and professional maturity must at some point prevail. One cannot be everywhere, and priorities are essential. We can all stop and ask ourselves why something matters. In many if not most cases, we must also ask whether it matters.

I propose that we apply the same logic to what I will now label FOBOTS: the fear of being off the stage. As Merriam-Webster’s definition states, FOMO simply relates to a desire to be included. FOBOTS is about being the center of attention. Much more ego is involved. The maturity equation here is different and far larger. The question is whether the person in the limelight is hogging (or hugging) it because of a deep need to feel important, or has some larger purpose for which he or she is uniquely suited. In the latter category, I would suggest that, while Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was frequently in the limelight, it was not often complimentary in his day, he suffered a good deal of withering criticism for taking principled positions on hugely significant issues of human rights, and he was clearly more interested in moving the agenda on civil rights than in self-glorification. He also left behind a very strong bench of independent thinkers in the civil rights movement who have continued to carry the banner long after he was assassinated. Moreover, he was still very young (39) and capable when the assassination occurred. He knew it was a possibility because of the racial hatred and violence that still exists in the United States of America, but there is no evidence that it is the outcome he wanted. No one with his skills and vision wants to be murdered. Such people do want the satisfaction of moving the moral arc of the universe, to use the biblical metaphor. To care about that, they must care about others.

So, who really suffers from FOBOTS? Certainly, plenty of politicians. The sickness today is clearly rampant because the former president, refusing to concede loss in the 2020 election despite an absolute dearth of evidence of voter fraud, cannot abide departing the stage, even when he is harming the prospects of his own Republican party by supporting primary candidates whose agenda is to help Trump exact revenge on his perceived enemies and those who refused to participate in his scheme to overturn the election. In contrast, former President George W. Bush, having served his two terms, virtually disappeared from the public stage and launched a new avocation as a portrait painter. His father, President George H.W. Bush, willingly departed the White House to allow a peaceful transfer of power to President Bill Clinton. And most notably, President Jimmy Carter, who lost re-election to Ronald Reagan, has used his post-presidency to advance a variety of humanitarian causes in a dignified manner consistent with his own Christian principles.

With Trump, however, we have the spectacle of a defeated president who refuses to concede and refuses to honor the results, and simply manufactures false accusations by the wagon load to justify his position. What is best for the country matters little; it is the loss of the limelight, the fear of being off the stage, that dominates his psyche, which was shaped by early successes in life in being able to garner public and media attention as a glamorous son-of-wealth businessman and reality television star. Sorry, Trump followers, there is nothing more there. This is not about your welfare or any agenda that benefits anyone other than Trump himself. It never has been.

If the damage were limited, however, to a continued presence of Trump in the political quarrels of the day, that would be one thing. But the sickness runs deep enough, and the mass paranoia wide enough, to allow him to intimidate hundreds of other Republican politicians who also suffer FOBOTS. The fear of being primaried by a Trump wannabe is so pervasive that almost an entire generation of Republican leadership has lost its moral stature to the point of fearing losing their own smaller stages—as Senators, U.S. Representatives, governors, and now even as Secretary of State in swing states. Only a handful of Republican leaders, notably including Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois—are willing to defy him and seek to build the badly needed new leadership that can guide the Republican party out of its moral wilderness. Notably, Kinzinger, while choosing not to run again this year, is launching a new organization to fight what he considers right-wing extremism in the Republican party.

The underlying question of FOBOTS is the emotional intelligence and maturity it takes to realize when it is time to make room for others who can follow in your wake. This requires having had some sense of a larger professional and moral purpose in life. To avoid FOBOTS, it is necessary to think through, in both moral and practical terms, what legacy you wish to leave behind. For many people around the world, that vision is focused on family, on creating opportunities for children, modest goals that do not require oversized egos, and those people should be admired. For the rare few, at various levels of public attention, the public stage is an opportunity to advance a good cause, to elevate humanity, to make life better for others who follow. FOBOTS is an indicator of narcissistic personality disorder.

There is nothing wrong with being in the public spotlight. I have occasionally enjoyed being there myself. But the question always remains: Why are you there, and what larger positive purpose will your presence serve? If you cannot answer that question with honesty and integrity, it may be time to find the exit. Use your time in the shadows to search your soul.

 

Jim Schwab

Truth and Consequences and January 6

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Reused with permission from Wikipedia

Like most people, I learned of the insurrection that resulted in five deaths and considerably more than 100 injuries to Capitol police from television news. Don’t ask me which channel; it was probably either CNN or MSNBC, but honestly, I don’t remember. I only remember what I saw—the searing image of American citizens attacking the seat of their own government on behalf of a President who lied to them because his twisted psyche did not allow him to admit that he had lost an election, fair and square. If he believes that the election was stolen, it is not because he has ever had any evidence to that effect. It is because he has repeated the lie to himself so often that he has internalized it completely. Such men are very dangerous.

There are plenty of good, well-written commentaries on the events of January 6, and it is not my aim to add another broad assessment of the day. The testimony before, and the final report of, the House Select Committee will add immensely to our knowledge, but it remains to be seen whether it can change minds. Even in 1974, as Richard Nixon was about to resign the presidency after a visit by a delegation of distinguished Republican Senators convinced him the gig was up, about one-quarter of the American public still sided with him, either disregarding or disbelieving the criminality on display from the Watergate affair. Even the most venal and corrupt politicians have always had their supporters, often until the bitter end. It is not as if the larger public is composed entirely of angels, after all. When the support fades, it is usually because the politician in question is no longer useful.

Corrupt and authoritarian politicians are almost always bullies who are highly skilled at making offers that their followers, and often others, cannot refuse. There is nothing new about this phenomenon. It is as old as civilization itself. The Bible is replete with evidence of such venality, dating back thousands of years.

So, what do I have to offer?

On the afternoon of the insurrection, I was preparing for a pair of sequential consulting meetings when the news caught my attention. That led to a mercifully brief text exchange with someone I will leave unidentified. I will paraphrase for clarity while sharing its essence. The point is not who it is, but his perceptions in the face of what effectively was a coup attempt. I understood his politics for many years beforehand; sometimes, he would needle me about it, and sometimes in recent years I was forced to terminate a conversation that, in my view, had departed earth’s orbit and no longer made sense.

But at that moment, I had to believe even this riot, insurrection, coup attempt, call if what you will, would be too much even for him. I was wrong.

I asked if he was still happy with Trump after Trump had incited an insurrection at the Capitol.

I was told that, after years of corruption that no one had challenged, except for Trump in the previous four years, “people are fed up.”

I want to step back here and make two points about this expression of frustration.

First, regarding corruption, this is a vague term that, without specifics, can be used as a broad brush against almost anything one disagrees with, and I believe that was happening here. There is, in my view, little question that corruption has at times affected both political parties. Personally, I have been perfectly willing to cross party lines to vote against candidates and office holders with documented records of corruption of any kind. I intensely dislike politicians who put self-interest ahead of the public interest. I am also aware that my disagreement with their policies does not constitute evidence of their corruption. Those are two different things, and we need to respect that difference if democracy is going to involve any kind of principled debate about what is best for our society. There are times when those lines are blurred, and times when it is clear. For instance, I was pleased last year when Democrats in the Illinois House of Representatives voted to replace long-time Speaker Michael Madigan, who had become entangled in a corruption scandal involving Commonwealth Edison Co. and its parent Exelon, with Chris Welch, who became the first Black Speaker in Illinois history. Welch may not be perfect either, but it was time for Madigan to leave. He has retired into obscurity, but he may yet face federal charges. I could name dozens of such situations in either party.

But to suggest that no one had addressed such corruption until Trump did so is ludicrous. It also demonstrates a willful blindness to facts. The litany of evidence of Trump’s shady transactions in both business and politics is overwhelming, from the $25 million fraud settlement in the lawsuit against Trump University, to the tax and insurance fraud charges now being brought against the Trump Organization by the Manhattan District Attorney, to the investigation of Trump’s demand of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to allow Trump to claim victory in that state in the 2020 election—the details have filled multiple books over many years. No matter the depth of evidence that Trump not only does not fight corruption, but personifies it, followers will insist on dismissing such evidence, almost surely without ever reviewing it. Nonetheless, it is absolutely clear to anyone reading all this, as I have, that Trump has never been the weapon against this corruption that this complaint suggests.

For those who may think otherwise, or want to better arm themselves to discuss this topic, I include a short, incomplete bibliography of Trump-related investigative literature at the end of this blog post. Beware: It may keep you occupied for weeks.

But there is also the claim that “people are fed up.” This deserves closer analysis. One could ask, Fed up with what, exactly? My correspondent cited Biden “bringing back old retreads that Obama had in his cabinet.” That is hardly a crime, of course, and may well have indicated a preference by a new president facing a crisis of confidence in government for choosing experienced people who know how to make government work. That is hardly cause for a riot, let alone a coup attempt, and I said as much, though admittedly I may have sparked further anger in referring to the corruption claims as a “bullshit excuse” for an insurrection—especially since the express purpose was to prevent certification of the election. He also noted the need for better trade agreements, for someone to “actually help the working person,” and the loss of manufacturing jobs. I would readily agree that these are all legitimate political issues, subject to debate both on the streets and in the media, and in Congress and state legislatures, but justification for an insurrection?

Reused with permission from Wikipedia

That was the red line I could not cross, nor could I accept that anyone else should be allowed to do so.

The idea that all this frustration, not all of it based on accurate perceptions, justified an attempt to overthrow an election underlines a sense of civic privilege that I find appalling. If your preferred candidate failed to make his case to the American people—and that is precisely what happened to Trump—it does not follow that the only path forward is insurrection. The presumption behind this logic is deeply rooted in white privilege, even if its advocates do not wish to consciously own that brutal truth.

After all, if anyone is entitled to a sense that they are pushing back against persistent injustice, it would be African Americans, who can cite centuries of brutal suppression and slavery prior to the Civil War, the use of home-grown terrorism through organizations like the Ku Klux Klan to suppress Black voting rights and citizenship and economic opportunity, Jim Crow laws that enforced inequality well into the 20th century, vicious housing discrimination, and violent police actions, such as those of the Alabama state troopers who assaulted peaceful demonstrators in Selma in 1965, all of which make pro-Trump protesters’ allegations of unfairness pale in comparison. Yet, most African American citizens have persisted across centuries to use what levers they have within the democratic system to achieve a more equitable society. Admittedly, there are times when tensions have boiled over, but who could reasonably have expected otherwise? I am not justifying violence, but asking reasonable people to consider the disappointments to which Black Americans have been subjected for generations before making comparisons to the complaints of the MAGA crowd.

Moreover, such issues of delayed justice have affected other minorities, such as Chinese, the subject of an immigration exclusion law for decades, the Japanese internment during World War II, and widespread prejudice and discrimination against Latino immigrants over the past century. One could go on, but the point is clear. All have sought doggedly to work through the existing system to resolve injustice.

That leads to the next element of the exchange, in which I insisted that any Democrat instigating such an attack would be accused of treason, and that to react otherwise to Trump’s insurrection is “blatant hypocrisy.” I wanted to draw direct attention to the double standard that was being applied by many Republicans in this instance. In fact, I added, “Coup attempt is crime.” Democrats made similar allegations, of course, in the second impeachment trial.

That led to the countercharge that Democrats were hypocritical in allowing “looting, burning, shooting and harassing of innocent people” in the demonstrations and riots that followed the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police in the summer of 2020. He then referred to Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot as “part of the elitist liberal problem in this country.” As with the corruption issue, we were back to the broad-brush approach to asserting problems without specifics.

At that point, I decided to end the conversation because it seemed clear that the discussion was going to veer off track. I made clear that “I have never endorsed violence and I never will.” But I added that in Trump’s case, “This is an official condoning this,” which separated it from mayors who did not like the violence in their cities, but were faced with challenges in deciding the best approach to handling it. His comments also ignored the fact that 93 percent of Black Lives Matter protests were completely peaceful. I contrasted such practical policy decisions to “federal crimes encouraged by a US president who should know better.” And with that, the exchange ended.

I realize, of course, that this is just one such conversation among millions of exchanges among friends and relatives with contrasting views across the country. I did not completely disagree with all of his concerns, but I also was deeply puzzled as to how those of us worried about the future of democracy when it is under attack by followers of a demagogue like Trump can wrestle with jello or shadow-box with phantoms, given the vague and disingenuous statements with which we are confronted, including some of his.

In the meantime, speaking of stealing elections, we are watching some amazing voting rights shenanigans, to say nothing of phony “audits,” at the state level. What will we say when the second insurrection anniversary rolls around? Will anything have changed?

 

Partial Bibliography: Recent Books on President Donald Trump and/or the Insurrection

 

Johnston, David Cay. The Big Cheat: How Donald Trump Fleeced America and Enriched Himself and His Family. Simon & Schuster, 2021.

Karl, Jonathan. Betrayal. Dutton, 2021.

Leonnig, Carol, and Philip Rucker. A Very Stable Genius. Penguin Press, 2020.

Leonnig & Rucker. I Alone Can Fix It. Penguin Press, 2021.

Raskin, Jamie. Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy. Harper, 2022.

Schiff, Adam. Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could. Random House, 2021.

Woodward, Bob, and Robert Costa. Peril. Simon & Schuster, 2021.

Woolf, Michael. Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House. Little Brown, 2018.

Jim Schwab

Fighting Lunacy with Lunacy

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Thanks to the New York Times, I learned over the weekend that birds are not real. Oh, the information has been out there, and I don’t know how I missed it. Perhaps I am just not tuned into the metaverse, being over thirty[1] and all . . . . but I just did not catch on. Now I know. I understand.

You see, the birds have long since been replaced with drones that are surveilling our every movement. It is important that all right-thinking Americans be aware of their real purpose. Join the Birds Aren’t Real movement and find out. I personally intend to alter my disguise daily when I go outside so that the bird-drones can never identify me as the same person twice. Tweet the warning. Tweet it wide.

Okay. Let me keep this blog post shorter than my usual ruminations and just point you to the Times article by Taylor Lorenz that brings attention to what I think is one of the most effective satires on disinformation that I can recall in a long time. As the article reports, “Birds Aren’t Real” is the increasingly popular fabrication of Peter McIndoe, a college dropout who moved to Memphis, but grew up home-schooled in a conservative Christian family outside Cincinnati and later in Arkansas. It began as McIndoe’s spontaneous joke against pro-Trump counterprotesters at a women’s march in early 2017, after Trump had been inaugurated. It grew on social media to the point where 20 million people have viewed a TikTok video in which an actor portraying a CIA agent confesses to having worked on bird drone surveillance. “Birds Aren’t Real” paraphernalia, such as t-shirts, are available. Why do birds sit on power lines? That’s how the drones are recharged. The whole “conspiracy” has grown its own subculture, in which followers are in on the joke and those who take it seriously, well—they’re seen as

Another instance of massive drone surveillance of a fishing community in the Louisiana bayou.

having bigger problems than just bird drones.

Some supporters apparently refer to their brand of conspiracy satire as “fighting lunacy with lunacy.” Yes, there is still a need for the House Select Committee to continue its investigation into the January 6 pro-Trump riot in the nation’s Capitol. Numerous people were killed and injured, and it is serious business. It is important for the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office to pursue the Trump Organization for tax fraud, for the New York Attorney General to continue her investigation, for charges of election tampering to be pursued against Trump in Georgia.

But we can also laugh because, if there is one thing the true believers in disinformation cannot abide, it is not being taken seriously. Trump himself, who suffered a secret humorectomy[2] by alien doctors at some unidentified point in his adolescence, especially cannot handle being an object of satire or ridicule. So, join the joke: Birds Aren’t Real. Your belly laugh at the absurdism involved will make your day and help keep you healthy.

And remember, if some bird poop lands on your head, save it for evidence. It’s all part of the plan to make you believe. Just make sure you can trust the people who do the lab test. 😊

Jim Schwab

[1] Unfortunately, I passed that age in 1980, before PCs and the Internet even existed on any large scale, but I’ve struggled to overcome this limitation. I live in fear of the solution revealed in the 1960s hippie movie, Wild in the Streets. I mean, since the 2016 election, you just never know what might become possible.

[2] This is the surgical removal of one’s sense of humor, including the ability to laugh at yourself. You won’t find the term in medical dictionaries because the coverup of such surgeries is all part of the conspiracy. If you must ask which conspiracy, you are clearly gullible and have bigger problems than the rest of us can solve. You may even have been an involuntary and unwitting victim of such surgery at a young age.