A Week In Foreign Lands.

I'm better now. But it was a rough few days.

WEDNESDAY
It took me nearly a full day to identify what I was feeling.

It wasn't anger. It wasn't fear. It was sheer astonishment. I got stuck in a state of disbelief, of not fully accepting the data, of saying at some level, "This can't be."

Once I identified that astonishment, I asked myself why I was astonished. And my answer lay in the confidence which I had developed that Hillary Clinton would simply win - a confidence largely engendered by a single newspaper column that I had read months ago.

Sorry, I don't remember the author (I gotta get better at recording stuff like this), but it was an op-ed piece written by a woman, which essentially said, "There's no way that the women of America will let this misogynistic clown become president."

That column made so much sense to me that I relaxed. I still wrote a little about Trump, and I still voted on Tuesday. But mostly, I took it for granted that women acting in their own interests, and simply asserting their own dignity, would save the day for America.

In retrospect, I see that I held on to that assumption only by not paying attention to what was in front of my face: namely, that every photo, every video that I saw of Trump rallies included lots of women.

The biggest wake-up call that I did not take seriously enough was a photo that appeared in my Facebook newsfeed not long after the Access Hollywood video came to light. It was tweeted by The Guardian's Ben Jacobs:

I found that photo the saddest and most disturbing thing that I saw during the entire campaign. But I did not let it undermine my assumption. I treated it as an anomaly, and did not let myself ask, "How many women might actually vote for this man?"

****************
THURSDAY
I find out that in fact, a lot of women voted for this man; more specifically, a lot of white women.

Mind you, Black women rejected Trump soundly: 94% of them voted for Clinton, according to CNN's exit polls.

But 53% of white women voted for Trump: a large enough number that they, all by themselves, could take credit for his win.

Realizing that triggers an intense desire to understand. I find myself wanting to speak with some of those white women. Or rather, to listen to them. I still want that. I want some white women to tell me in their own words why they not only did not vote for another white woman, but why they voted for a man who speaks about and treats women the way this man does.

In the midst of all this, I have a thought that I have never had before in my life.

"I want comfort food."

I'm not kidding. I wanted food that would make me feel better. I wanted to self-medicate with a big plate of spaghetti, covered with thick meat sauce, and with some nice big slices of garlic bread on the side.

In the absence of comfort food, I let myself experience the sadness evoked by the certainty that we're going to see a lot of suffering in America over the next few years; that America has laid herself down in a bed of thorns.

***************
FRIDAY
I think about specific groups of people for whom things might go badly - especially gay people. I think about how the Supreme Court's pass on same-sex marriage may have made many of them feel that they could fully be for the first time in their lives. And about how now a reconfigured Supreme Court could change that.

Sadness.

Hey, you know who voted for Trump in an even larger percentage than white women? White evangelical Christians. How about 81 percent?

EIGHTY-ONE PERCENT.

God don't like ugly. My fear for America is outstripped by my dread for the church: this is going to be very bad. My best hope for the church of Jesus Christ is that the next few years will drive the final nail into the coffin for cultural Christianity - the idea that to be American is to be Christian. America's Christians just elected a known adulterer, a known liar, a dishonest businessman - who doesn't believe in asking God's forgiveness - to the highest office in the land.

John Pavlovitz says it better than I can. READ THIS.

Friday night, I get together with some Christian brothers for dinner. I share that I have never had such deep and extended emotional responses to an election outcome, and say I want therapy.

I have spaghetti with meat sauce, and garlic bread.

****************
SATURDAY
It was a rough few days. But I'm better now. How are you?

POSTSCRIPT: The transition. Holy crap. Racism? Nepotism? A president-elect who needs tutoring?

Can we return to Earth now?

The thrill is gone

I think something inside me died Thursday night.

My wife and I were in the living room, watching "Rock Center," having tuned in for their story on Scientology. A commercial came on about planned news coverage of President Obama's second inauguration on Monday, and she said, ""We have to watch that."

I responded with something less than a shrug, and she said,

"You don't care." And I said,

"He's going to put his hand on a Bible and make a promise that he won't keep, and nobody will even care that he doesn't keep it."

And as I heard myself say that, it felt like something inside me had died. A few days ago, in response to the suicide of Aaron Swartz, I said that in future elections, I don't expect either the Republican or the Democrat party to offer a presidential candidate who will preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

I guess what died Thursday was the illusion that either party had done so in the last election.

Or the one before that.

Or the one before that...

And with it died the imagining that the press might press a president on his constitutional duty toward the Constitution.

I don't know what my political life will look like going forward. I do know that it will not look like November 4, 2008, when the outcome of an election made me feel glad and proud. 

A question in response to the case of Aaron Swartz

I follow Robert Scoble on Twitter. This morning (i.e., Saturday), he retweeted this from Tim Berners-Lee:

I had no idea who "Aaron" was, and initially thought he was just someone whom Scoble and Berner-Lee knew and whom some of their friends might know.

Even if the tweet had given the subject's full name - Aaron Swartz - I would not have caught the reference. I don't remember having heard of him before today.

I have spent the last hour or so getting a clue, both as to who Aaron Swartz was, and why Scoble retweeted Berners-Lee's tweet.

My first stop, CNN - whose headline summarizes both things well: "Internet prodigy, activist Aaron Swartz commits suicide."

As I began to get an idea of the scope of Swartz's achievements - co-creating RSS, developing Reddit, leading the campaign against SOPA/PIPA - I grew a little annoyed with myself for not knowing who he was.

Then I read "Remember Aaron Swartz," the official statement from Swartz's family and partner, which says in part:

"Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorney’s office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community’s most cherished principles."

And I read "The Truth About Swartz's 'Crime'", by Alex Stamos, who was preparing to serve as an expert witness in Swartz's trial for computer fraud and related charges.

And the more I read, the more I began to wonder, "Is the President of the United States responsible for the conduct of federal prosecutors?" Because if so, the prosecution of this case deepens my queasiness about President Obama, my concern about where he stands on civil liberties - a queasiness initially stirred when he signed the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, authorizing the indefinite detention of American citizens without trial.

My vote for Mr. Obama in November (which my queasiness says I should have cast differently) will likely turn out to be my last vote for either a Republican or a Democrat for president. I don't think either party will offer someone whom I can trust to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States - which in turn protects us from an overreaching government.

What can we expect?

I returned home about 45 minutes ago from lunch with a friend and found my Twitter and Facebook streams flooded with responses to the Newtown massacre, in which 27 people so far have been confirmed dead - most of them children.

...and just watched President Obama, who seemed to barely hold it together for the five minutes that it took him to express the need for America to support the parents and others in Newtown who have lost loved ones.

In the second presidential debate between President Obama and Republican Mitt Romney, held in October, this question was initially addressed to the President, with Mr. Romney having the opportunity to counter: "What has your administration done or plan to do to limit the availability of assault weapons?"

Here's how they answered:

 

The next day, NPR filed a report noting that, contrary to Mr. Romney's assertion, it is "not technically illegal" to have an assault weapon. Which raises the question, "Why not?" Why should anyone who is not active-duty military be allowed to have military-grade weapons?

The interviewee for this piece, Rebecca Metzler of U.S. News and World Report, also said that Mr. Obama's administration has been "absent on this issue."

When accepting the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 2008, Mr. Obama said one of my favorite things ever said by any politician: "the reality of gun ownership may be different for hunters in rural Ohio than they are for those plagued by gang violence in Cleveland, but don't tell me we can't uphold the Second Amendment while keeping AK-47s out of the hands of criminals."

The only way that might be improved is by adding "...and the mentally ill," which he did in answering the debate question. But when he came to the point of answering the question most directly, he mentioned reintroducing a ban on assault weapons - and then went on immediately to talk about other factors behind violence. Mr. Romney then rode that train all the way to Looneyville, and wound up answering a question about assault weapons with a recommendation that parents teach their kids to get married.

The most noteworthy thing about the above clip is that it was unusual for gun control to even come up during the debates. The second most noteworthy thing is that, even in answering a question about it, both candidates very nearly dismissed it.

And we - both the press and the electorate, generally - let them.

The question was not about violence, or a culture of violence. It was about assault weapons. And America's political discourse, and political action, have been soured by the degree to which we allow political figures to avoid answering direct questions.

And here's the thing: the debate came only three months after the Aurora shooting, in which a dozen people were killed in a Colorado movie theater, and when President Obama alluded to it, he seemed to care at a level beyond the political. Likewise, in today's brief statement, he said that America needs to "take meaningful action about this, regardless of politics." And as a parent, he was obviously deeply, deeply shaken. He cares. And who could not?

But...we are not connecting some gigantic and closely-placed dots. Mentally unstable people are using military-grade weapons to kill people, including CHILDREN, by the dozens. Less than four months after Aurora, we elected - and in many cases, re-elected - 535 lawmakers for the country. Did we know where they stand on controlling the sale of military-grade weapons when we voted for them? Did that conversation even happen?

Some folks tried to start it, but did it ever grow beyond a whisper? Does the National Rifle Association really control the people that we elected to such an extent that those Senators and Representatives can't have the conversation?

Or have the media, in reporting on the NRA's influence, bought and propagated a lie? Does the organization's utter failure to prevent President Obama's re-election mean they are a paper tiger - and should we demand that the media treat them as such? 

Either way, what can we expect of the people we put into office? What can we demand of them?

I sat down just to help myself think by writing. Now I feel compelled to ask how everyday citizens can act. Our caring is not enough. Our caring will not prevent one more madman from carrying out one more massacre with a military-grade weapon. Well-crafted laws, well-enforced, will. We just hired 535 lawmakers. How can we get them to craft those laws?

The only answer that comes to my mind is, "By insisting on it, in large numbers, loudly and daily." How should that happen? I don't know. In a web-enabled world, it is easy to petition the White House, and there are already a half-dozen petitions on its website asking for some new action on gun control, plus another petition for declaring a mental health emergency and making a conversation about gun control part of improving the country's mental health.

But a White House petition seems unlikely to affect anyone in Congress. And neither the Senate nor the House of Representatives offer online petitioning on their websites.

I don't know much about politics, but I know this about people: we can expect only whatever we are willing to accept, and no more. We who are not willing to accept more insane tragedies like today's shooting must say so, in large numbers, loudly and daily.

How can we do that?

An October glimpse of an American spring?

I just realized that Wednesday was an important day in the history of presidential debates.

No, not because of anything Mitt Romney said about Big Bird or garage banks, or anything President Obama didn't say.

Wednesday was the anniversary of an event that made the debate between Messrs. Obama and Romney possible. And not in a good way.

On October 3, 1988, the League of Women Voters issued a press release saying that the group would no longer sponsor presidential debates.

To appreciate the importance of that announcement, you have to understand what led up to it.

The League sponsored presidential debates in 1976, 1980 and 1984. In those debates, the candidates were questioned by panels consisting of between three and six journalists, representing both print and broadcast media and a variety of political leanings.

The 1988 debates featured panels of journalists, as well; but behind the scenes, a major change had taken place.

In 1987, Democratic National Committee Chairman Paul G. Kirk Jr. and Republican National Committee Chairman Frank H. Fahrenkopf, Jr. formed the Commission on Presidential Debates.

According to the commission's website, the CPD's mission is:

...to ensure that debates, as a permanent part of every general election, provide the best possible information to viewers and listeners. Its primary purpose is to sponsor and produce debates for the United States presidential and vice presidential candidates and to undertake research and educational activities relating to the debates

In September 1988, the leadership of both the George H.W. Bush and the Michael Dukakis presidential campaigns presented the League of Women Voters with a "debate agreement," including a list of demands that would give the campaigns "unprecedented control over the proceedings," according to the League's press release.

The League, saying that they refused to help perpetrate fraud on the American people, withdrew its sponsorship of the debates. Since then, the CPD has been the sole sponsor of the debates.

And since then, these things have happened:

Third-party candidates have been denied participation in the debates. With the exception of Ross Perot n 1992, no third-party candidates have participated in any CPD-sponsored presidential debates - and in 2000, the organization created a rule that could prevent third-party candidates from ever doing so. As the Center for Public Integrity writes:

To debate, a candidate must now show an average of 15 percent support in five selected national public opinion polls prior to each debate.

That famously kept Green Party Ralph Nader out of the presidential debates in 2000, and has kept other third-party candidates from participating since then.

Third-party candidates have been denied attendance at the debates as audience members. The CPI piece details how in 2000, Ralph Nader, and in 2004 Libertarian nominee Michael Badnarik and Green Party nominee David Cobb were not allowed into the buildings where the debates were being held.

The panels of journalists have been replaced by a single moderator. The last debate featuring a panel was on October 19, 1992, when Gene Gibbons of Reuters, Helen Thomas of UPI and Susan Rook of CNN questioned the candidates.

In the 12 debates since then and prior to Wednesday, there has been a single moderator - in eight of them, Jim Lehrer.

Much has been made of Lehrer's performance (or non-performance) Wednesday night. But the question so many are asking - "Why did Jim Lehrer peform so poorly?" - misses the larger question that should be asked: "Why is there no panel?"

Reducing a field of candidates to two, and a panel of journalists to one, nearly guarantees a flattening of discourse that makes it easy for both the President and his challenger to ignore truly challenging questions. I, for one, wish that a journalist would ask both Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney how they might end the so-called "War on Drugs," which has led to the U.S. imprisoning a greater proportion of its population than any other nation on earth.

The CPD is denying the American people the opportunity to hear from candidates whom a great many Americans will already vote for, and whom more might choose to vote for if they heard them. That may not be a crime, and it may not be a sin, but it's a low-down dirty shame.

However, just as Wednesday was the anniversary of the day when one could say that darkness fell on the debates, it also offered a glimpse of a new dawn.

On Wednesday night, thanks to the ethersphere, I was able to hear from three non-CPD-approved candidates: Green Party nominee Jill Stein and Justice Party nominee Rocky Anderson responded to Mr. Lehrer's questions at Democracy Now's website, and the Libertarian Party nominee, former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson, responded via Twitter.

Tracking all three of them, along with Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney, via two netbooks plus our TV, was pretty darn messy. But if my non-geek self managed, then the tools are definitely in place for expanding debates beyond the CPD borders.

Is an American spring brewing?

Watching Barack Obama

Since I dipped my toe in the water last night with Bill Clinton, I felt obligated to watch President Obama tonight. Actually, I watched most of Joe Biden's speech as well.

In retrospect, it might have been a really good exercise for me to watch as many speeches as I could during both conventions, just to learn about speechmaking. A large part of the power and position held by people who have taken the podium in both conventions has arisen from their speechmaking. And paths that I have set myself upon will require me to be a skilled speechmaker.

Thank heavens for YouTube :)

I didn't intend to watch Joe Biden, I just walked into the room and he was on. His appearance, like most of either party's national convention, made me ask, "Why is this happening?" The extent of the show, the sheer number of speeches, mystifies me, and leaves me wondering about the real work of the convention. What are people doing there, between speeches, in one-on-one conversations and small groups? And why, oh why, must there be so much hoopla?

In his weekly column a couple of Sundays ago, my friend and former boss David M. Shribman, executive editor at the Post-Gazette, called the national conventions a waste of time and money, saying that in his years as a political correspondent, "not one decision of consequence was made in the 11 conventions I covered."

Nevertheless, the conventions lumber on, and we get speeches.

For my money, President Obama's speech tonight was not as good as Bill Clinton's. Simply put, Clinton's speech made more use of facts, while Obama's speech made more use of rhetoric, and I prefer the former.

Indeed, at times when President Obama stated specific facts, he echoed President Clinton. But I will guess that he echoed other people who have spoken at the convention this week as well, that all of the speeches together were intended to sound common themes (e.g., that this election offers "a choice between fundamentally different visions for the future"). And at other times, when he began to get into specifics, he was simply drowned out by the crowd chanting "Four more years!" or "U-S-A!"

(Interjection: the "U-S-A!" chant creeps me out, and the term "American exceptionalism" scared me out of my wits the very first time I heard it. I don't care who's speaking, when someone says something like - as President Obama did tonight - "We work harder and smarter than anyone else," I stop listening. Humans are humans, nations are collections of humans, and I consider it the height of hubris to believe that American humans are inherently superior to other humans. I do believe that the nation is based on some of the best ideas ever - ideas that have never been fully lived. But I also believe that much of its success has been due to either ruthlessness or luck, including the luck to stumble upon effective ways of doing things, like property law. None of that makes Americans better than other humans.)

My biggest disappointment was that Mr. Obama did not say what I wanted most to hear from him: "Voting for me is not enough. In order for me to succeed in my second term, you need to vote for Senators and Representatives who will support me in Congress."

All that said, the moments that worked best for me were moments of phrasing, and some of those moments were outstanding:

Referring to veterans returning from war: "No one who fights for this country should have to fight for a job..." (the sentence went longer, but was drowned out by the crowd.)

Referring to Messrs. Romney and Ryan: "My opponent and his running mate are - new to foreign policy." Delivered with perfect timing and inflection.

After saying that Romney said that he would not have ended the war in Iraq and won't say how he will end the war in Afghanistan, "I did and I will."

Towards the end, he really got my attention with, "We also believe in something called citizenship." The concept of citizenship intrigues me, and challenges me on almost a daily basis.

From there he moved into, in my view, increasingly powerful rhetoric (that is a compliment, not a criticism), harking back to his first appearance at the convention in 2004 and then his nomination speech in 2008, quoting his 2008 self as saying that the campaign "is not about me, it's about you," and re-sounding that campaign's theme of hope and change. And then he laid this on the crowd:

"My fellow citizens, you were the change."

I'm getting chills just typing that. Not even because I agree, but because it's so darn good.

Then he cited some changes have happened in the past four years, not as his achievements, but as victories by the people: "You're the reason (such and such happened). You did that."

Then he pulled out stories of individuals, like Samantha Garvey, the homeless teen who became an semifinalist in Intel's Science Talent Search, concluding each with "She/he gives me hope."

In full throttle, he declared, "Ours is a future filled with hope," and then launched into a closing that, in both language and delivery, sounded like...well, activist and hip-hop artist Jasiri X may have said it best when he tweeted: "Is it Sunday already? Cause somebody's preachin."

"Yes, our path is harder but it leads to a better place..." After that, hearing him became harder, because the crowd was tearing up the place.

Yeah, he's still got it.

And here it is, in two parts:

Watching Bill Clinton

I decided to watch President Bill Clinton's speech at the DNC this evening, and within the first few minutes found myself saying, "Dang, he's good!"  And I said it again and again for the next 45 minutes.

First off, the Clinton charisma was in full effect: the ease with which he addresses a huge crowd as casually as if he were talking to a small group of friends, combined with the skillful use of gestures and facial expressions large enough to invite all of the crowd into his space.

Second, he didn't engage in name-calling or impugning character or demonizing the entire Republican party. On the contrary, he went out of his way to praise certain Republicans for certain things - President Eisenhower for enforcing desegregation, for instance.

But what he did do was, refute the Romney-Ryan ticket's claims about what President Obama has done or will do, as well as challenge their own promises. He went down a list of issues - health care, welfare reform, the national debt - and in each case produced facts that either illuminated Obama's achievements (e.g., the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act helped to produce 4.5 million new jobs) or highlighted flaws in the Romney-Ryan platform (e.g., reducing the national debt by giving $5 trillion in tax cuts weighted toward the rich).

The recitation of numbers was broken up by the use of instructional vignettes in which he would cite a Republican claim - say, that Obama has gutted Medicare - and then say, in a calmly corrective way, "Here's what really happened."

I look forward to seeing if any fact-checkers caught any errors tonight. My sense of Bill Clinton is that he is too careful to say anything provably wrong, but I could be wrong.

He was obviously preaching to the choir tonight, but I think that anyone watching tonight who was undecided might well have been moved into the Obama column by the end. In fact, I would love to see a before-and-after poll of people who said they were undecided. In further fact, I think Obama's workers would do well to download Clinton's text, divide it into chunks and memorize bullet points.

On the whole, I think that Mr. Clinton did such a good job tonight of not only countering the Republicans' claims with alternating doses of facts, humor and deep passion, but also of placing his refutation within the context of "deciding what kind of country we want to live in" - one in which "we're all in this together" or one in which "it's every man for himself" - that I almost feel sorry for Mr. Obama for having to follow him tomorrow night.

Almost.

In case you missed it, here it is (about 50 mins.). What do you think?