Labels

I've just discovered that I can use “Labels,” known elsewhere as 'tags,' to indicate what category(ies) each post is in, or what kind of content you can find here. You can find a list of labels I've used in the right column of this blog; clicking on a label will give you only the posts with that label. This may be useful and it may not. Here are some a list of possible labels:

• Serotonin – Actions which make us feel good but won't make a difference

• Effective Action – Actions that will changes something – anything!

• Naked Greed – Self-explanatory

• Illegal – Another nail in the coffin of the rule of law

• Misogyny

• Racism

• FYI – Just reporting on something that's happening

• Pure Politics – Just the PACs, ma'am

• Snark – I hope I don't have to use this, but I have it ready, just in case.

• Opinion – I assume there will be some of this

• The Economy – Tariffs, stock market, unemployment, and stuff

• Housekeeping – Blog business

This post will be labeled “Housekeeping.” Isn't this fun?

Viscerally Damaging

Today is Postcards to Trump day.  I walked to the Post Office yesterday and picked up a few postcards.  I have a bunch of postcards left over from the campaign, when I wrote about 850 of them to Democratic voters in swing states, but they say “Voting is Your Superpower,” which would, I think, confuse The Donald.

So I bought some blank stamped cards, and wrote four of them.  I successfully overcame the intense temptation to make my messages snarky and angry.  Nothing actually wrong with that, since no one's going to read any of the (hopefully) millions of cards being mailed today, including mine.  But stating the truth and doing it in a very concise way is a good writing exercise, so there's that.

Here's what I said:

1. President Trump:  You inherited the strongest economy in the world, and in two months you have dismantled it.  No matter what your advisors say, we will not come back from this.  Stop the tariffs.  Gary Koutnik, Oneonta NY

2. President Trump:  You came into office determined to destroy the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the rule of law.  And you did it, which makes you a fascist terrorist.  Gary Koutnik, Oneonta NY

3. President Trump:  I'm almost as old as you are.  I grew up during the Cold War.  Russia was the enemy.  Nothing has changed, except for the worse.  Your foreign policy is a traitor's foreign policy.  Slava Ukraini!  Gary Koutnik, Oneonta NY

4. President Trump:  The dismantling of the Department of Education is wildly irresponsible. You don't even know what it does, and neither does your Sec'y of Education.  Get a grip, and do some research for a change.  Gary Koutnik

OK, so I may have slipped into snark a little.  And I sure was angry.  And actually writing “President Trump” the first time made me stop and gasp for breath.  It's soooo wrong.  And it's still viscerally damaging to do it.  I walked back to the PO this morning and dropped them in the slot.  Just a tiny - really tiny - shot of feeling better.

There's also the ironic satisfaction of using the postal service to annoy Trump.  Our Postmaster General is Louis DeJoy, a Trump appointee from Trump's first term who has, incredibly, kept his job and is back in the divine light of Dear Leader.  There's some evidence that he has weaponized the USPS in support of voter suppression, so this voter used the PO to express his first amendment rights.  

A Different Country

I think this will be the last post about Gary. What I want to do in this blog is talk about governing, and politics, and the behavior of people in groups, a topic I have some expertise in, having been a psychologist for the last fifty years. But since this all comes from the trauma and sense of betrayal I felt – am feeling – about the trashing of the American experiment, and since it's designed to help me get through it, I have to answer the question: “Geez, Gary, get a grip! Why are you taking this so seriously? It's only politics!”

No, it's only America. And America, it turns out, is something I have loved dearly almost all my life.

Those who know me will not be surprised to learn that I come from a very highly structured family with pretty rigid routines. I'll spare you most of that, but this is important: from the time I was nine, when we moved in 1959, until I went off to college, we ate dinner at 6:00 sharp. Not 5:55, not 6:05. We sat down at 6:00 and the radio went on. Lyle Van, on WOR, I think. We listened to the news for fifteen minutes. Then we talked. On Wednesdays, there was “The Midweek Moment of Meditation,” when Gladys Swarthout sang “Bless This House.” I remember thinking she was a terrible singer (already a music critic), but it turns out that she was just an opera singer.

The point is – I was aware of, and engaged in conversations about, news, politics and history from a young age. I know this started before we moved, but my memories are fuzzy. The Berlin Crisis, which started in 1958, was a real scare, and those who were aware of it believed it could escalate into a nuclear exchange. I was eight years old and I knew the difference between the fire siren and the “take cover, nuclear attack” signal. Every time the siren went off, I stopped and listened carefully, my heart in my throat.

I remember what day President Eisenhower had his weekly press conference (Wednesdays), and I remember having opinions about the 1960 Presidential race, when I was ten years old. I remember winning a nickel from my friend Rod in a bet on the outcome of the 1964 Presidential race, and thinking he must be completely ignorant, thinking Goldwater had a chance in hell of winning.

It turns out that others weren't particularly ignorant – I was just particularly engaged. My mother was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, and did genealogy going back to the sixteenth century; my father was a grandson of immigrants from was then called Czechoslovakia. Our family trips were usually to historic sites from American history. In eighth grade, when I was thirteen, I decided to become an American History teacher (partly because I thought my eighth grade American History teacher was pretty cool), and never looked back.

And it's been like that ever since. I have been engaged in politics and history all my life. I almost became an American History teacher (and am still properly certified) but at the last minute I switched to School Psychology. I've voted – knowledgeably – in every election, marched in protests, slept in my sleeping bag on the lawn of the US Capitol; I've hand-written letters (the most effective kind, at the time) to decisionmakers, organized sporadically, and got elected four times to our County Board and labored in the minority the whole time. I worked briefly in a Senator's office during the protests following the Kent State killings, and much later I ghost-wrote a column about hunger for our Republican Congressman.  I listen to the NPR recording of the Declaration of Independence every July 4^th. I've driven across this country nearly a dozen times, reliving history as I drove.

And I love America. Not in the country-music way, not in the flag-waving way, but from a deep knowledge of what America is and where we've come from. A new thing, in 1776 and 1789, a daring experiment brought about by flawed but courageous men who kept at it until they had it right enough to work. I'm still awed by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights (the 3/5 compromise and the second amendment notwithstanding), and I was proud to live in a country where they stood firm against all opponents, providing Americans with the rule of law that both regulated and freed us.

And then, in my old age, I had to watch as America chose to throw it all way. It is a different country now, and not one I want to live in anymore. You might love it, you might be indifferent, you might hate it – but it's gone now. The damage, only two months into the America that we chose, is becoming more irreparable every day. Literally, every day: just read Heather Cox Richardson's daily letter.

America, you've killed something I've loved all my life. After four years of what America's turned into, The New World will be, regardless of what you thought of the old one, worse.

As I did at the beginning of the other New World blog, I'll offer up this brilliant song I heard Shawn Colvin sing on the radio this morning, a beautiful cover of the Paul Simon song “American Tune.”

But we come on a ship they called Mayflower

We come on a ship that sailed the moon

We come in the ages' most uncertain hour and we sing an American tune...

But it's alright, it's alright, for we've lived so well, so long

Still, when I think of the road we're traveling on

I wonder what's gone wrong, I can't help it I wonder what's gone wrong.

And that's why is so hard to get a grip. Something's gone wrong. Maybe this blog will help.

Enough about me. Give me some time to work on it, and we'll start a discussion about The New World ahead of us.

This Is My Something

They came at us in formation, led by the USS Mar-a-Lago, with its distinctive orange sails, flanked by the USS Tesla Cyberyacht and the well-built USS SCOTUS, captained by The Dread Pirate Roberts, once stately and respected, but now proudly flying the Jolly Roger. And there, after a while, was the USS Congress, recently captured, struggled to keep up, falling further behind for every league sailed.

And here they are, boarding our ships, killing our people, desecrating our home on the sea.  Taking whatever they want.  And no allies on the horizon, sailing hell-for-leather to our rescue.

OK.  That's where we are.  It is a new world, like pirates coming over the horizon and trashing your ship.  Say your prayers.

This blog is therapy.  I'm trying to cope with the End of America.  Since that horrifying experience on CNN on the morning of November 6, I haven't consumed news, analysis, or political anything.  I know nothing.  But it won't work.  I just can't keep on going like this.  Denial works only so long, and then you've got to get up and do something.  This is my something.

Not my only something.  I've started reading Heather Cox Richardson's daily newsletter.  She's a historian, and each evening writes the history of the day.  So it's history, not politics.  Sure it is.  History is politics, and politics – especially now – is history.

I've read somewhere recently that the “P” in PTSD is a misnomer.  The trauma isn't in the past – it is very much in the present and, given this scurvy band of pirates, in the future as well.  So we deal with the trauma as best we can because it's lurking in the shadows when we get up and when we go to sleep.  If we're particularly unlucky, it's follows us into our dreams.  It won't be over for a long time.

I promise that I'll wrap up about me soon.  This is, or will be, a blog about the political history we're making right now, and what I'm thinking about it.  Kind of like The New World, the first one.  Turns out there was no new world.  We won't be so lucky this time.

Pirates

For more than two years of the COVID pandemic - from April 2020 to June 2022 - I wrote a blog called The New World. I had this bizarre fantasy that the world would be shaken up so much that it would come to its senses and everyone would realize that we couldn't go on like we have been.  That the pandemic could somehow be a world-changing opportunity.  At the top of the blog, I pinned this thought, provided by Peter Baker in the March 31st edition of The Guardian:  

But disasters and emergencies do not just throw light on the world as it is. They also rip open the fabric of normality. Through the hole that opens up, we glimpse possibilities of other worlds.

This was exciting to me.  Thus, The New World. I read and wrote and followed trends and ideas and speculations and predictions and told a joke or two.  It got me through COVID.  That's about all it did.

After two years, and nearly 250 posts, I gave up.  Apparently, no one learned anything at all.

From my last post, in June of 2022:

But mostly I'm giving up because I'm giving up.  There is no New World... I wanted to live in the "possibility of other worlds."  I wanted the massive pandemic's disruption to wake us all up and move us forward into a new set of possibilities, where we were more able to see each other, treat each other kindly and fairly, help each other, and all benefit from "working together for the common good."  I had hoped we would come out the other side of the pandemic and say, "Wow!  We don't want to go through that again!  Let's see how we can use the world's massive resources to make life safer and more enriching for everyone."

Or something like that.  But it didn't happen, not even something vaguely like that.  Oh, things changed all right.  We're now more divided and bitter, entrenched and intractable, and as a society, we're less likely to work for the common good than we were two and a half years ago.  You've been there.  You've watched it happen.  You know it's true.

So there is, I guess, a new world.  It's a world in which those who were able to benefit and profit by the "disasters and emergencies" have consolidated those gains and become even wealthier, while those who have felt the power of those calamities are left in ruins, or, at best, left without a single lesson learned.

In America, the pandemic is not over, but it might as well be.  We have learned nothing, and are in the process of setting our clocks back 50 years.  Living in America continues to mean tolerating child murder, living without adequate healthcare, aiding and abetting historic income inequality, and elevating those who live by hypocrisy.  Here's the new world:  An America where over one million Americans died, and nothing changed.

So, welcome to the new world, same as the old world, but worse.  

This is Juan Quintero, third mate of the Pinta, adrift in some ocean, somewhere, signing off.

Just for fun, I would occasionally take on the persona of a member of Columbus' crew - Juan Quintero (the third mate's actual name) - and used the analogy to illustrate where we might be in our journey.  Say what you will of Columbus - he found the new world, and we didn't.

So we're still adrift on some ocean, somewhere - and - OMG - it's pirates.