Dump Trump! Then Reform the System that Made Him Possible

 

We must defeat Trump again. That is obvious. But that will not be enough to preserve America's Democracy. His supporters and enablers will remain. Unless the USA carries out major reforms of its political system, the danger from anti-democratic movements will remain high. 

In the last election, in 2020, if a few thousand votes had gone the other way in several states, Trump would have won the election, even though Biden got almost seven million more votes. How is this possible? Because democracy in the US is not firmly rooted, and never has been. 

The Trump regime built on anti-democratic policies and machinations dating back decades or more, some to the very beginnings of the country. Many of them exist at the state rather than federal level. A root and branch strategy is needed to eliminate these dangers. 

Many people will say the changes I suggest are impossible. And it will be a huge struggle to achieve any of them. But many people said that all men, and later all women, could never get the vote. Many people said slavery could never be eliminated. Britain was the greatest slave trading nation in history, but after massive grass roots campaigns, Parliament abolished the slave trade in 1807 and slavery itself in the British colonies in 1833. The US required a bloody civil war to accomplish emancipation.

The Chartist Movement in Britain in the 1830s and 1840s took its name from "The People's Charter." Its goal was to establish a working democracy. The rulers of the day dismissed Chartism as utopian. But of its six demands ("The Peoples' Charter"), all but one is now law. Moreover, this was accomplished without a revolution, and only minor violence. (Image: photo of Chartist Demonstration, London, 1848)

The Chartists did not include women in their vision of democracy but that demand surfaced almost immediately, and women got the vote in two stages, in 1918 and 1928. 

I have drawn up a People's Charter for the USA: 

• 1.       Abolish the Electoral College, the anti-democratic gift that has empowered American reactionaries since slavery times. Replace it with the National Popular Vote. 
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• 2.       End gerrymandering in the states. Create an independent, non-partisan commission to draw up boundaries of congressional constituencies. This is done in the UK and other countries.
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• 3.       Overturn the obscene Citizens United decision of SCOTUS. It is responsible for hugely increasing the influence of big money in elections. Nothing like this exists in other democracies.
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• 4.       Prohibit political ads. They are virtually useless as information, misleading or untrue, insulting, and damned annoying. 
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• 5.       Introduce proportional representation or ranked voting to end the stranglehold of the two-party system. Some people will argue that this would make efficient government impossible. Ask yourself, is what have now efficient? 
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• 6.     Make the Senate representative of the country. It gives the less populated states collectively far more power than the most populated. California with 40 million people and Wyoming with only half a million have the same number of senators. This is both absurd and grossly undemocratic.
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• 7.       Make voting simple, safe, and convenient. Voting is an obligation. It should not be a survival test, torture, or a danger. Eliminate voter suppression of all kinds. 
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• 8.      Fund public education adequately and fairly. Public college and university education should be free or cheap, as it was when I went to college and university in the late 60s and early 70s. Why are we shortchanging our children and dumbing down our voters? 
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• 9.      Establish a national, affordable health care plan that covers everyone. The present for profit system is a disgrace and an international laughingstock. The system costs the US twice as much as in other developed nations, and the results are worse in terms of mortality and morbidity. Scores of millions are uncovered, or poorly covered. Health insurance must be separated from employment, which turns workers into virtual serfs.
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• 10.       Require the payment of a living (not minimum) wage for all adult workers. This should vary according to local living costs. It costs a lot more to live in California than in North Dakota.
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• 11.     Reduce the period between the election of the president and the inauguration to two weeks at most. This would have minimized Trump's ability to create havoc. In the UK and many countries, a new government generally takes over immediately after the election. This can be done because the parties have already selected the members of the cabinet and other ministers.
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• 12.     Reform the judiciary. Judges should be selected by professional bodies, not by politicians. This includes the Supreme Court, whose bias towards Trump is flagrant and dangerous. Justices of the SCOTUS and all judges should serve fixed terms, not for life. They should operate according to a code of ethics. The number of justices, currently nine, should be fixed in law.

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"Perception, 2" - nalan's paintings

"Perception, 2" - nalan's paintings

Island Sunset - nalan's paintings

Island Sunset - nalan's paintings

Spectrum - nalan's paintings

Spectrum - nalan's paintings

"Twisted" - nalan's paintings

"Twisted" - nalan's paintings

The Clown - nalan's paintings

The Clown - nalan's paintings

On the Confederacy, Civil Rights, and Donald Trump

As a boy growing up in Chicago, I fell in love with the Confederacy. It seems strange now. I was living in the state of Illinois, the "Land of Lincoln." The "Great Emancipator" was also one of my heroes. 

How could I venerate the Confederacy? I saw little lead Civil War soldiers in a toy shop. I bought boxes of Confederate ones because I liked their uniforms better than the Union ones. 

They were more colorful, more “romantic” than the dull dark blue Yankee uniforms. Ironically, toy soldiers of both sides in the war were made in the UK by a company called Britains. [Image: Confederate Soldiers by Britains.] My soldiers had red caps and a cannon. These look like plastic. Mine were lead, but lead is toxic, thus it isn't used any longer. Playing with lead toy soldiers may explain my brainless drivel.

I thought it was sad that such gallant men had lost the Civil War. The dashing General Robert E. Lee should have had the ultimate victory. He would have, I concluded, if those nasty Union Generals Grant and Sherman hadn't played dirty by outnumbering him. [Below: Lee with Gen. "Stonewall" Jackson.]

That is the level of thinking that still exists in too many parts of America today, though with less innocence than my thinking at the time. I was an ignorant little boy, with malice toward none except bullies. I knew nothing about the reality of slavery, the cancer of racism, or the true causes of the war.

Later I learned about those realities, and the viciously racist society that followed so-called emancipation. I learned that the greatest tragedy of the Civil War was not that the wrong side won, but that the victors did not go nearly far enough to ensure equality and justice. 

The attempted "Reconstruction" of the former Confederate states (1867-1876) was abandoned too early, leaving southern white elites in firm control. They passed and enforced rigid segregationist laws, violating the human rights of the emancipated. For decades, most people in other states looked the other way or were openly sympathetic. Many took part in bloody race riots, especially in the 1920s, in places like Chicago, Detroit, and Tulsa.

Between Reconstruction and the 1960s racist and racialist ideas flourished in the USA, with little if any check from government. Lynchings became common events, with the victims numbered in the thousands. 

Many films and stories, such as Gone with the Wind and Birth of a Nation, romanticized the “Old Plantation South,” glorified “The Lost Cause” of the Confederacy, and vilified or infantilized black people. The phrase "Moonlight and Magnolias" summed up this misplaced nostalgia. The reality featured the Ku Klux Klan, cross burnings, mob lynchings, and miscegenation laws.

Outside the South, de facto segregation was a fact of life. Instead of being written into law, it was enforced by isolating blacks in ghettoes through housing red lines, which ensured they would go to segregated schools by the "accident" of where they lived. 

In the 1940s, Americans of all racial and ethnic makeups fought a war against fascism and racism abroad, but nothing much changed at home, at least right away. 

Yet some minds were changing. Significant institutional and legal change, accompanied by many a tragedy, finally came with the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. Progress was uneven, but progress there was.

Unfortunately, much of that progress was rolled back during Donald Trump’s neo-fascist presidency, which brought violent racism once again out of the American closet. Under Trump, it began to seem as if the Confederacy had won the Civil War. 

Trump's defeat in 2020 seemed to herald the Confederacy's ultimate fall from grace. If Trump should win the current (2024) election, the ideology underlying the Confederacy may rise again worse than before, linked with fascism and authoritariamism. This election is that important.  

   

2024: Year of Ironies

Let's face it, 2024 has been a pretty miserable year so far, and the worst may be to come. War, famine, massacres, mass murders, school shootings, hurricanes, typhoons, earthquakes, floods, fires, increasing inequality, and mounting assaults on human rights have been just a few of the horrible events of this year. It is of course, a leap year, and humanity seems eager to leap -- into the abyss. 

Irony is an enduring feature of the human condition, but 2024 fairly drips with it. Politicians denounce war crimes and crimes against humanity, yet continue to allow arms sales to the perpetrators. (I won't name any names, but I think you can guess who I mean). Politicians vow to combat climate change, poverty, disease, and other ills, but do virtually nothing. The world should be getting better, given our vast experience and knowledge, but it is getting worse. Another irony.  

Irony extends even to the dates of key elections, though this may be evident only to those who take an interest in history. This summer in the UK, the Tory (Conservative) Party Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, called a General Election. He had to call one in 2024, the law demanded it. But he could choose the date. So what date did he choose? Well, July 4 of course, US Independence Day -- the day independence was declared from Britain. On July 4, 2024, UK voters declared independence from the Tories, who suffered a landslide defeat after 14 disastrous years in power. 

The date of the US election is similarly ironic. November 5th is the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot in Britain. In 1603, a group of Catholic opponents of the Protestant regime of James I (and VI) concocted a plan to blow up Parliament and the king at its opening. The plot was discovered just in time, and the plotters captured and executed or killed in a firefight. The date, November 5th, became known as Guy Fawkes Day, for the plotter who planted the gunpowder under Parliament.    

In the USA, no person or party can choose the date of the presidential election. The Constitution fixes it as the first Tuesday in November, in a leap year, which this year happens (karma?) to fall on the 5th. A presidential election in the USA is always a leap into The Twilight Zone. But this election season seems destined to outdo all the previous ones in its fantastically outrageous mockery of the democratic process, not to mention its sheer lunacy. 

If this were the script for a dramatic film or TV series, producers would reject it out of hand as impossible. No one would believe it for a moment. Its only hope would be to rewritten as a comedic farce loaded with slapstick and infantile dialogue, a kind of political Beverly Hillbillies. How TV news presenters can report on this election and keep a straight face is beyond me. They must have been well trained. It's a good year to be on radio.  

When was the last time a convicted felon with scores of outstanding indictments against him ran for president? This snake oil salesman, father of 10,000 lies, has been selling bibles! to the faithful to raise money for his campaign. The scenario drips with unintended irony. He doesn't read and certainly doesn't heed the GOOD BOOK. He's broken virtually every commandment on a daily basis. "His" bibles are produced in China, a country he has repeatedly threatened and condemned. But they are cheap and profits are good. Never mind that a bible is the one book you can get for free in the USA.

Nevertheless, Don Old's supporters swear that GOD sent Donald J. Trump to save America from satanic libruls and commonists who run pedophile rings out of pizza parlor basements in DC and use an infernal machine to hurl hurricanes into red states. In their eyes, the "J" in Trump's name stands for Jesus, or possibly Jenius. Somehow, he didn't manage to come up with a way to save almost a million Americans from the pandemic. Bleach didn't work.

To his MAGAts Don Old is both savior and savvy, and most important, is opposed to gun control, the litmus test of their political leaning. He agrees with them that guns are not the problem, people are. The solution therefore appears to be eliminating people, because guns without people will not be a problem. Irony leaps at us again here, given his allegedly close encounter with a high-powered bullet at a rally in July. 

Another irony arises from the fact that Trump, the convicted criminal, is running against Kamala Harris, a former prosecutor. Who will prevail in the election on November 5th, the felon or the prosecutor? The global reputation of the USA hangs in the balance, by a thread. If Trump wins, it will likely be as in 2016, not because he wins the popular vote, but because he wins the Electoral College, a racist and undemocratic relic of the Constitution of 1787. That would be ironic, if not fitting. 

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Big Brother - nalan's paintings

Big Brother - nalan's paintings

Making Way - nalan's paintings

Making Way - nalan's paintings

Stellar - nalan's paintings

Stellar - nalan's paintings

Perception, 2 - nalan's paintings

Perception, 2 - nalan's paintings

Twin Cities, 2 - nalan's paintings

Twin Cities, 2 - nalan's paintings

Twin Cities - nalan's paintings

Twin Cities - nalan's paintings

On the Pleasure of Hating, by William Hazlitt

In 1826 the English writer William Hazlitt (1778-1830) wrote an essay called "On the Pleasure of Hating." Today considered one of the great British critics and essayists, his aim in this work was to explain the power of hate as an emotion, why so many people find satisfaction in hating others. Although much of the essay relates to Hazlitt's time and personal relationships, his analysis of hatred remains relevant to the present, given the upsurge of hate and cruelty across the planet. 

[Image: William Hazlitt, Self-portrait, from c. 1802]

At the outset, it is important to note that as a young man, Hazlitt was convinced of the benevolence of human nature. By the 1820s, he had rejected that belief. In the essay, Hazlitt argues that hatred is built into our nature. We need to have something to hate to maintain "our  thought and action." The human mind hankers after evil and "takes a perverse, but a fortunate delight in mischief, since it is a never-failing source of satisfaction." In contrast, pure good is boring. It lacks "variety and spirit." 

Perhaps for this reason, he continued, old friends often begin to hate one another as the years pass by. People who once delighted us begin to bore or annoy us. Hazlitt confesses that he no longer is on good terms with close friends of the past, who included many of the literary lights of the day, such as Wordsworth and Coleridge. His staunch admiration for the cause of liberty created friction with friends who had become more conservative due to the French Revolution. They might (and did) blame his bad temper, but he countered that they fell out with each other as well.  

The worst effects of hating, Hazlitt argued, arise in relation to religion and politics. "The pleasure of hating," is "like a poisonous mineral." It perverts religion, turning it into anger and bigotry. Virtue becomes "a narrow, jealous, inquisitorial watchfulness over the actions and motives of others." It turns "the different sects, creeds, doctrines in religion" into excuses "for men to wrangle, to quarrel, to tear one another in pieces." 

Hatred "makes patriotism an excuse for carrying fire, pestilence, and famine into other lands." Love of country does not inspire any friendly feeling or disposition to help one's countrymen. It means only hatred for the inhabitants "of any other country we happen to be at war with for the time." Here, Hazlitt was thinking of Britain's wars against the French in particular. 

People claim to be "patriots and friends of freedom," but the world is divided into two types: tyrants and slaves who support the efforts of kings to forge "chains of despotism and superstition." The words and actions of fools and knaves are hailed as "public spiritedness."  

If humanity truly desired right to prevail, "they might have had it long ago." But "they are prone to mischief." In private life, "hypocrisy, servility, selfishness, folly, and impudence succeed." Meanwhile, "modesty shrinks from the encounter, and merit is trodden under foot." 

Hazlitt then turns to and on himself. He confesses to having witnessed and analyzed human "meanness, spite, cowardice;" to have seen people's lack of feeling and concern for others; to have observed our self-ignorance and our tendency to prefer "custom" over "excellence." 

All these failings lead to social "infamy," to disgraceful and appalling behavior. In his own case, they have led to disillusion. "I have been mistaken in my public and private hopes, calculating others from myself, and calculating wrong; always disappointed where I placed most reliance; the dupe of friendship, and the fool of love." He asks, has all this not given him reason "to hate and despise myself? Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough."

Perhaps these were the words of a bitter old man, who spent his last years in poverty. His two marriages had failed. He found it difficult to make a living due to his radical ideas and critiques of influential people. Or perhaps he had discovered an inconvenient truth about human nature, one that helps explain the failure of "the acme of Creation" to establish a world of peace and justice. 

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Starry Night - nalan's paintings

Starry Night - nalan's paintings

An 18th century Trump: Jonathan Wild, Thief and Thieftaker.

Jonathan Wild was a notorious Jekyll and Hyde character of early 18th century London. Wild played both sides of the law brazenly. He fenced stolen goods, working with a gang of thieves and highwaymen. 

At the same time, he acted as a law-abiding citizen vigilante who informed on criminals, earning the unofficial title of "Thieftaker General." Many of the criminals he denounced to the law were rivals and even members of his gang. (Image: Wild, by Charles Knight, 1791-1873)

Wild was born in Wolverhampton @1682 the son of a carpenter. He moved to London in the early 1700s. After being arrested for debt, he became involved in the criminal underworld, learning from and working with Mary Milliner or Mollineaux, a prostitute. Around 1712 they began to live together. He set himself up as a fence of stolen goods, and Mary operated as a madam. Somehow, he managed to hide this unsavory side and present himself publicly as a respectable citizen with a veneer of gentility. he attracted the attention of the then chief thief taker in London, Charles Hitchens, who recruited him as an assistant.

Wild was aided on both sides of the law by a surge in property crimes in the 1720s. Alarm was increased by crime reporting in London's first daily newspapers. The public was demanding vigorous action, but the authorities were hamstrung. A professional police force was more than a century away, and was opposed as a possible tool of authoritarian government. Crime prevention was in the hands of superannuated night watchmen and part-time, unpaid constables who relied on public posses (the "hue and cry") to pursue thieves. Criminals had an easy time outwitting this ramshackle crew. In a grossly unequal society growing in wealth, opportunities and incentives for theft were legion. 

Wild manipulated the legal system masterly, and collected rewards for returning goods he and his colleagues stole. When one of his gang crossed him, or demanded a larger share of the proceeds, he would "impeach" them (inform on them), sending them to jail and perhaps the gallows. Wild then collected the reward for "taking a thief." The amount, £40, would be worth about £8000 today. In 1720, Wild manged to convince the government to raise the fee to £140. 

If Wild wanted to bring a thief back into his gang, he would bribe the jailers to let them out. He also used his gang members to "take" members of rival gangs, including that of Hitchens, his former mentor and partner. The two crooks engaged in a public pamphlet war, each protesting their devotion to the law and accusing the other of criminality. Wild also accused Hitchens of being a sodomite (homosexual), which stuck and eliminated him as a threat. There is no honour among thieves. 

Wild managed to balance his contradictory persona for more than a decade. But he amassed a large number of enemies. Evidence of mass corruption in the government in the early 1720s increased public skepticism of his civic spiritedness. One of his gang members he had impeached attacked him in the courtroom and cut his throat. 

Wild survived the attack, but it left him greatly weakened, and he began to lose control over his gang. Several of them came forward and testified against him. He was convicted of theft and sentenced to hang. On the morning of his execution he tried to commit but failed to commit suicide. On May 24, 1725 Wild was taken from Newgate prison and hanged at Tyburn (now Marble Arch). A huge crowd turned out to watch the execution, the largest ever to attend such a spectacle, according to Daniel Defoe. Tickets were sold for the best viewing spots. William Hogarth produced a famous engraving of an execution at Tyburn in "The Idle 'Prentice Executed at Tyburn." (1747)

In one of history's ironies, the hangman had been a guest at Wild's wedding. An 18 year old Henry Fielding was among the throng. Wild's body was dissected at the College of Surgeons. His skeleton is on display at the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, in Lincoln's Inn Fields, London. (Image: Ticket to Wild's Execution)

Many writers, including John Gay and Henry Fielding, were inspired by Wild's career. They used the story of Wild to attack corrupt politicians, notably Sir Robert Walpole, Britain's first prime minister. Today, it is not difficult to see a parallel between Wild and Donald Trump. The former president presents himself as a great patriot and public servant, while engaging in a series of criminal and legally questionable activities. Trump, like Wild, has often thrown his associates to the wolves to save his skin. Will the course of justice catch up with Trump as it did with Wild, or will The Donald end up more like Walpole, who survived as prime minister for 21 years? American voters will decide. 

Further Reading:

John Gay, The Beggar's Opera (1728).

Henry Fielding, The Life and Death of Jonathan Wild, the Great (1743).

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