1 January

Movie Review, Avatar 2: The First Trillion Dollar Screen Saver, Said One Critic. Maria Closed Her Eyes And Meditated For The Last Hour. She Didn’t Miss A Thing

by Jon Katz

Disappointed is a kind way to put my response to this movie. In fairness, two films are strung out interminably together (three hours, 12 minutes), and that was too bad since the whole film would barely fill up a 30-minute cartoon in terms of pace and plot.

One of the movies was good, one was awful.

The first Avatar has almost become a cult religion; people loved it so much. It was original and graphically powerful.

James Cameron liked it so much that he decided to do it again with some snazzier 3-D and high frame rate smoothness technology and gorgeous water scenes.

Cameron spent too much money to make this film, just like a kid in a candy store. The result was boring and leaden.

Avatar 2, The Way Of Water, revisits the Na-Vi (no subtlety, get it?) tribe from Avatar One. These people live happily, even idyllically (the point is to make us feel even worse about the persecution and slaughter of our own Native Americans).

The environmentally sound family of Sully and Neytiri are living in bliss with their children, stepdaughter Jurum and a kind of feral human boy called Spider.

Their beautiful, sappy,  and troubleless existence is shattered by the arrival of an ex-human mutant Marine with someone else’s mind inserted into his brain.  

He was awakened in a Frankenstein way and restored to consciousness as a giant murderous super marine posing as a Na-Vi and sent out to fool and find and kill Neytiri, who has been leading the resistance against the evil Sky-People (you know they are evil because they destroy the environment and torture and kill animals, many times and at great length.)

Cameron has all the time in the world. He blew his budget all the way to Mars. The middle of the movie, if you last that long, is worth the wait.

The color and graphics are mostly stunning, especially in 3-D, which Cameron loves, but it is the technology the rest of Hollywood forgot.

But it was not as stimulating or beautiful as I hoped, and honestly, it was not all that different from the first movie. I guess that one was a bigger shock and hard to top.

The movie is stuffed with all kinds of incomprehensible gibberish, from all the spiritual water chatter (we are one, to fish and plant spirits underwater to the stilted, almost humorous “wise man” voices of the tribe leaders.

I think Cameron thinks the people who come to see his movies are dumb.

In this movie, whales talk (before getting harpooned and torpedoed and the sea itself is full of supernatural powers, but hardly ever seen when they were really needed.

The underwater sequences, which the movie abruptly turns to for yet another hour, are almost worth the rest of the messy, dumb, and nonsensical film.

Frankenstein-of-the sea tries to kill the Na-Vi children but bungles it at least a dozen times before finally nailing one.

The children in that family seem to have one near-death episode a minute.

Even that gets boring. The Marine Monster (he is taller than the other evil human) is in ferocious pursuit on and off throughout the movie, threatening and killing and maiming all the way along.

He is cruel but without any style or menace. I’ll take the Joker any day of the week.

Neytiri is curiously averse to fighting for a resistance leader. At the first sign of trouble, he takes off, leaving the tribe to take care of itself. Forget the destruction of the planet, he says, a dad has to protect his family.

He is no Che Guevera and lacks the superhero personality and steel we have come to know so well. He’s squishy.

And absolutely no one in this movie has a sense of humor, cracks a joke, or has any fun. There is comic relief and wise cracking even the gloomiest Batman movies.

The kids are even grim when they are playing, which is mostly indistinguishable from when they are fleeing for their lives.

The Sully family flees to another island community – “sea” people live there, the newcomers are “forest” people – and ends up in another apparent Eden.

We know this can’t last long, and of course, it doesn’t. Cameron is reminding us to be welcoming and inclusive.  The villagers didn’t get the message. They don’t like “forest” people.

For the next hour of the movie, the bad guys show up with a sea-born armada that would have made the D-Day invasion look like a Church picnic.

Every boat had massive firepower (but dreadful aim) and nobody seemed able to hit what they were shooting at (except for some whales.)

The sea morphed again, this time into the land of a thousand big and loud fires and explosions.

The pristine sea turned into a Gulf Of Mexico oil fire and spill.

I don’t know how many of you out there would enjoy seeing friendly and spiritual giant whales tortured and slaughtered for what seems like yet another hour, but it didn’t work for me. I got squirmy.

I groaned by the end, but there was one more tortuous hour coming,  the eternal final battle scene between the Native Americans (you got it, right, Na-Vi?) and the rich, greedy, vicious humans who can’t wait to butcher people and ruin their culture (get it?)

Almost every one in the movie was killed many times, but they were just kidding. The Sully family had way more than nine lives.

(At this point, Maria stopped watching and meditated for an hour. She didn’t miss a thing.)

In the first Avatar, Cameron moved almost surreally between land to sea-based existence. It was a beautiful, exciting, original triumph, and creative pizz-azz.

Avatar 2 was as vital as a sponge for most of those three-plus hours.

But even the lovely visual underwater images felt flat because Cameron overwhelmed his own movie by spinning out of control and choking it with money and pomposity.

When you are that big and successful (Titanic, Avatar One), nobody can tell you when to stop, so you never do.

The Guardian newspaper’s critic Peter Bradshaw wrote that the “floatingly bland plot  is like a children’s story without the humor, a YA story without the emotional wound, an action thriller without the edge of real excitement.

Ouch, but true.

Sometimes less is more. Avatar 2 could have lost a couple of those hours and been twice the movie.

This final battle (the ones that pull in 14-year-old boys involved at least a thousand water tanks, boats, planes, robots, greedy and slimy bastards, missiles and torpedoes, and depth charged against a handful of peaceable natives with bows and arrows and flying pterodactyl- like shrieking birds.

I lost count of the twists and turns at the ending; it could have been a movie all it’s own.

Are we over four hours yet?

Half of the movie was candy to look at, and a half was incomprehensible. In trying to make heavy political points and buy the most expensive toys Cameron forgets how to make a good movie.

The message: Humans are ruining the earth, the water is one (whatever that means), and we keep destroying other people’s habits and paradise.

We don’t need to be hit over the head with it. Or maybe we do.

Is there anyone out there who doesn’t know this? Cameron had too much money to spend -360 million dollars. It was too much, too long, too loud, too violent, and too stupid.

I know millions worshipped the first Avatar, and I wish I had better news to bring them. Maybe I’m just wrong.

True Avatar fans can only hope.

19 November

One Man’s Truth: It’s True, Hannibal Lecter Is Running Our Country Right Now

by Jon Katz

“Remarkable Boy. I Do Admire Your Courage. I Think I’ll Eat Your Heart. – Presidential Candidate Hannibal Lecter in 2024, speaking to a cheering fan at his first campaign rally.

____

You are probably familiar by now with the story of President Trump calling a GOP canvassing board member in Wayne County, Michigan Tuesday who announced Wednesday she wanted to rescind her decision to certify the results of a Biden victory in her state.

The President wasn’t calling to pressure her or influence her, said Monica Palmer (who may already be struck by lightning), but to comfort her about the death threats she said she was receiving and to cluck sympathetically about the very credible accusations of racism against her.

This struck two chords in me: One was jealousy. From the day I started writing about politics and our President several months ago, I’ve received at least one death threat a day and many more on my best days.

Even my sister hasn’t called me to console me about them.

I called the White House switchboard immediately and was indignant and gave them my cell number. “I’ll be sitting by my phone,” I said, “I can’t wait for the President to comfort me.” 

I am still waiting.

The second feeling was a quickening heartbeat at the idea that the President of the United States might actually care about me, someone who can’t influence the election in any way but is still being threatened with death and worse.

I wondered if he’d ask about the donkeys.

This was sobering. So was the fear. I didn’t want to take a call from Hannibal Lecter.

I’m worried about Monica; she might end up like Lindsey Graham, his eyes glowing and his head spinning around and around when the sun goes down. If we survive all of this, think of the stories we can tell our kids and grandkids about 2020.

_____

I admit I didn’t want to believe that our President is mentally ill.

I didn’t want to go there, like the media and the Republicans early on. I see now that what the shrinks have been almost desperately trying to tell us for years is true.

Writing about politics made me a little pompous and guarded; I wanted to be statesmanlike, open-minded, above the fray, you know, not one of those radical left socialist people. But you know what, in recent days, I’ve come to realize all of us are the fray.

President Trump is a sociopath. He is severely ill. I expect we will survive it, but it’s past time to be denying it.

Looking back,  he has been carefully planning for some time to make sure that almost no one in the country would believe this about him once it became obvious, and we all could see it.

He is clever as a fox, but it’s not really intelligent; it’s worse than that, something more feral and ancient.

For years, he’s been carefully inoculating his followers to distrust any criticism of him from any source. And he did a great job.

He knew this moment of reckoning would come; even if most of us didn’t, people would start asking questions. The shrinks would come out of their holes. He would be ready.

By that time, nobody would believe anything bad anybody said about him, lying and cruelty were perfectly normal.

That’s the benefit of paranoia. Paranoids are always well prepared. The rest of us stumble along, our heads up our butts.

First, Trump neutralized the media by declaring that any news organization or journalist that spoke poorly of him or asked him tough questions was perpetuating “fake news” and was an “enemy of the people.”

The people agreed.

He even admitted what he was doing. “I attack them,” he told a columnist in 2017, “so people won’t believe it when they say bad things about me.”

He neutered the once proud and independent Republican Party by attacking and driving away any Senator or candidate who spoke poorly of him or was not “loyal” enough.

Almost all of them are gone. The rest are scared witless.

(We can stop waiting for the GOP to stand up and speak out. There is no GOP left.)

President Trump silenced independent bureaucrats, law enforcement officials, legally enabled whistle-blowers and people with independent viewpoints by firing them, brutally attacking them on Twitter, demoting or humiliating them, accusing them of treason and conspiracy.

He created a whole “Deep State” amusement adventure park, full of mysterious and evil spies and traitors, all of them sent to do him and stop him from saving the people from communists and swamp creatures.

He figured out how to drain the swamp, he became the swamp.

He trashed the legal opposition, the Democrats, by launching countless conspiracy theories on his Twitter feed and accusing them of being “devils,” “un-American,” “radical leftists,” “socialists,” (now somehow, a crime in America.)

He ran out one Attorney General to replace a loyal one, protecting his flank and his buddies from justice.

He brushed aside long-standing allies of the United States and critics of his policies by calling them lazy, ingrates and welshers.

He wrote love letters to dictators and despots and argued he was just trying to make peace.

Sadly, he persuaded many of his gullible and weak-minded followers to follow him blindly by exploiting their grievances and fears, and by labeling any criticism of him “Trump DerangementSyndrome (TDS). Just three letters could dismiss any critic for any reason.

This was a new trick.

Is there anyone in the world left who might challenge or criticism him that his followers might believe? I’m not sure.

For four years, psychologists and psychiatrists felt wrongly silenced by outdated psychiatric rules forbidding them to talk about people they haven’t examined.

It turns out that the people best qualified to spot the dangers of this broken President were the ones who couldn’t talk about it. How dumb are we? They are talking about it now.

Trump saw this danger coming years ago, as the invariably paranoid sociopaths often do. He’s been getting ready, and he seems to be smarter and craftier than almost all of the people who have confronted him.

Like the Joker himself, Trump outdance and maneuver anybody.

To be safe, he’s stuffed the courts with extreme – and often unqualified – judges in the hope they will bail him out if all else fails.

(This is his one malevolent hedge that seems to be failing. The “originalists” he so favored love state’s rights and hate government intervention. They aren’t buying into the coup.)

The question has surrounded Donald Trump ever since he began his campaign for president, writes Dr. Lance Dodes, Supervising Analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute, and a former Harvard Professor of Psychiatry.

Can a person who is “repetitively immoral – who cons others, lies, cheats and manipulates to get what he wants, doesn’t care whom he hurts just as long as he is gratifying himself – whether such a person’s indifference to the feelings of others for personal gain is just clever: crazy like a fox?”

Or are these actions a sign of something much more serious? Could they be symptoms of a significant, even extreme, mental derangement?

Dr.Does ask that question a couple of years ago. I think almost all of us know the answer now, watching the leader of the free world undercut, smear, and severely damage and cannibalize the safest and most honest electoral process in the world.

I am perhaps one of the last people to accept that our President is mentally ill. In my mind, and as one who has been diagnosed as mentally ill (generalized anxiety disorder), I’ve always struggled to find the line between dysfunction,  abuse, and mental illness.

The longer I live, the more I believe the crazy people are the only ones who are sane. But it looks like I was wrong.

Watching Trump ignore the raging and increasingly tragic pandemic and spent his day locked up in the White House between golfing treks to Virginia and hundreds of tweets, I saw a sociopath very clearly.

There’s no more grey.

He’s crossed the line and then some.

His efforts to overturn the election of Joe Biden and his refusal to help in his transition to power increase the genuine danger of killing people in a time of genuine crisis.

Delaying a vaccine distribution and sharing critical information about medical supplies to health care providers are acts out of a Superhero movie.

We are waiting for Captain America or Iron Man to show up and start smacking some senators around.

By permitting people to die out of self-interest and malignant narcissism takes Trump out of the realm of scheming politicians and into the realm of Hannibal Lecter.

The familiarity of normal empathy is central to sociopathy, which is diagnosed as an absence of guilt, obsessive manipulation, and controlling or even sadistically harming others for personal power or gratification. People with sociopathic traits have a flaw in the basic nature of human beings. Rather than being “clever” and “telling it like it is,” they are missing an elemental part of being human.

This is why, say, the shrinks, sociopathy is among the most severe mental disturbances. Because Donald Trump doesn’t care if anybody dies because of what he does. When I think about that, everything is clear.

I’ve learned a lot this week about sociopaths; I’ve finished several classic texts on the subjects.

Generally, there are two paths for people with severe sociopathy. Those who are not skilled at manipulating and hurting others, who are not careful in choosing their victims, and who lack the gift of charm well enough to fool people have lives that often end in suffering and failure.

But those gifted at manipulation, who can appear charming and caring, who deny their immoral and illegal behaviors, can often bully their way to the top, even of a nation. They rarely end up in prison.

The psychiatric term for these people is “successful sociopaths.
They are the ones who fool others into thinking they are “crazy like a fox,” but not really crazy.

Then there’s the scariest part, the Hannibal Lecter part: the empathy of the predator. The tiger is “empathetic” with its prey, that’s how they catch them, but they are not sympathetic or caring. Successful sociopaths are like that, they are closely attuned to their victim’s emotional state, which makes them geniuses at manipulation.

Trump leaves unsuspecting bodies all over the place, just ask John Kelly or Senator Graham.

Trump is giving an awful name to foxes.

Even the rages and tantrums of sociopaths can be hidden or appear normal. They are prone to firing people and suing them. As their power increases, their ability to disguise their mental disturbance may also increase, concealed behind walls of underlings happy to do their dirty work or armies of lawyers to threaten their enemies.

Different diagnoses use different words for the essential traits of the sociopath: sadistic, unempathetic, cruel, devaluing, immoral, primitive, callous, predatory bullying, dehumanizing.

I take no pleasure in seeing that everyone perfectly fits the 45th President of the United States, the darling and avenging angel of the Christian Nationalists who take the name of Jesus in vain.

The truth is sociopaths are severely and emotionally ill.

It’s only right to end this piece with another Hannibal Lector quote, which eerily fits:

“Cruelty is a gift humanity has given itself.”

31 August

One Man’s Truth: Trump, King Of The Angry White Boys

by Jon Katz

Watching Donald Trump’s excited MAGA Angry White Boys (I have yet to see a black MAGA in a pickup with a giant flag flapping) in the wind, I keep flashing back to my time on a neighborhood playground when I was in middle school.

Mostly the angry little white boys had little to do with me, a Jew from another neighborhood. Sometimes they let me bring my  toy pick up with a big bed full of big blue bubble gum balls to throw at the smaller kid and then run and hide.

It was fun, then. It’s different now.

If you want to understand the election, match the behavior of 10-year-old boys that you know to our President Donald Trump, and the Angry White Boys he lead, and you will have a much better sense of what has become of the presidential election in 2020 and how to understand the madness that has slowly enveloped our country.

When Mary Trump says Donald Trump is a little man, not a big one, she wasn’t kidding.

The angry white men, simmering for years at their displacement,  have a leader to follow as they make their last stand against the armies of women, Blacks, people of color, elitists and eggheads, young people, scientists, ministers, journalists,  and anyone with a college degree.

Trump isn’t just the leader of the Angry White Men, he is one of those playground kids  personified – bullying, lying, complaining, name-calling, disrupting, disturbing.

Our country is in the hands of An Angry White Boy, who has never grown up to be a man. He commands a growing Army of other Angry White Boys, they are his shock troops.

This is the Last Stand of the Angry White Men, their time is coming,  and they have their General Custer tweeting them on, ignoring the warnings and advice of all the wise men around him and gathering his boys in a circle.

Come and get us.

If we’re going down, we’re going down fighting.

I admit that I loved being one of the bad and angry boys during my brief appearances in the playground. It made a weak and frightened boy feel strong and fearless, at least for a few minutes.

You can either eat lunch or be lunch, said my father. It was pretty heady to be eating lunch once in awhile.

As the 2020 campaign gets red hot, our new national Man Child and Lucifer is tweeting to his legions to get the pot boiling so he can frighten enough suburban “housewives” and fence-sitting independents into voting for him and winning re-election.

You can wonder when our country went stark raving mad, but you have to admit this one of the most interesting countries on the earth. No one ever imagined we would get here.

The Angry White Boys are now Angry White Men and they are watching Fox News and appearing regularly in cities where Black Lives Matter protesters are marching and are vocal. BLM is just about everything these angry and resentful frightened boys fear.

Over the weekend, hundreds of them drove their trucks into embattled  Portland, looking for a fight, tossing objects into protesters and pepper spraying them when they could. They were clearly out to spark some more violence, so their leader could vow to stop it.

Sadly, they got a fight, a member of a far right-wing Christian organization was shot and killed.

Trump also got what he was looking for, a jarring symbol of chaos and discord. In his campaign, Trump is pretending that Joe Biden already won and is President and he is campaigning against him to clean things up. The scary thing is that he seems to believe it.

It worked the first time. Why not try it again? Again.

The good news is that Biden is rising to the challenge, the contrast between him and Donald Trump could not possibly be greater.

These images over the weekend were revelatory to me.

An epiphany.

They brought me back to the middle school playground and helped me understand what I was seeing in those videos. I saw that we have a President who is really a child. No wonder he relates to them so easily.

I keep remembering that the most popular toy among the boys were blue and red pick-up trucks. Many of them wore baseball caps.

They loved to play with those American flags on sticks and attach them to their pick-ups. Those with battery-powered trucks formed parades and marched around the playground, flags flapping in the wind.

They loved to frighten and annoy people. They loved to throw things at unsuspecting passers by. They loved making trouble and being in trouble.

Sometimes they were soldiers, sometimes they were fighting Russians, sometimes Native-Americans, sometimes criminals. Sometimes the victims were anybody who walked by.

They were already angry, even then, I recall, testosterone mixing with a grievance.  The secret formula of Trumpism. Everyone is out to screw us, everyone is taking advantage of us.  Their hero was the Joker or other bad guy stars of the comics of the time. Superman was too much of a goodie-goodie.

Now that I think about it, they were already full of grievances. They were always complaining, they all had chips on their shoulders.

They hated the teacher’s pets. They hated the Jews, who they thought were all rich and scheming. They hated the Blacks who they thought were all thieves. They hated the poor people who they thought were all lazy. They hated the teachers, who pressured them and punished them. They hated the Irish, who they thought were all drunks. They hated the Chinese, who should go back to their country.

They hated anyone who had authority over them and tried to use it.

And a lot of them hated their fathers, as did I, for not understanding them or caring about them.

When it comes back to me, and I watch the news, it is startling to match this memory up to this reality. They seem just the same to me. But as I look back, I know they never had a leader before, celebrating and reflecting on their anger and victimization, cheering them on.

Can you really be a bad guy when the leader of the Free World is showering glowing tweets on you?

The boys had slingshots and big fat chewing gumballs to spit out at other people watching in the playground. Some threw firecrackers.

Almost all of the boys had toy guns, plastic, or “cap” guns and they were always waving them at one another and shooting at real or perceived enemies. A lot of them had slingshots, to fire pellets at kids riding their bikes by the playground. I wasn’t really good with guns or trucks, I was just trying to fit in.

I usually was excluded from the fun. Sometimes I wanted to belong, but I knew I was kidding myself. I’d never get in.  They didn’t trust me.

Just as well, I got some fish instead and became a fish nerd.

Honestly, if you teleported these kids into the future, they could easily have been the men in that Portland parade, every one of them, from what I could see, young and white. Many standing up in their truck beds, firing pepper spray, and waving their Trump flags.

Testosterone meets Trumpism. Perhaps both are the same thing.

These young men, these angry young white MAGA men, are not ideological. They are not interested in political discussions or arguments about governing systems. They have no respect for disagreement or dissent. They are terrified of women displacing them.

People who want to talk about things don’t go riding through towns and cities in big parades showing off their rifles and tossing urine bottles at opponents.

They are not normally into politics, but until now, politics was never fun like this is. Now, they belong. Now, the reporters are, and school teaches and parents are paying attention to them. Now the smart kids and stuffpots are afraid of them.

They are having fun, just like the kids in the playground.

They are bad and angry again, scaring old ladies and men again, tormenting elitists and liberals, and best of all, riding around in parades of big pickups with giant flags.

I’m not sure they really represent the spirit and meaning of those American flags, but it doesn’t really matter. The flags are props, toys. They don’ signify patriotism, they signify rebellion, and perhaps that is an American trait.

The young man killed during the parade was a tragic sacrifice. And for what? How brave to you have to be to ride in a parade of hundreds of trucks and shout at people and wave your rifles and throw things at them?

Adolescent boys and young men live for moments like this Portland Parade in their dreams and fantasies.

They imagine themselves in victory parades, showing their flags, scaring the hell out of everybody,  blowing gum at their critics and rivals, driving through town, throwing things at people.

Since the playground days, they never got to do this until now. I would bet none of them have been in political parade their whole lives.

President Trump, the Godfather of the Angry White Men, has given them a chance to live out their dreams and fantasies. And to be important.

It’s becoming clearer by the day that Trumpism is about angry white men and some angry white women. Nobody else is really welcome. Nobody else is joining the parade.

The term “Angry White Male” is described in Wikipedia as a “derogatory term,” but more and more, I see it as a descriptive one. It is the point of this election.

The term commonly refers to a political voting bloc that emerged in the early 1990s as a reaction to perceived injustices faced by white men in the face of affirmative action quotas in the workplace.

Angry white men are characterized as having animosity toward young people, women, or minorities, just like their leader.

Trump supporters have been described by some political commentators and liberal-leaning media companies as angry white men. That is a generalization, of course, and it doesn’t tell the whole story.

Lots of white women feel alienated by their government and angry about their lives as well. They don’t seem to be having as much fun as the MAGA boys, with their big red hats, guns and pickups.

When else could they ride around disrupting and scaring people and getting praised by a President? When else could they be part of an enraged populist movement without really bothering to engage in the democratic system’s work at all?

I feel like a broken record. This won’t work either.

Once again, I believe President Trump has greatly overplayed his hand. He grabs onto a legitimate issue – how to deal with unrest – and turns it into a racial or cultural war.

In so doing, he eliminates any opportunity for dialogue or empathy or compromise and forces everyone to separate and take sides. This, not his conservative politics,  is what most people are sick of, and this is what will do him in.

I fear for the Angry White Boys when Trump is gone. Only he could have gotten this far with it. I don’t think Ivanka and Donald Jr. are up to it.

19 July

One Man’s Truth: Donald Trump, “The Best Possible Thing..”.

by Jon Katz

I don’t mean to break up anyone’s pity party, but if you care to know what is happening to our country, I’d suggest stepping way back to learn how Donald Trump and at least four separate crises may very well be bringing back the American Dream.

In my humble corner of the world,   we lazy, timid and complacent citizens are getting the ass-kicking we need and deserve to awaken us to the promise of our quite wonderful country, still great after all these years.

The grim part is our daily, round-the-clock awareness of so many national failures at once – the tragic and unnecessary bungling of the coronavirus, racism, a hallowed out federal government, health care, and the crumbling economy.

It’s a lot to endure.

But as always happens with challenge, there is a great opportunity. “A Republic, if they can keep it,” said Benjamin Franklin.

Donald Trump, who has chosen to be an avatar of racial resentment and human neglect, has been outed and revealed by the crises he faces.

He’s sinking by the day, proving almost every time he opens his mouth that his niece Mary Trump got it right; he is not fit to lead.

Yesterday, the father of the Chlorox Cure looked an interviewer right in the eye and said he had been right about the virus much more than anyone, including Dr. Fauci.

He can’t empathize, he can’t manage his way out of a paper bag, he surrounds himself with amoral sycophants and has wedded himself to the failed and darkest impulses of our tormented country.

It doesn’t get much lower than that. History will know him for it.

But look at the good he has spawned.

White Americans have suddenly awakened to the startling news that blacks have been right all along – racism in America does exist, and if you don’t believe it, there are some videos for you to watch.

The pandemic, along with the video,  has become a deadly but powerful force for truth and change. I wonder if, in some Biblical way, this year is the price we had to pay for electing someone like Donald Trump in the first place.

If you believe in voodoo, someone stuck a doll in us. We had it coming.

Americans are learning how important government can be, and how crucial free health care is. There’s a difference between shaking things up and recklessly destroying them.

As they get furloughed and laid off by the millions, their health care cut off, their savings gone, they know how important a fair and balanced economy is, and how much a rational and caring leader can mean.

And perhaps most important, Americans are learning that you aren’t to blame if you find yourselves poor and vulnerable.

We are learning that the country can’t work any longer if it’s just for the white, the male, the rich. More and more of us are accepting that. The culture of whiteness is fading out, even dying. They will not go quietly, and they are not going quietly.

But still, some form of affordable health care reform is now inevitable, immigrants have never had more sympathy and support, the Dreamers are still with us,  communities all over the country are re-imagining, not defunding,  policing, and the President is lying and denying himself into the biggest imaginable kind of hole.

His many enemies didn’t figure out how to do him in, he did it all by himself. Go figure. Perhaps he will learn that he isn’t a stable genius after all.

I know the pundits love to say anything can happen, but I think it’s too late for this poor and broken man. Just look at him, his face tells all of it. He’s done.

I have no crystal ball, but the evidence is pointing to a landslide by Joe Biden, and there is great momentum building for a takeover of the Senate as well.

None of these things would be happening if we didn’t have such a lousy year or such a nasty, loony-toons leader.

When the country is clamoring for truth and guidance, he offers none.

When the country needs to hear from doctors and scientists, they are silenced and undermined. When the country needs to learn how to heal its racial wounds, they are being opened almost daily.

And when the country needs to stop honoring the defenders of slavery, they are being guarded by roving men in green, who hide behind their federal riot gear, they are the President’s new personal palace guard.

President Trump has gone off the rails, his ranting about saving our civilization sounds like cartoon dialogue out of Batman or Dick Tracy.

What he is doing is persuading more Americans every day that voting him out of office is what saving civilization means.

Dr. Anthony Fauci is three times more popular than the President, and a hundred times more respected.

And he’s right about Trump: the President’s cowardly and juvenile campaign against him is hurting him, not helping.

Some politicians speak out of both sides of their mouth, Trump speaks out of five or six.

Why is this bad news a reason for hope and excitement?

Because all of it is awakening much of the country to what it means to be in a democracy, to care for the poor, to staff government responsibility, and to spread the wealth to people who are learning every day what it means to have none.

Trump’s supporters will get the shake-up the asked for, but perhaps not the one they wanted.

There is growing evidence that at least some of his supporters are beginning to see that he is their problem, not their solution.

But it doesn’t matter anymore. Trump has awakened us, and also the Democratic Party, suddenly drowning in money and volunteers from all over the country.

Joe Biden’s campaign motto ought to be: “Do No Harm, Stay Home.” It isn’t the Lincoln-Douglas debates, but it’s sure working.

It’s hard to see things when we’re too close. Sometimes you just have to step back.

In America, the working class has become the new poor, and a powerful new coalition is forming that could dramatically alter the course of our history – white women, African-Americans, Latinos, college-educated white men,  disenchanted working-class people, reluctant young people with nowhere else to go.

A couple of decades ago, the Republican Party, Richard Nixon, and the conservative political movement all decided together that black people, immigrants, and poor people had become dependent on a government gone soft.

The timing was right for them. Americans have always been afraid of blacks, but more so in the ’60s.

Blacks were rioting in some cities, the South was looking for a more compatible political party, and working-class whites were beginning to feel betrayed and abandoned.

The conservatives believed it was within the power of the poor of the needy and vulnerable to pull themselves up to good health and prosperity all by themselves, an act of will,  just like the pilgrims were alleged to have done when the country was founded.

At its worst, these policies were blatantly racist. At their best, there was a belief that the government could smother ambition and drive if it did too much.

Conservatives and Republican legislators began a fierce and relentless movement – still very much underway – to cut back the size of government, reduce benefits, block health care reform, remove all restrictions on runaway wealth, undermine the unions that helped build a middle class that was the envy of the world, and flood the political process with money and conservative judges,

These judges allowed even more corporate money to flood our political campaigns, marginalizing individual citizens who weren’t wealthy.

The idea was that the economy would grow so quickly that everyone would get a slice of the pie. They forget to do the last part.

To accomplish this, billionaires, Republicans, CEO’s and business lobbies first had to convince the white middle and working-class- at the time prosperous and relatively secure –  that African-Americans and other people of color were a grave threat to their well being and were getting the help they weren’t getting, but that belonged to them.

They succeeded. Now, nobody is getting any help except wealthy corporations with their tax breaks.

Working-class white people swear to this day that an elitist spoiled billionaire President (who wouldn’t be caught dead hanging out with working people at Mar-A- Largo) and who is totally in the grip of the billionaire class, is their friend and advocate.

The Republican Party now opposes and blocks welfare programs, food programs for poor children, immigration, job training, universal or even affordable, health care, gun control, massive opioid interventions, or any of the things that might elevate the poor and needy.

To do this would almost certainly require raising some taxes on the one percent of the country that now owns 40 percent of the wealth. Those people would rather die.

This war on the needy has been successful beyond Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan’s wildest dreams.

But here’s what no one expected: in the past 40 years, working-class whites and rural Americans have been hit as hard or harder than most African-Americans, immigrants, and people of color.

Today, the middle-class has traded places with the people they feared: they are the working class and are increasingly needy.

Last year, a Federal Reserve study found that almost 40 percent of American adults wouldn’t be able to cover a $400 emergency with cash, savings or a credit card charge that they could quickly pay off.

These government policies have left the United States the only advanced country on earth without universal health care, some gun control, or unlimited paid sick or maternity leave.

When white working-class people had money, they didn’t care about those things, they were persuaded that paying to help the poor was treasonous in some way. So are the millions of people losing their jobs in the layoffs that continue as the virus worsens.

The pandemic is persuading them to care. They are as vulnerable as any other group without resources to spare. And the economic reality is right up in their faces. White people can need help, too.

This isn’t just about them. It’s about all of us, or 99 percent of us, anyway.

The middle-class, black and white,  has been eviscerated by these failed economic policies. The great irony is that so many working-class people haven’t figured out who has screwed them again.

Political scientists like Alberto Alesina of Harvard argue that investment in these kinds of safety nets and human capital – the kinder America we miss and now dream about – were tainted and shaped by bigotry, okay, racism.

Nixon, Reagan, and the conservative political movement spread the widespread belief among working-class whites that African Americans and immigrants were benefiting more than they were and at their expense.

These fears played nicely into the stereotype of blacks and immigrants as being lazy and without ambition.

When African-Americans talk about racism, they aren’t just talking about police brutality. Racism is a system, not just a knee on the neck.

Nixon’s timing was good decades ago. The South was looking for a new political party to follow, they were still seething from the government’s support of the civil rights movement. Working-class whites were soon to be enraged by the damage the trade agreements did to their lives and communities.

At least one demagogue sniffed the air and smelled an opening.

But Trump’s timing is not as good as Nixon’s was. This is 2020, not 1968.

The country is going through a very different kind of awakening; it is far more diverse and racially conscious than it was 40 years ago.

The policies of racial resentment have made millions of people poor, not self-sufficient, and independent. And more and more, their faces are white.

The confederate statues are a symbol of nothing but what they appear to be – monuments to treason and cruelty.

Nobody but our broken President and a few of his cultish supporters want those statues to stay up.

NASCAR, The NFL, the NBA, even Coca-Cola, are blowing Trump off and ignoring him. And these kinds of institutions don’t ever lead, they follow. Their fingers are always up, trying to catch the direction of the wind.

The CEO’s know something Trump seems unable to learn.

People on the wrong side of history lose every single time.

Trump has now aligned himself with every hateful and destructive ideology in America, from white nationalists to angry old white men to secret government agents in masks and camouflage to brain-damaged conspiracy theorists, anti-vaccers, anti-maskers,  and historians deniers.

He loves them, “good people all.”

He loves his new militarized militias and their Mutant Ninja Turtle outfits and masks. They crash uninvited into troubled communities like Portland and snatch people off the streets without warrants or identification.

They make everything worse, wherever they go. What a lesson in what we don’t want and won’t tolerate. You may not be powerful, but you are far from powerless.

He’s even re-tweeting white crazies who think Democrats are really a secret nest of pedophiles.

No group is too extreme, hateful, or dishonest for him. He doesn’t want to be Andrew Jackson. He wants to be the Joker, laughing and thrilling to the cries of the wounded and the fearful.

But what he is really doing is empowering an army of Hobbits to march out and confront the Orcs. It is already an epic battle.

“There was something about seeing a man’s knee on another man’s neck that woke people up,” Helene Gayle, chief executive of the Chicago Community Trust. “People think I’m crazy, but I have a sense of possibility.”

Me too, I see signs of awakening everywhere.

Harvey Weinstein did the same thing for women that the video did for blacks. People are listening to women’s stories in a completely different way. Things are changing.

And Weinstein is in jail, something many women thought would never be possible.

The lie the new economists peddled was that the poor could work if they only wanted to and that all immigrants were lazy or worse (Trump, ever healing, suggested many were rapists).

It was absurd to say that caring for the poor was now the problem of religious institutions, not the government. Or that the poor would be inspired by government neglect to heal the broken social structure of a country.

How is that working out? The Evangelical movement is not interested in the poor; they are into political power, telling other people how to live, discrimination against gays and trans people, and real estate.

The good Christians, like the good citizens, are numb. But religion has somehow failed, and to my surprise, we miss it.

This idea that the poor and the needy want to be poor and brought their suffering upon themselves proved to be a disaster for almost all Americans, especially the working class.

Marginalized groups like African-Americans and Native-Americans have suffered the worst, but white working-class Americans are catching up, even surpassing them in some ways.

American children today are 57 percent more likely to die by age 19 than European children are. Suicide and drug overdoses are now the leading cause of death for white rural American males, whose life expectancy is plunging.

This awful distinction for young white men in the country puts them more likely to die young than any other social group in America.

American life expectancy overall is continuing to decline sharply, especially in rural areas, according to the Center for Disease Control’s latest statistical release.

Americans are dying at an average age of 78.6.  The drop has been driven significantly by 70,237 deaths from drug overdoses. For comparison, that number’s nearly equal to the entire population of Bismarck, North Dakota’s capital.

In 2016, a fifth of the deaths among Americans aged 24 to 35 in rural areas was due to opioids. Where do we get off sneering at Democratic socialists?

Between 2001 and 2015, suicide rates among white adults increased 41 percent in the U.S. between 2001 and 2016, reported the CDC. Over those eighteen years, 453,577 adults aged 25 to 64 died, 77 percent of them male.

This catastrophe was neither noticed nor responded to by the federal government or the media.

There is a town just a few miles from me where 35 percent of one small high school graduating class had died of suicide or opioid abuse by the time they were 35.

In his new and shocking book,  Dying Of Whiteness, Dr. Jonathan Metzl writes about the boomerang of racial resentment.

The very people who so violently objected to helping the needy have become them instead. People die in the United States from drug overdoses at a rate of one every seven minutes. And most of these deaths are not in the suburbs or cities; they are in rural America.

People get frustrated with me when I defend Trump supporters, who certainly know how to appear hateful. But the truth is they have every right to be angry, as do African-Americas and Native-Americans and so many women.

People say we are more divided than ever, historians say this is not true. The Civil War was far worse, so were the 60’s. I was there. In a warped and ironic way, much of the anger and hatred is digital, a kind of toilet bowl of grievance.

Demagogues appear when a government lies to its people. Perhaps its time for the government to tell the truth. A lesson for Biden.

We seem to have a long way to go to be the country we want to be and hoped we were. But change is blowing the doors down now; I can hear the noise.

A 76 -old- woman, a long time reader of mine, and someone I have come to care for,  e-mails me often to express her alarm about socialism and the danger of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, with whom she is obsessed.

She learned about how dangerous Cortez was on Fox News, she said, which her late husband watched all day for years.

Her name is Jane, and she is sick and has no health care. She lives in New York State, way up near the Canadian border. We agree on just about nothing, but we haven’t given up on each other.

She has a good heart. She loves my dogs and donkeys and overlooks my values and beliefs.

I’m no doctor, but her illness could be the virus.

She won’t get tested because she’s afraid she will not be able to afford it or pay for hospital care.

For years, she’s gone to a government-subsidized food bank to buy the groceries she can’t afford. I’ve been urging her to get help.

She is a fervent Trump supporter; she doesn’t’ want the country to fall in the hands of leftist Democrats who would give everyone free health care; her taxes would then, she says go to people who should work and immigrants who shouldn’t be here.

She’s never met an immigrant, and she admits to having no idea what socialism is.

Why would free health care be so bad? I messaged her about the politics of racial resentment and sent her Dr. Metlz’s book through Amazon.

I said I am not a socialist, but would be proud to have such a caring and bright and knowledgeable young person for a daughter or friend as Cortez.

Why would you make her a demon just because you disagree with here?

Connect the dots, Jane, you’re not foolish or stupid.

She e-mailed me yesterday Thanks for the book, she said, my first-born son died of an overdose three years ago. Her neighbor’s son tried to commit suicide. Nobody did anything to help.

Thanks for telling me, I said. Think of your son. And think for yourself.

I live in the present because, for me, the past is a trap and the future is not knowable. But I think the great irony of this political campaign – and with the help of a killer global pandemic – a window is opening, another chance for a wonderful country which has lost its way.

I hope we move forward and think of reconciliation, not vengeance. There are a lot of victims in this story; nobody has a patent on being mistreated.

In Sunday’s New York Times, Elizabeth Cohen, a respected historian, told a reporter that “it is possible that the best thing that could have happened to make progressive change possible is the crass, self-interested, ineffective politics of Donald Trump.’

We all have choices to make this year; I choose hope, not gloom. And with good reason.

 

6 October

Fall

by Jon Katz

It was an almost eerily beautiful Fall morning, gathering clouds, a strong wind, cold enough to bite a bit. The gardens have all gone barren after two nights of hard frost, we’ll be feeding hay to the animals in a week or so.

My Will Cather wife loves days like this, she is out for hours cutting, digging, re-arranging.

Yesterday, Matthew  Ross came to trim the donkey’s hooves, and today, Maria and I shoved the manure pile into our wheelbarrow and hauled it out to the gardens, thinking ahead to the Spring.

Our donkey manure has been something of a miracle, bringing even the most tired gardens back to life. This is a chore Maria and l love doing together, I did the shoveling and the wheelbarrow rolling until my back protested, then we took turns.

People tell us we could sell the manure for a lot of money, but we would rather give it to friends and use it for our own gardens. Scott Carrino used to come in his old army truck and haul it off, but he doesn’t come for it anymore.

Once we start haying the animals, we start on a new manure pile. The digging and shoveling wore me out, I’m still sore from all the walking at the Bronx Zoo Friday. Walking on concrete for a long time messes up my legs.

Fortunately, there isn’t too much of it up here. Maria dug up the Dahlia plants that did so well this year and brought them into the Cold Storage room in the basement, along with our Fig plant. Our strawberry bush will go into the vegetable garden which got most of the manure.

We’re planning to go to the movies this afternoon to see Ad Astra, the new and reportedly gorgeous space adventure movie with Brad Pitt. I might so see the Joker tomorrow by myself to write about it and see what all the fuss is about.

The reviews are very, very mixed, which is exciting. Fall hints at the big changes in our lives. Tuesday, someone is coming to clean out the wood stoves for the winter, we’ll start burning our wood towards the end of next week.

We’ll have to get up earlier to feed the animals. No more lounging around in bed for hours, talking and hugging and loving. I feel the cold more than I used to, but I would never give winter up for a place like Florida, I don’t need to be warm and sticky.

I’m still discovering the beauty of the winter pasture.

Everything gets a little bit harder and more challenging. Soon,  Liz Willis, our shearer is coming to shear the sheep, and we’ll make another trip to the Vermont Knitting Mill.

Maria has sold just about all of her yarn, just a few left on her Etsy Shop. That was a huge success for her this year.

We are very ready for winter. In my role as farm quartermaster, I’m happy to say the shed is full of wood, the barn is full of hay, the water tub is heated again, the stoves will soon be lit.

 

Bedlam Farm