Congenial-speak #32

In Ten Years and Change: A Liberal Boyhood in Minnesota a trail of breadcrumbs is left for abrogations. It leads to the house that was a closer-to-home replica of our clear and present danger. Our times mime the past, they mine it for its chutzpah, for its sense of morality. My book pictures a time, like now, when politics crossed the line at which humanity lies. Back then it was the troop train in front of which political dissidents lay. Today they are the angry mobs that die in senate offices, the citizens that rushed to the airports to welcome their Islamic friends, the people jamming WH phone lines

Trump is riding on a electoral win. His popular vote count was eclipsed by his opponent, but he squeaked by in the electoral clause. The 12^th amendment provides that elector cast votes for president. The idea of the college is not to leave the election of a president ultimately in the hands of the perhaps uneducated masses. Now, let's face it, how well did this idea work when the winner is not well educated himself. (This is not bias, theory or fake news. It is fact that tweets have proven time after time. Trump and Mrs. Palin need a world history class.)

In 1964 Lyndon Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater in a landslide. LBJ easily won both the popular and electoral vote. He won 61.1 percent of the popular vote, the highest since James Monroe's re-election in 1820. Trump's concept of reality and his ignorance of the consequences of things as epic as nuclear weapons have been compared to Goldwater. Both were conservative extremists. In the wake of Kennedy's assassination, a wave of despair fractioned America. By the end of 1963, when Johnson was sworn in as the 36^th POTUS. He executed landmark legislation, pushed his Great Society program that benefited many minority groups, but his policies on Vietnam quickly vitiated his popularity. In February of 1965 Johnson used the provisions of 1964's Gulf of Tonkin Resolution to justify and authorize dropping bombs on North Vietnam in a sustained offensive strike named Operation Rolling Thunder. In a Gallup Poll taken that year 61 percent of Americans thought that our involvement in Southeast Asia was a good idea. By 1971 that number was reduced to 28.

Trump was widely unpopular from day one. He created his own reality, and for months after the alternative fact he insisted that his inaugural exceeded his predecessor's in crowd size. I would not be surprised if he brought this up today with Putin. And the press foolishly indulges his fantasy. How come every majority that mattered saw that Goldwater was a bit farshimmelt, delusive, ausgespielt? No one, enough to concern a plurality, saw that this real estate huckster, who made a name for himself on “Reality” TV, as a threat to democracy. No one saw, from the debate stage, from the campaign trail, his disrespect for anything and everyone without a TRUMP label on it. Enough people overlooked his outright refusal to play by the rules, his genuine lack of attention needed to learn or desire to learn U.S. and world history most high school graduates should know. Oligarchy, monarchy, autocracy, kleptochracy and, anarchy push the decent word from my mind today. Those forms of government are what we have steered clear of for 241 years. They are what our founders wrote a very certain constitution to avoid being. Democracy, the equitable way of life America has known all its relatively short life, is what all the veterans say they were defending. What would have happened when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? They didn't, but Mr. Blutowsky (Animal House) creates an interesting scenario. Had FDR not committed troops to beat Hitler back, we would be under what—well something like I imagine if the current administration is allowed to go on for seven more years.

In my book the “change” is the ten years, 1965 to 1975. It is the few years before, when the Vietnam conflict, the Second Indo-China War, was already creating a cult following of protesters. It is ten year of trying to work things out in a democracy, trying to hold a nation, or even a political party, together. A book written by a Trump child, a child that grew up in this web of lies, a child for whom there is literally no example of democracy at its best, after the alternative fact, would be different but similar. A child raised by parents, like mine, who were so political that their action were felt at the top (if rooted in grass). Parents, one or both, who went to the 2020 DNC, or protested at the RNC. Say the poor kid had parents who marched in every march, from the pink pussy to the tax day. Forty years after the facts he or she writes a memoir akin to Ten Years and Change: A Liberal Boyhood in Minnesota. In 2057 a generation Z looks back in their PTSD. They'll write about what their parents did for them when they came out of the womb. They'll write about the evil Mitch McConnell who, as I hear, is losing his gumption, discovering what Bernie said a year ago. How Mitch, the victor in a battle of childhood polio, tried to rob millions of their health care. I doubt they'll have the halcyon memories of Apple Jacks and hearing that Watergate song, of Casey Jones and Gopher Gulch Indians or politicians reading poetry like I did. But they'd be good. And they should dedicate it to their parents, to all the millions of milennials who never relented, who comprised an abrogation more than 231 million strong, conspirators of a theory to shake out the fake news of the world.