Exposed

The election season will come to its merciful conclusion tomorrow with the assurance that the outcome will be utterly depressing.  The most likely result, that Hillary Clinton becomes the first woman president, provides us with four more years of the status quo –   rising income inequality, the continued use of drone warfare, and a government beholden to Wall Street and corporate interests.

Of course a Trump presidency throws us back into the stone age. I don’t believe that The Donald would be more than a figurehead, but when you consider the damage that a Mike Pence and a stasi-esque Cabinet could wreak the mind boggles.

I do not believe that Trump will win, but regardless, the damage has been done.  He has exposed the racist underbelly of the United States and it is exponentially greater than was thought.  The fact that nearly half of the electorate will cast their vote for a racist, homophobic, xenophobic, narcissistic dullard speaks volumes on the state of the American psyche.

Then you have the effete liberals, practically pissing their pants in fear of a Trump victory.  I haven’t seen such pearl clutching since Zabars stopped carrying organic Camembert cheese.  Man up!  We lived through twelve years of the Bush dynasty and eight years of Reagan — we’ll make it through Trump.

Or not.  Who cares at this point?  In a country that doesn’t provide health care, wages perpetual war, rewards corrupt, predatory CEOs, punishes its working class, sentences its college goers to a life of crippling debt, and leaves its poor to scramble for minimum wage jobs, what’s the difference?

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

 

 

Troubling Times

The Trump stuff is starting to get a little scary. He’s like a cartoon character — a buffoon – and it’s hard to take his platform seriously.  After all, other than promising to build a wall, or make Mexico build a wall, he really hasn’t said anything. If you go by his history he’s even a little more liberal than his hapless opponents.

No, what’s worrying me are his followers.  Trump’s jingoistic, xenophobic banter has brought to the surface a virulent racism in this country, so much so that I’m beginning to wonder if we’ve progressed at all since the 1950s.

Coded racism has long been a staple of Republican (and even Democratic) candidates.  One need look no further than patron saint, Ronald Reagan launching his 1980 campaign at the Neshoba County fair, a few miles away from Philadelphia, Mississippi, a town associated with the 1964 murder of civil rights workers.  There, he used the term, states rights, a kind of code for tacitly approved racism.

But with the ascendance of Trump there is no longer a need for code words.  He can vilify Muslims and Mexicans, thus empowering rednecks across the land to speak their minds.  And I’m not just referring to the South.  There were plenty of racists in the New York metropolitan area six years ago when I lived there.  Drive ten miles in any direction from Manhattan and you’ll see what i mean.  Long Island and New Jersey are cesspools.

Even here in the Bay Area, one of the most liberal places on the planet, you can find racism.  A singer with whom I worked with just last night friended me on Facebook.  No sooner did I accept her request than I saw that her page was littered with racist posts.  One showed a pair of four or five year old African American boys teasing and hitting a white girl, with the implication that violence starts at a young age.  She also compared these children to Palestinians.

By itself the post is merely ignorance.  In light of the violence and bile we have seen at Trump rallies, however, it’s unsettling.  What level of racism would be unleashed should this man somehow gain the White House?

 

 

George McGovern

And now, for a sorbet, a palette cleanser, let’s talk George McGovern.  I was 12 years old when the long-time senator from South Dakota won the Democratic nomination.  He would proceed to suffer the largest defeat ever by a presidential candidate, winning just 17 electoral votes to Richard Nixon’s 520.  Massachusetts and Washington D.C. were his only two electoral victories; he did not even win his home state.

McGovern was a war hero in World War Two; a pilot who flew many dangerous missions, was injured in battle, and was able to execute a difficult landing on a short runway with a damaged plane, thus saving his crew.

In the Senate he fought hard for migrant farm workers, as well as an expanded food stamp program, but most of all he was known for his staunch opposition to the Vietnam War.   As early as 1963 he had challenged the burgeoning U.S. involvement in the war.

The 1972 Democratic primaries found McGovern in a three-way race with Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace, the governor of Alabama.  Wallace, who had run as an independent in the ’68 election, stated that he was no longer a segregationist and had become more moderate.  His campaign, however, was based upon a fierce opposition to desegregation busing and this turned out to be an issue that was harmful to McGovern.  Wallace siphoned off southern votes — McGovern did not win one county in Florida — and even took large swaths of votes in northern states.  So much so that by May he had a lead in votes, though not in delegates.

The all-important union support was slow to come to McGovern.  Much of the union leadership supported the Vietnam war, as well as opposed busing.  Their support, at least at the outset was more likely to go to Humphrey.

The election swung on a tragedy.  On May 15th Wallace was shot at point-blank range during a campaign appearance.  He was paralyzed from the waist down and had to withdraw from the campaign.     

McGovern was able to eek out a win in California and ultimately win his party’s nomination.  He chose as his running mate Tom Eagleton, a Missouri senator.  When it was revealed that Eagleton had undergone shock therapy for clinical depression McGovern accepted Eagleton’s resignation from the campaign.  Five prominent Democrats turned down the offer of the VP slot before the campaign settled on the U.S. ambassador to France, Sargent Shriver.

Given this comedy of errors it is no small wonder that Richard Nixon felt it necessary to gain an edge in the campaign by bugging the Democrat National Committee headquarters at the Watergate hotel.  This has to be considered paranoia’s finest hour! 

My take-away from this is that the issue of busing, though well-intentioned, was a disaster for the Democrats.  It virtually cost them the entire south which had long been a stronghold, as well as much of the industrialized north.  Blue collar workers who had voted Democrat for generations became Republicans practically overnight.

McGovern remained a senator until 1980 when he was defeated for reelection.  By this time the Reagan revolution was in full swing.  We will never know what kind of president he would have been.  Almost certainly the war would have ended much sooner, which would have saved thousands of lives. 

Because of his landslide defeat in 1972, as well as the demonization of the word ‘liberal,’ he tends to be remembered in a negative light.  In reality he was a good man; a great senator who opposed an unjust war and worked hard to improve the lives of the poor.  Things broke right for him to gain the nomination but the reality was that he, or any other candidate, for that matter, had little hope of defeating Nixon. 

Although I was only a boy, I remember watching his acceptance speech at that ’72 convention, and I recall the feelings of hope and possibility that were in the air for such a brief period of time.