I have to say, I’ve never felt as embarrassed to be American than I have felt since Trump became president. We had George W. Bush, who was appointed president by the Supreme Court, and he was pretty bad. He started two wars, one legitimate and the other based on bad information, and put them both on a credit card. Not only did he not raise taxes to fund his wars; he actually lowered taxes significantly. For the lives and futures he stole, as well as the trillions of dollars his wars and tax cuts cost us, he is my choice for being the worst American president whose administration I have lived through. Donald Trump has not eclipsed W. yet, not by a long shot. That is because he hasn’t destroyed as many lives or cost us as much money as W. did. Yet. But his incivility and boorishness and lack of patriotism is far worse than Bush’s. And his ignorance and belligerence don’t bode well for the future. The scary part about it is, the worst may be yet to come. We don’t know how this story is going to end. I was a young man in 1974 during the Watergate trial. We didn’t know how that was going to end, either. Now, it’s like a fait accompli, ending up neatly with a resignation and a pardon. It seems difficult to believe that this sorry spectacle we are living through will end as nicely. People are going to get hurt, if not physically, then every other way. Careers will be destroyed. Millions of dollars will be spent on lawyers and trials that wouldn’t have been necessary if we had had a different election result.

It seems to me that there is something in America’s DNA that makes it different from European countries. We were born by a violent revolution. We conquered the land through dangerous settlements, courageous explorations, and cruel, horrible, disgusting treatment of native Americans who were here before the white man came along. This feature in our country’s DNA is what people mean when they talk about “American exceptionalism”. Some of the greatest corporations in the world, probably most of them, originated in the United States. I say “most” because I haven’t done a survey, and I can’t seem to find a percentage anywhere, but my guess is that nearly all the great companies have their roots in the U.S. The current top ten companies in the Fortune 500 are American. So our violent birth and pioneering spirit has made us the most financially successful country in the world. Six of the ten top universities worldwide are in the States.

The flip side of the American exceptionalism is what has led us to the Trump mess we are in now. A large minority of our citizens think that their 2nd Amendment rights to own a firearm are more important than all of our 1st Amendment rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. In the United States alone, we are unique and exceptional in that we are the only first world country without universal health care. Think about that for a minute. We have the Constitutional right to own deadly weapons, but we don’t have the Constitutional right to health care that would help us recover from an assault by those deadly weapons. What has happened is that we have a rogue political party that has taken advantage of both the ignorance and the individualist, frontier mentality of Americans. The Republicans are only in it for the rich. Full stop. They don’t give a tinker’s damn about the rest of us. But they have convinced a large minority of Americans to vote against their own interests by using cultural issues to divide us. This has been going on for many years, and Trump is only the latest and most brazen example of this division. Football players protesting? Divide. Nazi and KKK sympathizers demonstrating? Divide. Gun control? Divide. Voting rights? Divide. Health care and welfare for the poorest among us? Divide. The list goes on.

I took a trip to the Netherlands in 1992. It was before the election that Bill Clinton won, and George H.W. Bush was still president. I remember a couple of times my group was treated strangely, kind of coldly, by the people there. I was a little embarrassed, because Bush wasn’t my choice of president, but it was no big deal if they thought he was. But now, Trump has transformed America into a pariah state. We stand alone in our disgrace, thanks to Mr. Trump. Backing us out of the Paris climate accord. Threatening to back out of the Iran nuclear pact. Hiring cabinet secretaries, among them an EPA chief, who have publicly stated their disdain for their agencies’ missions. Dirty air, dirty water, groundwater pollution, who cares as long as the corporations are satisfied. Insulting our allies and provoking our enemies. Traitorously colluding with the Russians. I know that there is a whole process that has to play out, but I would bet my life against a million dollars that Trump and his family are up to their necks in corruption and emolument law violations. You know that “dossier” that all the pundits are gingerly tiptoeing around because it contains salacious allegations? Every, every single allegation is true, in my opinion. I watched in real time as Trump defended himself against allegations that he hired Russian prostitutes to defile a room that had been occupied by the Obamas. His words, his face, and his body language screamed “guilty”. As in the Doonesbury comic strip that came out during Nixon’s Watergate hearings: “Guilty, guilty, guilty!”

I don’t do airplane travel anymore, so it is unlikely that I will be confronted by Dutchmen again (unless it’s my cousin and his family here). But if I did go abroad, just to keep myself from having to give a speech every time I met somebody new, before I left the States, I would familiarize myself with Canada’s laws and prominent politicians. I would call myself Canadian. Not because I don’t love America. I do. It is because I don’t like what a minority of unscrupulous people in power have turned our country into. I am in my early sixties now, not young but not exceedingly old. I hope I live long enough to see the time when I can feel proud to be American again.

I believe that as of now, the end of October, 2017, the critical mass of negativity regarding our president has been reached. Up to now, it has been all Republican hands on deck, lining up like a stone wall against any serious criticism of Donald Trump. But now, we have seen Jeff Flake, John McCain, and Bob Corker, in quick succession, give speeches and in Flake’s case, write a book critical of Trump. And we have seen both former presidents Obama and the younger Bush give anti-Trump speeches, although they did not mention his name or his office. See, the Democrats can scream bloody murder as loud as they can, but nothing will happen until Trump’s own party turns on him. That is how Nixon ended up resigning. A team of Republican senators led by Barry Goldwater went to the White House and laid out the situation for Nixon, telling him how much his support had evaporated. Richard Nixon resigned the next evening. Nixon was well into his second term when he left office. Trump is barely beginning his first term. It goes to show how vile a character Trump is to be on his way out before he is all the way in. But I think that the process has started that will push him out the door. But it has been and will be slow.

The only reason that Trump is being tolerated by the majority of Republicans in congress is because they know that this is their last chance for a long time to pass a Republican agenda. Fortunately, they were stymied in their efforts to repeal Obamacare, eliminate much of Medicaid, and hand the wealthy an early Christmas gift. That effort seems to be over for now, anyway. But now they are hot on the trail of tax “reform” (cuts). Which will be another effort to give an unasked-for bonanza of billions of dollars to the 1%. I don’t know what’s going to happen with that.

I didn’t really understand why the Republicans don’t just impeach Trump and get rid of him. V.P. Mike Pence would be much better than Trump at giving them what they want, and he is next in the line of succession. But this article in Vox lays out a pretty good case as to why that might not work our so well for them. It would be an enormous gamble, and the odds against them would be huge.

So, to sum it up, we have a party in charge of all three legislative branches of government. They are not interested in helping the average American. In fact, it appears that many of them don’t really care about the average American. A few of their members are starting to speak out, those who are not facing reelection. That’s what is allowing them the freedom to speak, which puts in stark bas-relief why there are not more of them speaking out. It is cowardice and borderline treasonous behavior, putting party and legislative priorities ahead of the well-being of the whole country. That is what makes me, and many others, so resentful. The president is governing for his base, about a third of the country. The rest of us can go play fiddly sticks as far as he cares. That is no way to run a country. It does not work for long. To me, it is so obvious that we have a traitor and a white-collar criminal running our country with his crime family. This is a very unhealthy situation for the country and the world. We are a very powerful nation, and our actions affect the rest of the world. I don’t believe Trump will remain in office for a full term. Something has to give long before then. It is much too slow for my liking, but if there is any hope left for America, Trump will exit his office prematurely, one way or another.

I believe that there are several words and phrases that are hot-button political land mines right now. Right up there, among the top ten anyway, is the phrase “politically correct”. A man who, in my opinion, has no business in any public office, became president on the strength of that epithet used in the most pejorative way. I think that it is more complex than that.

I remember, probably more than 20 years ago when a certain middle-aged man was a columnist for the T&G. He wrote a column on the subject of political correctness. His thesis was that there is nothing wrong with being politically correct, and that those who think that there was something wrong with it just didn’t like their own prejudices exposed. I also remember a later column by the same man, in which he was very angry that he couldn’t even call a black male child under 12 years old “a boy” without the boy’s mother complaining. See, I think political correctness is dependent on the context, whether it is considered good or bad, and it is also very subjective.

I have been thinking about political correctness lately, mostly because of my TV habits. I subscribe to Netflix and Amazon Prime, and it is a pleasure to be able to watch several episodes in a row of a good series without commercial interruptions. I have especially been interested in shows that focus on adolescents and their problems. Fictional shows. I also have been keeping up with The Walking Dead and its spinoff, Fear the Walking Dead. I first noticed it on The Walking Dead. I thought it was a peculiarity of that particular show, but it has been true of every single one of the modern dramas that involve groups of young folks. They all have a cast of characters that looks like a mini-United Nations. And they all have male and female gay characters, both single and “shipped” (TV slang for coupled up). And the “shipped” couples are always shown kissing. And they make a point of showing women and minorities in leadership roles, and the Dead shows make a point of showing females committing violent acts, upending the stereotype of women minding the store while the men go out and take care of business.

It’s good in a way, the obvious value of reducing the power of stereotypes about people that are prejudicial and false. And it bothers me less now than it did when I first noticed it because I have gotten used to it. I don’t know why the producers of these shows portray their characters in such a self-consciously rainbow-hued way, if it’s that they believe in what they are doing, or they are just trying to stay in the good graces of critics and activist groups. Maybe a combination of both. And I don’t rule out the possibility that the shows are doing a good thing. I just think that, if a show is supposed to be based on real life, it shouldn’t be so obviously bent over backwards to show equality among race, sex, and sexual preference. I have mixed feelings about it. One thing they haven’t done yet, at least not the shows I have watched, is to bring in a transsexual character. Maybe that’s still a bridge too far for them, and maybe it doesn’t fit well with the plot. But I say, if you’re going to go, go all the way. Bring in the drag queens, and bring down the barriers. Allow me to paraphrase a deceased actor who became President of the United States #40: “Mr. (or Ms.) Hollywood producer, TEAR DOWN THAT WALL!”

I copied this from Facebook from a friend who copied it from someone else. Not surprising. The “law and order” party is quite finicky about which laws to obey, and who to focus their “crime fighting” agenda on:
From a friend of a friend:
I’m going to try and edit this once I get to my computer but I was hoping someone would compile data like this. The damn truth right here “I made a comment recently where I claimed that Republican administrations had been much more criminally corrupt over the last 50 plus years than the Democrats. I was challenged (dared actually) to prove it. So I did a bit of research and when I say a bit I mean it didn’t take long and there is no comparison.
When comparing criminal indictments of those serving in the executive branch of presidential administrations, it’s so lopsided as to be ridiculous. Yet all I ever hear about is how supposedly “corrupt” the Democrats are. So why don’t we break it down by president and the numbers?
Obama (D) – 8 yrs in office. Zero criminal indictments, zero convictions and zero prison sentences. So the next time somebody describes the Obama administration as “scandal free” they aren’t speaking wishfully, they’re simply telling the truth.
Bush, George W. (R) – 8 yrs in office. 16 criminal indictments. 16 convictions. 9 prison sentences.
Clinton (D) – 8 yrs in office. 2 criminal indictments. One conviction. One prison sentence. That’s right nearly 8 yrs of investigations. Tens of millions spent and 30 yrs of claiming them the most corrupt ever and there was exactly one person convicted of a crime.
Bush, George H. W. (R) – 4 yrs in office. One indictment. One conviction. One prison sentence.
Reagan (R) – 8 yrs in office. 26 criminal indictments. 16 convictions. 8 prison sentences.
Carter (D) – 4 yrs in office. One indictment. Zero convictions and zero prison sentences.
Ford (R) – 4 yrs in office. One indictment and one conviction. One prison sentence.
Nixon (R) – 6 yrs in office. 76 criminal indictments. 55 convictions. 15 prison sentences.
Johnson (D) – 5 yrs in office. Zero indictments. Zero convictions. Zero prison sentences.
So, let’s see where that leaves us. In the last 53 years, Democrats have been in the Oval Office for 25 of those years, while Republicans held it for 28. In their 25 yrs in office Democrats had a total of three executive branch officials indicted with one conviction and one prison sentence. That’s one whole executive branch official convicted of a crime in two and a half decades of Democrat leadership.
In the 28 yrs that Republicans have held office over the last 53 yrs they have had a total of (a drum roll would be more than appropriate), 120 criminal indictments of executive branch officials. 89 criminal convictions and 34 prison sentences handed down. That’s more prison sentences than years in office since 1968 for Republicans. If you want to count articles of impeachment as indictments (they aren’t really but we can count them as an action), both sides get one more. However, Clinton wasn’t found guilty while Nixon resigned and was pardoned by Ford (and a pardon carries with it a legal admission of guilt on the part of the pardoned). So those only serve to make Republicans look even worse.
With everything going on with Trump and his people right now, it’s a safe bet Republicans are gonna be padding their numbers a bit real soon.
So let’s just go over the numbers one more time, shall we? 120 indictments for Republicans. 89 convictions, and 34 prison sentences. Those aren’t “feelings” or “alternate facts.” Those are simply the stats by the numbers. Republicans are, and have been for my entire lifetime, the most criminally corrupt party to hold the office of the presidency.

So there you go. And now that we have a liberal who has contributed heavily to progressive causes in the spotlight, it might be good to see things in a bit of perspective when it comes to ideology and criminality. It fits that money-hungry, scorched-earth tacticians (see Gorsuch, Neil; Supreme Court) would be more prone to breaking the laws related to theft and dishonor than the Democrats, who, for the most part, try to do good things and not screw the country to benefit their party. Democrats are overwhelmingly morally superior to Republicans, in government at least.

Well, with the advent of Facebook, I have been able to check in on people whom I have had no contact with for many years. I did not attend a full-time institution of higher learning, so the last time I had a “generation” around me was in high school. Back then, we were all part of one crowd or another. Without getting into the subgroups, the main factions, with some overlap but not that much, were the jocks, the freaks, the greasers, and the nerds. One group that has stayed true to its roots has been…drum roll…the nerds! They, of course, had the last laugh. After being vilified as uncool, made fun of, at times even severely bullied, the nerds won the game of life, at least in the outward sense. The old line from the Beatitudes, “the meek shall inherit the earth”, could be updated to modern times to say “the nerds shall inherit the earth”. They didn’t abuse themselves with illegal drugs, not much anyway, nor did they do a lot of underage drinking. They are the ones who ended up with the big jobs, the beautiful homes and trophy families. The rest of us took various and sundry routes.

I was a nerd until my sophomore year in high school, when I was introduced to the wonders of psychedelic drugs. I experienced some unforgettable times, some euphoric trips that could be compared to kissing God. On the flip side, my grades dropped and I graduated high school by the skin of my teeth. I went to work right away after high school. I worked at jobs that you didn’t even need a high school diploma for, just a young, strong body. Which I had. There was always some cognitive dissonance in my mind, though. I felt like I was meant for better things. I remember one time when I was working as a machine operator in a plastics factory, I took a class at WPI on introductory plastics engineering. I did okay. One thing I remember about it was suppressed laughter among my fellow students when they asked what we did for a living and I said I was a machine operator and a floor boy. Heavens to Betsy, what’s he doing here? See, they were a bunch of entitled idiots, but I was trying to do something in the wrong way. I needed to enter a full-time educational program, and I wasn’t willing to do that. I took several courses, including a stint in an accounting program, which eventually got me a job working for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts as a counter clerk and examiner. I worked there long enough to get a halfway decent pension, and when the Governor offered an early retirement incentive, I took it.

So that’s a much-abbreviated account of what happened to me after high school. The thing is that I didn’t change much. I am still very much the same person, with the same values that I had as a high school senior. Older and wiser, but not really much different. I am easily recognizable as Charlie Erickson from the mid-Seventies. What has happened to my old crowd of friends and acquaintances has been quite varied. It has been a disappointment to me in many cases. I’m not saying that somebody who identified as a freak back in the day should take a vow of poverty. I’m just saying that I would have expected some consistency. Like, if somebody advocated peace, love and shining your inner star, I might expect such a person to go on to a career in, perhaps, environmental advocacy. Or social work, or maybe a defense attorney. Not a hedge fund manager financier big dog who votes Republican right down the line, and posts anti-Obama conspiracy theories. What the hell were they doing back then? What happened to their ideals? Hypocrisy, thy name is Baby Boomer. It seems like so many of my old buddies have sacrificed their ideals in pursuit of the pot of gold that supposedly exists at the end of the rainbow.

Some of them are even trying to erase their own pasts, for example, denying that they were drug users in high school when everybody knew they were. Hell, we used to stand on the front steps of the school before the opening bell, smoking cigarettes and other items in full view of the street and the school front windows. There were no secrets back then. Nobody tried to hide what they were doing. I could understand this denial if we were in our thirties or forties and had to avoid making a career-ending disclosure. Either that, or not wanting to set a bad example for your kids. But we are in our early sixties now, either solidly entrenched in a career, in any case near the end or at the end of said career, long past the time when we should have to worry about losing employment opportunities. And those of us who have kids, those kids are now old enough so they won’t be hurt by learning about your past. They might even like you better for it.

I don’t want to sit in judgment of people. I just dislike hypocrisy and greed. If I have offended anybody, I’m sorry. Maybe the truth aches, just a little, like one of those hangovers after a beer party at Rutland State Park.

Well, here we go again. Another mass shooting. I don’t know what the official definition of a mass shooting is, but my personal definition is four or more dead bodies constitutes a mass shooting here in America. Anything less is too common for words here. This has been going on for a long time, this issue of deranged or ideologically extreme killers shooting up the place, wherever that place may be this week. As a side note, it seems to me that we have been lucky in Massachusetts. Could our relatively strict gun laws have something to do with that? Could be, but anyway my blog isn’t centered today on our state, it is about our country and its politicians who have been bought by the National Rifle Association.

Once upon a time, actually when I was a boy in the 1960s and went hunting with relatives, the NRA was a good, public-spirited organization. It meant what the name says. It was about guns and gun safety, an organization that hunters and other gun owners can belong to, and find information and safety tips. I remember one thing that was drilled into me by my relatives and by NRA pamphlets: Don’t point your gun at anything that you do not intend to shoot. It doesn’t matter if you believe the gun is loaded or not. Just follow that rule under all circumstances. That’s why I cringe when TV shows like “Breaking Bad” portray supposedly knowledgeable people, in that case, Walter White’s DEA agent brother-in-law, pulling out his gun at a party and showing it around and letting people handle it. That is the height of irresponsibility. So the NRA had a hand in teaching me that lesson that I will remember for the rest of my life. That is what a quasi-public agency does. It does the unglamorous work of promoting good practices and common sense rules. What happened to the National Rifle Association was that it was taken over in a coup by right wing ideologues in 1977. The NRA became a shill for the Republican Party, advocating an extreme view of the Second Amendment, and, in my opinion, they became a terrorist organization hiding in plain sight.

What the NRA has done is to make all Republican government officials, as well as some of the Democratic ones, fearful of their power and unwilling to vote for any common-sense gun laws. Like background checks on all gun purchases: two-thirds of NRA members and three-quarters of the general public support a law mandating background checks on all firearms purchases. Makes sense, right? Not according to the NRA. Any, and I mean any, gun restrictions are opposed by them under the “slippery slope” theory, that it will eventually lead to gun confiscation by the government. The most heinous example of this kowtowing to pro-gun forces is the fact that the Center for Disease Control is no longer allowed to research the effects of gun violence. So, not only are we not allowed to enjoy our First Amendment rights to life and the pursuit of happiness, our federal scientists entrusted with protecting the public cannot even conduct a study to determine how to save the lives and limbs of the people injured or killed by gun violence. Not to mention the many, many more whose lives have been permanently altered by witnessing gun violence, or who are burdened with grief by the loss of a loved one to the American way.

The Second Amendment was construed by the supreme court, in the Heller decision, to mean that private individuals are allowed to own guns in America. The reason that I took the capital letters out of the court’s name is that they don’t deserve to be deified. They are just a bunch of lawyers and judges who were appointed by various presidents, often for their political views. They are not deities. They insanely decided that an ancient law, passed in the days of single-shot muskets, can be applied to today’s society of high-tech weaponry and criminal nut cases, along with a lobby that not only refuses to pass any sane gun restrictions, but is hell-bent on removing the lame restrictions that already exist in a vanishing number of American states.

There are a whole bunch of reasons for this sorry state of affairs. Gerrymandering, money-drenched politics, an ignorant public among them. Donald Trump’s jingoistic “America First” stupidity might be correctly applied to our gun violence problem. We truly are first. We truly are exceptional. We have the most corrupt, crooked, cynical, money-hungry, partisan politicians in the world. There are so many guns in circulation now that, even if we stopped all gun sales, the guns in existence, some 300 million of them, would keep our hospitals and morgues busy for quite a while. There aren’t any easy answers, but I can tell you this: There is only one party that is monolithic in its support for the NRA. Guess which one it is. If by some stroke of luck we don’t shoot ourselves in the foot by dividing the Democratic party by Bernie Sanders and his advocates’ litmus tests, and we take back at least one branch of the government, that would be a good start.