A Declaration

I will not be silenced.

I will not stand idly by while Steve Bannon sticks his Nazi hand up Donald Trump’s ass and puppeteers that nylon-haired idiot into policies and actions that define immorality, anti-Americanism, and full-on Fascism.

I will not suffer gladly a Congress and an Administration that sees no problem with this.

I will not let the howling mob of the ignorant tell me that this isn’t happening or that it is somehow praiseworthy. 

I will not sit complacently in some dark room being spoon-fed “alternative facts” by people too stupid to know or too corrupt to care that the alternative to facts is lies.

I will not accept the systematic dismantling of the Constitution by authoritarian dictators and extremist enablers.

I will not countenance the betrayal of everything this country stands for, of everything we have achieved as a nation, of everything the Founders created and their successors built upon and my ancestors worked to see to fruition by cowards too scared of their own shadows and too convinced of their own righteousness to respect those achievements or the people who brought them into being.

I will not be moved by false pretenses and accusations or by the moth-eaten excuses offered by this travesty of a government to defend the indefensible. 

I will not be concern-trolled by people who are “tired of politics” and want me to stop.

I will not be fooled by accomplices who want me to give Fascism a chance, nor will I treat such nonsense with anything other than the dripping contempt it deserves.

I will fight back in every way I can.

I will keep the flame of American values alive against all threats, internal or external.

I will defend the Constitution of the United States even when those who have sworn oaths to do so refuse to honor them.

I will act.

I will speak.

I will be heard.

I am an American.  These colors do not run.

Here I stand.  I can do no other.

News and Updates

1. We may get our Christmas letter out by the end of this month.  This is earlier than some years past, actually. 

2. One of the many reasons I’m glad I attended the Women’s March last weekend is the simple fact that it has driven der Sturmtrumper to distraction, knowing that more people attended those marches than his inauguration.  Honestly – this is the leader of the free world these days?  This petulant little attention whore?  We are so screwed.

3. I actually came home sick from work today, for the first time over a decade.  I don’t get sick days from teaching at the college level – there are no substitutes, so you just have to go and do your thing regardless of how you feel.  I remember one evening several years ago, for example, teaching for three hours and then staggering back to my office and putting my head on my desk for nearly an hour before I could summon the reserves to drive the seven minute commute home.  So no sick days from teaching.  But my advising position, well, no point in bringing students into a confined space with you just so you can share your illnesses with them, or, if no students show up, in just sitting there in your office not really focusing on anything other than the fact that you really wish you could just breathe without conscious effort.  That’s a poor use of company time, really.  It’s your basic winter crud that I had been sort of but not quite coming down with for more than a week until this morning when it finally whacked me upside the head but good.  So I blog instead, because that requires no particular train of thought.

4. I am also working on having my hands removed.  My right hand hurts because a couple of weeks ago I caught my pinkie finger between a bin and a 50lb sack of chicken feed and bent it in a new and creative angle, from which it has yet to go back to straight.  And my left hand hurts because I was helping Lauren cook fried rice and picked up a bowl that I hadn’t realized she’d been cooking as well, which meant I spent the next 24 hours holding desperately onto a bag of ice.  Eventually I will be down to stumps and I’ll get a keyboard with keys the size of drink coasters and just bash away on them to make my statements here.

5. If Trump really thinks that millions of illegal votes were cast in the election that brought him victory, then there isn’t any other option but to declare the election null and void, and have a new one that is better monitored – preferably by outside agencies that don’t have a stake in the outcome.  So state governments would be out.  Perhaps we can convince the UN to do it.  Does he even think about what he says?  He’s just destroyed his own legitimacy.

6. Well, even further.

7. The cat has begun to sound like Edward G. Robinson.  Mithra doesn’t really meow much anymore – she just kind of growls at us.  “Mrow, see?  Mrow!”  All she needs is a cigar and a fedora.

8. Perhaps reading a book about the Nazi takeover of a once-proud democracy wasn’t the best choice for these parlous times.  It was a lovely story, though.

9. The chickens have gone berserk, and we are inundated with eggs.  On the whole, this is not a bad problem to have.  I need to bake more.

10. This has been a winter full of ice and drizzle, which is kind of dreary.  It really hasn’t snowed all that much so far, and for much of January it has actually been raining.  And then it freezes overnight.  I think winter should be winter, with cold and snow.  This halfway winter is just kind of disappointing.  Of course, at current pace we may not have winters anymore.  I will miss them.

Wow, That Was Fast

It’s already happening.

The Gish-Gallop of right-wing insanity that anyone with half a brain could see coming from the moment der Sturmtrumper was declared the winner of the Electoral College vote is now well underway.  His plan – or at least the plan of the malignant people actually pulling his strings, since Trump is mentally incapable of planning anything more complicated than his next tweet – is to overwhelm rational thinkers with an avalanche of nonsense in order to create the kind of Fascist regime that Sinclair Lewis tried to warn us about in the 1930s.

It can happen here.  It is happening here.

If you’re not worried about the increasingly erratic, authoritarian, and dangerous course that this country is hurtling down this week – and bear in mind it has been less than a week since this thin-skinned vulgarian took over – then you’re not paying attention.

I said this before the election, and it is rapidly becoming apparent that I underestimated the danger.  Trump represents an existential threat to the survival of the American republic, and it is incumbent on Americans to do all in our power to deny this threat. 

His administration is already unraveling.  The new White House leaks like a sieve, which is unprecedented for this early in an administration, and the portrait that comes out is remarkably consistent – a demoralized and frightened staff of people who had supported him but are now desperately trying to hold things together in the face of a deluded, ignorant, unpredictable, and vindictive president who may well be genuinely mentally ill and whose primary advisors are either actively evil or unconscionably opportunistic.  He’s nominated people for less than 20% of the posts he has to fill, and qualified non-partisan people are jumping ship like it’s the Titanic – the entire senior staff of the State Department resigned en masse today, for example.  By many accounts the man is perilously close to mental breakdown, and this is the guy with his finger on the nuclear button.

Keep that in mind.

Trying to fix this – even if you forget about the aggressively vicious, morally bankrupt, hyperpartisan positions being put forward and just focus on getting the nuts and bolts of American government functioning again – is not going to be easy.  Nor, on the current trajectory, will it be anything like the well-established republic the Founding Fathers built for us once all is said and done.

I have no faith that the modern GOP will be willing or able to play any positive role in this.  They sold their souls to absolute power and authoritarian dictatorship long ago, and however many times they repeat the word “freedom” it will still be a lie on their lips. 

I haven’t much more faith in the Democratic Party, which hasn’t been able to organize anything more significant than a fundraiser in years.

It’s going to be a bumpy ride, folks.

In less than a week, Trump has already managed to establish a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny.

These are the times that try men’s souls.

Pink Hats and Grey Skies

Madison is just the politest city in the world when it comes to protests.  

We took the girls to the protests over Governor Teabagger’s (a wholly owned subsidiary of Koch Industries) evisceration of the state back in 2011, and despite all the hot air from right-wingers claiming it was some kind of war zone, the plain and simple fact of the matter was that I’ve been in rowdier grocery lines.  There were people walking around carrying trash bags for you to put your paper cups in so the place would stay clean.  Senator Herb Kohl – who is maybe five feet tall – showed up without any sort of entourage whatsoever and mingled with us.  It was far more civilized than the cold-hearted mayhem happening inside the legislative chambers.

So we weren’t particularly worried about the Women’s March that we went to this afternoon.

For those of you living under rocks, the fact that Donald Trump is now The Only President We’ve Got has caused serious consternation among people with more than seven working brain cells.  He’s a racketeer who has been sued more than a thousand times for everything from stiffing contractors to the open racism he practiced as a landlord.  He is currently in violation of Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution and would have already been impeached if the Republican Party cared for anything other than maintaining their black-hearted grip on power.  And he is a sexual predator, something he seems inordinately proud of.

“Grab ‘em by the pussy” is really not something you want to hear from a presidential candidate, but it was apparently okay to the millions of so-called Christians who have wearied my ears and eyes with their claims that he is some kind of moral exemplar for our fallen times.  

This tells you all you need to know about the morality of such people.

Kim spent much of the week knitting a “pussy hat” – the pink hats with cat ears that became the symbol of this particular protest.  The girls, being now teenagers and not particularly ambulatory on weekend mornings unless absolutely required to be so, decided to sit this one out, so this morning it was just me and Kim headed to Madison to meet our friends Heidi and Travis and do our part for participatory democracy.

Yes, men were allowed.  As the sign says, “Men of quality support equality.”  

And to be blunt, any male (you can’t really call them a man) who tries to grab my daughters the way Trump advises without their express consent will have their hand removed at the shoulder and then returned to them through the nearest convenient orifice.  

I think that message is worth marching for, just on its own.

We gathered at the Library Mall on the UW Madison campus, and waited for the official start of the event while more and more people filtered in.  You really can’t tell how many people show up to these things when you’re inside them – visibility is rather limited – but the local news has since pegged it at around 75,000.  Not as big as the 2011 protests, but still bigger than any city I’ve lived in since 1993 and nearly a third of the size of Kommissar Trump’s inauguration crowd.

Seriously, watching that clueless vulgarian try to tap dance around the fact that his inauguration was so poorly attended has been the funniest bit of political comedy I’ve seen in weeks.

We stood there for about an hour, on a grey, drizzly, unseasonably warm day, listening to the chants that would periodically emerge from the crowd and reading the signs.  There were some pretty clever signs (my favorites being “I would have preferred an actual swamp” and “Free Melania!”).  The crowd was friendly and talkative – I spent a good quarter hour chatting with a guy who washed up next to me in one of those eddies that crowds have – and eventually we were off.

Crowds that big don’t move quickly.  It probably took half an hour for us even to begin our trek up toward the Capitol, and then we moved at a fairly slow shuffle for a while until the crowd thinned out enough to let us walk.  

It was quite a scene.  This is what democracy looks like.

We got up to the Capitol and decided that we were old and hungry and needed lunch, so having done our bit for democracy we headed back to our car and drove off to find some food.  It was a lovely meal.

I have no illusions as to what the results of this march – or any of the more than 600 other similar marches across the United States involving millions of American citizens and other marches all over the globe (including Antarctica, surprisingly enough) – will be.  The modern Republican Party has made it very clear that it has no particular interest in serving anyone other than its plutocratic masters, a fact which (credit where due) Donald Trump has not bothered to hide the way that Governor Teabagger (a wholly owned subsidiary of Koch Industries) tries to do.  Look at his cabinet, and be awed at the sheer brazen declaration of this fact.

There will be no policy changes, not yet.  There will be no sudden realization that maybe if millions of people across the nation and the world consider your actions problematic enough to protest publicly you might want to reconsider.

But we march anyway.

We march to send a message to those in power, to make sure that our voices are heard.  It’s a fairly simple message, really.

We outnumber you.

We are coming.

You are on the wrong side of history, morality, and American values.

We will see you fail.

We will make sure you are forgotten.

Sleep well.

On the New Era

He is my president.  That’s the horrifying part.

We only get one president at a time, and he’s the president for all Americans.  Barack Obama was the president for all Americans.  George W. Bush was the president for all Americans.  Bill Clinton was the president for all Americans.  Every one of them, in an unbroken line stretching back to George Washington, was the president for all Americans.  Donald Trump is the president for all Americans.

So all of you with the “not my president” hashtags, t-shirts, and memes?  You can stop that now.  Really, it’s just silly.

Of course if someone would explain that to Trump, that would be much appreciated.

Because he clearly doesn’t believe it.

I see a lot of butt-hurt Republicans complaining about how so many of us are protesting Trump, how we haven’t just rolled over and accepted the agenda, existence, and supporters of that nylon-haired vulgarian as the Only Way To Exist.  They call us immature.  They call us unpatriotic.  They demand that we “get over it” and accept the new order of things. 

They forget how they acted when it was the guy I supported who won.  They forget the protests they made, the threats they made, the violence they committed, the mindlessly fanatical ideological resistance they launched to anything he did even if it was something they had written (hello, ACA?).  They forget that they threatened us with “Second Amendment Solutions” – a code phrase for treason – and how some of them acted on that threat.  They forget, even if I do not, the excuses they made for those actions.

They forget that the Donald has clearly demonstrated that while he may be my president, he does not consider me to be his citizen.  That he regards people like me as his enemies.  That he intends to punish me for not toeing the line he draws.  That he expects me to fear him.

And then they wonder why we’re protesting.  They wonder why we’re not rolling over.  They wonder why we’re not going to “get over it” or even accept that “getting over it” is an appropriate thing to demand in this situation.

Irony is people waving Confederate battle flags telling Americans “you lost, get over it.”  Not that this group is particularly adept at irony.

But they are right about one thing.  He is in fact my president.

And that means I own his sorry ass.

He works for me.  He is my public servant.  And I will hold him accountable.

I will hold him accountable when he treats my fellow Americans as second-class citizens because they don’t look, speak, vote, dress, worship, love, bank, or act like him, when he treats them as anything other than Americans, and when he privileges his own over the rest of the nation.

I will hold him accountable when he stands in violation of the Constitution, in contempt of the law, and in defiance of human decency.

I will hold him accountable for his hand-picked subordinates, for their ignorance, for the grotesquely unqualified nature that they share with their boss, and for the damage they will do to this country as they enrich themselves at our expense.

I will hold him accountable for his petty vindictive actions, for his pandering to the worst elements of American society, for his rampant authoritarianism and his kowtowing to foreign dictators.

I will hold him accountable.  And I will act on what I see. 

I will be better than him and his supporters.  I will not stoop to their treasonous level of threats or violence.  But I will act, and I will not be intimidated.

I am an American.  These colors do not run.  I will not fear my president. 

He should fear me.

Conversations

Today would have been my dad’s 78th birthday.  

Normally I would call him, and we’d talk for a while – sometimes up to an hour, less as his health declined last year.  We did that a lot, actually – not just on his birthday.  It was one of the things I looked forward to, week in and week out.  

We’d been trading phone calls since I went away to college.  I didn’t go all that far as an undergrad, really – maybe six miles as the crow flies – but there is a world of distance between home and college, as anyone who’s been in that situation knows, and a phone call is as good a bridge as any.  We would pick a night for calling and stick to that for a while, and gradually it would drift to another night and we’d stick to that for a while.  The nights drifted across the week, and my mailing address drifted across the country, from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh to Iowa and then finally to Wisconsin, but the calls never stopped.  Once a week, usually – enough time to build up a store of things to talk about without so many you’d forget some of them.  Less often if things were hectic.  More if they weren’t.

With my academic schedule, which demanded 10-12 hour days but was remarkably flexible about when, exactly, I put that work in, our calls moved toward the day rather than the evening, especially after the girls were born.  Over the years more of the calls started coming from me rather than the other way around, but not all, especially if it had been a while.

There wasn’t any particular set of things we’d talk about.  During football season we’d compare notes on the Eagles and their latest collapse or, more rarely, success.  Sometimes the Phillies.  We’d talk about the various family members and what they were doing, especially his granddaughters.  He enjoyed hearing about them, so far away.  We’d talk about politics sometimes – he was a Goldwater Republican who came to despise that party in the last couple of decades of his life, though I don’t know if he ever became a Democrat.  “Those bastards stole my party,” he’d complain.  I couldn’t disagree.  We'd just talk about whatever came to mind, and that was enough.

Usually when I called him on his birthday I would tell him to watch his mail, since I never remembered to get his card and gift sent off in time.  We have a Movable Feast tradition in our family, though – holidays happen when you have time for them – and he enjoyed them when they arrived.

We told jokes to each other too.  He had a great sense of humor, and when one of us came across a new one we’d share it.

They were good conversations.

I will always be glad for them.

Happy birthday, dad.

News and Updates

1. You never think about how nice it is to breathe until it you can’t do it anymore.  I may be coming down with my first winter crud of the season, which if precedent holds will last until April or so in varying degrees. 

2. If you want to know what Donald Trump and his GOP are like, all you have to do is look at what they accuse others of doing and being.  It’s a pretty infallible guide.

3. Kim and I went to a bookstore that was having an “Everything In The Store For $1” sale yesterday and cleaned the place out.  Seriously – I came home with more than two dozen books for less than the price of a new hardback.  My to-read pile is now verging on “Excessive” and I have no problem with that.  In dark times one must find what light is available.

4. I’ve been at my new job for about a year now.  I may be getting the hang of it, finally.  Academic advising in a transfer institution is a continual exercise in figuring out how to get the specific case in front of you to fit into the general rules you’re supposed to use, and if you can make that happen on a consistent basis without frying your neurons, delaying someone’s graduation, or earning a well-deserved reputation for email snark, you’re doing okay.  So far I’m managing, though I will admit to going through multiple drafts of certain emails.

5. When we were driving home from NYC on New Year’s Day we naturally had to tune into the Green Bay Packers game on the radio.  Because we live in Wisconsin, and there’s a law about that.  So we traveled down the highway, switching from one AM station to another as they faded in and out and occasionally landing on an FM station carrying the game – which is nicer sound but shorter range, usually.  And then it was halftime and they threw the broadcast back to the central studio somewhere, and I thought to myself, “I know that voice!”  Sure enough, it was a guy I used to hang out with back in college.  He was part of the Late Night Lobby Club, an informal group in my dorm that met from midnight to 4am nightly because that’s when the fun happened.  Apparently he has done well for himself in his chosen field, and good for him – but it was strange to listen to him being all Adult and Authoritative while memories of the kinds of things we did in college played across my brain.

6. Santana died this week.  She was one of our hens – the Sultan, which is quite possibly the single dimmest breed of chicken on earth.  She wasn’t much of a layer either, but she was the most sociable of the hens and the one who would let Lauren carry her around like a football.  She was a sweetly dim bird, and we’ll miss her.

7. The four of us went over to visit friends on Friday and had a good time eating dinner and playing Cards Against Humanity.  One of the signal victories of parenting is when your children can sit in a room full of adults and participate as equals in the conversation.  I am very proud of my daughters.

8. I still haven’t cleared my desk from last semester’s debris, and this semester is rapidly bearing down.  This needs to change.

9. Word to the wise: if you see a machine screw on the road, try not to run it over.  We ignored this advice on Friday, and ended up with a flat tire.  I really did not want to spend the morning digging around in the undercarriage for the spare and then figuring out when to get over to a place that would resolve the whole issue for real.  Fortunately AAA covers this sort of thing, even in your own garage.  The guy came out, identified the problem, and fixed it right there – no further appointments necessary. 

10. You can get into some fascinating conversations by bringing up the phase “reverse Polish notation” even when it is warranted and factually accurate.