How the Cow Ate the Cabbage

Position Statement for a Moderate Democrat

Or

“How the Cow Ate the Cabbage”

By Mike Grant

My biggest Covid-19 fear is that I’m going to get sick and die without ever having come out of my self-imposed silence in relation to political affairs.  There is a degree of hypocrisy involved in my situation that I am struggling to rationalize, but I can’t go back and say shit when I should have said it last week, last month, last decade, last century.  I can only try to set the record straight and move forward with more honesty.    Here is one example of the hypocrisy that is so disturbing;  I spent my entire working life being either directly, or indirectly, involved in extractive industry,  and in the interest of keeping my job, keeping workplace peace, or keeping happy customers, I bit my tongue and listened to the insufferable and incessant comments about tree huggers, stupid  environmentalists, greenies, and so forth.  I stashed my Sierra Club and Trout Unlimited membership cards in the back of my wallet and carried on in industries that were disgorging all manner of disgusting and destructive effluent, destroying public lands, sterilizing streams, and probably sterilizing more people than all the Planned Parenthood clinics in the country. So many of my friends and acquaintances are righties and Trumpists that the Facebook algorithm thinks I’m one too.  I get a constant barrage of unadulterated horseshit, and I just let it pass—NO MORE!  Here is how the cow ate the cabbage topic by topic.


*Trump is a narcissist.


Trump and the Covid-19 Pandemic

Let’s face it.  By this point in the Saga of Donald there is nothing he could do that his opponents would find acceptable, or that his supporters would find less than perfect, really big,  maybe the biggest thing ever, (a lot of people are saying it) , or fantastic.  After the dust settles and the investigations wind down, if we confirm that in the early days he really did downplay the seriousness of the emerging pandemic in the hopes of fending off a bad stretch for the stock market and thus protecting the wealth of his right-wing donors and billionaire buddies, then we have a crime on the order of something really big, maybe the biggest thing ever, perfectly imperfect.  Let us hope that the people in the private sector, and those remaining in the local, state, and federal governments who have professionalism and integrity can save our asses.  Then we can dig into the adjective thesaurus and go hog wild.  (Note:  April 16^th Orange Man went ahead and “authorized” the governors to follow a sensible and safe approach to getting the economy started down the road to recovery.  Dr. Fauci and Mike Pence must have smacked him in the side of the head and got his attention.  I hope it holds.)


*Trump is a megalomaniac.


Reproductive Rights

I don’t kill babies.  I don’t want the government to kill babies.  Aside from the odd psycho, I don’t think anybody wants to kill babies.  A woman’s right to choose is a complex issue, and to hide behind the simplistic notion that all abortion is murder is a way to absolve oneself of having to put any real thought into it.  I find it interesting that the same people who are supposedly all about self-determination, self -reliance, and individual rights, jump on this opportunity to be all up in somebody else’s business.  There is undeniable truth in the argument that the ultimate decision is between the woman, her loving family, her conscience (possibly, but not necessarily religion based), and her trusted confidants, if she is lucky enough to have some.  I don’t have a problem with some restrictions if they are applied fairly.  A minor should be required to have the advice of parents or guardians, but with some relief in special circumstances where the guardians are demonstrably off the deep end in one way or another. A lot of people, really smart people, some of the smartest people ever, and people with compassion, really compassionate people, some of the most compassionate people in the world think that 20 weeks is a reasonable guideline for distinguishing “late term” procedures, but even then there has to be consideration for medical circumstances.  The fact is that abortion rates have been declining since 1990, and it is due to improved access to contraception rather than to increased restrictions on abortion.

How the cow ate the cabbage: 1) When abortions are illegal, people with money and connections can (and do) get discreet and safe procedures and can go back to thumping Bibles with nobody the wiser.  Disadvantaged women end up enduring much less favorable, more dangerous circumstances, and this sucks.  2)  When you get to the bottom of it, it is none of the government’s business, and none of your business either. 3)  Now the only unanswered question is whether society should subsidize the procedure through Medicaid or other programs.  If the government helps pay for any medical procedure, then it must help with this one.  If society is going to get out of the medical field all together, then there will be a whole lot more of us in trouble than the poor young lady on the tenement stoop who is struggling to find aid and hope in a terrifying circumstance, whatever that may be. 


*Trump is a demagogue.


 The Electoral College

The Electoral College is not working, and it should be eliminated or substantially modified as soon as possible.  The way it is functioning is to make the votes of some people count for more than the votes other people. Florida, with a population of about 20 million, has 29 electoral votes, or about 699,000 Floridians per electoral vote. Wyoming with a population of about 586,000 has three electoral votes, or about 195,000 Wyomingans [sic] per electoral vote. Or, to put it another way, each citizen of Wyoming has more than three-and-half times the voting power as a citizen of Florida. This violates common sense as well as the concept of "one man, one vote."



  Contrary to widely held belief, the Electoral College was not instituted to protect a courageous and self-reliant rural minority from the misguided snowflakes in the cities and on the coasts.  It was a compromise between those who wanted to select the executive by popular vote, and those who thought selection should be by Congress.  The designers of the Constitution were terrified of the exact situation we find ourselves in now.  They were paranoid about excessive executive power, and they were afraid of the power of a populist president appealing to an ill-informed and gullible public:

The president should be elected "by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation," Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist 68. "A small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations." 

Thirty states now require the electoral college vote to reflect the popular vote.  This is progress.  We need more.


*Trump is a douchebag.


Republicans


Back when I was a kid and we walked five miles to school through blizzards and tornados after milking the cows and feeding the chickens, Republicans  were just people who had money and who advocated policies to help make sure they could keep it.  They thought a key to keeping their money was to avoid sharing it, but you could sometimes convince them that sharing was a good idea, and they’d be okay with it.  Democrats, particularly the ones with power, (eg. Kennedys, Roosevelts, Johnson, McNamara, etc.) were people who had money and thought that there was enough money in the country that working -class people could have a share-- enough to have a decent life.  The two parties had significant differences for sure, but they generally figured a way to work things out and to get some things done.  It was give-and-take.  We built highways, dams, cars, suburbs, awesome swords and sandals movies, and had a shit-load of kids.  We made some mistakes, (Vietnam, aspects of The War on Poverty, electing Nixon), but our hearts were in the right place, and we made sincere effort to fix our screw-ups.  We could talk to one another.  It was pretty cool.


Sometime in the 1980’s, it became obvious to some Republican mucky-mucks that they weren’t likely to win many more elections unless they recruited more people.   Someone got the brilliant idea to co-opt some social issues that they really didn’t give a rat’s ass about and use them to bamboozle a whole lot of the white working-class into joining the team.  It was a miraculous turnaround for the party.  There was a kind of utilitarian mind meld between the ultra-conservative ultra-rich, and the ultra-conservative, ultra- white Christians.  Rich Republicans get enough votes from poor Republicans to keep them in power and to keep them getting richer. And we are where we are.   We don’t have civil discourse anymore and the income gap just keeps growing.







*Trump is a buffoon.

The 2^nd Amendment

I don’t want your guns.  I don’t want the government to take your guns.  I don’t want the government to take my guns.  If you think you “need” a whole rack of AK 47’s to “protect my family”, I suggest you move to a different neighborhood.  If you have a gun shrine in your living room, you have problems the 2^nd Amendment can’t help you with.  I don’t think it is unreasonable for state or federal laws to make guns a bit harder to get, or to limit who can own guns based on mental health, criminal record, etc.. These principles have been upheld in the courts numerous times.  I don’t think it is unreasonable for state or federal governments to limit the types of weaponry we can own.  The Constitution guarantees our right to own guns.  It does not guarantee the right to own unlimited numbers and types of guns.  I have some guns; I don’t have any fighter planes, or rocket launchers, or even any hand grenades or fully automatic assault rifles.

 Garrett Epps, in an article from 2018 in The Atlantic makes a very cogent argument in this article:  https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/second-amendment-text-context/555101/



Be safe, stay healthy.  Stay tuned for updates on climate change, environmentalism, and other topics.

Mike



*These comments do not have anything to with the passage they precede.  I just needed to get them in here someplace.