Musing on Power and Strength

 The Democratic National Convention wrapped up a couple of days ago, bringing the curtain triumphantly down on a week of amazing excitement, path-breaking and historic moments and joy, so much joy. Yet, as Kamala Harris delivered her speech accepting the nomination and laying out her vision of tomorrow, beyond the happiness and pride, one interesting note struck me more than any others. Unsurprising, perhaps since this was a moment of affirming a muscular approach to the world outside, and that is not an idea one associates with Democrats, much less with a liberal from San Francisco, as Harris' opponents would like to describe her.

 In some ways, the idea of a Democrat arguing that she will ensure America's military remains the most lethal force in the world should not be a surprise. It was Roosevelt who led the USA through World War 2, it was Truman who willingly stood up during the Cold War, it was John Kennedy who remained steadfast through the Cuban missile crisis, Bill Clinton intervened in Yugoslavia to protect Albanians from genocide and it was Obama who reminded the world while accepting the Nobel Peace Prize that he would never flinch from defending American power and interests. While the Democrats may have many voices that speak in softer language and advocate for less violent realpolitik, the leaders have rarely shied away from projecting American power abroad. It is also true that no Democrat nominee for President would use their moment in the brightest spotlight to suggest a new approach.

And, yet, a new approach is exactly what we need. Speaker after speaker echoed the cliched "God bless our troops!", a line that has as much meaning as offering "thoughts and prayers" after yet another mass shooting. I am not naive enough to suggest that America should disengage from the world and withdraw into isolation - a policy more associated with the American right-wing than the left - nor that we should send our forces to act as the world's policeman in troubled corners of the world, from Haiti to Yemen to Niger. Above all, what I hope is that our leaders recognize the difference between force, strength and power. 

At first glance, it may seem that the terms are largely interchangeable, especially strength and power, and there is no doubt that they are deeply connected. Yet, as we can see around us all the time, force and strength are not the same, and strength and power are likewise quite distinct. We know now, after three bloody years of war in Ukraine that Russia was never militarily strong. Their open invasion of Ukraine showed that they could not sustain a military operation just across their border in an area deeply connected to their own logistical network; what chance do they have of fighting further abroad then. Yet, till the moment that their army rolled (metaphorically) across the border, few people doubted their strength, and that illusion of strength gave them power. The moment they employed force however, it stripped away the curtains and showed that they were nothing but a  toothless tiger - dangerous, cruel, ruthless, still and able to inflict tremendous pain on a smaller neighbor, but quite incapable of matching their actions to their bombastic words. Indeed, their deployment of super weapons like hypersonic missiles proved as much a game changer as the V-1 and V-2 flying bombs of Hitler, again able to hurt but far less overwhelming than promised and it is almost beyond question that the Khinzal enjoyed far greater status before it was used. In a similar way, the Ukranian counteroffensive of last year revealed weaknesses in American and West European armor - perhaps as much a function of expectations, conditions and operational mistakes - that deflated the power they had enjoyed before the limitations in their strength were exposed.

It should not be thought that this loss of power is peculiar to Russia and its ilk either. The USA enjoyed its own moment of seemingly incredible power in fall of 2002 - a terrorist attack on New York had destroyed the Twin Towers and America came together in righteous anger, determined to unleash unprecedented retribution on the men who had planned and enabled the attack, and for good measure. And that power would fall upon others with far less connection to the attack but deserving of suffering our wrath because we could. The world watched with bated breath and mostly silent awe as US special forces swept the Taliban from power in Afghanistan, then America toppled the Iraqi dictator with almost ludicrous ease, killing thousands of Iraqi soldiers for a near negligible cost in American blood. And having seemingly demonstrated its strength, America believed its power to be near infinite when it brushed off Iranian overtures. In hindsight, we can see that we had reached the apex of our power and that the use of force was about to undermine our strength and eventually reduce our power, as low-level insurgencies in both Afghanistan and Iraq sapped our wealth and will. We eventually withdrew from both countries with most of our stated aims defeated. The Iranians realized that they were no longer under threat of invasion and began to make their own miscalculations of strength and power.

Over and over, we can see that the use of force reduces our power. An interesting case is playing out in Israel and the Middle East - Iran and Hezbollah have stayed largely on the sidelines and appeared stronger as a result, while any move to engage Israel tends to undercut that power when their actual strength is revealed  to be less than it was supposed. Israel sadly is facing its own dilemma - the terrorist attacks belied Israel's seeming invulnerability and it is now expending a massive amount of firepower to try and restore its position. The jury remains out on whether Israel will emerge stronger or weaker from its operations in Gaza, but it shows the delicate balance between projecting power and using force, with the latter inevitably undermining the former. A slightly different scenario was seen in Europe, when Russia seemed to hold the power over Western Europe through control of Europe's gas supply. Yet Europe's economic strength, with help from the US, soon negated Russian power, while in turn Russia was able to find customers elsewhere and thus weather the West's attempts at using their power to chastise Putin; in both cases, strength on one side overcame power exercised by the other, even without the use of force. Examples can be found is so many places: the Houthis have shown the limits of Western power and continued to attack civilian shipping with impunity, despite punitive strikes by American and allied air forces, yet their own power is built on weak foundations and will vanish if and when the world decides to return to the longer, more expensive route around Africa, leaving Yemen mired in poverty and violence and no better than it was a year ago.

Turning back to Harris, who I hope to see as our next president, I hope that she understands these subtle differences. America is strong, a country blessed with so much natural wealth and resources. The USA is powerful, too, but it is important that we keep that power through wise alliances, for power is multiplied when we act in concert with our allies. We must also always recognize the link between our strength and power - our strength, as the disruptions of the Covid epidemic showed, is not without weakness and we would do well to address the chinks in our armor. And above all, we need to avoid the gratuitous use of force. This is not to say that force may never be used, for their are threats that can be handled only through force, but we should remember the keys to successfully employing force - keeping it calibrated to the provocation, ensuring that we have a clearly defined and achievable goal and above all remembering, that the threat of force is often more effective than force itself. Bismark and Sun Tzu would both recognize the wisdom of the words, "speak softly but carry a big stick". I hope Harris ensures we have a big stick, but I also hope we never have to do more than tap it lightly on the ground at a reminder.

The Tragedy and Waste of the Trump Presidency

 It's been only a few days since the Trump presidency ended, and I, and I suspect many others, haven't really gotten used to the idea of waking up each morning to find no breaking scandal or outrage. It is still a welcome novelty to have a president who is focused on the nation rather than himself, a novelty that will surely wear off soon enough, and one that clearly has not struck the fancy of patient folk like Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson. It is so soothing to have no rage tweets each morning, nor any wonder about what presidential norm or tradition may next be shattered.

I could write a lot about the sins of omission and commission of the last president, and dwell for a long time on his fatal flaws and less than glorious claims to history as the only president impeached twice and the only one to seemingly encourage an insurrection. I could spend many wordy paragraphs on the inexplicable failures of the Republican Party and their abdication of all responsibility and moral rectitude. But I thought it may be more interesting to look for a minute at the sadder side of the last four years and the unique fortune that was Donald Trump's for the taking but which opportunity he sadly neglected to even consider much less reach out and seize. Trump was a unique figure in US history, a unicorn of sorts though perhaps a flawed and narcissistic unicorn and one particularly dangerous to be left around virgin maids; a man that I called "lightning in a bottle" a few weeks ago. Few presidents have had more opportunity to shape the world into a fundamentally different place, and perhaps none have done less to seize the opportunity. 

Donald Trump, amongst all the standard bearers of the party in the past two decades, was not beholden to the party. He rose to prominence by staking out a radical position, well removed from the familiar grounds of the party establishment. This is not to praise his role in questioning Barack Obama's birthplace, but simply acknowledges that Trump was not a part of the establishment. Most American politicians love to claim the role of outsider but Trump was one to whom the term truly applied. He won the primaries by bucking the party, refusing to commit to supporting the winner if he lost and mounting wild attacks on his opponents. Few stalwarts endorsed him early, especially when Jeb Bush was the anointed favorite of the party elite. Yet Trump won, and that placed him in an unique position of ruling a party he despised openly, and therefore free from the bonds of compromise and deals that typically pave the way to victory. Trump owned his party in a way that literally no other leader has ever done, and he owed nothing to the party leaders. He was free to be the presidential candidate he wanted to be.

During the election campaign and later, he continually showed his disdain for GOP orthodoxy. He promised to raise taxes on the rich, an absolute heresy amongst modern Republicans, even claiming that he would personally pay more in tax under his proposed system. Yet when the tax bill finally passed and became law, it was a warmed over mixture of the usual tax breaks served up during every GOP reign. While many groups saw a reduction in their tax bill, it would be hard to say that it ever raised the burden on the  richer sections of society. Generally, itemized deductions became less attractive, which is a good thing, but  there seems to be a consensus that it was corporations that gained the most. It is also fairly safe to say that the tax cuts did not pay for themselves nor did they boost the economy beyond the very short term. So while not quite a tragedy for the middle class, the Trump tax cuts were a waste of billions of dollars and a taste of the Trump presidency to come, where campaign promises were ignored and the GOP establishment got exactly what they wanted all along.

It was on rebuilding America that Trump truly failed. His party has stubbornly opposed spending money on infrastructure, even to the point of preventing others from funding it, but Trump rode in promising to rebuild America, and gild it, no less. Again, Trump the candidate promised grandiose plans for repairing Americas faltering bridges and highways, and less coherently promised to restore American manufacturing. Plans with eye-popping arrays of zeroes were floated, or at least the names of said plans were floated. Yet, when the time came to make good, Trump's trillion dollar inventment plan was orders of magnitude less and depended on magical private capital to fill in the difference, no credible reason being offered for why private investors should open their purse strings. This was more than a broken promise. This was a golden opportunity lost. Trump could have joined forces with his political foes, and used his even then considerable sway over his own party to push a real investment in the nation's future and he passed on it in favor of empty gestures and bombastic claims of great success to mask the most complete failure. Not only would this have benefited America, it would have made political sense as well, splitting his opposition and widening his coalition.

It is perhaps unfair to include healthcare here amongst his missed opportunities, not because he made the slightest effort but because it was always so obvious that he had absolutely no idea about the subject nor any interest in learning. But unlike a neurosurgeon whose motto is, "first do no harm", Trump attacked the existing systems with all the concerns of a particularly deranged bull in a shop full of delicate porcelain chinaware. He could have left the provisions of the Affordable Care Act in place, having discovered what most Democrat leaders already knew well, that America's healthcare system is really complex. But hatred for his predecessor drove him to push for repeal of the ACA, and only a late crisis of morality by John McCain stymied him from gutting it and plunging the country into crisis. But failure didn't chastise him any more than his brief glimpse of the complexities and his own ignorance, and he worked to destroy through executive action what he had failed to topple through legislation. Needless to say, the amazing plan he promised from the early days of his candidacy failed to ever materialize, being nothing more than a figment of his fevered imagination.

Trump rose to power on the strength of his opposition to immigrants, the central pillar of his appeal to a broad and confusing mixture of Americans. A forgiving critic may claim that he opposed only illegal immigration, but reality begs to differ. His public tirades attacked people as much for their background as their means of arriving here, and his actions included massive restrictions on the avenues for legal immigration. He fanned the flames of xenophobia with his promises of a wall to seal off Fortress America from the scourge of brown skinned immigrants. As a member of that dangerous brigade, I am more than a little opposed to his actions, of course. But it was precisely his ownership of the issue that gave him opportunity. It is well known that such knotty issues can sometimes be solved only by those who have established their  credentials on the subject. Like Yitzhak Rabin or Ariel Sharon on peace with Palestine, like Bill Clinton on Welfare reform, or Ronald Reagan on raising taxes, Trump could have used his perceived hardline stance to negotiate a real and broad solution in a way that no one else could. George Bush and Jon McCain tried but could not bring the radical side of their party to the table; Marco Rubio abandoned his attempts and fled at the first sign of opposition from his right. But Trump was the radical wing of the party. He could have made a grand bargain, and such was his hold on the party that they would have had no choice but to follow along. His supporters would have believed him if he switched position and claimed that a comprehensive reform bill was the way to end illegal immigration. This was a man who made the GOP, the party of Ronald "Tear down this wall" Reagan, amend their party platform in favor of Russia and Vladimir Putin. He could have sold the final bill anyway he liked and his supporters would have gone along for most part; the few who broke ranks and called out the emperor's lack of garments would find that they no longer commanded the same attention when attempting to compete with Trump and the Democrats would have stayed out of his way, if they had enough to cheer on their own side. But Trump never once attempted to rise above his baser instincts, he never sought to unify the nation through compromise nor find common ground with his opponents. Instead he doubled and tripled down on his xenophobic and racist behavior, and pursued meaningless aims like a border wall (effectiveness or rather lack thereof being just the icing on his rotten cake) even to the extent of stripping the military of housing funds to build a few miles of barrier of debatable efficacy. It was a situation and a moment crying out for a statesman, but instead of a Trajan we got Nero.

Trump was  a man who won the rare opportunity to rise above himself, to become far more than any of us expected (in part because we expected so much less of him than of Barack Obama or Hilary Clinton), a man presented with a moment is history where he could have changed the nation for the better. But in the end he failed because of who he was. He rose because he was the most political of outsiders, reading the angst of a vast swath of the populace and riding the wave to the White House. He failed because he was the most venal of politicians, catering only to the lowest common denominator amongst his supporters and whipping up the basest emotions rather than rising to a nobler calling and drawing them along with him. This was the  tragedy of Donald Trump, that when Fate called he was true to his inner self and his true self was every bit as mean and small as ever we had feared.

The Flames of Wrath

 When I departed the shores of my native land some twenty years ago, I expected to miss some aspects of life in the old country and I was not disappointed in my expectations. What I did not miss was the violence and death that stalked our elections, and that I naively believed I had left well behind. Till now. This past month and more, it has been increasingly obvious that this nation I now call my residence was hurtling towards a cliff and that the leaders of the executive branch of government were busy pushing it forward ever faster instead of making any attempt to stay its course towards mayhem and destruction, aided and abetted by their allies in the legislature. On a wintry afternoon in the first week of the new year, the United States found itself on the edge of the cliff and staring down into the flames of chaos and as this week turns, it is far from clear if we have reeled away from the precipice or whether we are still tethering there, arms windmilling and wondering if the slightest mistake will send us hurtling down into the abyss. 

For as long as I can remember, the world has looked, rightly or wrongly, to the United States as an example of how a democratic republic should function. Unlike the United Kingdom, with its centuries long history and tradition that helped them develop their democratic institutions, the USA was a better example to newly independent nations emerging into the light of freedom, especially when for nations that had suffered years under European colonial rule but also for nations that had fallen under dictatorships or communist rule during the Cold War. To be sure, the Philippines may have taught us a thing or two about American colonialism, but we saw that less and were generally enamored of the brighter image, of a nation that cast off colonial rule and forged its own destiny by adopting a progressive and revolutionary government where the power resided with the governed populace. And while the US model was flawed, it always seemed to be trending forward leading towards a better, brighter future for all. And one thing that was never even questioned was the transfer of power from one administration to the next. Even when the 2000 election transfixed the world and opened our eyes to the myriad oddities of the US electoral system -  electoral college, no national or even state-level system, archaic and non-uniform - on the far side of the world, I never doubted that there would be a peaceful and orderly transfer of power. It was one of our greatest sources of pride in India that our own young republic had managed a similar tradition and that no matter how deep the political or personal differences, a losing government graciously yielded to its vanquisher, while an unsuccessful challenger ruefully accepted its loss, and this in contrast to most other nations in the neighborhood and further abroad.

In 2016, I never expected Donald Trump to defeat Hilary Clinton but I sensed that something had changed forever in his continuous talk about how the election was rigged against him (it wasn't!) and his refusal to accept the results unless he won. I suspected that he was simply setting up for his defeat, as a way to avoid that he had lost to a woman; I also suspected that Russia expected no more than to create divisions, to cast doubts and de-legitimize the incoming president, and were as surprised as anyone else when Trump tapped into a deep vein of rural discontent and rode it to victory. Four years of corruption and ineptness later, President Trump returned to the same playbook, railing about rigged elections though the electoral college actually favors him and the Republicans fully control or at least share power in all the battleground states, sowing division and hatred, lying shamelessly with absolute disregard for reality or truth. And when he finally came up short, to the tune of seven million votes, he refused to accept his defeat and did all that I had expected in 2016, except that his actions were now the actions of the President of the United States.

From the moment it became obvious that Biden had restored the Democrat's "blue wall" in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and flipped Georgia and  Arizona to cement his victory, Trump went into overdrive with ludicrous claims of fraud and after barely a moment's hesitation, the elected congresspeople of his party swung into line. Some of them tried to have it both ways, neither endorsing Trump's false claims but not repudiating them either nor acknowledging the obvious victory of president-elect Joe Biden. Others were less bashful and leaned into the president's dangerous narrative, claiming to share his beliefs of dead voters, fake ballots and other fake assertions. And through their self-serving acts of omission and commission, they fanned the mistaken belief of Trump's more fervent believers that their champion's victory had been stolen by nefarious actions. Rather than highlight the fact that Trump's lawyers had never stood by their claims of fraud in court nor brought any evidence before the courts in even one of more than five dozen chances. But his supporters never saw, or at least never acknowledged the sixty to one record in court challenges. They were fed an unvaried diet of lies on their preferred source of propaganda (it is impossible to pretend that these are news services), amplified on Twitter and Facebook and other less social media. Rather than let them move through the stages of grief, the president trapped his supporters in denial and as the clock counted down to the end of his inglorious term of office, they finally reached anger, and finally on January 6th, it boiled over in a way that we had never imagined but should have seen coming all the way from 2016.

When an angry, armed mob storms the Capitol, chanting their intent to hang the vice-president, it is impossible to call this anything other than an insurrection. It failed, partly because this was a mob led by a morally corrupt coward, a man who embraced them while things seemed to go his way but denounced them and threatened them with dire consequences as soon as it became obvious that he would have to pay for his role in the violence. A fanatical supporter, an Air Force veteran was shot dead, while a policeman was beaten to death and three others died of indirect causes and the death toll was no larger only because the mob had no plan beyond storming the Capitol and stopping the pro-forma certification of the winner of the election win. Had they actually encountered Democrat or the small number of Republicans who accepted reality, though, things may have been much, much worse. The rioters were largely drunk on lies and white privilege and no one explained their attitude better than Elizabeth from Knoxville, who was shocked that police used mace on her while she was storming the capitol as part of a"revolution". But while the execution may have been ludicrous and their attitude lends itself to mockery, the anger is real enough. When millions of people buy passionately into so dangerous a lie and believe that they have been wronged and robbed, they are not going to easily accept that they were in the wrong and quietly accept that they have lost. When many of them have come to believe the wildest of conspiracy theories and come to view the situation as a pivotal point of history with themselves as the guys in white hats, and when so many of them are also owners of weapons of war, the potential for violence is beyond possible and almost certain. Trump and his Congressional enablers have sown the wind, and while Mitch McConnell may have decided to hop off the crazy train now, the situation is now beyond their control and it is the nation that must reap the hurricane. Opportunists like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, Trumpists like Matt Gaetz, the owner of Devin Nunes' cow, Mo Brooks et al, and conspiracy-crazed newcomers like Representatives Boebert and Greene might seek to ride the wave they've helped unleash, in reality they control it as much as a rider on a tiger - if they ever try to pivot back towards reality, they will find themselves considered traitors and hated even more than perennial enemies of this movement. Mike Pence has experienced it already, as have others like McConnell and Lindsey Graham. Even the nominal leader of this movement, Donald Trump himself, is now irrelevant and his feeble calls for peace are likely to be ignored; many of his supporters have dismissed these messages as coerced or fake and have vowed to continue with whatever it is they believe they are doing.

Donald Trump has to answer for so many sins against this nation, from gutting the Affordable Care Act without any alternative to destroying the postal service, from stacking the courts with hundreds of unvetted, and often, unqualified judges to politicizing the civil service, from destroying the environment to turning his back on combined action on climate change, from disparaging the US intelligence services in favor of Russia's (in all but name) dictator to stealing housing funds from the military to fund a mostly meaningless, ineffective and environmentally disastrous border wall. He is arguably culpable in the death of four hundred thousand victims of Covid-19. But this is the deepest and most lasting wound he has inflicted on his own country. He has sown the grapes of wrath and now he will skulk away into ignominious obscurity leaving us to harvest the bloody results.

Lightning in a Bottle

It's been over a month since the United States general election, and despite the myriad court cases and bizarre, bordering on ridiculous, conspiracy theories floated by President Trump and his allies, it now appear almost certain that the desire expressed by over half the nation will in fact be fulfilled and Donald Trump will soon be keeping company with George H. W. Bush and Jimmy Carter as a one term president. For most people, this would not be the worst company to keep, but Trump has turned losing an election into such a personal anathema that he recoils from any hint that he has been rejected by the country and instead clings to the most outlandish and ridiculous lies in an attempt to avoid facing reality. He has refused so far to recognize his conqueror and stubbornly persists in his delusions, though the moment of cold reality draws ever closer and it is over but for the wailing and pouting.

Normally this would be a moment to savor, given the pain and damage this man has wrought upon the nation. This should have been a moment of sweet triumph when a man who delights in belittling others is himself brought low and when a lout who claims the powers of a king in a democratic republic is reminded that he does in fact answer to the people and that they have sat in judgment upon him and found him wanting. But the reality is that the this was not an election to be enjoyed. Trump, as he loves to point out, won more votes than any other president before him and only the inconvenient fact that his opponent won a good six million more votes than he and prevailed in a handful of key states denies him a chance to prolong our national agony. But the fact that over seventy million Americans decided that they would like another four years of the same is a sobering thought, a draft of gall that ruins the nectar of victory.

Tomorrow, the tally of the electoral college votes should further reinforce what we have known since the first week of November, that Joe Biden has won the election and will be the next president of the United States. But what of the man he displaced? Trump has made it clear that he will not accept his defeat, graciously or otherwise, and in a rarity for him, he has kept his promise that he will be a bad loser. But beyond the short term tantrums, theater and grift,  he has hinted that he will not do like previous losing candidates and yield the political centerstage. Other losing candidates have remained active - Al Gore became a climate change activist, Jimmy Carter championed housing for the less fortunate - but they exited the stage of presidential politics. Trump, by contrast, has hinted that he may run again for the presidency in 2024, something that has never been done before. To be sure, it is his right to do so, but  losing candidates of yesteryear have stepped aside not because of any law precluding them but because they have accepted the judgment of the people and know that their failure should open the path for new ideas, new candidates and new energy.

Donald Trump however is a Unicorn, a man of unique talents. This is not a compliment but a mere statement of fact. His record setting vote haul was noteworthy in the energy and dedication it revealed in his supporters but also in the wide swath of supporters he enjoys beyond the traditional Republican tent. In the same way that Nixon attracted Southern Democrats to the GOP, Trump has found a surprisingly durable vein of support in places not always favorable to the GOP. The party leadership would like to tap into that support for other electoral battles, but they are painfully aware that the support is for Trump, not for the GOP as a whole. Trump could draw that support because he had no real ideology and was happy to offer lie upon barefaced lie, telling his audience what they wanted to hear. His own aura of success was built on similar myth and it was easy enough for him to promise anything and everything to his followers. 

Now the GOP is caught in a trap of its own creation. Many candidates would like to vie for the leadership of the party, but with Trump refusing to yield his position, they must either step aside or challenge him. They have been so abject in the servility so far that it is nigh impossible to see any of them summon the courage to challenge Trump now, even though the longer they wait, the lower their chances of becoming the new face of the party even should Trump finally fall. But for the rest of the leadership, the men like Senate Leader Mitch McConnell or House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, the greater fear is that should Trump retreat into the shadows, the coalition he has created may collapse as suddenly as it formed. They, and all would be leaders of the party, know that no one else can capture the lightning in a bottle that Trump possesses. For one, they are generally bound to GOP orthodoxy, even when they spurned it at Trump's command. From no tax raises to free markets to corporate supremacy, they are on a vastly different path from that which drew support to Trump. The fact that Trump never delivered on his promises made little difference to his supporters since he always claimed with absolute confidence that he had in fact done so. From a woeful record of actual new manufacturing jobs to literally no increase in infrastructure spending, from trade wars with no clear plan to a lack of any healthcare agenda, Trump never attempted to actually deliver anything he had promised but he had the unique ability to lie boldly and unashamedly. None of his would be successors have that level of audacity; perhaps they are too rooted in reality to be able to actually pull it off. 

Trump had other skills that few realized would translate so well to electoral politics. He reveled in chaos, he understood the TV news cycle in a way that none of his peers did (and to be honest, neither did his critics in the press). He knew that any crisis could be swept out of the public's mind by simply creating a new controversy. He understood the short attention span of the American public because he understood the need of the press for non-stop continuous hype and excitement; he provided it through outrageous actions and statements and in the fog of confusion, no single issue ever grew big enough to hurt him. On the rare occasions when events remained beyond his control, he resorted to outrageous lies, depending on the distrust he had already created around the nation's news media and the unwillingness of the press to  recognize that he had torn up and trampled the rules that they still clung to. It is for sober research in years to come to determine exactly why so many people continued to believe his lies or excuse them, but the fact remains that no other GOP leader can hope to walk the same path he has blazed. They have too much awareness of reality and they have too long a record in public life to suddenly promise anything they need to win support. Ironically, a major anchor holding them back is their record through the Trump years and how they abandoned all their core beliefs to support Trump. To retain the support of Trump's devoted followers they must continue to bow down before him, while to stand up for themselves now would be to stand naked before the world. They are Trump's playthings, his puppets and they should know that whether he is deposed or simply fades when he loses the oxygen of attention, they cannot hope to be his successors, nor have they anything left to stand by themselves.

Right Funding Our World

In the weeks since the murder of George Floyd tore the lid off the long simmering discontent with the way we police ourselves, one term has been gaining significant traction and by virtue of its pithy concise framing has become the rallying cry in city after city across the nation. From sea to shining sea, the people, in significant numbers have raised their voices to cry out, "Defund the police!" and this is no idle demand, nor the anarchistic slogan feared by its opponents. As is my wont, I waited to acquaint myself with the topic in greater detail before giving voice to my opinion, believing that so significant a subject is worthy of deep consideration and that it were better to offer no words in place of hasty or ill-thought ideas. Whether the time was well spent or ill is not for me to say, but suffice to say that I have sought to see the subject from different angles and deal with it accordingly.

The problem with all slogans in a world with short attention span and even less appetite for nuance is that they convey a wealth of meaning. Defunding the police, as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez so eloquently explained, is not abolishing the police, but rather restoring to our police the duties it was created to fulfill and removing the many tasks assigned to them by resource-starved cities and towns. This is an important matter to remember and one that I will return to discuss in a minute. The idea behind the slogan is not wholly misplaced, though opinion is somewhat divided on which services should be pulled from the police and assigned elsewhere.

The funding issue is the first question that must be addressed. Whenever cities or towns face a budget shortfall, the gap is closed by defunding some of the social services. Police unions (ironically the one type of union on which the traditional political positions of GOP and Democrats are flipped) not only guard their budgets zealously, but in modern America, no politician is willing to be "soft" on crime by slashing the police department. Cutting funds for libraries or community centers, after-school programs or prisoner rehabilitation are easier sells, rarely debated too long, easy to pass public muster and quickly forgotten. Even when budgets recover, the money rarely flows back to the defunded programs. The default agency left to deal with myriad problems from stray critters to truant children are then the police and it is worth noting that their funding is not increased to cover the additional workload. American police already receive shorter training than their counterparts in many developed countries, and they are now tasked with far more roles, roles that they have not been trained to tackle.

This is actually not in the interests of the police, and while the "defund" tag has posited them as antagonists in this discussion, it would actually be far more in their own interests and the public's if they were to team up with the defunding proponents to find a better solution to the problems in our cities. As Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez explained, the suburbs already enjoy the sort of policing that would result if cities "defunded" their police force, i.e. assigned the many services not suited to law enforcement officers to people trained to fulfill those roles. And more importantly, it would assign those alternate agencies the funding needed to actually perform their duties. Imagine an effective crime prevention program in place of arresting and incarcerating thousands of youth. Imagine after school programs that helped kids tap into their talents and follow their dreams instead of curfews and harassment that provide no solution. Imagine positive action and positive role models in place of fear and confrontation.

The police are not, I believe, inherently racist. The policemen who stood by as George Floyd was murdered included an Asian American; Black policemen have acted as rough with Black men as their peers. Police have killed white people, albeit at a lower percentage, but nevertheless the color of skin does not protect a person from harsh police action. The police are simply a reflection of the world they come from, and in that world racism and classim are closely entwined and institutionalized. Our society was designed to keep Black people down; it was really designed to keep various groups suppressed at different points - Irish, Italians, Chinese, Japanese - but the Blacks were the one group that couldn't cross the divide. They were too large a minority and too heavily targeted, in far too many places and ways to break through as a whole. And that is why Black people in middle class neighborhoods attract suspicion. For far too many of us, the idea of a successful Black person - a Michelle Obama or Kamala Harris - is more than we can comfortably fathom and so we react negatively, aggressively challenging their right to be in "our" neighborhoods even to the point, increasingly, of summoning our police to remove their interlopers. Note that these are not cases of police racism, and that more often than not the police react with far greater wisdom than the complainants. Our police, like our society as a whole, is classist rather than straight up racist. And we have a very set idea on what a poor person must look like, and a corresponding idea of where a Black person fits on that economic scale - the high overlap in those two images is why so many interactions between police and Black people are negative.

In our society today, a poor man is in the wrong, because to start with he's poor only because he's lazy and refuses to work - that is the primary lie we tell ourselves to explain away the privileges we have set in place for ourselves; being so deficient in character, it follows then that poor people simply want to steal our wealth and so we can justify harsh police action, without proof. And we have created police to protect the privilege of the rich against any attempts by the poor to raise themselves. Privilege is very real, and it's why a dark-skinned Indian like I have less to fear than a Black person - Indians have been permitted into the good place, people do not question my presence in upscale neighborhoods and the worst stereotyping I face is the assumption that I work in IT. It's why police begin by assuming the worst of poorer people and why they act with so much violence towards them; the decades, centuries of oppression have ensured that the poor and Black people are often the same group. Eric Garner was selling cigarettes on a street when he was accosted and murdered by the police; I never saw police even bother the college kids hustling tickets in downtown State College PA on gameday. Tamir Rice was playing with a toy gun in a park when he was murdered (whether the policeman shouted at him to put the gun down is irrelevant) while white men parade in Texas with rifles - the difference is that they are obviously middle class jerks. It's why Daniel Shaver, a blue collar pest control technician was murdered by police in a Mesa La Quinta but armed protesters can march into the Michigan congressional buildings without fear.

It's why we have to right fund our cities and government services. It's not about defunding police, it's about assigning resources to agencies that can do a better job because they are trained for those situations. It's about no longer having police handcuff eight year old kids because that's the only way they are trained to react (I suppose we should be glad that they did not taser the kid!) or have police threaten a victim of domestic violence with arrest for not inviting them into her home without a warrant - that footage, from the now discontinued show "Cops" shows everything that is wrong with our police services, I believe. The victim and the alleged perpetrator were white, but clearly lower middle class at best. The policeman requested to enter after a 911 call about a wife beating, but the woman wouldn't let him in; he ended up dragging her out and threatening to arrest her. There was no one to help the victim, but plenty of police with enough weaponry to re-enact Kitchner's slaughter of the dervishes, and that is why we need to change the way we fund our city government. Heavily armed police do not reduce crime; more officers with more interaction with communities they police may help, but only if they walk the streets and know the people. Instead the police are now an alien force, serving the privileged and not considered a part of the lower classes of society. We have to change that and for a simple reason - we have tried it the other way and it has failed so clearly it's time to try something new.

Mornië Alantië (A Promise Lives Within Us Now)

These may seem like darkness has indeed fallen, when Americans are being attacked while exercising their most fundamental freedom to protest, and the attackers are the agents of their own government. There have been some violent protests with destruction of public and private property, and a disproportionate number of attacks by heavily armed police on crowds marching to protest, ironically, the excessive use of force by the police. The president of the nation, in words reminiscent of Tsarist Russia or any absolutist government of your preference, has threatened to unleash the military against the civilian population, in the name of restoring "law and order"; one's attitude to this proclamation depends strongly on one's existing trust in his leadership. But a good sign of his true thoughts were revealed when he advised the states' governors that they needed to "dominate" their citizens through use of overwhelming force. Even more telling, however, was his statement in that same meeting that failure to crush the protests would make the governors look weak and foolish. And, so even as Washington DC is flooded by faceless but heavily armed paramilitary forces to help the president show his strength and courage, even as police cars mow into crowds of civilians, even as peaceful protesters are subjected to pepper balls that are not technically "tear gas" despite having much the same effect, even as crowds of Americans are attacked by police with batons and pepper spray, even on those nights when the nation burned and the shining city on the hill tethered on its foundations (seemingly made of sand, rather than the rock we always imagined), even in these darkest of times, I could not help but feel that things were never better, and was already smiling in anticipation of a much brighter tomorrow.

Let me start by saying that it's much easier for me to brush past the institutional racism suffered by most Black Americans. As an Indian, and a graduate engineer, I enjoy a position that is denied to black Americans who have been born in this country. But I am rejoicing not for myself, but for all victims of injustice in America. This is not the hopeful dream of a perennial optimist, but a reading of reality. As an outsider, I have the advantage of seeing the bigger picture in a way that is hidden to those living, and suffering, through the actual events. As a person, technically, of color (a term that I have the privilege to brush off without consequences, a privilege denied to black or Hispanic Americans), I do not suffer the burden of white Americans who struggle with the guilt of not having solved the obvious issues of racism and injustice, with the guilt by association of having family and friends who voted Donald Trump into power. Neither black or white Americans are free enough of their involvement in this tragedy unfolding before them to see that the dark clouds enveloping them have not a silver lining but that in fact the dark cloud is but a spot in a much larger bank of dazzlingly silver clouds.

The world has changed tremendously in the last dozen years. For black Americans, and for white Americans who are capable of human empathy, it may seem that the last eight years have seen nothing but a wall of shame covered with a mosaic of murdered Black men and women, people cut down for the crime of being black rather than any crime they may have actually committed. No crime deserves a death sentence, much less one executed before trial and with chilling finality. Eric Garner was selling cigarettes illegally,  Michael Brown had stolen a box of cigars using force, Walter Scott had an outstanding warrant over child support payments but not since medieval times have we executed people for such minor crimes; Trayvon Martin was walking home when a (non-police) vigilante followed him and an ensuing scuffle ended with him being killed, Philandro Castile was shot in a routine traffic stop, Tamir Rice was shot and killed for playing with a toy gun, Breona Taylor was shot in her home by police executing a "no knock" warrant (at the wrong place, just to make it worse, but that detail shouldn't even be important). On the face of it, George Floyd may seem like just another name on a long, endless and shameful list. But each death has moved the weight of public opinion towards its watershed moment. For the dead, for their families and for many in the communities that suffer and fear each day, the movement may seem glacial, and long overdue, and I cannot deny the justice in that sentiment. But I prefer to look at how the majority of the country is waking up to the injustice perpetrated in their name and finally they stood up and said, "No more!"

When Ferguson, MO exploded in anger, the right-leaning press could highlight that the race of the protesters and use that as rationale for ignoring their demands for justice. When Baltimore burned after another Black Man was shot by police, President Trump could insult the whole city and its black citizens and despite some objections, he could get away with it. But today, there are white people marching in the streets besides their black brethren. Liberal stalwarts of course have spoken up in the past, but too many other people sat quietly and allowed a matter of justice for all become by default a matter of the color of one's skin. When whites and Asians sat on the sidelines, the only voices raised in a demand for change were black and it was easy for their opponents to recast this as racial battle and racial issues make everyone uncomfortable and so too many of us walked on by like the priest on the road to Jericho. But not this time! Finally, we have seen that this is not just a matter of race, it is a matter of justice and equality and simple humanity. Of course, race played a role in the events that led to the murder of George Floyd and Breona Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery but they deserve justice, not because they were black or their killers white, but because no one should be killed the way they were murdered and finally America has realized that we are only as good as the worst of our responses. And so a chorus of new and powerful voices joined those who have struggled alone for years. Taylor Swift, once raised up as paragon of white womanhood by white supremacists (without her consent and against her desires) has gradually thrown of the shackles of fearful silence. She has found her voice now and leaped to the front lines (metaphorically) adding the power and reach of her enormous pulpit to spread the message.

One of the most uplifting and hopeful stories came from Minneapolis after the first nights of violence. A Bangladeshi immigrant restaurant owner saw his life's work burnt to the ground, and his response was, "let it burn, we need justice for George Floyd". He understood that the violence was not against him, that this fight was not just the fight of the blacks but a struggle for justice and as such it was  fight for all Americans - and coincidentally his restaurant was named Gandhi Mahal, honoring the greatest apostle of non-violent advocacy in modern history. The same sentiment was articulated by Hasan Minaj, in one of the rawest, most powerful segments of his Patriot Act I have ever seen. Now Hasan is not a surprising supporter of justice and equality but he turned the spotlight inward and challenged each of us, especially those with brown skin, to face up to our inner racist. Racism is not an easy issue, and is rarely defined in black and white, or between blacks and whites, but all Americans are now thinking of this, and only good can come from this introspection.

When Colin Kapernick knelt to protest police brutality, he was pilloried as unpatriotic and somehow the fight for justice morphed into respect for the troops. The only men who stood with him were black and white America complained that they did not want to see their football sullied with such unpatriotic behavior. That was three years ago, but today the world has changed and we have Carson Wentz and Aaron Rodgers and Tom Brady speaking up for justice, voices that were conspicuously absent in the past. White coaches in the NBA like Greg Popovitch and Steve Kerr supported their black athletes, but the NFL remained tightly focused on their bottom line. Till today! Now we have thoughtful statements from a long line of football executives from Bill O'Brien to Brian Flores to John Elway admitting the mistake of their past silence. The few discordant statements from Vic Fangio and Drew Brees have been contested and since withdrawn - to be clear, they have every right to have their opinions, but they have been challenged and corrected on facts and have been forced to acknowledge reality. College coaches too have added their voices in support of change. For decades, the colossus that straddles the professional wrestling world has been a bastion of conservatism, and Vince McMahon has never been shy about casting all political positions he dislikes as unpatriotic and using the theater of the ring to humiliate those fictionalized and conveniently buffoonish enemies. But today a legion of his stars are standing proudly for justice, and some of them have marched in solidarity with the protesters. Like the NFL, other corporations are flocking to be counted on the right side of history, from Amazon to Nike to Uber and Lyft and United Airlines and Target and Snapchat and Twitter.

The swing in sentiment in Corporate America is telling. Corporations, and the NFL is one of them, have no moral compulsions, they do not make decisions because they are morally right. It is not a knock on corporations, per se - they are (with deference to the US Supreme Court) not people, they are amoral entities designed to maximize profit. They have not joined the calls for change because it is the morally right thing but because they realize that to oppose it, or even pretend that the problem does not exist, is against their own interests. The NFL and every other corporation are soulless but they depend on their workers and patrons and they have seen the signs - the public mood has shifted and it is time to align with the new winds of change or suffer loss of both staff and consumers. The change in the corporate mood is a sign that American sentiment has moved towards the light and the smarter and more nimble corporations are proving that reality.

The final, and most important proof that change has come, that it is now inevitable, is provided by no other than President Trump. His determination to crush the protests, his insistence on demonstration of strength stem for sheer terror on his side. He is scared, frightened that he can no longer bully the country nor gaslight them into apathy and his every move proves his weakness. When George Wallace threatened blacks during the civil rights movement, when Hosni Mubarak sent his army into the streets of Cairo, when Ferdinand Marcos did the same in Manila, when Indira Gandhi suspended the Indian parliament in 1975, when the Communist Politburo attempted a coup against Gorbachev in 1991 as the USSR crumbled, they were none of them acting as leaders secure in their position and they all fell before the strength of popular protests. Donald Trump is scared, as all those leaders were scared and his fantasies (and may they remain fantasies) of unleashing the military against American citizens stems from his knowledge of his own weakness, not matter how he may try to dress it up as strength. Strength never needs to strut and demonstrate its nature, a strong government has no fear of its own people. And in a democracy, the strength of a government derives from the support of the governed, not from the number of jack-booted stormtroopers it can line up in the streets.

Sometimes, governments manage to crush their people, as Deng Xiopeng did in Tienanmen Square. But the United States is still a democracy and I believe in the American Experiment. Despite all the damage done over the last three years, I believe in people and I believe that today a critical mass of the population has moved past sitting silently and passively while their fellow citizens suffer. And with each act of violence by the police, the case for change is made ever more clear. Perhaps Trump will survive this, perhaps the protests will dissipate, but I do not think it will be that easy. Change is coming and in the words of Viktor Lazlo (Casblanca), "This time I know we will win!"

When the night is overcome, may you rise to see the sun!

Reality Strikes Back

It's been a long while since I've blogged, not because of a lack of material nor even a lack of things to say, but it's been a soul crushing three years and counting. In 2016, the people of the United States decided that a conman and liar, who also happened to be a really bad businessman and very possibly enmeshed in myriad deals of dubious legality, was the best option to run the country, over a woman whose resume included being First Lady, US Senator and Secretary of State. It is at this point quite worthless to go back into what drove nearly half the country to choose certain ineptitude over proven skills, but enough people in enough places did so, and so this country will forever have Donald Trump in their history books as the forty fifth president of the republic.

The bigger question is whether time has led to a change in viewpoints, and strangely enough it appears that a very significant, perhaps even an overwhelming majority of his original supporters have not changed their minds at all and have simply doubled down on their support despite a long litany of failed promises and dismal incompetence, always playing out against a backdrop of corruption and pettiness. Through it all, the core supporters of the Republican Party have stood staunchly behind Trump and in doing so, ensured that no GOP representative or senator should feel a sudden twinge of duty to the country they pledged to serve. They stood shoulder to shoulder through the generally pointless trade wars - many of them may believe that the US is winning the trade deals, and it is unlikely that facts would sway them. They've not even blinked at the policies enacted or embraced by this administration that are polar opposites of what was promised by Trump while campaigning. They've been unfazed by insults and worse heaped upon uniformed military officers by a man who claims to be the biggest supporter of those same soldiers, not to mention their glee at the insults directed at all other perceived opponents, which basically means everyone who does not kiss the ring their leader. The principals of democracy have been undermined at every turn, and like Senator Mitch McConnell, they care not whit. But worst of all, they've shrugged at the continuous loss of trained professionals from every department of government.

Sadly, the GOP for the last forty years, starting at least with Reagan, have distrusted people who are experts in their field. This has allowed blowhards and conspiracy theorists to rule supreme in the non- elected circles that exert such massive influence over the party. Such disdain naturally extends to all people of science and this party would rather believe in miracles and magical ideas than embrace reason. So much so that any scientific position that disagrees with their established worldview is suspect, and scientific theories backed by mountains of emperical evidence are treated at best as no better than articles of religious faith - never mind that one does not "believe" in science, one understands it or one doesn't - and far more often, science is held to levels of proof and scrutiny that none of their preferred claims ever do.

Now we are seeing what happens when a modern government purges its ranks of all apolitical experts who refuse to bend to the injudicious and sometimes unethical, even illegal, whims of a president woefully unequal to the challenge of the office he holds and surrounded by a cabinet of spineless yes-men. Scientists and professional administrators have been forced out and not been replaced, their expertise lost forever and dismissed with a wave of the hand by the president. For three years, we dodged disaster mostly by luck, but the COVID-19 pandemic has left us with nowhere to run, with no fig leaf to shelter behind.

It didn't have to be this way. To be sure, few countries have covered themselves in glory through this pandemic. It's true that the World Health Organization has made mistakes and stumbled quite badly, and only time will tell if their early mistakes were coerced by China in part, or just an honest oversight. But the US was supposed to have it's own premier organizations that would either reinforce or critically examine WHO guidance and act as an additional line of defense. The teams that were set up specifically to study pandemics and identify them before they became too big to handle were disbanded or shunted aside; whether they were ignored or incapable of identifying the problem remains a question to answered in the future, but it appears that well before the wave of the epidemic hit American shores, there were warnings from the intelligence community. One has to wonder if a more independent cabinet might have insisting of engaging the president if he was dismissive of the threat, or if a more mentally acute and engaged president might have recognized the magnitude of the threat gathering on the horizon. It is tempting to believe that former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, as well as Hillary Clinton, would have been more aware, not only because they are more intelligent, more engaged in the world beyond their immediate family business and would have certainly listened to their intelligence briefing attentively (not to mention that their briefing would have been more detailed by their choice).

If facts have any meaning the sudden sell-off by several GOP congresspersons who heard classified intelligence briefing of looming stock market weakness must count as one of the more amazing coincidences of modern history. Yet the US government did nothing to prepare for the real problem and even when the virus had begun to spread within the country, the government reacted with nonchalance and bluster, led by the president himself who likened it to the normal flu and insisted that it would vanish in a week or two. Perhaps the real revelation in Trump's statement that the fifteen cases in the US at the time of his infamous statement would soon resolve to zero is that it shows how little he understood of the nature of the problem - he either didn't know or didn't understand that we had not tested people who had been in contact with the infected patients and that there was no way to realistically predict that the cases would immediately reduce. Of course, this president has never cared for reality and his supporters have rewarded his lies with blind belief - from claims that the testing shortage had been solved long before it was (even now we don't have the ability to do contact tracing and have pretty much abandoned that approach) to claims that Russia and Saudi Arabia were about to make a deal to save the oil industry (Russia rather cavalierly denied any talks had even started), Trump has lied casually about any and every issue. But while his lies may comfort his supporters, reality has finally broken past is wall of denial and while he may use the power of his position to petulantly to uncomfortable questions or profess total ignorance about the problems plaguing ever more cities across the country, the reality confront the country can no longer be really ignored. That initial denial of reality was all the way back in late January, when we had a dozen cases or so. The US did not cross a thousand cases till nearly mid-March, six weeks time during which we watched South Korea and Taiwan implement successful counter-programs, while Italy showed us the dangers of poor preparation and inadequate reaction. This was a time when we could have mobilized to to be ready. We would have still faced thousand of cases - the US is too big and too open a country, to factitious to marshal the same way as was done in Taiwan or South Korea. But we could have been prepared a lot better and maybe we would not have gone from one thousand to three hundred thousand in barely three weeks.

This a failure of massive proportions, and  Trump is not solely responsible, just as he is not solely responsible for the racism and xenophobia now running rampant in the country. But just as he pulled away the curtain and released those forces into the open, and acted as cheerleader for them, in the same way he presided over a weakening of the government, he tore down the institutions that informed the country and raised himself as the sole voice of government and whether he declares that he is not responsible for any failure (though he is quick to claim credit even when none is due and he is the only one offering himself plaudits), history will judge him far less kindly and will lay the eight thousand deaths (and counting) and the massive wrecking ball taken to our lives and economy squarely upon him. Would that the country had been spared this by seeing the inevitable in 2016 but we can only hope that we emerge from this nightmare in 2020 with a renewed understanding of the importance of science, intelligence, expertise and above all, empathy.