[Note from Steve: If you’re afraid of the truth, don’t read this article…or maybe you should!]

“The Trumpian lie is different. It is the power lie, or the bully lie. It is the lie of the bigger kid who steals your hat and is wearing it—while denying he took it.”—Masha Gessen, in Surviving Autocracy.

Of course, Trump’s lies are much more than that, especially in the danger they represent for American democracy. He says he won the popular vote in 2016 if you don’t count all the fraudulent votes; he didn’t, because studies have shown that the number of fraudulent votes was minimal. (He’s expanding that lie to mail-in voting.) He states that the Obama administration spied on him, even wiretapped him; there’s zero evidence for that too. (On the contrary, he encouraged the Russians to go after Hillary’s server—they obliged, releasing the emails via Wikileaks as organized by Roger Stone.) He claimed that Mexico would pay for his damn wall; it didn’t and won’t, and now Trump is now stealing funds that Congress allocated elsewhere to pay for that “beautiful wall” (after putting people in cages, including mothers and children.)

Some Americans (probably not his supporters, though, who always turn a blind eye) might remember that Hitler’s propaganda minister Goebbels said that if you tell a lie often enough, people will accept it as truth. Trump has taken that fascist trick even further: He states a lie as truth, the Washington Post or some other fact-checking “dirty liberal organization” show it’s a lie, but only once, so when Trump keeps repeating it ad infinitum a la Goebbels, the public forgets it was proven to be a lie. That’s how he’s destroying our democracy. It’s like trying to hear a pin drop (the proof it’s a lie) when there’s a pile driver running (Trump’s habitual lying). You can’t hear the signal (“It’s a lie!”) over the noise (Trump’s bla-bla-bla over and over again). His lies, in short, are exhausting.

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Too many Americans forget their origins: Unless you’re a Native American, you’re an immigrant or descended from immigrants. At one time, the poem on the Statue of Liberty was a clarion call for all who seek refuge in the US. Now DHS and ICE have basically edited it to say, “Give me your tired, your poor, your hidden masses…but only if Mr. Trump wants them here.”

What do a lot of autocrats have in common with Trump? If your answer is “fascism,” you’re right, but what fascists create is an us-versus-them polemic that haters and bigots feed on like Dracula, AKA many Trump supporters in the US. Trump uses refugees and immigrants as scapegoats and calls them migrants and invaders to create that us-versus-them picture. Never mind that his wife and her parents are immigrants; never mind that he himself is the descendant of immigrants. He still includes them in the class of “us” and anyone he despises in the class of “them,” including persons who were born here. All dreamers (DACA kids) are in the class of “them,” for example, and he told the Squad (that name was unfortunately created by those four new reps in Congress) they should go back to where they came from, never mind they’re all Americans.

Trump does this so his supporters have someone to hate. Although he’s a complete racist, he couldn’t use the Jews like Hitler did, but any fascist worth his vitriol knows that the wannabe autocrat must create a “them” so people can circle the wagons around the “us.” It’s a standard fascist tactic, and unfortunately it works. Trump was elected after all by people who are haters and bigots, and that group includes the Christian right. Trump didn’t win the popular vote—there are too many people who don’t become that extreme in their hate, racism, and bigotry—but the votes were distributed well enough to allow him to eke out a win using the Electoral College.

Of course, Trump is far too moronic to come up with that us-versus-them idea himself. In 2016, his handlers, Bannon and Miller, created the current immigration policy, if we can call it that. In spite of American industry pleading for more workers of all types, Trump and his minions want to close the country’s borders to all of “them” so they can concentrate their fascism on controlling and exploiting the “us,” with the privileged circle of “us” starting with the Trump family and becoming ever smaller as time goes on. Anyone not favoring Trump becomes one of “them.”

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John Bolton’s book has made a lot of news (Simon & Schuster likes the free publicity, I’m sure), and he’s been attacked by both Dems and the Good Ole Piranhas firmly in Trump’s greasy, fascist hands now. The book will be published (copies are already distributed and many pundits have one), and we’ll have to see if Trump’s threat of reprisals isn’t just more autocratic blathering (loss of royalties and lawsuits for releasing classified info, although so far I see no reason for this, and the book passed inspection back in April).

So is he just another celeb trying to get rich writing tell-all crap? I hate celeb books. They’re often written by ghost writers (that’s financially good for those writers, I suppose) and replete with scandal and character assassinations. Has conservative hawk John seen the light, trying to save his soul by pretending to worry about the American people? Nah! His gaze has always been outward, a bit like many English leaders lamenting Great Britain’s loss of relevance; Bolton has never worried about social issues, which often affect Americans more. Has he suddenly realized that fascism is morally reprehensible, and the wannabe autocrat in the White House can destroy the country?

Who is the real John Bolton? First, let’s consider who he’s not. He’s not the guy who testified against Trump in the impeachment. He betrayed the American public there. Ho-hum…Trump broke the law some more: Supporting Xi’s concentration camps for China’s Muslim minority shows Trump’s immorality, but asking Xi to interfere in American elections on his behalf is as least as damning as asking the Ukraine to investigate the Bidens. After all, China’s Xi is probably a more dangerous foe than the bumbling Putin. But did you really expect anything else? And did Bolton? Why did Bolton not testify? Because he wanted to save those headlines for his book!

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The US is huge and probably has the most diverse population among all industrialized nations. We should all understand and embrace the different currents and eddies coursing through the American cultural ocean, but they’re just that, parts of an American cultural experience. “Black culture,” “Irish culture,” “Italian culture,” “Jewish culture,” and many others belong to the past and are part of American culture now. To dwell on these ingredients thrown into our grand melting pot is to live in a past, one that has often been full of social injustice, hatred, and violence. We should get past the past and move on to discover a better future.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, massive emigrations from Europe to the US led to many atrocities like those committed against Irish and Italians, but now we seem to have grouped them all together as “white culture,” and now too many pit that against “black culture.” I suppose there’s some historical logic to this because of the slave trade, although historically African tribes enslaving members of other African tribes was at least as common as white men enslaving other vanquished white men if they didn’t wipe out all the males on the losing side. Human beings had a habit of doing horrible things to other human beings, and still do.

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Trump’s administration is the worst in American history…and like all fascist-inspired executive institutions, it is also incompetent and perfidious. The NY Times seems to have problems calling Trump and his administration fascist; I’ve been doing so since the 2016 campaign. I guess people like Robert Reich have finally decided that word describes Trump. I suppose I should feel vindicated.

Allow me to ignore the many tweets from this narcissistic ignoramus where he displays autocratic behavior and stupidity. I’ll be nice and just make a list of some his recent gaffes and sins where he shoots himself in the foot:

Stimulus program for individuals. His economics team, all of them Ayn Rand-supply-side-trickle-down con artists, Mighty Mouse Munchkin in the lead, convinced this man who takes credit for every NYSE good day to “save the economy” with this stimulus. Hard to do, because he only likes government largesse if it’s directed at him! Even GOP members of Congress got onboard in a rare instance of bipartisan agreement (Ayn Rand Paul was probably the exception—he doesn’t even want to prevent lynching), knowing they could co-opt the program to their one-percenter constituents’ benefit.

Not only was the stimulus too little and too late, there had to be a work-around for people who don’t declare electronically and people who had not yet declared their 2020 taxes. Checks and debit cards were sent out to the latter two groups. But people who never declare because they make too little, the nation’s poor who need the money more, were left out. Checks were stolen. The debit cards looked like those credit cards people receive as spam mail, so many cut them up. And carnivorous scammers preyed on everyone.

Complete incompetence.

Stimulus program for businesses. Another egregious gaffe occurred in sending funds to help businesses in COVID distress: (1) Some didn’t ask for it; and (2) others didn’t deserve it. But the policy disaster didn’t stop there. Small businesses who did need help, and lots of it, couldn’t get it. They had no relationships with the mega-banks in charge of distributing the funds, who naturally favored their privileged clients. And so many conditions were placed on the funding, many small businesses were afraid to apply.

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[Note from Steve: Everyone seems to be addicted to knee-jerk reactions these days. Here’s mine, although it’s a call for sanity.]

I hope sanity prevails, but the subtitle here is a statement made by a protester in Minneapolis; it indicates temporary insanity, at the very least. “Defund the Police” is the new mantra, although its real meaning is often unclear. When the mayor of Minneapolis was asked if he would end the the MPD, yes or no, his answer was the only sane one: “No!” The protesters then booed him as he left the angry mob.

This isn’t a productive discussion, folks. Let’s look at it logically (I know that’s hard for many people who are drunk on adrenalin): Who would run toward and not away from the action when a mass killer like the one in Las Vegas opens fire? Not that woman on the stage in Minneapolis, that’s for sure! Who would pursue a man who raped and killed his victim? Maybe those people who booed the mayor, forming a lynch mob. Who would arrest the DUI driver who just killed your kid? Not anyone in that Minneapolis crowd. And who would protect cities from terrorist attacks? Those dead after the 9/11 attack and other terrorist incidents would see no justice.

A few bad cops doesn’t make a whole organization bad. We’ve seen cops marching and embracing protesters of George Floyd’s murder. Good people watch that video and are horrified. But good people also know that police departments are necessary…and it’s better that they’re local police departments instead of something like the Nazi SS, East German Stasi, and so forth. We need more community policing, not federal policing, but we’re likely to get the latter if anarchy rules the day.

If you think an ordinary citizen is trained to do all I mentioned above, you’re an idiot. Period. I saw that someone even suggested social workers should assume policing duties. Huh? If true, that’s more insane than asking school teachers to carry guns so they can stop school shooters. People must be trained to perform the tasks mentioned above. Policing is a profession, and local police departments are filled with well-trained and caring professionals for the most part. Ever heard the expression “You’re throwing out the baby with the bath water.” It applies here.

Whatever the status of your local police department, it is the product of an evolution over centuries. If you know the history of Ireland, where you were only fined if you shot a local Irishman but beheaded if you shot an English occupier (around the thirteenth century, if I remember correctly), you’d think the Irish wouldn’t want cops around either. But they do. Their Garda is an excellent deterrent for all the crimes mentioned above. A similar evolution exists in most democracies. A corrupt and oppressive police force characterizes autocratic states.

A well-equipped and well-trained police force is an absolute necessity in a sane, modern, and democratic society. Otherwise, you have anarchy and chaos. Or maybe those who cry “Defund the police!” want to see looting and destruction of property continue. Most people aren’t criminals; we have to protect them from those who are.

Ending police departments, or even slashing their budgets, will just cause a huge backlash. People’s stupidity is all too often rewarded. We got Trump in 2016 that way. We’ll get him again in 2020 if we give him a “Law and Order” platform. Defunding police departments is not a liberal cause: It’s human stupidity in action, but Trump loves it! Defunding police departments will lead to a police state with Trump as dictator. Is that what you want?

I’m on the side of that Minneapolis mayor, no matter how much Trump says he’s weak. There are no simple yes or no answers here. But at least that mayor’s smart enough to know that without a local police force, we’d first have anarchy and then a backlash to that leading to a police state. Sane people ignore the Hobson’s choice the protesting woman gave the mayor. They fix what’s broken and keep what works. And the City Council in Minneapolis should know better. How did they ever get elected?

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Comments are always welcome, even if you disagree (just keep it clean).

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

The lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic are many. Unfortunately some are about scurrilous human behavior. As much as we say “Be smart…stay apart” and “Don’t be an ass…wear a mask,” there are knuckleheads and jerks who can’t seem to follow that advice, creating danger for others as well as themselves. One young man in California stated, “It’s so good to see people out here [on the beach] breaking quarantine.” It seems partying is more important than keeping people alive for some.

The most scurrilous behavior comes from young people who think it’s okay that older people die. Another party goer might say, “You have to die of something,” but “those people in nursing homes were going to die anyway,” or “They’ve lived a long life; I need to live mine.” These pronouncements show a lack of respect for elders shown by too many Gen-Xers on down who are selfish and arrogant. These people are basically condoning viral euthanasia: Get the old-timers out of our way now! is their mantra.

What are these people thinking? Every COVID-19 death, all 100,000-plus of them as I write this, is tragic. What gives these people the right to steal a woman or man’s remaining days so they can go out and play, eat, drink, and be merry in some bar or at some other event packed with fellow party-goers? “Irresponsible actions” isn’t a fit description of this attitude. These people don’t even deserve to be called human!

It seems that working together to defeat this virus is just too much trouble for some idiots. While it’s true that the Trump administration isn’t showing much moral leadership in this regard, these knuckleheads—many of them with red MAGA hats—don’t care about nursing home patients dying, they don’t care that little kids’ hearts are stopping, and they don’t even care that persons their own age get sick and die. It’s time these people become more responsible and less stupid. Frankly, I wouldn’t care so much if the virus only killed the irresponsible people—we could eliminate some of the stupidity genes from the gene pool—but they’re probably in contact with responsible people who do their civic duty but will die as these knuckleheads spread the contagion. That’s how the virus spreads! Through knucklehead behavior. It loves ignorant and selfish people.

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[Note from Steve: As some faithful readers of this blog already know, it originally contained op-ed articles about current issues and events as well as book and movie reviews, author interviews, and articles about reading, writing, and the publishing business (all written in op-ed style). I stopped posting the first type because they often represented too long an investment in time to find the relevant background material and fact-check as much as possible. That said, I believe it’s now time to express my opinions again, so I’ll occasionally post such articles in the future. They’ll all start with the phrase “Op-ed pages” so you can skip over them if you like (I prefer that you comment, though, even if you disagree). Here’s another post in this new (and old) category….]

“Grossly incompetent” were the words Donald Trump aka Il Duce (he of the imperial scowl) used to describe Barack Obama. Of course, he should have been pointing the finger at himself. Without naming Trump, Obama lashed out at his successor for handling the pandemic incompetently and basically called him an incompetent and immature schoolyard bully, which he is indeed. But why is this occurring?

I can’t believe that Trump is completely stupid. Although he often acts like a knuckle-dragging ape at times (which is an insult to apes, of course), this poor excuse of a human being is of average intelligence and appeals to many others—that takes some skill, because he’s a hard man to like. One has to kiss his derriere too much; the only ones left in his admin survive by doing just that. In spite of his many personal defects (and questionable mental stability, according to many psychiatrists and psychologists), it was puzzling to me how he could be so incompetent even before Obama made his prognosis.

Now I think I’ve discovered the reason, and it goes hand-in-hand with Trump’s schoolyard-bully image: He’s a fascist at heart. All the characteristics of an autocratic leader are there: narcissistic, sociopathic behavior leading to disdain for anyone else’s opinions. There are a lot of knuckle-dragging apes in the US now (again, that’s insulting those noble creatures), and they love fascism—they euphemistically call fascist leaders “strong leaders” and scream slogans like “Make America Great Again!” It was always great, a noble experiment against fascism and fascist thought, from England’s King George to the 20^th and 21^st century despots, most infamously Putin and Kim, but Trump isn’t making America greater. He and his followers are tearing it apart at the seams.

Fascist rule is usually incompetent because it depends on one or a few men and women to make correct decisions. Both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany proved this. For all the far-left idiots (the far-right in the US doesn’t have a monopoly on idiocy, but far-right and far-left don’t cancel each other out like particles and anti-particles, unfortunately) who call their friends “comrade” and admire the debunked ideology of Soviet Communism, there was little difference between the Soviet Union under Stalin and Nazi Germany under Hitler. Both leaders were fascists and incompetent. Later Soviet and Russian leaders were all fascists too—I guess the labels are changed to protect the guilty?

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[Note from Steve: As some faithful readers of this blog already know, it originally contained op-ed articles about current issues and events as well as book and movie reviews, author interviews, and articles about reading, writing, and the publishing business (all written in op-ed style). I stopped posting the first type because they often represented too long an investment in time to find the relevant background material and fact-check as much as possible. That said, I believe it’s now time to express my opinions again, so I’ll occasionally post such articles in the future. They’ll all start with the phrase “Op-Ed Pages” so you can skip over them if you like (I prefer that you comment, though, even if you disagree). Here’s another post in this new (and old) category….]

I cringed when I saw protesters in Michigan’s capitol rotunda carrying automatic weapons. I immediately asked myself, Who do they want to kill? The governor? (Just a few days ago, a man was arrested for threatening the life of Michigan’s governor.) The legislators? Or are they just macho crazy fanatics looking for media attention? Maybe they should turn to more useful activities like helping those Michigan people threatened by the floods?

Here’s the problem with guns: In a protest or any argument (stand-your-ground laws come to mind), such weapons can lead to a slaughter. And, if both sides are armed—and FYI, Michigan crazies, the other side can bring weapons too—the slaughter will affect both sides. That’s a rather barbaric outcome for the 21^st century but not unusual elsewhere (Afghanistan, India, Yemen, etc.). Maybe that’s what the knuckle-dragging knuckleheads in Michigan want? They might as well be brainless, bloodthirsty zombies. Freedom fighters they’re not!

I didn’t have answers for those questions in the first paragraph, but that didn’t matter. The whole episode just reaffirmed my belief that ordinary citizens must be protected from all fanatics, but especially NRA fanatics. We need reasonable gun control! While Donald J. Trump is the dangerous fanatic holding the nuclear codes, is he more dangerous that these protesters? Maybe. He enables them by defending them (“There are good people on both sides”). I refuse to visit states with stand-your-ground laws. While the knuckle-dragging gun fanatics aren’t likely to shoot me because they don’t like one of my books—no danger there, because most of these skinheads can’t read well and just watch Fox News while belching on the couch, both activities just like their idol’s—I still don’t want to run the risk that someone shoots me over a parking space.

Second Amendment “experts” who believe the Founding Fathers gave them the right to bear arms are ignoramuses who don’t know history. Not only do they don’t read books, they’ve never read, let alone studied, the Constitution. I guarantee most immigrants studying to get their citizenship papers know more about that famous document than most Americans, especially the gun nuts. The use of the phrases “bear arms” and “militias” in the eighteenth century was simply a recognition by the Founding Fathers that, without militias to fight the King’s Redcoats, the American Revolution would never have occurred.

A database at BYU shows exactly that. Almost every document is evidence for restricted gun use. Of course, many people ignore history. Antonin Scalia didn’t, though. He cherry-picked those documents in that database to find only those documents that make some reference to personal gun ownership. In doing so, he out-Trumped our current president: lying by omission is still lying! A cleverer way of doing it…maybe. And not that he was the first conservative judge to do so. Most SCOTUS conservative judges got to where they are by lying, mostly by ignoring precedent, i.e. lies by omission.

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[Note from Steve: As some faithful readers of this blog already know, it originally contained op-ed articles about current issues and events as well as book and movie reviews, author interviews, and articles about reading, writing, and the publishing business (all written in op-ed style). I stopped posting the first type because they often represented too long an investment in time to find the relevant background material and fact-check as much as possible. That said, I believe it’s now time to express my opinions again, so I’ll occasionally post such articles in the future. They’ll all start with the phrase “Op-ed pages” so you can skip over them if you like (I prefer that you comment, though, even if you disagree). Here’s the first post in this new (and old) category….]

Writing about lessons learned from the battle against COVID-19 can seem like finger-pointing, A week ago, I wrote about sci-fi stories with pandemic as a general theme (see the article “I Told You So”). It often seems like we’re living in a sci-fi story now. I just want to put the novel down and get on with my life—the quiet life my wife and I were living before. Many probably feel the same way. But it’s natural to ask questions about this real-life pandemic, and there are many lessons to learn.

Containment. If there’s a vaccine against a virus, it’s the best medicine against it. Anti-vaccine fanatics endanger all of us, as the measles virus has shown, and I never put credence in false religious or paranoid reasons to resist vaccination. For example, every student in a public or private school should be vaccinated against the common diseases or required to stay at home. Period. This isn’t just opinion. It’s a scientific fact: Vaccination programs, when available, are necessary to protect everyone.

But the best medicine against a nasty virus can only be containment if there’s no vaccine. You don’t have to be an infectious disease expert to know to beat a new contagion like COVID-19 is to contain it. That’s just common sense! Unfortunately common sense seems to be in short supply these days.

So the first question is: Why didn’t the Chinese government take steps to contain the virus? Note that I’m not blaming the Chinese people (or all immigrants, as Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s Heinrich Himmler, wants you to believe)—the citizens of China have little choice about what their autocratic government does. And that government did very little and covered up how bad things were until it was too late.

The virus quickly spread throughout China and beyond its borders, mostly from business and tourist travel, I suspect (remember Chinese New Year?). Before this plague was declared a pandemic, people died in the state of Washington (due to lack of testing, we didn’t know how early that occurred). It wasn’t difficult to understand even back then that sea- and airports should be closed then and there. And, in one major port, Mardi Gras visitors carried the virus back to their origin points, blanketing the US. There’s every indication that COVID-19 was also widespread in NYC early on too, mostly by European asymptomatic travelers, I surmise; we just didn’t know about it until people started dying.

The virus will continue to spread. Think you’re home free because you live in a rural area? Think again! As I write this, COVID is reaching rural areas, with small numbers of cases and fatalities, to be sure, but large as far as per capita measurements go. We’ve lost the battle of containment. We’re playing catch-up.

Information. Our current federal government dropped the ball and created a lot of misinformation, but they don’t own all the lack of information, in spite of Mr. Trump’s efforts. Why didn’t all those infectious disease experts supposedly in the know scream about the threat of pandemic? Why didn’t journalists pick up that story and blast it out in media outlets? It’s hard to believe that all the so-called experts and pundits just buried their heads in the sand. What happened? Was everyone following China’s lead and covering up the seriousness of this plague?

I don’t think so. Incompetence can be as effective a cover-up as political expediency. Maybe all the people who should have said something didn’t want riot in the streets. Well…now the riots are led by irresponsible knuckleheads who want to go back to the old normal, so those people who should have known better made a bad choice. I don’t know if the idiots who prefer to risk their lives and others for a paycheck, or some perceived freedoms that are being trampled on (the excuse) would have listened to the information, but honesty is always the best policy. Pandemics are serious business and not just themes in sci-fi.

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