Democracy is a Messy Business: Thoughts from the Summer 2020

 I am solidly against the Moron President whose next idea is destined to  die of loneliness.  But I'll say this as his first four years in office draw to a close:  it hasn't been boring.

It's silly, pointless, and completely unnecessary to make a list of Trump's offenses against reason, decency, the planet, even common sense, so I won't get started on that run of fun facts and figures--tempting as that is.

But here's the thing.  I'll be 80 at my next birthday and could be spending my old age during yet another piously boring Democratic presidency struggling with ways to improve human rights by fine-tuning the manifesto of Political Correctness.  Hillary Rodham Clinton would have taken us along that path.

I am of course in favor of equal rights for women, civil rights for Blacks, and a full-range of human rights for everyone else--even the obese.  But I still resist being a professional proponent of Political Correctness.

Planetary Correctness is another matter.  Even to the scientists who have been warning us about global warming for the last quarter century, Earth is apparently already beyond saving, so I can't see that it makes much difference at this point if we cool things off by a couple of degrees.  And it has always been disconcerting to discover that a look through the four-and-a-half-billion-year-history of the planet reveals regular periods of overheating and deep freezes which will continue regardless of what we do to alter the patterns.  

With a resigned and sorrowful sigh, however, I still feel duty-bound to do what I can to lower the temperature.  I think it's too late, but I'm still working the problem.  Call me a planetary Pollyanna. 

Ah, what the hell.  If the Idiot President isn't alarmed, why should I be?

We are living--if we are lucky enough to survive--at a time that historians will report and revise for generations to come.  Like the evil emperor Nero who threatened the Roman Empire, Donald Trump is the narcissistic president who is threatening the American Republic.  It's quite extraordinary to be alive during this decisive moment in history.  And to have a vote.

You'd think someone as stupid as Donald Trump would be quiet and circumspect, careful of making mistakes, fearful of being found out, but no! The Moron rushes forward, one foot on the pedal, the other in his mouth, lunging from one self-created crisis to the next defying his advisers, his cabinet, and his voters--who will turn on him in November.

But none of it is boring.  You gotta give him that.  At its best, Democracy is a messy business.  And it doesn't get any messier than it is now.

"COTTON MATHER, YOU DOG!"

 Originally published in the Tampa Free Press, September 23, 2021

    Cotton Mather (1663-1728)

from a 19th-century engraving.  Wikipedia

COTTON MATHER, You Dog!

Inoculations 300 Years Ago

    Cotton Mather, the cantankerous Boston minister who has been saddled with a big portion of the blame for the deadly Salem Witch Trials in 1692, was a hero in 1721 when he espoused inoculations to fight off the deadly smallpox epidemic that had reappeared in Boston that year.

    The anti-inoculators were so fierce and ferocious in their opposition, however, that one of them hurled a homemade bomb through Mather's bedroom window one November night.  It came with a message:  "COTTON MATHER, You Dog!  I'll inoculate you with this!"

    What exactly had Mather done to deserve such treatment?

    For starters, he was smart enough to recognize the recurring pattern of smallpox epidemics in Boston.  He had calculated that from 1630 the disease came back every twelve years.  He was expecting the next attack to begin in 1714, but it didn't come that year, which drove Mather to speculate that the 1713 measles epidemic that had claimed his wife and three of his children had somehow altered the smallpox pattern.

    Everyone in Boston, however, feared its deadly return from one year to the next that decade, and then in 1721, it hit again with a vengeance.  In all nearly 6,000 people were infected that year, about half the city, 844 of whom died, according to Kenneth Silverman's Pulitzer prize-winning biography, The Life and Times of Cotton Mather (1984).

    But Mather did more than simply detect a pattern.  Drawing from successful inoculation accounts published by the British Royal Society and adding word-of-mouth testimonies provided by his African servant, Onesimus, he published his theory of inoculations.  The evidence was sufficient, Mather argued, to begin a wide program of life-saving procedures--but his arguments fell largely on deaf ears.

    However, through the work of a respected Boston physician, Dr. Zabdiel Boylston, an unknown number of what may be called "Mather's inoculations" were administered during the summer of 1721 throughout the city and surrounding areas.  There continued to be hot disagreement, but the general public had begun to be educated to the theory and implementation of protection through inoculation, the very same principles that would become widely accepted over the next three centuries.

    Mather's critics remained loud, violent, and persistent, however, very slow to accept the controversial theory.  And many never did.  They worried that inoculation wouldn't stop the disease but would instead worsen it.  They called Mather and the other inoculators hypocritical and authoritarian.  And they dragged out their most reliable all-purpose argument:  smallpox was a divine judgment against a sinful people.  And sinners always got what they deserved.

    History has corrected the judgment against Cotton Mather in this 1721 political-scientific-religious battle over infectious disease.  It has recognized the rightness of his crusade for inoculation against smallpox--and by extension against countless other deadly diseases from measles to polio to Covid-19.  There is no longer any scientific dispute about inoculations or immunizations, what we call vaccinations today:  they have saved millions of lives and will save millions more as people line up one by one, roll up their sleeves, and get their shots.  

    All of this due to the tireless work of an unlikely spokesman for science, the Rev. Cotton Mather, the most puritanical of all the 17th-century New England ministers.

January 20, 2021: Liberation Day

 

January 20, 2021:  Liberation Day

Wave the American flag!

 

            Donald Trump will go down in history as the president who gave his rank and file supporters official permission to embrace their bigotry and openly hate Blacks.  Trump told them in so many words it was just fine to be white supremacists, to stand up for white America, and to put aside Black people because Black lives didn’t really matter after all.

Trump and his supporters have long-hated the liberal trend of America that culminated with the election of Black president Barack Obama, an eight-year stretch that successfully brought whites and Blacks together.  They seethed through the Obama presidency that clearly threatened white privilege and white superiority, both of which are bedrock foundations of what Trump and his people think America is all about.  

They boiled over with self-righteous excitement when Donald Trump embraced them in the 2016 election.  They were suddenly proud of their white America, and they strutted their bigotry with bitter voices their president approved of.  They were finally being heard by a president who was as guilty as they were.  It grew into a four-year orgy of shameful behavior.  They were all the way out of the closet and wearing their hatred proudly.  Defiantly.

It is worth pointing out that white supremacy is not the sole purview of openly racist organizations like the Neo-Nazis, the Proud Boys or the Ku Klux Klan, that it runs clear to the bone of many white Americans who believe they are better than Black people.  Superior.  They support law and order and secretly applaud police killings of Blacks.  They are driven to rage over Black Lives Matter.  Taking a knee makes them crazy.  They don’t want to be reminded of the horrors Black Americans have suffered in their family histories, the stories of slaves owned, tortured, bought and sold for the white ruling class of American Southerners—and Northern supporters.  Blacks were, after all, only sixty percent human, it said so in the sacred Constitution, which stipulated that slaves were only to be counted as three-fifths of a white man.

            That’s the bigoted mindset that Donald Trump saw and exploited for his own political benefit.  He played his hand so well that he became the president of white racists everywhere—they are fanatically and uncritically devoted to their president.  So much so that they took up arms and stormed the Capitol building on January 6, an act of sedition that is already being called our second Day of Infamy.  They became right-wing insurrectionists out to preserve white privilege.  That’s the country and the democracy they want to conserve, what makes them conservative.  Theirs is not a country of equal opportunity and respect for individuals in a pluralistic society.  What they want is white power.  They’re proud boys, even though it’s hard to imagine what they have to be proud of.

            But on January 20 Blue Collar Joe Biden will be inaugurated as the 46^th president of the United States, taking the place of the mean-spirited ego maniac, Donald Trump, who has been unceremoniously dumped by millions of Americans who came together to throw him out of office.

            On Inauguration Day put your flags out to welcome the return of responsible government and humane democracy to our country.  It’s Liberation Day.  As a nation we finally, once again,  do have something to be proud of.