Rarely, in the totality of life, is there one etiology for a disease, a societal illness, a political crisis, an endangerment of people, places or things. As a "senior," born in 1942, the first son of Polish immigrants to become a physician, I have seen a lot: real-world issues, life in the USSR post-Chernobyl, fall of the Berlin Wall, life in the ghettos of Southside Chicago, police "heavy-handedness" with jail time, quotas based on religion, medical care of those living in Watts, and East LA as well as those living in Beverly Hills. Life, if your eyes, and ears, heart and mind, is open and active, teaches us a ton about people — what drives them, what makes them succeed or fail, their interest in legacy, in unity, or if they have vision.
Mike is an excellent reporter. He is outstanding in analyzing events and showing their relationship to the present circumstances we are in. Many of us, however, are unable to see the full picture because the totality of our experiences comes at the end of our lives. An old saying, speaks directly to this:
"Vee Get Too Soon Olt Und Too Late Schmart!" —old German proverb
I present, for your consideration, the following as the multi-parametric etiology for why Americans have allowed Democracy to succumb to Fascism. And do not think, not for a moment, that what you are witness to with Trump, his appointees, and the Republican Party and much of this country is something else, but not Fascism. Another quote is apropos here:
The Duck Principle: "But when I see a bird that quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, has feathers and webbed feet and associates with ducks, I’m certainly going to assume that he IS a duck.” - Emil Mazey Secretary-Treasurer UAW Labor leader 1946
Parameter #1: A majority of Americans have a political form of attention deficit syndrome.
He who knows not
And knows not that he knows not
Is a Fool
Shun him
He who knows not
And knows that he knows not
Is a Child
Teach him
He who knows
And knows not that he knows
Is Asleep
Wake him
Americans "AIL" for the most part. The focus in the US is to acquire, to buy, to consume. Relatively minuscule attention is given to reading, and most importantly to learn conceptual thinking. In many verbal exchanges with fellow citizens, family, neighbors and surprisingly medical colleagues, I think back to my younger days and the joy of reading those childhood stories to my son. My favorite was and remains The Frog and Toad stories. There is so much truth in fables, tales and stories for children. Toad nailed it in diagnosing one of the major factors regarding "what got us here."
A List
One morning, Toad sat in bed,
"I have many things to do," he said.
"I will write them all down on a list
so that I can remember them."
Toad wrote on a piece of paper:
A List of Things to Do
Then he wrote:
Wake up
Americans remain asleep, not all, but probably a majority. We are the Italians of Mussolini's Italy. We are the Spaniards of Franco's Spain, and yes, we are pretty much the Germans of Hitler's Germany. History, if books are still published and if people are allowed to read what they wish, will posit: How did the American citizenry elect a con man, a fraudster, a person who has announced his dictatorship and shown nothing of the moral code relating to truth, beauty and the good?
My European friends say that they work to live, but Americans work to buy. We have made two of the four horsemen of the apocalypse our goals in the US. And no surprise, we elected twice the poster-boy for these human traits:
ego, envy, avarice and ambition
Because of the very nature, a foundational block of who we are, we elected the "star," literally and figuratively of greed or avarice, of ambition without moral code, of frail ego, of envy and with the paranoia that accompanies this a miscreant consumed with retribution.
In a way, this is like the expression, "You are what you eat" or "how you make your bed is how you sleep in it." We have met the enemy, and it is US.
Parameter #2: Too many voters in America, "AIL."
AIL is an acronym for apathy, ignorance and laziness. My next-door neighbor voted in the last election- a write-in vote for his dog. He did not like Kamala Harris, so that was how he used his vote. Not enough citizens in this country vote. How can you not vote in an election that puts the most powerful person in the driver's seat? As Brock pointed out a long while ago, the candidates were not equivalents. Saying "both are corrupt" expresses AIL. You did not do your homework. Americans do not read. They do not even speak to one another because it is "uncomfortable." I can imagine a patient with cancer coming to see me in consultation saying "I can't talk about it; it's too uncomfortable. Take care of it." We, as a nation, have become apathetic, and we are amazingly ignorant because we direct our neural circuits to sports, entertainment, cars, vacations, but not for who we elect to Congress or to the White House.
Can you imagine that on my 83rd birthday, I get a text message from my older sister and an email from my younger sister? You know a country is sick when the only time someone calls you is when they're stuck in traffic. But some of my patients and friends in other countries communicated something of substance that was meaningful to me. We have devolved into a glib society. In medicine, once a profession or calling, but now a business, and one not conducted well. It is McMedicine, or as my RN wife said "No talk, No touch" medicine.
There are other factors involved here, and those, such as racism, are best discussed after reading "Caste" by Isabel Wilkerson.
Bottom Line: We, Americans, now live under a Fascist regime that involves the President, his appointees, the Republican Congress (almost all of them) and a majority of the American electorate. Our prognosis is dire. Our only chance to BEGIN to undo this rests on the "wish" that the Midterm elections are held and not rigged by the most corrupt president in our history.
Unless, all of America fully wakes up and smells the stench of our Fascist Government, and votes, this country, the USA, will fail and become one more lesson about what we should not do if we wish Democracy to prevail.
Another well written piece. I don’t know how convincing the WSJ was to steer us into this catastrophe but those who read WSJ must realize the bias of its owner, Rupert Murdoch. There are a large swath of well educated people who bought into this. I know many attorneys, liberal and conservative who thought SCOTUS would hold the line and here we are.
There is no inability to meet the mortal moment. They are just liars who want the cruelty and the political dominance while being too craven to own it. They prefer twisting in pretzels to excuse things they supposedly abhor than admit to not only others, but i suspect many themselves that this is who they are. That all that intellectual baloney was exactly that and they are total frauds.
It's unsurprising that those who publicly supported Trump have been unwilling to admit error. What's more surprising and much more depressing is that the same is true of the vast majority who voted for him, even though they may not have said anything public about it. They have watched corruption on a massive scale, masked secret police on the streets, failed economic policies and much more, but still report approving of Trump's performance. Unless this changes soon (which seems unlikely) US is done for.
I think you give them too much credit. Sophistication? Maybe, for some, but it is hard to imagine they did not know exactly what was coming. I am a "commoner" and even I knew the institutions would not hold.
Congress is complicit ( Jan 6) and SCOTUS is captured.
I could also read a map, and saw the authoritarian pincers, Russia, China, and then if the Trump won, Europe would be encircled
Gotta say, I've never been a fan of the "tribal blindness" description with respect to the complete acquiescence of the Republican Party and their subsequent behavior and actions. It was always tribal willingness, tribal readiness. They were already there in mind, spirit, and heart...they just simply needed someone to open up the gates of hell for them.
So well said! Our takeaways should include a deep realization that bad faith is both self-serving and monumentally stupid. These voices should be perennially exorcized as thoroughly discredited as Flat Earth.
This seems like a serious failure of proportional thinking between moral categories. One issue affects the constitutional framework that enables democratic disagreement for all 340 million Americans. The other is a policy disagreement affecting a small population that requires democratic resolution.
Even if you think Democrats are completely wrong about transgender issues, that's still a disagreement within constitutional governance, not a threat to constitutional governance itself. When you can't distinguish between policy content and democratic framework, you've lost the cognitive capacity required for citizenship.
You can vote for different politicians to get different transgender policies. You can't vote for different politicians once you've eliminated the constitutional constraints that make democratic choice possible.
Why was protecting transgender people important? Because when we start trampling on the rights of American citizens, it reinforces the reality that we protect the rights of all people in America, no matter their race, religion or gender.
Rarely, in the totality of life, is there one etiology for a disease, a societal illness, a political crisis, an endangerment of people, places or things. As a "senior," born in 1942, the first son of Polish immigrants to become a physician, I have seen a lot: real-world issues, life in the USSR post-Chernobyl, fall of the Berlin Wall, life in the ghettos of Southside Chicago, police "heavy-handedness" with jail time, quotas based on religion, medical care of those living in Watts, and East LA as well as those living in Beverly Hills. Life, if your eyes, and ears, heart and mind, is open and active, teaches us a ton about people — what drives them, what makes them succeed or fail, their interest in legacy, in unity, or if they have vision.
Mike is an excellent reporter. He is outstanding in analyzing events and showing their relationship to the present circumstances we are in. Many of us, however, are unable to see the full picture because the totality of our experiences comes at the end of our lives. An old saying, speaks directly to this:
"Vee Get Too Soon Olt Und Too Late Schmart!" —old German proverb
I present, for your consideration, the following as the multi-parametric etiology for why Americans have allowed Democracy to succumb to Fascism. And do not think, not for a moment, that what you are witness to with Trump, his appointees, and the Republican Party and much of this country is something else, but not Fascism. Another quote is apropos here:
The Duck Principle: "But when I see a bird that quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, has feathers and webbed feet and associates with ducks, I’m certainly going to assume that he IS a duck.” - Emil Mazey Secretary-Treasurer UAW Labor leader 1946
Parameter #1: A majority of Americans have a political form of attention deficit syndrome.
He who knows not
And knows not that he knows not
Is a Fool
Shun him
He who knows not
And knows that he knows not
Is a Child
Teach him
He who knows
And knows not that he knows
Is Asleep
Wake him
Americans "AIL" for the most part. The focus in the US is to acquire, to buy, to consume. Relatively minuscule attention is given to reading, and most importantly to learn conceptual thinking. In many verbal exchanges with fellow citizens, family, neighbors and surprisingly medical colleagues, I think back to my younger days and the joy of reading those childhood stories to my son. My favorite was and remains The Frog and Toad stories. There is so much truth in fables, tales and stories for children. Toad nailed it in diagnosing one of the major factors regarding "what got us here."
A List
One morning, Toad sat in bed,
"I have many things to do," he said.
"I will write them all down on a list
so that I can remember them."
Toad wrote on a piece of paper:
A List of Things to Do
Then he wrote:
Wake up
Americans remain asleep, not all, but probably a majority. We are the Italians of Mussolini's Italy. We are the Spaniards of Franco's Spain, and yes, we are pretty much the Germans of Hitler's Germany. History, if books are still published and if people are allowed to read what they wish, will posit: How did the American citizenry elect a con man, a fraudster, a person who has announced his dictatorship and shown nothing of the moral code relating to truth, beauty and the good?
My European friends say that they work to live, but Americans work to buy. We have made two of the four horsemen of the apocalypse our goals in the US. And no surprise, we elected twice the poster-boy for these human traits:
ego, envy, avarice and ambition
Because of the very nature, a foundational block of who we are, we elected the "star," literally and figuratively of greed or avarice, of ambition without moral code, of frail ego, of envy and with the paranoia that accompanies this a miscreant consumed with retribution.
In a way, this is like the expression, "You are what you eat" or "how you make your bed is how you sleep in it." We have met the enemy, and it is US.
Parameter #2: Too many voters in America, "AIL."
AIL is an acronym for apathy, ignorance and laziness. My next-door neighbor voted in the last election- a write-in vote for his dog. He did not like Kamala Harris, so that was how he used his vote. Not enough citizens in this country vote. How can you not vote in an election that puts the most powerful person in the driver's seat? As Brock pointed out a long while ago, the candidates were not equivalents. Saying "both are corrupt" expresses AIL. You did not do your homework. Americans do not read. They do not even speak to one another because it is "uncomfortable." I can imagine a patient with cancer coming to see me in consultation saying "I can't talk about it; it's too uncomfortable. Take care of it." We, as a nation, have become apathetic, and we are amazingly ignorant because we direct our neural circuits to sports, entertainment, cars, vacations, but not for who we elect to Congress or to the White House.
Can you imagine that on my 83rd birthday, I get a text message from my older sister and an email from my younger sister? You know a country is sick when the only time someone calls you is when they're stuck in traffic. But some of my patients and friends in other countries communicated something of substance that was meaningful to me. We have devolved into a glib society. In medicine, once a profession or calling, but now a business, and one not conducted well. It is McMedicine, or as my RN wife said "No talk, No touch" medicine.
There are other factors involved here, and those, such as racism, are best discussed after reading "Caste" by Isabel Wilkerson.
Bottom Line: We, Americans, now live under a Fascist regime that involves the President, his appointees, the Republican Congress (almost all of them) and a majority of the American electorate. Our prognosis is dire. Our only chance to BEGIN to undo this rests on the "wish" that the Midterm elections are held and not rigged by the most corrupt president in our history.
Unless, all of America fully wakes up and smells the stench of our Fascist Government, and votes, this country, the USA, will fail and become one more lesson about what we should not do if we wish Democracy to prevail.
Another well written piece. I don’t know how convincing the WSJ was to steer us into this catastrophe but those who read WSJ must realize the bias of its owner, Rupert Murdoch. There are a large swath of well educated people who bought into this. I know many attorneys, liberal and conservative who thought SCOTUS would hold the line and here we are.
There is no inability to meet the mortal moment. They are just liars who want the cruelty and the political dominance while being too craven to own it. They prefer twisting in pretzels to excuse things they supposedly abhor than admit to not only others, but i suspect many themselves that this is who they are. That all that intellectual baloney was exactly that and they are total frauds.
It's unsurprising that those who publicly supported Trump have been unwilling to admit error. What's more surprising and much more depressing is that the same is true of the vast majority who voted for him, even though they may not have said anything public about it. They have watched corruption on a massive scale, masked secret police on the streets, failed economic policies and much more, but still report approving of Trump's performance. Unless this changes soon (which seems unlikely) US is done for.
So what I don’t get is why they’re still trying to say this is normal
I think you give them too much credit. Sophistication? Maybe, for some, but it is hard to imagine they did not know exactly what was coming. I am a "commoner" and even I knew the institutions would not hold.
Congress is complicit ( Jan 6) and SCOTUS is captured.
I could also read a map, and saw the authoritarian pincers, Russia, China, and then if the Trump won, Europe would be encircled
Sophistication? Treason!
Gotta say, I've never been a fan of the "tribal blindness" description with respect to the complete acquiescence of the Republican Party and their subsequent behavior and actions. It was always tribal willingness, tribal readiness. They were already there in mind, spirit, and heart...they just simply needed someone to open up the gates of hell for them.
So well said! Our takeaways should include a deep realization that bad faith is both self-serving and monumentally stupid. These voices should be perennially exorcized as thoroughly discredited as Flat Earth.
This seems like a serious failure of proportional thinking between moral categories. One issue affects the constitutional framework that enables democratic disagreement for all 340 million Americans. The other is a policy disagreement affecting a small population that requires democratic resolution.
Even if you think Democrats are completely wrong about transgender issues, that's still a disagreement within constitutional governance, not a threat to constitutional governance itself. When you can't distinguish between policy content and democratic framework, you've lost the cognitive capacity required for citizenship.
You can vote for different politicians to get different transgender policies. You can't vote for different politicians once you've eliminated the constitutional constraints that make democratic choice possible.
Why was protecting transgender people important? Because when we start trampling on the rights of American citizens, it reinforces the reality that we protect the rights of all people in America, no matter their race, religion or gender.