I Got Yer Peace Prize Right Here

 

One thing I have in common with Trump is avoiding the spotlight. So it was with reluctance that I divulged receiving an opinion columnist’s highest honor, The Fred’s Auto Parts and Bakery’s first-ever “Best Peace of Writing Prize.” Since the revelation, people come up to me with tears in their eyes, saying, “Sir, it’s way honorier than the Pulitzer or the Nobel assuming there’s one for writing.” 

Embossed in real-looking gold with the inscription “The Least Biased And Most Cheerful Writer Since The Invention Of Cuneiform In Mesopotamia,” the medal (it’s quite large) was accompanied by a trophy in the shape of a carburetor made to look like a biscuit. The sign on Fred’s business will now read “The Sid Schwab Fred’s Auto Parts and Bakery for Columnists Not To Be Confused With Communists.” The font will be understated and tasteful. 

I can see my birthday becoming a holiday during which banks will be closed except for bitcoin deposits, and shoppers will receive a three percent discount on auto parts and a free donut hole if they buy a dozen crullers, making them very affordable and not a hoax. Admission to national parks will be complimentary for people bringing a copy of my book. 

Because I’m not a self-promoter, I was relieved when my news was pushed to back pages by Trump receiving soccer’s first-ever, not made-up, totally legit “peace prize.” It was awarded between murders at sea and before invading South America, so it’s as deserved as anything he deserves. Like Trump, I’m six-foot-thirteen, so, rather than having to bend, we each placed our medallions over our own heads, which for sure wasn’t weird. Also so no one had time to retract the award.

Ha, ha. Nothing like cutting-edge humor to undarken days like these. Because Trump accepting a fake peace prize and heralding it like the greatest honor given to anyone anywhere ever wasn’t laughable. Or pathetic. Or like a four-year-old with a plastic light saber, telling everyone he’s Luke Skywalker. But maybe it is. Around the world, except among rightwing media, people are ridiculing him. (Trump, not the four-year-old, but who can tell the difference?) 

The accompanying trophy is seriously creepy. 

What’s unfunny and beyond despicable for a “president” of the United States or any decent human is Trump’s declaration that Somalis are “garbage.” Really, MAGA, is that what you voted for? Do you not see how he stains America? Or do you approve of such obscene racism? If not, what will you do about it?

I’ve worked with Somali personnel in operating rooms and seen the honors Somali graduates from our schools have received. They’re good people and, for what they’ve overcome to be here, admirable.

Like my parody but not parody, Trump designated his birthday a national holiday during which admission to national parks will be free. At the same time, he rescinded free entry on MLK, Jr Day and Juneteenth. His disgusting bigotry surpasses that of any US official, ever, including Orville Faubus, Strom Thurman, George Wallace, and David Duke. Garbage? It seeps, stinking, daily, from the White House. The real “Trump Derangement Syndrome” is inside his head. And the heads of people who accept it.

Marco “Me, a sycophant?” Rubio, announcing the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace with the straightest of faces and brownest of noses, described Trump as “the greatest dealmaker in our nation’s history.” No kidding. He did. Not Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase; not FDR’s New Deal or LBJ’s Civil Rights Act; not GHW Bush’s START treaty; definitely not Obama’s Paris Accords or Affordable Care Act or Iran nuclear agreement that Trump rescinded, eventually to bomb them. So, on what evidence? Trump’s Middle East peace deal? Ending Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? His healthcare plan? Price-lowering tariffs requiring bailouts for farmers? Which “deals,” economic, geopolitical, or otherwise, lasted more than a month or accomplished what he promised?

But don’t worry, MAGAs. Even as the country shows signs of realizing the damage Trump and his handlers are doing at home and across the seas, SCOTUS’s Subversive Six will keep Trump’s party in charge, no matter its lawless incompetence. Texas’s grievous mid-term gerrymandering is peachy, they said, because it’s "likely to succeed on the merits of its claim," reasoning that the lower court (Warning: empty your mouth of liquid) "failed to honor the presumption of legislative good faith.” Right. If there’s a state whose politicians legislate in good faith, it’s Texas.

Such fact-inverting scale-thumbing recalls the Citizens United decision in which Anthony Kennedy wrote that unlimited campaign contributions “do not create corruption or the appearance of corruption.” And John Roberts, gleefully gutting the Voting Rights Act, declaring the end of racism in the US.

Trump and his carefully chosen, ideological Justi are determined to turn our republic, one year shy of its 250th anniversary, into an authoritarian kleptocracy in which fair voting no longer exists and electoral outcomes are pre-determined by a handful of oligarchical stealers of our national treasure.

And that there is some Fred’s Auto Parts prize-worthy writing if ever there was.

Racism, Protest, And Trump

The thread of racism runs through the fabric of America. Anyone who pretends otherwise, who believes our justice system is free from it, who fails to understand it’s at the heart of these demonstrations, is deluded. 

Contrary to claims, the election of President Barack Obama didn’t mark its end. Like jogging or birdwatching, presidenting while black provoked racist fury, eventually helping to “elect” Trump, whose racism was obvious long before he back-doored politics by way of Kenya. Before he urged participants to “knock the crap” out of protestors at his rallies, before he told police to be rough when arresting people.  

White Americans can grieve, but we can never feel what it’s like to be African-American when yet another is killed by cops in circumstances unlikely to have extinguished a white person. None of us has had to teach our sons how to avoid being murdered, nor feared for their lives whenever they went out. Who can say they wouldn’t be protesting, rioting even, if skins were exchanged? 

Policing mass protests is tough. This isn’t about cops. It’s about bad ones and unequal justice. And bad people and their bad president, who didn’t start it but has made it worse, before, during, and, no doubt, after the current turmoil. He thinks it plays well for him.  

It’s an unending cycle: brutal police action results in the death of an African-American; angry protests arise, initially peaceful. Then someone throws a brick, a firebomb, looting starts, police respond, people are arrested, violence becomes the story, peaceful protestors are ignored, the underlying issues are suffocated. Again.  

The words of no president could entirely quell violence. Before Trump, though, they’ve tried. Only he, seeing personal advantage, has intentionally poured accelerants into the flames. Incapable of rising to the occasion, he could no more appeal to our best than he could put down a cheeseburger. To him, this violence is an opportunity to distract from his incapable coronavirus leadership, to get his base even angrier, to assure their turnout in November.  

No doubt some of the violence is an expression of anger and frustration, even as it buries the message. But the overwhelming majority of protestors have been non-violent; those who aren’t make it easy to dismiss them all as, in Trump’s inspirational words, “lowlifes and losers.” Which is the point: many instigators – white supremacists, neo-fascists -- are there to do just that; and, unlike anti-fascists, the only group Trump would designate as terrorists, their presence has been documented.  

Violence is to be condemned, but a real president would acknowledge the country’s cross-cultural pain and seek ways to heal it. Instead, eager to look tough, Trump chooses to make it worse, threatens to unleash “vicious dogs and ominous weapons,” calls governors “weak” while sequestered in a bunker in a darkened White House. (He was only “inspecting it,” he told Fox “news.”) Lacking the moral authority of presidents past, he calls for cruelty, not calm.  

In his most disgusting act, ever, which is like picking the hottest tree in a forest fire, Trump, aping third-world dictators, facilitated by his (no longer our) Attorney General, had peaceful citizens dispersed with gas, rubber bullets and low-flying helicopters, before imperiously strutting across the street, followed dutifully by the Secretary of Defense and, decked out in combat fatigues, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. To posture with a Bible, with whose content he’s unfamiliar. 

Never have Trump’s phony religiosity and authoritarian phantasies been so evident, nor his certainty that his supporters are fools. Which they were quick to confirm. That Book should have melted his face like the Lost Ark.  

It’s heartening to see police and elected officials kneeling with protesters, and black demonstrators stopping white agitators from further carnage, pleading for calm, protecting a white cop. But Trump and his enablers will never address racial inequality. It’s up to all of us, liberal and conservative, finally to do so; and, because it’s now or never, to recognize the mounting danger we thought impossible: a democracy-destroying “president,” exploiting justified demonstrations to drag us ever closer to the military-backed dictatorship he craves; whose latest actions have been so disturbing, so sinister, they leave one bereft of words.  

So hear Joe Biden’s instead. Consider what we might regain, if there’s time; if military leaders find the integrity to refuse Trump’s despotic demands; if Republicans reclaim the American values for which they once stood; and if white people finally listen. Really listen.

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Two Horrors

My next newspaper column. It's getting pretty damn depressing out there.

Recently I lost a friend because he thought I’d called all Trump supporters, including him, racist. In fact, I was calling on non-racist supporters to speak out against Trump’s deliberate manipulation of those he believes are racists. He was unconvinced. 

I wonder how he feels about Trump telling four Democratic Congresswomen of color, three of whom are American-born, the fourth a naturalized citizen, to go back to their “broken” countries. As Trump claims they’re “pro-terrorists,” feigns outrage that they say “vile” things and use the F-word in public, one concludes the White House mirrors are broken. 

If you defend Trump’s latest, it’s because he hates the people you hate. Because of you, he sees it as winning strategy, sees you as an easy mark. If that characterization offends, take a stand. Or stop pretending. 

Like the above-the-law dictator he imagines himself to be, Trump is attacking America itself, made great since its founding by disagreement and protest. It’s who we are. Except for Trump’s latest ralliers, chanting “Send her back.” To whom he listened, gloating. If, in your heart, you’re chanting with them, you have no idea what patriotism is nor what America is about; you make it clear it CAN happen here. 

But enough. Believe it or not, we’re facing something even worse than Trump: mass extinction. 

Commissioned by the UN, a summary of the results of a three-year study on the magnitude of the problem has just been published. Comprising the work of five-hundred scientists and referencing fifteen-hundred research papers, it covers a wide range of earthly perils. 

Driving Mercer Street to downtown Seattle lately, one comes to understand. In addition to traffic that allows three cars per stoplight on a good day, high-rise dwellings are sprouting like asparagus, block after crowded block, readying to house more people by the thousands. There are too damn many of us.  

“The essential, interconnected web of life on Earth is getting smaller and increasingly frayed,” wrote the co-chair of the eighteen-hundred-page report. “This loss is a direct result of human activity and constitutes a direct threat to human well-being in all regions of the world.”

We’re bludgeoning our planet to a slow but certain death. As we heat it up to intolerable levels, deplete finite resources, cause the elimination of millions of species, we’re destroying the home whose complex ecosystems sustain us. And though it’s obvious what needs doing, it’s increasingly unlikely to happen, for humanity lacks the required collective wisdom, and America’s leadership is no more. Increasingly, we seem to be looking backward, wishfully, not ahead and clear-eyed. 

Around twenty-five-percen of plant and animal species are threatened, and an additional million are heading toward extinction. For those who don’t care about flora and fauna any more than they do about Trump’s anti-Americanism, the report catalogs the deadly threat to all humankind, including them. For those who do care, the summary can be found here. 

Climate change is a big part of it, but there’s more. We’ve lost eighty-five percent of the world’s wetlands. Two-thirds of ocean waters are stressed; half of the world’s coral reefs are dead. It’s happening hundreds of times faster than millions of years past. We’re clearcutting hundreds of millions of hectares of rainforest, gobbling up rapidly-diminishing, essential elements, as the world population has doubled since 1970. People are already fighting over food and water, fuel and land, to the tune of twenty-five-hundred conflicts currently ongoing. It’ll get worse.  

Topping the list of required changes are two all-but impossible actions: stopping population growth and decreasing consumption. These would entail entirely re-constituting the developed world, in which all economies are, to a greater or lesser extent, predicated on consumerism: increasing and housing customers, making newer and more irresistible products. 

Could we abide a less self-destructing economic model? Would we be willing to keep our current smartphones and outdated HDTVs? Not in the irreparably divided, conversation-averse, science-rejecting US, where our “president” has convinced half of us our biggest problem is immigration. 

Years ago, there was an experiment in which mice were challenged with dense overcrowding. Good news: they stopped reproducing. Bad news: they turned to cannibalism. Thanks to Trump’s self-serving provocations, we’re already tearing each other apart in a kind of verbal feeding frenzy. Trumpists are stockpiling weapons, and their food-stores won’t last forever. Are we better than rodents? 

If Trump’s rallies portend America’s future, the answer is no. Clearly, undeniably. No.

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