I am ashamed of our leadership, and terrified of the future.
And I'm not criticizing yours or BI's or MD's viewpoints. To each his/her own, and all.
I'm just at a loss to comprehend that perspective, or what y'all are talking about.
but I think you should tell us why you can't comprehend our perspective or understand what we are talking about. Time to open your kimono. I've done enough of it on this board. Your turn. Tell us about your world.
Dinner time here, and laptop is shut for the night.
When I look at America, I see an imperfect nation formed with the idea of becoming more perfect. To that end, we've dealt with slavery, women's suffrage, Jim Crow, civil rights, voting rights, gay rights, etc., all in pursuit of that ideal. But still, we've always been, and likely always will be, a 'work in progress.'
So, I try to look at things and ask, "Are we making progress?" Not, "Are we there yet?" or "When will we be there?". But, "Are we getting better, moving forward, working on the problems?" And in America 2024, I think we are. Sometimes quickly, sometimes far too slowly, but still, forward.
We're a heterogeneous group here in the PBR. Yet, you can see the vast differences of opinions we have between us. Even with such common upbringings and interests, we still find it challenging sometimes to knit together a solution. Now, throw together all of the other cultural, ethnic, economic, and religious blocs in this country. Many different sets of concerns, opinions, solutions, etc., get thrown into the mix that maybe even our tiny PBR group doesn't understand. That makes moving forward highly challenging, sometimes. It takes men and women of goodwill and faith to work through those challenges and find a path forward. That goes for most public policy issues today.
Funny, as I was gathering my thoughts and writing this, I stumbled on David Brook's column "The Cure for What Ails Our Democracy" in yesterday's NYT (linked below). And it struck a chord with me because it accurately depicts where we are today. We've become so polarized as a nation that every disagreement or difference of opinion becomes a battle between 'good' and 'evil' that my side must win. Instead of looking at the good on the other side, we focus on the bad and build up these impediments to progress that leave us stuck in the mud.
That's certainly an immense frustration for me. But I don't get the 'shame' you say you feel. Or the disgust Brahms feels. I may get the cynicism that Marine Domer feels. There are plenty of men and women of goodwill on all sides. They need to be empowered, and the charlatans, grifters, and hucksters cast aside.
We've never been a perfect nation. We've never had 'it' and lost 'it.' It has always eluded us. Likewise, we'll always have challenges, both foreign and domestic. History waxes and wanes
My frustrations with the current state of affairs do not make me hopeless. The generations behind us have the energy, goodwill, and ability to work across interest groups to get us unstuck and move forward again. We needed to cede power over to them nearly a decade ago. Once we can make that transition, the wheels will turn again.
I'm appreciative of the job that President Biden has done. He's willing to work hard to find common ground and accomplish things. He has a steady hand and competent people under him to handle many of our foreign challenges.
Domestically, I'm a massive fan of the 'Build Back Better' framework. We've gone decades where we haven't publicly invested in America. To that end, the [ill-named] Inflation Reduction Act, CHiPs Act, and other aspects of that framework are focused on those areas of our country that have been under-invested in forever, regardless of whether they are red state or blue. And those policies are also bringing private investment into solving many of these issues.
More work needs to be done to deliver quality healthcare to all Americans. Better solutions are also needed for housing and education so that future generations have a positive American experience.
But yes, overall, I'm optimistic. Mostly because I see the quality of people in our upcoming generations. They really are a group of amazing people.
I have posted the following paragraphs from my Navy memoir on a previous occasion:
Helicopters on the roof
“…After the fall of the South Vietnamese government, stories leaked out describing the hardships suffered by people we left behind. The saga of the Boat People was covered extensively. However, the plight of former RVN military personnel and civilians who had worked for the Americans was largely ignored. Sometimes, it seemed as if government officials, journalists, academics, and ordinary citizens conspired to push the story to the back pages. In today’s vernacular, they wanted to “move on”. This was understandable, I suppose—the country had just endured a national humiliation. Yet, we knew that senior RVN military officers and civilian officials were being tortured and executed. We knew that many more people were sent to “re-education” camps in the countryside where hard labor and political indoctrination hastened acceptance of the new reality.
What about Trinh? In the turmoil after the war, was she able to reunite with her children? She had worked for the US Army—was she persecuted? Or sent to a re-education camp? What about Dai-uy Be? On my last day at Ben Luc, Be looked me in the eye and said, “We are freedom men”, adding that he was proud to have fought alongside such a good friend. Did he end up against a wall?
On those occasions when I think about my Vietnamese friends and comrades, people like Trinh and Be, the guilt and the shame are so overwhelming that I struggle to breathe. I know I didn’t do anything wrong. I just left. And that’s the problem. We all did. We did as we always do—we got on our planes and helicopters, and we left. And when we did, we abandoned people who had invested everything—their safety, their futures, their entire lives—in us.
Americans do not think of themselves as a treacherous people, but our recent history teaches us that we are. We think of ourselves as a generous and kind people, not people who are careless and sloppy with the lives of others, lives that have been put in our hands. But the pattern repeats: We demand trust and obedience. Then, when the going gets tough, or when we become distracted, or when we grow tired of making sacrifices, we leave. It happened in Vietnam and Iraq, and it will happen again in Afghanistan.”
Of course, it did happen in Afghanistan when the Biden Administration painted its masterpiece at the airport in Kabul, an event characterized by spectacular ineptitude, cynical indifference, and cravenness. You say you don’t get the disgust part. What reaction other than disgust can one have when confronted by the scenes we witnessed in August 2021?
Your exposition leads us in many directions, and that’s fine. I intended to make a point about our abandonment of Ukraine. As Sir Winston explains so eloquently, we make a fatal mistake when we fail to confront evil. Or confront it far too late as we did in 1941 by which time the men who signed the petition of the Oxford Union were serving at sea in the North Atlantic, in the air over Britain, or in the desert at El Alamein. Just as they were, we will be levied a toll, and it will be paid by young men like my grandsons. That is not progress.
has three elements to the pledge. Lives, Fortune, Sacred Honor.
It is that third element that seems to be missing in the cases where we have walked away. Lives, treasure - those can be written off as 'sunk costs' - especially when it is the lives of others or draftees, when the money is borrowed or taxed from the masses. But the willingness to still do right when it hurts, or when it's unpopular, or inconvenient is an important factor in shifting history.
Watching what my party (and yes, the Democratic Party as well, to a lesser degree) have become, watching the hopeless corruption and incompetence that is the Crook County court system, watching our feckless leaders diminish America's role in the world, watching our feckless leaders diminish Notre Dame's role in the world.
I will continue to rage against the dying of the light, but I grow tired. I'm disgusted by a world and a nation where doing the right thing is no longer rewarded as it should be. I take solace in knowing I'm still blessed beyond anything to which I'll ever be entitled, and my belief in God's infinite forgiveness for us unworthy souls.
P.S. -- Damn, does anyone in the world talk like Winston Churchill any longer? What a master. This weary world could use another like him.
I rage, but I do it silently. I am alone--there is no audience in the man cave from where I follow the daily pageant of silliness on the PB.
I suppose I could be angry all the time, but then there is Usher in his sparkly pants. What joy! What I do have all the time is shame, and it arises every time I look at my grandsons. It occurs to me that my Boomer counterparts and I are supremely lucky. We will not live to see the end (unless the Great Pacific War begins this year or next).
The shame comes from knowing that we fucked it up. We squandered every advantage, never took the right path, avoided sacrifice. I do not suggest that we are unique--those who follow us are doing a splendid job of fucking it up. And, btw, I don't buy the Greatest Generation bullshit. They gave us Vietnam among other things. They loved their cocktails and their entitlements.
I belong on an island somewhere. St. Helena or Pitcairn. But given a choice, I'd select the Big Island.
you should know your shame should be outwardly directed, not inward. In addition to your courageous service, and your work helping micro-financing all of the world, your posting here (whether I respond or not) brings me joy. We may not always agree, but I love reading your geopolitical analysis, and marvel at your memory of events, names, faces, food, etc. Your travelogues alone are worth the price of admission.
You definitely should.
The goddamn thing is full of mistakes. It's sometime too wordy, too cluttered. I was resolved to correct all that with a second edition, but it morphed into a different book, more autobiography than travelogue. It sits on my computer along with a memoir of my Navy days and a collection of essays, letters, and rants (blog posts).
and all that.
I am sickened at how political cowards are allowing the Cult of MAGA and its leader to march the world toward another disaster.
In 1935, Churchill was in outer darkness, for reasons good and ill. Today, Cheney might be a parallel. Will something terrible enough to shake our polity free of MAGA's grasp in time to repeat the ultimate success of the 1940, horrible though it was, or will China, Russia, and North Korea be allowed to take command.
Dangerous times.
and the mistake of so many on this board, it your fixation on Trump as the author of our travail. The disintegration, the slouching, began long before the advent of Trump. Remember that Yeats wrote his poem in 1919 in the aftermath of the Great War. Ireland’s struggle for independence was just getting underway, and his wife had become a victim of the flu pandemic (she survived).
Since then, no few writers, film-makers, and others have borrowed Yeats’ images and phraseology—Joan Didion, Lou Reed, Joni Mitchell—to describe the end of the gyre. Remember Gordon Gekko in Wall Street? “So the falcon's heard the falconer, huh?” Robert Bork wrote Slouching Towards Gomorrah in 1996.
“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” I guess we could debate how much time we have left until the next rough beast arrives. In the meantime, we should acknowledge that, If arson is the metaphor, Trump didn’t set the fire. He is merely an accelerant.
I’m sure Liz would be flattered, but she ain’t Churchill.
PS: You can't bet serious about "shake free of MAGA's grasp". Are you powerless? Instead of standing there sucking your teeth and wringing your hands, go about replacing Biden with a candidate who will win convincingly. I want to puke every time I hear the stuff about what a good job he's doing, slow and steady, blah blah.
I'm not so sure the way to shake free of MAGA's grasp is to have the party already not embracing it nominate someone else who isn't embracing it but will "convincingly" defeat its progenitor (again). I don't think we will move on from MAGA's grasp until the party that openly embraces it rejects its influence.
Apparently you think I'm a Democrat. This is not true. I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the Democratic Party.
Thus, I have little input to the decisions made by the Democratic Party. And the Democratic Party has not shown any interest in listening to me, anyway.
There are multiple factors involved, but briefly ... as though I can be brief ...
In '64 or '68 (Goldwater on principal, Nixon because he was Nixon), the GOP started doing things that attracted the folks who had been offended by the Civil Rights legislation of the Johnson years. They started with a wink and a nod, but became ever more obvious. It's my fault that I was in denial about this until around 2010, but there you have it. It was still there and growing.
They added all of the culture "stuff" along the way. It fit with the underlying message about keeping the right demographic in charge. A modern version of "Gone with the Wind" developed. A fable about a time that never was.
Along came a fellow with the skills of an old time vaudevillian, he could read the room, and the ethics / morals of ... what? Doesn't matter. He became the leader of the MAGA band, a group who believed that he would take them back to that time that never was.
All this was enabled by Watergate.
Post Watergate, there were a lot of reforms. One of them was to eliminate the "smoke filled rooms" full of professionals and replace them with the will of the people as demonstrated in primary elections.
It is through the primary election process that the MAGAs can impose their views on the GOP. And the so-called leaders of what was once a great political party have avoided confronting the problem since 2016, by which time, it was really too late. Insert here the Churchill quote you used in your post. It fits exactly the GOP response to the rise of MAGA power, a rise that began in earnest around the turn of the Century. But the first crisis came when those leaders had at least three clear shots at confronting the problem: impeachment 1, impeachment 2, and election denialism.
Finally, when those opportunities were wasted, the fate of the GOP probably sealed. Not this year, not next, but before the decade is out, it will probably have turned into a minority party akin to the Libertarians. Hopefully a new party, Forward?, will rise to take its place in the center-right of our nation's political spectrum.
In closing, I do not mistake Cheney for Churchill, save for their shared experience of being cast out for their commitment to telling the truth as they saw it. And, while she ain't Churchill, a lot of the folks in the GOP have to stand on tiptoe to see eye to eye with people like Chamberlin and Quisling.
I weep.
of Iraq and Afghanistan has done incalculable damage to the collective psyche of America when it comes to discerning how and when to use our power and leadership.
There are few respected voices on the path forward for us - on Ukraine, Middle East/Iran or Taiwan.