Category Archives: Politics

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Unfit: A Memo


TO: DJT, POTUS

FROM: Ken Goldstein, Author & Businessperson

RE: The Trump Legacy

SUMMARY ASSESSMENT:

You were unfit to hold the title of the executive office you won in election.

You were unfit to issue executive orders empty of study and laden with self-interest.

You were unfit to appoint cabinet officials whose job it is to challenge your opinions.

You were unfit to seek loyalty from the subordinates you bullied.

You were unfit to be seen as a role model by children in homes and classrooms.

You were unfit to talk of family values, ethical mandates, or moral imperatives.

You were unfit to order military action or report on its efficacy.

You were unfit to lay a wreath at Arlington.

You were unfit to represent our nation in state visits or international forums.

You were unfit to offer comment on science, health, or climate change.

You were unfit to speak of business norms or effective negotiation.

You were unfit to hold authority in the age of “Me Too” reform.

You were unfit to broadly attack our free press as perpetrators of fake news.

You were unfit to demand intellectual credibility when you lied consistently without regret.

You were unfit to be taken seriously as anything other than a threat to world stability and security.

You were unfit to embrace the gravitas of the immense power you commanded and the lack of humility you celebrated.

CORRECTIVE ACTION:

We will heal while you are mired for the rest of your years in shame.

We will recommit to values that embrace compassion and empathy.

We will again celebrate learning and understanding, particularly in matters of science and empirical knowledge.

We will rejoin the community of nations in saving our planet.

We will address income inequality.

We will recommit to healthcare justice.

We will acknowledge the safe haven of asylum and treat immigrants with dignity and kindness.

We will welcome the stranger.

We will not viciously insult distinguished participants in our democracy whose views reflect diversity of thought or background.

We will not embrace humiliation as a strategy to undermine those with whom we may disagree.

We will appreciate journalism and distinguish facts from dangerous manipulation.

We will reject the cynicism of pattern lying for convenience.

We will never forget the hardships we suffered under your fragile ego.

We will face the future with courage, hope, and love.

We will make our nation appropriately great again.

We will let time address your place in history.

_______________

Image: Pixabay

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The Press and the President

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders at a briefing of journalists this past week exclaimed in exasperation:

“You guys have a huge responsibility to play in the divisive nature of this country, when ninety percent of the coverage of everything this president does is negative, despite the fact that the country is doing extremely well, despite the fact that the president is delivering on exactly what he said he was going to do if elected.”

It would be difficult to disagree with her observation that media coverage of the president is 90% unfavorable.

Why is the press overwhelmingly negative toward this president?

1) He lies obviously, shamelessly, and constantly.

2) His ideas and policies are uninformed, constructed from whim, and largely empirically wrong.

3) His behavior is morally repugnant and his driving force is feeding his ego.

4) The circumstances of his election are being investigated for criminal intervention by credible authorities.

The press is doing its job. The press is reporting on the dangers it sees threatening our nation. Were the weighting of critique not so uniformly negative, we might wonder if there was some hidden agenda in an institutional bias, some collusion with ulterior motives. The only collective agenda I can glean is the reporting of information allowing us to make critical decisions about our freedom and well-being.

Fake news is not the work product of trained journalists under credentialed editorial supervision. Journalism and a free press are the backbone that anchors the ongoing experiment that is our democracy.

Fake news is the drivel that emerges from undisciplined commentary and targeted propaganda. Misdirection is a tactic of human divisiveness, subversion of logical process, and chaos that beckons autocratic control.

Journalism and misdirection are not the same, unless one purposefully hijacks the other. When a true journalist makes a mistake or misstates a fact, the press runs a retraction. When an ignorant or hateful opinion-maker deliberately attempts to mask a lie as the truth, the lie is left to stand because it was intended to spread falsehood.

To confuse journalism with fake news is to misunderstand the fundamental pillar protecting democracy from authoritarian rule.

The press is not the enemy of the people.

Our president is not a victim. His relationship with the media is his own making.

Make change happen. Change happens when the pain of change is less than the pain of staying the same. We are in severe pain.

Read your ballots carefully. Studied reporters have filled our news sources with more analysis than at any other time in history. We always have a choice.

Get out the vote.

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Bad Behavior Made OK

I haven’t written about Donald Trump for quite some time. No, I’m not unwell, not more than anyone else. I brought out my third novel earlier this year and wanted to try to focus on storytelling without being overly divisive, although I will say at some of my book talks the social sparks found a way to fly. Guess I can bring that out in an audience even when I don’t try too hard.

I also became creatively exhausted on the topic of politics as it pertains to my blog and let Facebook do a lot of the heavy lifting for my rolling commentary. Apologies if you have been overwhelmed by that. Well, no apology really. It’s stuff I needed to say, just not here.

Sadly the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings have roped me back in for the moment. It’s not just Kavanaugh, with whom I sadly share a branded diploma. It’s the voice of Trump that set me off. It always is.

The pervasive nature of Trump’s dysfunctional behavior for the almost two years he has been in office oozes without containment far beyond the Capital Beltway. The question of Kavanaugh’s judicial temperament was brought to bear during his highly combustible vetting. Even if he were deemed to fail this test, his shortcomings are but a pittance compared to Trump’s demonstrated abomination in presidential temperament.

Trump is not satisfied laying waste to government conventions and respectable demeanor. He has declared a culture war on civil discourse as we know it. His public comportment does not end at being reprehensible. He strives to be offensive in order to fully make the point that he has the bully pulpit, he is in charge, and he is entitled to any style of verbal combat he alone condones.

Unfortunately, his influence does not end when the video clips cease to loop. He has changed our neighborhood rules of engagement. His warring rage on opponents is bad behavior made OK.

Perhaps The Beatles said it better:

I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.

If he can be an aggressive jackass without any filters of polite society, then it’s an easy step to thinking so can I. So can you. So can we all.

So many of us are now emulating his frightening postures, we are transforming our interactions into Trump World. This seems to be what he wants. It divides us. It keeps his platform solidified while we crumble into anarchy.

What makes me so sure? It’s hard to argue with the psychological tyranny of the workplace.

If you’ve worked in an office—or pretty much anywhere with a hierarchy—you know that people begin to take on behavioral traits of the boss. It’s a real phenomenon that begins subtly enough with quirks and builds over time with implicit permissions.

Allow me to illustrate the case, and then you can fill in your own anecdotal corollary.

I once had a prominent boss who sat at the head of the table during meetings with a disposable plastic water bottle. When he finished drinking the water, he would put his hands on either side of the bottle and crush it accordion style. Within two weeks of his arrival most everyone around the table was doing the same thing. With the echoing thunder of crushed plastic, our meetings began to sound like the Fourth of July.

Want another one?

I often use a borrowed expression in work situations: “Luckier than Steve Guttenberg.” At this point in pop history, few remember where it came from, let alone the target of its sarcasm. When the movie Three Men and a Baby was released in 1987, it starred the very famous Ted Danson, Tom Selleck, and… Steve Guttenberg? In its time it was a quirky joke. It still comes out of my mouth when we get unexpectedly lucky in business. Within a week of saying it in any environment, I will hear it repeated back multiple times. I’ve asked the younger people who parrot it what it means. They have no idea, but they keep saying it. Often they laugh at the joke, not even googling the punchline.

Let’s call those relatively innocuous examples of boss behavior becoming everyone’s behavior. It gets much worse.

I had another boss with a penchant for taking credit for other people’s creative work. I should have known something was up when he regularly used brilliant media samples created by companies unaffiliated with ours to pitch the potential of our company to clients and investors. He never actually said we created those samples, he just used them to illustrate possibility, so I bit my tongue and let it go. I noticed others around me were also squirming, and the level of trust with this boss became built on silence rather than candor. Later he decided a high-profile project I had designed from concept to prototype hadn’t really been created by me but by him. He took over development of it from me and asked me to focus again on blue-sky initiatives. At that point I fully understood the downward norms of his success. I quit and restarted my career in a much better place.

Think of your own office emulation. Got a nasty example you can’t shrug off?

Now imagine the biggest Boss-in-Chief. Imagine how his daily abhorrent conduct is eating away at our nation’s cultural norms. Think about what you are seeing, hearing, and reading in routine circumstances that two years ago would have been considered appalling.

He mocks a victim of sexual assault. He mocks a physically disabled journalist. He belittles the military service and wartime imprisonment of a senator. He insults the supreme sacrifice of a Gold Star family. He touts his wealth as permission to have his way with women at his whim. He proclaims that his ability to avoid taxes makes him smart. He denies climate change in direct opposition to the vast majority of the global science community. He cries out “America First” in a nation that already consumes the most natural resources per capita and maintains the planet’s unequalled reserve of nuclear weapons.

What impact might that egoism be having on the rest of us? I’m not suggesting most of us long to lead rallies with chants of locking up an opponent, but think about what you are doing that you wouldn’t have done publicly in the prior time frame. Might you be acting ever so slightly differently? Are you feeling OK about it? I’m not.

Trump’s impact on our lives rises beyond the content of his thin theories and thinner policies. His stab to our innards is more than the overt lies he tells without remorse. The deterioration he is causing is systemic. Were we to be transformed in his image, his chaos would become our chaos.

Modern leadership is a privilege built upon empathy and humility. To rise above cynicism, we must embrace the notion of leadership by example. When we are entrusted with authority, what we do is what we allow others to do.

When a boss whispers, it’s a shout. When a boss shouts, it’s a call to arms.

Ridding ourselves of this malady will be no small trick. If it’s crept into your world view, start to root it out. If it’s infected your workplace, blow it up with a bomb. No, no bombs. Just eliminate it without drama. Insist collectively that the dreadful antics go away!

When enough of us allow Trump’s norms to become our own, the detriment to our well-being will last well beyond his term, likely beyond the life service of a Supreme Court justice. That vile tone will remain his legacy long after we think we are done with him.

When we rot, we decay until we dissolve. It’s not OK to let ourselves rot. Not now. Not ever.

_______________

Image: Pixabay

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And It’s One, Two, Three, What Are We Fighting For?

I know people are exhausted with the political dialogue. I am as well. Government is not meant to be this far forward in our lives. It is meant to be the structural framework behind the scenes so we can pursue the individual and shared goals of our lives. These are very unusual times.

Extraordinary times.

But let’s not forget what is at stake. This is not petty bickering or pointless head bashing over immovable viewpoints. I believe we have unveiled competing visions of American purpose and responsibility, and many of the values that separate us seem irreconcilable. Until the millennium I believed Americans had more in common than not when it came to the notion of purpose. Now I have a hard time seeing the glue binding us together.

That’s what I think we’re fighting over and what I think is at stake. That’s why our social media dialogue with each other is increasingly less civil, and that’s causing polar opposites to either stop talking with each other or openly despise each other. Unity for unity’s sake is an unholy compromise and not an option for me. We either have a treasure trove of shared values or we don’t. If we don’t, the divisiveness can’t be mended because morality is at the core of personal definition.

If we don’t agree then we don’t agree. I see little evidence that at the core of national purpose there is broad agreement. It is the purpose of leadership to build consensus out of difference to unite disparate elements in strength. Politics is a different game, and it can be a nasty one. If there are competing visions of America up for grabs, I see little choice but to listen closely and then stand firm on moral imperatives. If we find that we have irreconcilable differences, then there is a reason why.

I have already detailed a laundry list of apparently irreconcilable differences in a previous post. Our lack of consensus around civil rights, gender rights, a woman’s right to choose, economic inequality, healthcare, environmental justice, personal weapons, educational opportunity, and America’s international posture are ripping us apart with little healing on the horizon. Let me take a run at boiling it down to just three things I believe are at the core of our national impasse, sharing my own very personal beliefs:

  1. I believe we live in a global community. I believe that with immense prosperity comes immense responsibility and humility. To put our own national interest entirely first denies the leadership stake we have taken in the world as a result of disproportionate consumption of natural resources and stage time. None of this is incompatible with my love of country.
  2. I believe the highest purpose of government is peaceful prosperity, evidenced by a profound commitment to establishing and maintaining a level playing field. Government rises to admiration in the administration of justice and fairness. I don’t belive the highest purpose of government is a tax cut. I’m not even sure a tax cut makes my top ten, since most of the benefit will go to wealthy people whose lives won’t be changed by it. Tax reform focused on true fairness makes my top ten.
  3. I believe government leadership is about public service. It is selfless. It is in awe of its own responsibility and acts accordingly with intellectual rigor and behavioral reserve. It is not authoritarian or autocratic and does not seek to position itself as uniformly superlative. Exemplary leaders bring out the best in us, not the worst. I don’t believe a big job title is about self-aggrandizement, bullying, sloppy thinking, whim, or egomaniacal hubris.

We seem to be descending into a culture war. We’ve already proven we are capable of a Civil War. Is it absolutely unthinkable that could happen again? Try talking to some people who ardently disagree with you on your deepest convictions. Then you decide if we’ve all learned history’s most vital lessons.

I need to focus on my family and friends, my business, and my dreams, same as you, but I’m being emotionally battered by the scope of this attack on my values. This is where my head is at, and I feel a generational obligation to champion resistance. I admire journalists and the media when they take their job seriously. I am a writer so I am part of the media, and I choose words with discipline and scrutiny. Most professional writers I know do the same, despite the click bait and fake news that tempts hacks. To frame the media as our enemy is purely ignorant and dangerous. Close reading, observation, and listening saves lives and is the cornerstone of cultural achievement.

I’m not willing to cross my own lines for false harmony. I know the same is true for those who vehemently disagree with me and feel their convictions are being violated. This probably will end badly, but it’s always crucial to know what we’re fighting for. In these extraordinary times, it is the soul of our nation.

_____

Post Title: H/T Country Joe and the Fish

Image: Three Flags by Jasper Johns / Whitney Museum of American Art