EASTER'S TWO MIRACLES

Easter is upon us.

It is Christianity's most important day.

On it, we celebrate the resurrection of an itinerant Jewish preacher who roamed Galilee in the first century of the so-called Common Era.  

We claim a man was risen from the dead.  

We believe it was an act of God. 

It is Christianity's fundamental miracle.

Without it, there is no "Christ".  

Christ is a word, not a name.   

It is a transliteration of the Greek word christos. 

Christos in Greek  means "anointed one". 

It was used to translate the Hebrew word for "one who is anointed".  

That Hebrew word is  "Messiah."

We believe the miracle was witnessed.

Shortly after it happened. 

By followers -- women and then men -- who carried that witness to the edges of their known world.   

Without them, there is no Christ either.

No messengers.

No good news.

No new commandment of love.

It is Easter's other fundamental miracle.

The one that turned a rag-tag group of frightened followers . . .

Into a committee of the courageous.

On Easter, we celebrate Him for saving the world with His Gospel of love.

And Them for letting the rest of us know.

Teilhard De Chardin was a French paleontologist and Jesuit priest.

"Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity," he said,  "we shall harness for God the energies of love".

"And then," he continued, "for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire."

None of us can be God.

But all of us can be disciples.

Happy Easter.

THE FIRST CASUALTY

They say truth is the first casualty of war.

But who exactly are the "they" who say this.

So far, I have found three candidates.

California's Republican Senator Hiram Johnson is reported in 1918 to have said "The first casualty when war comes is truth."  Roughly 2500 years earlier, the Greek playwright  Aeschylus ostensibly coined the phrase as a military maxim, though no one can actually find the place in which he coined it.  Others give credit to Samuel Johnson's long-winded version in his November 11, 1758 essay in The Idler: "Among the calamities of war may be justly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages."

Anytime someone these days says "they" or "some people" are saying or have said something, it is a good idea to figure out who exactly those "people" are and what exactly "they" said.  

Like many duties imposed on us of late, this is one we owe to Donald Trump. Among his ubiquitous verbal tics is the now infamous "Some people are saying. . ."  More often than not, however, it is followed by a fact-free fusillade of fabrication.

Or, in a word . . .

Lies.

Of our three "first casualty" candidates, it is probably best to eliminate Senator Johnson and Aeschylus as the original authors.  At least it is probably best to do so if we are interested in using evidence as the basis for any claim of authorship.  Though among the Senator's supporters the remark is supposed to have been said in 1918, there is no source reporting the comment by him at that time. The only document attributing those words to him is a February 1929 edition of the Local Engineers Journal, and the words themselves were in print in Philip Snowden's Truth and the War two years before the Senator ostensibly spoke them.

So . . .

Senator Johnson was probably quoting Snowden.

And unless Snowden had access to writings from Aeschylus that no one before or since has seen, Snowden was probably quoting -- or at the very least inspired by --  the other Johnson, a/k/a . . .

Dr. Samuel.

Dr. Johnson was a polymath. He was a poet, critic, biographer, historian and journalist.  He wrote in Latin and English.  By the time he wrote in The Idler, he had published his renowned A Dictionary of English Language. It set the standard for proper English until supplanted by the OED in 1928. It was also the reason Oxford (finally) gave him a degree.

As a boy, he travelled the economic ladder, his debt-ridden father having eventually put the family into poverty that only a timely inheritance remitted.  As an adult, he suffered from Tourette's syndrome, though no one at the time knew it, and was saved from debtor's prison on more than one occasion by admiring (and generous) friends. What, however, was an unrequited burden to him may have turned out to be a benefit to us.  The tics and outbursts that define the disease laid waste to so many job interviews that writing became a form of refuge. And, as his fame grew, it paid.

The November 1758 Idler  essay is really about the creation of public ignorance.  The bit about war and truth came at the end.  The lion's share of the essay is a critique of the idleness of the rich and the idiocy that too often encourages.  Johnson was a Tory, a devout Anglican, a monarchist and a loyal supporter of his King.  He did not despise England's economic elite.  He did, however, despise waste, especially of the intellectual sort.

"Money and time," he wrote, "are the heaviest burdens of life". The "unhappiest of all mortals are those who have more of either than they know how to use."

And so . . .

"To set himself free from these encumbrances, one hurries to Newmarket; another travels over Europe; one pulls down his house and calls architects about him; another buys a seat in the country, and follows his hounds over hedges and through rivers". 

All this according to Johnson would be innocent enough were it left there.

But it isn't.

Because, as he put it  . . .

"One of the amusements of idleness is reading without the fatigue of close attention".

Every audience, of course, attracts its performers.  Adam Smith's famous laws demand as much and Johnson -- a friend of Smith's -- knew this. 

And so it was for those who sought to "read without fatigue". 

They generated, according to Dr. Johnson, "writers whose wish is not to be studied, but to be read", the largest of whom were "writers of news" filling the pages of what in the middle of 18th century England were mushrooming numbers of morning and afternoon dailies and weeklies. A reader from this century might be forgiven for thinking Dr. Johnson that century's conservative unable to tolerate a free press.  He wasn't.  Puncturing egos and hypocrisy was his calling card, whether they came in the form of British and French imperialists (the "two robbers", he said, of Native American lands) or would-be American revolutionaries ("How is it," he asked "that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?").  

What he couldn't tolerate was ignorance.

The product of those who wrote "not to be studied".

The drug for those who "read without fatigue".

At the end of his essay, Dr. Johnson tells us that "Among the calamities of war may be justly numbered the diminution of the love of truth." One reason for this is the natural inclination to take one's side, to praise one's soldiers and abhor the enemy. "In a time of  war," he wrote, "the nation is always of one mind, eager to hear something good of themselves and ill of the enemy." Another, however, is the sheer "attention" war's embellished or one-sided "tale of cruelty"  "awakens".  "The writer of news," he said, "never fails in the intermissions of action to tell how the enemies murdered children and ravished virgins, and, if the scene of action be somewhat distant, scalps half the inhabitants of a province."

As I read (and re-read) Dr. Johnson's essay, I wondered whether today's wars fit his template. 

In Ukraine and Gaza, the fit is imperfect.  

Putin and Hamas are clearly offering their publics fictive justifications for wars each of them started.  Their ""writers" are selling wars in which truth is more than the first casualty.  It is a daily one.  As for "tale[s] of cruelty," the "scene[s] of action" here are not remotely "distant".  Cameras are there every day, 24/7.  Ukraine does not need writers to invent cruelty. It is self-evident. And in Gaza, no one disputes the cruelty of civilian deaths. The issue is whether they can be avoided without insuring Hamas's survival and another attack.

Back here at home, however, Dr. Johnson’s warnings fit like a glove.

The world of "writers not to be studied" and those who "read without fatigue" is the world of America's 45th president.  

Like the multiple morning, evening and weekly gazettes that in the 18th century replaced the single national newspaper Dr. Johnson knew for most of his life, our talk radio, cable and internet outlets have overwhelmed the professional journalism wrought by Adolph Ochs when he purchased The New York Times in 1896 and turned hitherto partisan print into an embarrassment.  

And like the writers Dr. Johnson pilloried, with today's scriveners at FOX, OAN, Newsmax and the GOP twitterati, only "contempt of shame and indifference to truth are absolutely necessary."  As Dr. Johnson put it centuries ago: "He who by long familiarity with infamy has obtained these qualities, may confidently tell today what he intends to contradict tomorrow; he may affirm fearlessly what he shall be obliged to recant".

Yesterday was Super Tuesday.  

Presidential primaries were held in sixteen states

As predicted, Donald Trump ran the table in the Republican contests.  He won fifteen states; Nikki Haley won Vermont and today suspended her campaign. Though her vote totals mean a sizeable percentage of GOP voters do not support Trump, and even suggest that a sizeable number  of them will not vote for him come November, he will be the Republican party nominee. 

A singular cancer, Trump and his enablers in Congress and the right-wing news media have injected three lies into a substantial segment of the American body politic:

1. That he, Trump, won the 2020 presidential election;

2. That Joe Biden, now 81, is mentally unable to serve a second term; and

3. That he, Trump, is the victim of a weaponized criminal and civil justice system that unfairly indicted him on ninety-one counts in four jurisdictions; unfairly fined him $450 million for financial fraud; and unfairly found him liable for sexual assault (and $83 million in damages).

As a corollary to these claims, Trump has convinced a substantial number of Republicans that the January 6 attack on the Capitol was some kind of "inside job" fomented by the deep state, that the hundreds of convicted January 6 defendants are really political hostages, and that Nancy Pelosi failed to call out the National Guard or accept protection that was offered.

All of these claims are false.

Trump lost.  Biden is fit. The January 6 insurrection was an attempted coup that Trump advocated and refused to stop. The indictments are based on mountains of evidence from Republicans and Trump staffers and are to be tried in jurisdictions that cross the political spectrum.  The civil verdicts follow full  bench and jury trials, respectively, and are subject to appellate review of any error. And for its part, the jury that found Trump liable for sexual assault was selected from a venire that also crossed the political spectrum.

One of the signal characteristics of fascist or so-called "strongmen" states is the creation of false narratives and the use of mass media to mainstream lies and have the public accept them.  This is what Mussolini did in Italy in the 1920s and Hitler did in Germany in the 1930s. It is also what Pinochet did in Chile in the 1970s and '80s and Putin is doing in Russia today. 

Trump , FOX and their on-line and off-line imitators are following the same game plan.

There are three reasons Donald Trump has thus far survived politically.  

The first is that the American institutions that could have taken him out have tragically refused to do so.  The US Senate refused to convict him after he was impeached for the second time in January 2021 following his attempted coup, and the US Supreme Court refused to remove him from the ballot this week after a full and fair trial determined he was an oath-breaking insurrectionists barred from office under section 3 of the 14th Amendment.  The former was an example of partisan political cowardice that itself knows no end; even Mitch McConnell, who in refusing to convict Trump still held him "practically and morally responsible" for January 6, today endorsed him. The latter re-wrote the 14th Amendment to make enforcement of its anti-insurrection clause dependent on Congressional action; with Trump and the current Congress, of course, that will never happen.

The second is that Trump and his co-conspirators have successfully followed the fascist approach to mass media.  They have seized the media eco-system run by FOX et al., and that system has repeatedly broadcast and mainstreamed his lies.  Absent such a megaphone, nowhere near the numbers who currently (and falsely) believe Trump won in 2020 or Biden is mentally unfit in 2024 would or could do so. Without radio, Hitler would have been a failed artist.  Without FOX and social media, Trump would  be a failed businessman.

The third is that other actors are being taken off the field more or less as a consequence of their own passivity.  The biggest example of this is the mainstream media. They have literally allowed their love affair with an artificial definition of objectivity (i.e., report "both sides") to preclude a thorough search for and commitment to  truth. 

A believed lie is still a lie. 

A violent insurrection and attempted coup does not become a mere protest turned unfortunate riot just because a lot of people have been brainwashed into thinking it was. 

And a dereliction of presidential duty in refusing to stop that attack does not become less derelict because the narcissist in the White House supported the coup or was joined by lawyers advancing the blanketly illegal demand that a sitting vice president unilaterally refuse to count certified electoral votes.

In this contest against American fascism, no one gets to be neutral.  

If you try to imitate Switzerland, we could wind up becoming Germany. 

The New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, other national newspapers, ABC, NBC and CBS should stop seeding Trump's lies.  

It won't be that hard.  

Instead of reporting on a poll announcing some enormous percentage thinks Biden mentally unfit (hardly a surprise inasmuch as  they have been fed this for four years by Trump and his acolytes), they should talk to Biden's doctors,  find out whether that is true (the doctors will tell you it isn't), report he is fit (because, in fact, he is), and play that back ad nauseum and absent the false "other" side until the lie is no longer believed. 

Instead of spinning Nikki Haley's candidacy as a pointless tilt at the Trump windmill, they should cast it as the principled effort it was to stop the party of Lincoln from becoming the party of America's Adolph.  

Instead of perfectly balanced powerhouse round tables with the de rigueur Republican apologist (like Reince Priebus), they should give Liz Cheney the spot. She is more than capable of representing any legitimate Republican views and more than willing to kill the illegitimate ones. 

Finally, when it's over, they should turn off their cameras.  After being assessed $450 million for financial fraud and $83 million for sexual assault, no other litigants in America would get to take free shots at the juries or judges who made those decisions.  If Trump has complaints, that's what appeals are for.  

My analogy to Trump as a form of political cancer was intentional.  Lies metastasize.  They make it difficult to discern any truth, not just the specific truth hidden or denied by the specific lie.  And that is what is going on now with Trump and Republican partisans.  He has so polluted the system that his followers are having difficulty accepting any facts.  

President Biden will deliver his State of the Union tomorrow (he is delivering it in March rather than January because the House's petulant haters in the GOP refused to invite him until now, a Constitutional requirement that never use to cause a ruckus). He has a good story to tell.  The economy is humming.  Unemployment is at historic lows. Inflation has fallen pretty much back to the Fed's desired 2%.  Crime is down and America’s infrastructure is being rebuilt. Biden was willing to shut the border and give the GOP almost all it wanted to tighten the asylum laws, but Republicans decided they would rather have an issue than a solution.  So they now own the border crisis.  To this can be added their ownership of the abortion/IVF crisis, as Alabama's judges turned frozen embryos into people after the Supreme Court gave them the go-ahead by overturning Roe, and their ownership of a crisis to be in the one they will create if they ever succeed in their goal of overturning Obamacare, which has now resulted in the all-time lowest percentage of Americans without health insurance.

Tomorrow, however, half of those sitting in the Capitol and at least 30-40% of those watching at home will believe all of this is a lie.  

This reality is not a case of "both sides doing it". 

As Paul Krugman pointed out last month, the macro-economic numbers today are close to where they were in 2019 when Trump was president riding high on the economy he inherited from Obama, and Democrats feel about as good about today's economy as they did about 2019's; Republicans, however, "have gone from euphoria about the economy under Donald Trump to a very jaundiced view under President Biden."  From a different angle, the same is also true on crime. Locally, Republicans and Democrats have the same view on the "seriousness" of crime where they live and the vast majority (more than 80%) do not think it "extremely or very serious".  Nationally, or where they don't live, the percentages who think it serious go up.  For Republicans, however, that percentage is almost twice as high as for Democrats and approaches 80%.

This is a serious problem and it should not be consigned to the opinion pages of our newspapers.

The job of professional journalism is to report the news.  

That job begins by . . .

Telling us the truth.

On the front page.

THIS WEEKEND

This is the only three-day weekend in the month of February.

January had one as well.

After Christmas, however, those are the only two we get until Memorial Day.

Believers, and any non (or other) believers fine with free-riding, try to save us from this work-a-holic paucity of time off with Easter and Passover.  

The latter starts on  April 22 this year and is an eight-day affair. If you are following the rules, work is strictly forbidden on four of them. The former, which occurs on March 31 this year, really begins on Holy Thursday and celebrates Christendom's singular mystery of tragedy and triumph from then until Easter Sunday.

None of this, however, is mandated.

Nor, given the First Amendment, could it be.

Which gets us back to . . .

This weekend.

In January, we took off to celebrate the unique courage and extraordinary work of Martin Luther King, Jr.  On Memorial Day, we will honor the sacrifice of those who gave the most. In a way, both of these secular events are sacred. 

This weekend we celebrate Presidents Day.

Whether it is sacred . . .

Depends.

As regular readers of this space know, the country as a whole has not been able to agree on precisely who or what is being honored.  See "Celebrating . . . Somebody", 2/21/22.  Some states use the day to honor George Washington alone.  Others use it to honor Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Still others honor any who have held the office. 

Some celebrate on a different day in the year.

Delaware doesn't celebrate at all.

In the presidential pantheon, of course, Washington and Lincoln are gods.  

The first saved us from monarchy, the second from slavery. 

At the time they became president, neither result was assured. 

Washington could have served for life.  He went home after eight years. To the aristocrats who would have addressed him as "His Highness" or "His Excellency", he insisted on the simple "Mr. President". His humility was his superpower. When, in 1783, George III was told Washington was going to resign his military commission, the King said "If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world." 

He did. 

And in so doing entered august precincts so many others  -- Caesar, Napoleon, Lenin -- claim but never inhabit.  

Byron put it best.  

In his Ode to Napoleon.

        But thou forsooth must be a king,
                And don the purple vest

        As if that foolish robe could wring

                Remembrance from thy breast.

        Where is that faded garment? where

        The gewgaws thou wert fond to wear,

                The star—the string—the crest?

        Vain froward child of empire! say

        Are all thy playthings snatch’d away?

        Where may the wearied eye repose
               When gazing on the Great;

        Where neither guilty glory glows,

               Nor despicable state?

        Yes—one—the first—the last—the best:

        The Cincinnatus of the West

               Whom envy dared not hate,

        Bequeath'd the name of Washington
        To make men blush there was but one.

For his part, Lincoln inherited a fractured country on the verge of Civil War.  Once that war broke out, he honored his oath by fighting it and then carefully re-laid America's Jeffersonian foundation.  

This time, however, equality was made real.  

On January 1, 1863, he ended slavery where he could as commander in chief, and in January 1865 he shepherded through Congress  the 13th Amendment that would ultimately end slavery in its entirety. On February 1, he sent the Amendment to the states for ratification.  Nineteen states had done so by April 14, the day he was shot.  The rest did so by December 6.

If Washington's superpower was humility, Lincoln's was eloquence.

Among presidents, he is our Shakespeare.

In 1861, he pleaded with his countrymen, begging them to slow down and take a breath. 

"You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government," he said "while I shall have the most solemn one to 'preserve, protect and defend it' "  

He also asked them to remember: 

"We are not enemies, but friends." 

"Though passion may have strained," he continued, "it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."

Three years later at Gettysburg, he authored America's second founding.

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent  a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." 

"Now we are engaged," he continued, "in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure."  

He believed it could.

He believed it could because on Gettysburg's "great battlefield" lay thousands who had given "their lives that that nation might live."  

He told us the world would "never forget" what those soldiers "did" there.  

About that, he was right.  

He also told us, however, that  the world "would little note, nor long remember, what we say here." 

And about that, he was dead wrong.

He was wrong because, as he put it,  those "honored dead" were exacting a promise from the living.

The promise was that . . .

From them, "we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion. 

That . . . 

"This nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom".

And that . . . 

"Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

The first speaker that day was not Abraham Lincoln.  

It was Edward Everett. 

He was a former Senator, Congressman, Governor of Massachusetts and Secretary of State, the current president of Harvard University and a famed orator.  

He spoke for two hours, followed by the President.  

He later wrote the President, measuring their words.  

"I should be glad," he said, "if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours,  as you did in two minutes."

Last week, in explaining his departure from the position embraced by his fellow GOP Senators opposing aid to Ukraine,  Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said that "History settles every account." 

He was right.  

As I write, Russia's Vladimir Putin is basking in support bordering on treason from Donald Trump and his MAGA followers in both the House and Senate.  

The majority of GOP Senators voted against an emergency funding package for Ukraine. Even though the Senate bill passed with votes from the entire Democratic caucus and twenty-three Republicans,  and even though the assistance is needed to stop renewed Russian counter-offensives,  the Republican Speaker of the House refused to take up the Senate bill and instead sent his body home for a ten day recess. 

Last weekend, Trump himself  told Russia that as president he would not honor our obligation to defend NATO allies if they were attacked. 

Last Wednesday, he reiterated those comments.  

And yesterday we learned that Russian dissident Alexei Navalny died in the Arctic prison where he was serving a nineteen-year sentence for opposing Putin.  Navalny, who Putin tried to poison in 2020, ostensibly dropped dead while "walking".  The authorities have yet to release his body. 

Trump's love affair with Putin is long-standing.  

They are both crypto-fascists.  

The only real difference between them is that, while Putin operates in a state whose institutions create no check at all on his power, corruption or ability to rub out opponents, Trump operates in one where he is currently subject to criminal  indictment on ninety-one counts in four courts and has been ordered to pay $350 million and $83 million for financial fraud and sexual assault, respectively.

There is nothing to celebrate in Donald Trump or the MAGA GOP.

They are killing democracy at home and abroad.

Washington would not be a king.

Lincoln appealed to our "better angels" and created a "new birth of freedom".

Trump wants to be a king.

And the only angel he respects is . . .

The fallen one.

WINTERS -- THEN AND NOW

I used to hate winter.

Not the period from Christmas through New Years.

That was fun.

Family, parties, presents . . .

Egg-nog.

The short days and long nights were illusory at Christmas time. 

The Brooklyn neighborhood I grew up in was always a sea of bright lights. The nativity scenes seemed appropriately staged.  The directors had decided that each creche had to be bathed in the warmth of  a well-lit December night.  If the Bethlehem of Jesus's birth had not welcomed Him, at least Brooklyn did.

Eventually, of course, the lights went out.

The long, cold nights returned. 

It was winter.

What to do? 

In the ''50s and '60s, the post-war America of my boomer youth was on the move.  Eisenhower's interstates were being built. People started flying en masse. Because gas was cheap, they drove en masse too. Escaping winter became possible.

In 1971, my family actually went to Florida for Christmas. My retired grandparents had moved to Orlando. An aunt and her two children -- my cousins -- flew down.  My father, mother, sister and I drove.  

It was a learning experience.  

I learned that Eisenhower's interstates were by no mean complete.  This made it impossible to avoid the sharecropper poverty of battered see-through shacks standing aside US-1 in the Carolinas and Georgia. Or the billboards that announced we were in "Klan Country". In Lumberton, North Carolina, where we stayed the first night of our two day drive, my father  learned that restaurants did not serve liquor in that dry state. A guy who liked his martinis, he was disappointed but survived.  

Driving to Florida was also an education on what actually constituted escape.

Back then, New Yorkers in January wanted a respite from the weather.  To get one, however, you could not just "go south".  In fact, if you were driving down that not-yet-finished interstate, things did not really warm up until you passed Jacksonville.  Since states weren't reliably red or blue then, the snowbirds made sure they made it past Jacksonville in their search for summer in winter.  In April or so, most of them also made sure they returned.

A lot has changed since then.

To begin, most of those leaving are not returning.  

According to the US Census Bureau, more than 200,000 people left New York in the year ending July 31, 2023.  This was a net loss, accounting for those who moved in and out. Over the past three years, the state's population has declined by more than 600,000.  New York is not the leader here.  That honor belongs to California, which saw a net out-flow of 338,000 people during the same period.  The six other states that lost population were Illinois, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Hawaii and West Virginia.

Republicans think these numbers are to their advantage. 

Of the ten states whose populations grew the most between 2010 and 2023, six were reliably red or Republican, one was reliably blue or Democratic, and the other three were competitive. In absolute numbers -- which matter most when the nation's 435 Congressional seats are apportioned -- the biggest gainers were Florida and Texas.

The GOP, however, might want to curb its enthusiasm

Because . . . 

Depending on the state, the claim that migration from blue to red is a net benefit for the GOP is not at all ineluctable.  

Georgia, for example, is a red state state where population increased by 14.7% between 2010 and 2023. It did not make the top ten but was close at number twelve.  Of its new arrivals, however, the percentages of Republicans and Democrats were roughly equal. And for the nation as a whole, while one study showed that, of those moving to red states, 46% registered as Republicans and 30% registered as Democrats, the largest category of new arrivals were already Republicans and were coming from  Republican states. In other words, they did not alter the national political balance in their favor. 

The same study showed that while moves from red to blue states had more Democrats retaining their identification than Republicans doing the same, in moves from blue to red states the ratio was about even. If that's the case, migration may actually be helping Democrats, i.e., blue states may actually be getting bluer while red states are just running in place.

This data also appears to be consistent with some more general views of where states are heading on the question of political identity. 

To wit:

Florida is reliably red and not changing anytime soon.  Its population has grown but its new arrivals aren't changing the landscape as much as fitting into one that already existed.  Georgia, however, is by no means monolithically red and its new arrivals did not change that reality. The same may also be true in Arizona. And Texas, which has been a magnet for those leaving California, is becoming less red. That may be due as much to immigration as anything else.  But those blue Californians settling in Austin cannot be ignored.

Back in the '70s, and perhaps for all the wrong reasons, the regional divide was not as great. The south still had large numbers of conservative Democrats and the north still had large numbers of liberal Republicans.  That started to change with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and was thereafter turbocharged by Ronald Reagan in the '80s, Newt Gingrich in the '90s, and Trump and the politicization of evangelical Christianity more recently.  The evolution of those three versions of the Republican Party has led us to the present moment.

Which is a very dangerous one.

A large part of the danger has been described ad nauseum over the last few years. A crypto-fascist, pathologically lying narcissist has taken over the Republican Party.  He orchestrated an attempted coup on January 6, 2021 and has since convinced more than half his party that he won an election he lost (and did not rape a woman a jury concluded he had). He owns the Republican caucus in the House of  Representative,130 of whom have endorsed his now third run for the presidency, and is actively working to insure (fellow crypto-fascist) Putin's takeover of Ukraine by having the House kill the military assistance that would stop it. 

His MAGA faithful resemble Germans in the 1930s.

They have swallowed his lies whole just as the Germans swallowed Hitler's.. They think January 6 was either justified, peaceful or allowed to become violent because Nancy Pelosi did not summon a National Guard over which she had no power. They think the four criminal cases against him are political hit jobs, even though the witnesses to his alleged crimes are either Republicans themselves, his former aides and/or staffers, or both. They think the more than 1200 January 6 defendants now found guilty are "hostages".

All this is bad enough.

What is worse, however, is the GOP establishment's gelded inability to end his reign of terror.

This has not been for lack of opportunity.

Nor only for lack of backbone.

And it is persisting.

Nikki Haley is the establishment's latest best hope.  

She is running for president and is Trump's only remaining GOP opponent.  In theory, this is what the non-Trump GOP establishment has been waiting for.  Back in 2016, when Trump was still a political footnote but had started to win attention (and convention delegates) with some decidedly small margins, the political cognoscenti all prayed that the Bush-Rubio-Cruz-Christie-Kasich-Huckabee-Paul-Carson-Fiorina wing of presidential wannabees would reduce itself by eight and send Trump back to reality TV after he lost a string of one-on-ones.

They didn't.

And so he didn't.

January 2024, however, is not January 2016.

Trump entered the body politic in 2016.  Thereafter, our finely tuned political immune system did not deliver the antibodies needed to defeat him.  Over time, we went from pussy-grabbing to Covid incompetence to election denial to insurrection, each more politically virulent than the other.   In 2021, in a unique dereliction of duty,  the Senators to whom our Founders had entrusted the vaccine of impeachment refused to administer the shot. The virus then continued to spread.

Vaccines eliminate viruses because they supercharge the immune system.  They literally create (many) more antibodies to fight the pathogen.  For a number of reasons, however, Nikki Haley is coming up short..

Because she thinks she must, she is campaigning as if President Biden and Donald Trump are equally out of touch.  And for roughly similar reasons. Biden is forever confused, she falsely claims; Trump forever chaotic, she understatedly concedes.  In marrying the first with the second, however, she allows herself and Trump's supporters to ignore his much greater sins (like supporting an attempted coup).  In her world, Trump is not a fascist, a pathological liar, or a dangerous narcissist. Rather, as she puts it, "rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him".  She is silently saying -- or allowing Trump supporters to hear her saying --  "it's not his fault".  Just like it's not Biden's fault he is confused. 

They're just two old guys. 

Who need to be put out to pasture.

Trump voters, however, aren't buying it.

Because . . .

In today's America, Haley's understatement on Trump doesn't take him down.

In fact, it actually builds him up. 

For two reasons.

One is that our culture is enthralled by disrupters.  People like Elon Musk command attention and -- with many -- admiration. Chaos is not something to be embarrassed by or to run from. It is their secret sauce.  In truth, this is probably just an over-hyped excuse for the obnoxiousness inherent in people like Musk or Trump.  But be that as it may, Musk's fatal flaws haven't stopped him from producing high-end cars.  Trump's, on the other hand, have done significant damage to the country.

The truth -- and this is the second reason -- is that Haley is in a bind.

For that bind, she can thank Reagan and Gingrich and her fellow establishment Republicans.

Because it is a bind caused by the GOP's inability to come up with any policies that actually combat the popular distaste which fueled Trump's rise and explains his survival.  

Tax cuts and culture wars have not restored the economic fortunes of the rural white men who form the impregnable part of Trump's base.  Nor has overturning Roe v. Wade (in fact, that just made their wives and daughters less MAGA-friendly). On policy, however, this is all Reagan and Gingrich offered in their heyday and it is all establishment and non-MAGA conservatives (including Haley) are offering now. 

Haley, like many of her GOP establishment cohorts, wants to cut taxes and then reduce the deficit by changing Social Security and means testing entitlements. She is against raising the minimum wage. She opposed Obamacare and as Governor refused to implement health insurance exchanges or expand Medicaid. She called Biden's Inflation Reduction Act a "Communist manifesto" and she opposed the BiPartisan Infrastructure Law.

Given this absence of policy, grievance has taken over the GOP base and Trump has poured gallons of gasoline on the fires of hatred it has lit.  As Tim Alberta has painstakingly recounted in The Kingdom and the Power; American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism, many leading pastors in America's evangelical churches have also fanned those flames by turning their Sunday services into holy endorsements of Trump's lies.  In this environment, people like Haley are not putting them out with their talk of tax cuts and chaos.   The base knows more of the first will not work.  And as far as the pastors are concerned, chaos doesn't matter.  In their mind, it followed Jesus too. 

Whether Haley is too little too late remains to be seen.  A sizeable group of Republican voters say they will not vote for Trump if he is convicted of a crime. And while others are twisting themselves in knots to avoid commenting on the verdict in E. Jean Carroll's rape and defamation case against Trump, Haley said on Sunday that she "absolutely trust[s] the jury" and "thinks they made their decision based on the evidence."  

For now, she is probably hoping Trump's voters trust the jury as well.  

But even if they don't . . .

There are more juries in Trump's future.

I can't remember precisely when I stopped hating winter 

Maybe it was on February 5, 2000. 

That was the day I got married.

For the second time.

This one worked. 

The federal judge who married us was a Reagan appointee and a former professor at Yale Law School. He was also one of the group of conservative academics Reagan put on the bench.  The others were Scalia, Bork, Posner and Easterbrook,  I became friendly with him when I was a student at the law school and  clerked for him immediately upon graduating. He always bragged about his ability to hire clerks who did not share his political loyalties.  At our wedding, he claimed that he and my wife-to-be were the only Republicans in the room. Debbie corrected him with a quick "Wait'll you meet the rest of his family".  

Over time, he remarked about how uncommon friendships like ours were becoming.

How politics had driven people into silos from whence they never emerged.

The lesson was that it did not have to be that way.

And in not being that way, it wasn't because everyone would be silent and avoid political discussion or disagreement lest kumbayah be imperiled.  

Far from it.  

He and I laughed a lot. An awful lot.  

But we also argued at lot.  

The arguments often became heated.  

Neither one of us could ever be characterized as unemotional or placid.  For every bit of experience he (correctly) claimed I was ignoring, there were professorial barbs I (correctly) challenged as ad hominems.   We weren't equal.  He was more experienced. And on the law, his knowledge was encyclopedic; so there were some arguments I never came close to winning and should not have even made. 

But no one invented facts or ignored them when they refuted a claim. 

No one condemned anyone else.  

No one stopped talking.

And the friendship lasted forever.

America should try it.

I started clerking for him in January 1982. 

I didn't hate that winter either.

CHRISTMAS 2023 -- WHITHER THE WISE MEN

It's Christmas 2023.

In the past, I've focused on this as the season of anticipation.  On kids who cannot sleep while listening for Rudolph.  On adults who millennia ago deemed it the day of new beginnings. ("Twas the Night Before Christmas", 12/24/08, 12/24/16, 17, 18 and 19)

In other years, it's been Shillelagh Law's musical catalogue of downtown lights and wrapped presents overcome by a 9/11 Christmas eve prayer.  From the believer (or was s/he a skeptic) who knelt "down in the last pew, right on the aisle" admitting " 'God I know that it's been awhile.' " ("It's Christmas in New York Again", 12/22/14; "A Christmas Carol", 12/15/21)

One year, I channeled John Lennon's plaintive "what have we done".  ("Silent Night", 12/21/10)

This year I cannot get the three Wise Men out of my head.

The story's original source -- the Gospel of Matthew -- creates as many questions as it answers. 

The first is whether they were all that wise.  The Biblical text is all over the place.  It changes depending on which translation you read.  The King James version intones "Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the King, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem."  Though the New Revised Standard Version dispenses with King James's awkward meter, it too calls the travelers "wise men". That changes, however, in the New International Version.  There, it's "After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem,

So, which is it?

Wise Men or Magi?

And does it matter?

Matthew wrote in Greek and the English "Magi" comes to us from the Greek (transliterated) "magos" that he used in his Gospel. That Greek word, in turn, referred to Zoroastrian priests who, coming full circle now, were deemed reputable astrologers at a time when astrology was considered a science.  More than that, they were also advisers to kings, large in number, and reputedly expert at divining the meaning of dreams. As such, they became important political, administrative  and economic players and veritable king-makers.  

Not surprisingly, therefore, the ancient world thought Magi possessed wisdom. Cicero even said so, calling them "wise and learned among the Persians". Ditto Herodotus, centuries before. And this view survived long enough for King James to put the words "Wise Men" into Matthew's mouth and the English world's Bible.  

Today, of course, astrology and oneiromancy are  closer to sorcery than science.  (Extra points for anyone who even knew the word oneiromancy -- the use of dreams to predict the future -- existed, let alone what it means.) So the ambiguity of Magi is a more useful construction, especially in a world full of atheists and agnostics. That way, the Magi's wisdom can be mediated through the epistemic seas we humans have travelled over the centuries. 

And made real for us.

Put differently, today's Magi would be physicists, counselors and psychologists.

Not astrologers or . . .

Oneiromantics.

In Matthew's Gospel, his Magi come "from the east" bearing gifts of "gold, frankincense and myrrh" for the Christ child. He never tells us how many came but the Christian churches and traditions have conveniently settled upon the number three, largely on account of the three gifts.  

Matthew also does not tell us his Magis' names or precisely where they came from in the "east". This too, however, has not stopped the churches, though here the choice depends largely on which Christian rite one follows. The west decided the three were the Persian Melchior, the Indian Caspar and the Ethiopian or Arabian Balthazar. Other rites settled on different names and origins, some as far east as China.

Almost all of this is historically suspect.

At the time Herod was king, Judea was basically a buffer-state between the Roman west and the Persian-Parthian (present day Iran and Afghanistan) east, the control of which alternated between the two depending upon which contending army had won the latest battle. 

This made Herod's rule inherently shaky. 

Though the Romans made him King of Judea, he was an Edomite (thus not Jewish), had bribed his way to the office, and had by the time of Christ's birth assassinated competitors. Neither fully Roman nor Jewish, he assuaged Rome but also sought favor with the Parthians when the opportunity presented itself. 

In a word, he was cunning.

He was also paranoid.

In Matthew's Gospel, the visiting Magi arrive first in Jerusalem asking "" 'Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews?' " "When King Herod heard this," Matthew reports, "he was disturbed, and all of Jerusalem with him." 

No kidding. 

The Magi were king-makers. 

Looking for someone who might replace him. 

How many were there? 

We don't know.  

But as one Biblical observer notes, "The whole city of Jerusalem wouldn't be upset about three guys on camels; no, this is a major Parthian group, or entourage, that has arrived, and Herod is nervous."

The churches' origin traditions make the Magi's visit a form of international worship and approval.  The gifts they gave are used to symbolize the Christ child's godly kingship and human mortality on the one hand, while restricting the number of visiting Magi to three and keeping politics out of the nativity on the other. 

For the Magi, however, politics was the heart of the matter.

Herod sought to use them.  

Matthew again: 

Herod "called together all the chief priests and teachers of the law" and "asked them where the Messiah was to be born. 'In Bethlehem in Judea, they replied' ". He then "called the Magi secretly . . .  and sent them to Bethlehem and said 'Go and search carefully for the child. As soon as you find him, report to me, so that I too may go and worship him.' "

The Magi, however, would not be used.

They were looking for a new king.

Not Herod's next victim.

So . . .

Upon arriving in Bethlehem and "coming to the house", Matthew writes that "they saw the child with his Mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshipped him.  They then opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. And having been warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, they returned to their country by another route."

There's an awful lot hanging on that last sentence.  

In the New International translation, the Magi are "warned in a dream".  In the King James version, "God" delivers the warning "in a dream".  Either way, the message is being delivered to a group (Magi) in a form (dream) they get.  Remember, in the ancient world, these guys were the experts on dreams. Empires rose and fell  depending on the meaning they attached to them. 

They figured dreams out.

Shortly after the Magi left, Herod "realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi" and "was furious".  He therefore "gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under".  By then, however, Jesus had been ferried by his parents to Egypt where he stayed until Herod died.

A lot clearly hung on the Magi's "wisdom".  

On their putative expertise.

What if they had misinterpreted the dream?

What if they had said to themselves:

"Yeah, we know Herod is paranoid. And we know he has killed competitors before. And we know he is dishonest and lies. But, let's get real here. This is a just a baby. Not even a kid yet.  And Herod's pretty old. And that star leading us here, they're saying, is a prophet's sign. So, hey, maybe the old man is softening. Gotten religion even. Let's just go back and give him a chance."

The Magi could have gotten it wrong.  

There were probably even some in their entourage who argued for a return. Herod had worked with Parthians in the past. Been an ally of sorts.  Done them some favors. 

Some perceived him to be a pragmatic politician and wily negotiator. 

Not an extremist bent on killing a mere infant.

Others, however, remained steadfast.  

The were unwilling to forget Herod's past. The bribes, the lies.  They weren't taken in by his false promises.  They knew that a man who had killed kings would not pay homage to another who would be king.  They especially knew he would not do so with another who would bear his own title.

King of the Jews.

The steadfast prevailed.

The Magi did not get it wrong.

Neither should we.

Merry Christmas.