From Cedar-Rapids.org, city web site, the new Cedar Rapids flag.
I am not really a flag person, but I like the new Cedar Rapids city flag, unveiled by the city on Sept. 18. Symbols have some importance--I wrote on this blog earlier about Mount Mercy's new Fall Faculty Series, and each series has been unified in its communications by a series logo.
When Mount Mercy College became Mount Mercy University some years ago, the unveiling of the U's new logo was a key feature of the big announcement.
Some flags cause consternation. The Nazi banner is illegal to display in Germany. Here in America, it's just in incredibly poor taste, although it, like the battle flag of the Confederacy, at least serves so the rest of us can quickly identify the most awful people among us.
And now we have a new flag, meant to represent the Cedar River, the land, some flood control and our protection via star-wielding ninjas.
Although, to me, the nice new flag also vaguely looks like it could be from some obscure Central or South American country. Perhaps my city has appropriated the proud national banner of Val Verde.
Another image from city web site--the new flag flies.
And thus, we have a new civil symbol. I’m not sure it was an important project during a pandemic, but I do think the green-blue, end-of-island shape is attractive. It replaces a city flag designed by the 1960s that was rather dated (see image in Gazette story in link in the first paragraph).
And whatever you might think of this proud new symbol of an OK small city, I think most of us could agree it’s far superior to our other prominent civic symbol—the toilet brush of five seasons. Five. Why five? Four seasons and a fifth one to scratch your head and wonder.
Wikimedia commons, image from Eric James. The "Tree of Five Seasons," which never looks like a tree.
Plumes of smoke from The World Trade Center twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001. From Wikimedia Commons via flickr poster Michael Foran.
Today is Sept. 4, which means the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States is one week from today.
The 9/11 events were so big that “9/11” is all one has to say and everyone knows you don’t mean any Sept. 11—you mean that Sept. 11.
The world didn’t exactly change 20 years ago. The forces that attacked my country that day had been at work for some time—indeed, there had previous bombing attempts to destroy the World Trade Center. But that September day, sunny and beautiful in Iowa, at least in my memory, was still a pivotal day.
From the FBI's web site, FBI.gov, a timeline of Sept. 11, 2001.
I have a little trouble picturing myself at 43. I was already greying—did I still have some dark hair? A man in his 60s has a little trouble picturing the world of the 40-something year old. Much in my life has remained the same, and much has changed.
On Sept. 11, 2001, I had a son in elementary school. My oldest daughter was nearing the end of high school, but was adjusting to a large public school—Linn Mar High School—after her first two years of secondary education had been at a tiny Catholic High School—St. Mary’s in Storm Lake, Iowa.
We had just bought a house in Cedar Rapids. The next year would be financially a little dicey for us, as we owned two houses. But both my wife and I had jobs, she at the birth center at Mercy Medical Center (where she would become the nurse manager in a few years), me at the start of a new career. I was fresh out of the world of journalism and into the world of academia, less than a month into my new job teaching at what was then Mount Mercy College.
A hole in the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. on Sept. 11, 2001. Defense Department image by Cpl. Jason Ingersoll, USMC, downloaded from Wikimedia Commons.
That Tuesday, I was buying tires for our van. I was at a tire shop near Lindale Mall that morning, and it was a very strange morning. Very few people were out, and I was the only customer at what would usually be a busy shop. I think six guys were working on replacing my tires, each taking 2-minute shifts or so before they traded off—the rest to join me in the customer lounge, watching TV. Special report from New York, a plane has struck the World Trade Center. Then, another. The Pentagon. A planned second attack on Washington, D.C., ending with a crashed plane in Pennsylvania.
I can’t recall a lot from that day other than the sense of shock. I was teaching a class that fall that I’m teaching this semester, too—CO 280, Writing for Public Relations. It was an afternoon class, I think, and I scrapped my lesson plan.
We rearranged the room in a big circle. And the students and I just talked about it, the big news of the day.
My wife and I visited the Newseum in Washington, D.C. during spring break, March, 2015. This is a ruined TV tower that been atop the World Trade Center on display at that museum.
And here we are, almost 20 years later. Two decade of grappling with new realities, of questioning what freedom means, of foreign wars and increasing polarization at home. The internet existed in 2001, but way back then we didn’t carry it around in our pockets and we still watched big events on a chunky, square TV in the customer lounge of a tire shop.
I am just starting to look into it, but I don’t think our current era of struggling with fakery on social media is unrelated to 9/11. That day shook America to its core, and became one of those improbable, shocking events around which wild conspiracy theories swirl.
Another image from that 2015 visit to the Newseum. A wall of headlines reporting 9/11 attacks, from an era when news media mattered more than social media.
Partly, of course, because it was the result of a shadowy conspiracy, and unpacking it is a process historians will be tied up with for decades.
What does it all mean? A lot, and I’m glad that Mount Mercy University will spend some time grappling with this key world event.
Every year, faculty at MMU designated a topic for a series of public discussions—the Fall Faculty Series. I am proud to have helped start this with our first series in 2014 being on the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I.
This year, the Series has a very simple title: 9/11: Twenty Years Later.” Five faculty members, including me, will give free, public Wednesday talks, all of which will start at 6 p.m., and all of which will take place in Flaherty Community Room in Basile Hall.
Logo of 2021 Fall Faculty Series at Mount Mercy University.
Here is the schedule, the topics and the speakers:
Sept. 29, Precursor Events: At War before 9/11, James Jacobs, associate professor of computer science.
Oct. 6, Conspiracy, Myth, and Misinformation, Joe Sheller, associate professor of communication & MMU Times advisor.
Oct. 27, Heroism and Sacrifice after the Attack, Norma Linda Mattingly, associate professor of education.
Nov. 9, Fear and Trauma after 9/11, Dennis Dew, associate professor of psychology.
December 1, Reflections of a Muslim-American Immigrant, Ayman Amer | associate professor of economics.
Have you seen the 2008 Disney animated movie “Bolt?” I had not until a 5-year-old grandson picked it to watch on Friday night (his usual movie night) of last week.
The movie started with an improbable, over-done action sequence, and I was worried I had agreed to an empty experience like “Penguins of Madagascar,” a movie I intensely dislike.
But, no. The improbable action sequences were part of a show inside a show—in the movie, Bolt is a TV star dog who acts sincere because he doesn’t know it’s an act. It’s a “coming of age” film in which the child star, in this case a dog, learns the hard truth that he’s just a normal creature.
And the nice truth that being a normal creature can be a beautiful thing. Bolt is lost and trying to get back into his media bubble, and bullies a cat named Mittens to aid his journey.
Mittens, it turns out, is the true star. She knows Bolt’s world is fake. Mittens is a con cat, she’s been fooling pigeons into paying her in a protection racket based on the potential use of claws that she doesn’t even have.
It is Mittens, the lost, feral cat, who must teach Bolt how to become a properly domesticated, and thus happier, dog.
Flickr stream of Cthomasuscg: Rhino, Bolt and Mittens, three main characters of the movie "Bolt."
I ended up loving the movie (and Mittens). I thought it great because it’s a child-friendly glimpse into the reality that media you see is not actual life. The fourth wall is torn down and the fictional nature of entertainment media is laid bare.
There are media stock characters, to be sure. A “director” too caught up in his artistic vision who finds he must please “Mindy from the network,” who he had belittled on first meeting. It turns out, it’s not the art, it’s the business that has the power in showbiz.
I was slightly disappointed that Bolt and his girl end up retiring from showbiz—I would have preferred that Bolt learn he’s an actor and be willing to continue acting—but I still thought that the movie worked both at the level of entertaining a 5-year-old, and pleasing a media professor in his 60s by illustrating key media realities.
And now, to me, Mittens is my favorite Disney princess. '
Delivered papers around campus Wednesday morning--first edition of MMU campus newspaper of the year. Looking forward to having a work study student do this!
After two decades, it is apparent that the Afghan military we built to hold the country together was unwilling to resist an Afghan extremist faction taking over Afghanistan. I’m no expert in either military strategy nor in foreign policy, but this does not make President Biden look good.
Nor, to be fair, does it make the younger President Bush look good. Nor Obama. Nor Trump. Two decades of no end point were not enough for us to achieve the impossible goals that we never articulated anyway—although there is also a saying that Afghanistan is where empires go to die. Just ask the British or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Bad as it is to walk away from 20 years of money, sweat and death, the comparison with Vietnam ignores how much bigger an impact that conflict had on America. We lost almost 2,500 American service people in Afghanistan. Tragic as that is, about 17,000 American service people died in 1968 alone in Vietnam, and in the decade that we were engaged in combat there, well over 50,000 American souls were sacrificed.
In both wars, the people of the country where the battles took place paid a much higher price than we did in lives and destruction, something we ought not forget, either. And, as a wiseass man once said, one of the great lessons of history is: “Never get involved in a land war in Asia.” See “The Princess Bride.”
Anyway, to me, the decline of the Pax Americana is only tangentially related to Afghanistan. What we face, more fundamentally, is a crisis of discourse—a tendency to ignore unpleasant facts that don’t coincide with our point of view. We have culturally long downplayed the value of education, and now we’re reaping the rewards of a post-literate culture.
What we have here is a failure to communicate. (Too many movie references, sorry. Thank you, “Cool Hand Luke.”)
And it partly is a result of the decline of the American newspaper. In pre-social media days, Walter Cronkite would report the news to America—and CBS in that era was often influenced by sources like The New York Times or The Washington Post. It was the Post that pursued the Watergate scandal, and CBS that eventually started to pick up the story, too.
Well, I don’t want to be a Luddite. The cortex (a “Firefly” reference, what a great name for the internet) may spread lies too quickly, but it does open the world to many more voices. What’s wrong is that the audience isn’t doing well in knowing which of those voices to listen to. In ancient history (say, the 1990s) there was a vibrant newspaper industry that served as the information algae of the media ocean. And today, that medium is in rapid retreat. The base of the info food chain is drying up. A general economic crisis more than a decade ago knocked the newspaper business model off kilter, and the days when the Penny Press model worked are not coming back.
There are recent signs of that decline in my corner of the world. The Marion Times, a weekly paper that served the largest suburb of Cedar Rapids ceased publication this summer. The Gazette is now that community’s primary newspaper news source. And The Gazette is in decline, too. This summer, delivery of the paper to my house became sketchier, as the paper shifted to “driveway” delivery, which will be fun to cope with this winter.
And more recently and importantly, the paper decided to shut down its press. Mary Sharp wrote a long and interesting feature on the move, see link earlier in this paragraph.
Despite owning several daily papers, The Gazette’s local parent company apparently can’t keep that giant, expensive machinery going, and our paper will now be printed by The Register in Des Moines
Why the neighborhood gets to see me in my PJs, paper on the driveway. The horror.
And so, it goes. The world turns.
Not all the media trends today are negative. The New York Times recently reported it has reached a subscription level of 8 million. I’m sure that rating number would embarrass Tucker Carlson, but still, old school journalism is, for some players, growing—at least online.
Online—the Wild West. As Americans, we can’t even agree that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, although it’s clear he did. Some significant portion of our population would rather listen to its own crazy echo chamber than tune into the factual universe. Rachel Maddox calls it Earth 2, and it is Earth 2 that is causing America to lost its spirit.
At the university where I teach, my student editor wrote a column in the first edition of the student newspaper this year stating that Mount Mercy University is lucky to still have a print paper.
She’s right, although we’re also trying to transition to be a more online source. The problem is, once online, will any students pay attention to us?
Special early issue of MMU Times paper.
Of course, do they pay attention to us now? It’s a bit depressing how “reading” has become so old school among young adults who aspire to be college educated.
Post-literate. Not illiterate, just too busy, too amused, too self-indulgent to bother.
But there is hope. Even if it is the world where a jackass like Tucker Carlson shouts anti-Cronkite nonsense in too many ears, there are 8 million New York Times subscribers and growing. And it was a student, a young American adult, who recognized the value of what a little newspaper on a little campus contributed to that campus culture.
Editor of MMU Times making mages for the issue of the paper that came out this week.
Just today, I received a sweet message from a former student. I had posted on Facebook (the modern town square) that I was distributing the first edition of the school paper, and she let me know how much the paper meant to her while she as in school.
This is what she wrote:
Hey Joe! I was thinking yesterday while doing real estate photos how much the newspaper and you believing in me helped me be able to do this job 🙂 I have social anxiety that was way worse in college. But having events to go to, having friends on the newspaper really helped me face that fear. Just wanted to say thank you 😊 Hope you’re well!
I am well, thank you. I think I would feel more well if I felt a bit better about the state of our democracy. Seeing Afghanistan collapse didn’t feel good—but it’s not the heart of our darkness.
There is a lot to like in a new book by novelist and vlogger John Green. His newest work is not a novel, but a collection of nonfiction essays, some of which appeared in a podcast that has the same title as the book: “The Anthropocene Reviewed.” (The Anthropocene is an idea of a geological age named due to the way in which our species has reshaped the environment of our home planet.)
There are also some things to not like. I don’t always agree with him, and dislike a few of his reviews. He manages to extract meaning from an opening sequence of “Penguins of Madagascar,” which is cute of him to do, but I worry it might lead some innocent soul to experience that movie—and, please, don’t. It’s a horrible movie, more horrible because it successfully appeals to the lack of aesthetic sense of the young via flashy action, simple gags and silly characters. A bad movie made all the worse by being part of a trend of contemporary movies that make the meaningless artful as a way of thoughtlessly entertaining us, especially children. Do yourself a favor. Pick any Pixar movie for your kids instead.
In defense of John Green, I will agree that a point of his in this essay—that we, humans, make consequential decisions for other species—is important, and one of the many compelling factoids in this entertaining set of essays that comes from this review is that lemmings never commit suicide by casting themselves into the sea.
We choose to believe many things that just aren’t so.
As a journalism professor, I also think John is too hard on CNN—although I agree with his premise that a huge problem with news media is the lack of context in most news. I also concur that long-term, important trends are under-reported because they don’t cause unusual day-to-day events. My issue with his point is that I don’t think CNN is central to these trends—those tendencies existed before that cable TV network and are exacerbated today by social media. Lack of grounding in context has been a problem with American journalism since colonial times, although the problem is getting worse. CNN is not innocent in this, I just don’t it’s as guilty as Green implies.
In my kitchen, a monarch butterfly has emerged. My wife and I adopted a caterpillar in a program run by a local nature center, and we successfully raised this one to butterfly stage (not much to it, it was large when we got it and formed its chrysalis the next day). We are leaving on a trip and will have to have our daughter release it after its wings dry, so I have not seen the other side of its wings to confirm its biological sex. But I see no evidence of scent spots that males have. We named our caterpillar Anderson Pooper. After the CNN anchor. Turns out it may be Andrea.
Still, agreeing with his opinions or disagreeing with them is not really central to enjoying this book. In many ways, I like reading an essay that I don’t completely agree with—it causes lots of thoughts in me, which is pleasant to experience.
And good writing should encourage the reader to think—full credit for that, John Green.
A daughter got me this book for Fathers Day. It's cool that John Green signed thousands of sheets of paper so that each copy of the book has his actual signature in it. I don't think he doodled a cat, however--I think that image may be courtesy of a 5-year-old grandson who has a cat. Or his mother. Cool, either way--I am happy to have a book signed by John and decorated by family.
Beyond the nits I can pick, the book, overall, is excellent. Green has a pleasing, repetitive structure to many essays. He’ll open either with a personal anecdote or a seemingly unrelated tidbit, ruminate on it for a page, and then the main idea or thing that this essay reviews enters the stage, with Green sharing what he likes or does not like using the opening tidbit as narrative glue or for comparison. Each essay ends on the titular topic of the essay being rated on a 5-point scale.
He also writes about how artificial, how human, the 5-point rating scale is, which is part of the fun. He’s rating the works of humankind on a contrived, human scale. We live in a universe that our complex mammal brains give us the ability to reshape and tell stories about and make sense and nonsense of.
I’m listening to “The Mountain Goats” as I write this, a band I have never tuned into before. I don’t know that they’ll be a favorite of mine as they are of John’s—so much in musical taste depends on your age when you encounter that music—but I can hear his point. It’s good music.
It’s also media consumption that feels more useful than both CNN and “Penguins of Madagascar.”
To me, the book is all about the duality of humanity. We are a global species and we are doing a lot of damage to this Earth—and yet, we have the capacity for shared endeavor and understanding that maybe leaves some room for hope that we can learn to shape that impact in a less disastrous way.
One of my favorite essays is early in the book: “Humanity’s Temporal Range.” Temporal range refers to how long a species has been that species (or will be that species). We are, as humans, much younger than many types of life whose existence we have ended. The dodo was far more ancient than us. Elephants, whose long existence we now threaten, have been modern elephants for approximately 10 times longer than we have been modern humans—homo sapiens have had their hands on this planet for something on the order of 250,000 years, compared with the African elephant, lumbering along for more than 2 million years.
And one reason for us to think about the future of the elephant is that we are part of a complex web of life that we ignore at our peril.
As John puts it: “We probably didn’t know what we were doing thousands of years ago when we hunted some large mammals to extinction. But we know what we’re doing now. We know how to tread more lightly upon the earth. We could choose to use less energy, eat less meat, clear fewer forests. And we chose not to. As a result, for many forms of life, humanity is the apocalypse.”
A profound point, even if the editor in me want to remind John that the name of our planet—Earth—is a proper noun. Maybe he means we are treading upon dirt—earth—but I think the sense of the noun in his sentence refers not to soil, but to our planetary home.
Consider another nit picked.
“The Anthropocene Reviewed” is a book of our time. It is written during the pandemic, which is one of the points. Such a pandemic has long been foreseen, and inevitably, like the next flood, will occur again because of human action and inaction.
So, it would be easy to despair at the state of humans. Indeed, in many personal essays, John Green deals with his own mental health struggles, living with the black force of meaninglessness.
However, he does not despair, and neither do I. His brother provides scant comfort for him in an essay about the pandemic by noting “the species will survive this.” Well, yes, but I would like to survive it, along with all who I love and even some who I don’t love, too. As Green notes, diseases that wipe out many humans are not unprecedented, they are very precedented, and what matters is our response.
Some of the essays concern nature, and how we are not separate from it, but part of it. “Sycamore Trees” are reviewed, and like Green, I am occasionally comforted by gardening and by nature. It’s good to gaze in awe at the trees.
As he puts it: “I’m just looking up at that tree, thinking about how it turned air and water and sunshine into wood and bark and leaves, and I realize that I am in the vast, dark shade of this immense tree. I feel the solace of that shade, the relief it provides. And that’s the point.”
It is.
Morning glory bud Monday in my backyard. It will be a pretty blue flower on Tuesday, gone on Wednesday. Life is temporary but beautiful. It's good to be in awe of it.
I don’t think it’s giving too much away, that it’s too much of a spoiler, to quote the end of this flawed but marvelous book, because it encapsulates John Green's message well, and also the words will resonate more when you experience the journey that brings to you to them. We are connected to each other as humans and to the planet that spawned us. We are not entities on Earth, but part of Earth that has become conscious of being part of Earth. We are Earth experiencing Earth.
“I won’t survive, of course. I will, sooner or later, be the everything that is part of everything else. But until then: What an astonishment to breath on this breathing planet. What a blessing to be Earth loving Earth.”
It does not work anymore, but it still looks good. My first SLR camera, unearthed today.
As a journalist, my pre-professor career was mostly as a writer. True, my first gig was as a sports editor at a small daily paper, and I later was overall editor of that same paper—but while I did copy editing, page design and photography, my primarily activity was interviewing people and writing stories based on those interviews.
So if you asked me what I “was” before I began teaching at Mount Mercy University, I would say “a writer” and I meant it, although I was really a reporter/writer.
Still, photography was important to me. In 1979, for a photography class at Muscatine Community College, I purchased a Minolta SLR camera, a model XG-1. It was a lower-end camera, sort of between the amateur and professional worlds, but it served me well and was my primary visual tool for a decade or so.
I learned to roll my own black-and-white film, develop it in a darkroom, create contact prints and print images for media use.
Old film, a photography guide, the camera, lenses and a flash. The cloth for cleaning lenses may still be useful.
A lot has changed in the world of photography, and journalism, in 40 years. All that knowledge of film and paper is way less important in the digital era.
This week, my wife has taken on the project of clearing a mountain of clutter from our garage. I’ve helped out, some, but to be honest, she has done the bulk of the work. She is trying to be as clear as possible—if it’s been accumulating in the garage for 10 years or more, the idea was to toss it out.
But the old Minolta was there. It was slated for the junk yard—it’s been nonfunctioning for decades—but I decided it just looked too cool. I’m going to consider it office decorations.
These days, I teach others to write and make images mostly as a hobby for my own pleasure. I like it, but just as a background in typewriters and early computers helps me today (students often don’t known what a “tab” key is nor how it should be used, a concept us old Remington users have more of a handle on), time spent years ago with the Minolta and its manual controls ingrained ideas such as depth of field that are not obvious to new image makers.
I have many fond memories of using that first SLR camera. Honestly, I don’t miss the darkroom all that much—Photoshop is way much handier—but I learned a lot using that Minolta. Along with the camera was a book I bought back then. I don’t recall if it was the text for that MCC class, but it was a book that opened my eyes to see the world in a new way.
The way a photographer sees it. And even if I never was fully a photographer, making images was something that I could do and enjoyed doing.
Thus, I was happy to see that camera again. And I’ll be happy to us it as a fancy paperweight on my desk. It’s a physical reminder of where I was and where I started.
Camera bag. A bit grimy, but I may clean it and use it again. It's the one piece of ancient equipment that may still work.
Official White House images of President Joe Biden (above) and Vice President Kamala Harris (below). In 2020, they won the election. Let's acknowledge that as a fact.
What a week! Who knew the contemporary Republican party could be so weird and vindictive that Democrats would feel a little sympathy for someone named Cheney?
In some ways, the odd Republican reaction to the election of 2020 parallels the reaction of liberals in 2016.
Remember the #notmypresident trend? That was a hot hashtag in 2017 when it became obvious Trump’s odd craziness during the 2016 campaign wasn’t a publicity stunt—Donald J. Trump was every bit as awful and delusional as president as he seemed to be when he was a candidate.
The campaign bombast was not a ploy—Trump immediately began governing in chaos, occupying his time on strange obsessions like the battle over the inaugural crowd size, and his insistence that his basically average Electoral College win (coupled with a popular vote loss) somehow was a historic landslide.
There was a sense of unreality on election day in 2016, that something unexpected had happened—and indeed it had. I recall hearing an acquaintance say shortly after that at a meeting that Trump “is not my president.” At the time, I was taken aback. Our republic rests on political opponents accepting election results and agreeing to fight another day.
President Donald Trump, the man who thinks he's still President. He's not. Accept it and move on.
Trump won. Not a clean nor decisive win, but under the rules, a win. Last year, Biden won, by the same Electoral College margin as Trump, and also, unlike Trump, in the popular vote—and yet there is again a new “not my president” idea in the air.
But the 2017 #notmypresident movement was fundamentally different from what we face today.
In 2016 and 2017, neither President Barack Obama nor candidate Hillary Clinton sought to have the election of 2016 overturned. Clinton didn’t call her supporters to the streets to disrupt the normally routine task of Congress counting electoral votes. The losers in 2016 were not digging in their heels, denying reality.
And when some said in 2017 that Trump was not their president, they were mostly rejecting him symbolically—implying that he was not fit to be president and they would not consider him their leader. There was no huge movement, run by the leader of the Democratic party, to recount votes months after it was all over. There were no oddball Q Anon ninjas seeking bamboo in Arizona. There weren’t dozens of lawsuits—all based on BS and all tossed quickly by the courts—to try to overturn the election.
Today, Donald Trump still has a grip on the increasingly extreme GOP, and he’s fuming in Florida, plotting his return, sometimes even seemingly convinced he’s still “Il Duce.” Trump’s stranglehold on his party is cutting off the fact oxygen supply to the GOP brain, and the Trumpy House vote to oust conservative Liz Cheney from her leadership post because she speaks the truth this week shows how tight that grip is.
There’s a sharp contrast between today and four years ago. When Rep. Elise Stefanik was named third-in-command among House Republicans this week, her first public statement called for “unity” as she works with her party’s undisputed leader—President Trump.
She got around to mentioning President Biden after first praising the orange one—Stefanik referred to the current president in a statement about how terrible, socialist and dangerous he and his party are—so she’s not denying the election results.
Rep. Elisie Stefanik, R-NY. When was the last time we had to care who was number three in the House minority party?
At least not yet. As quickly as some in the GOP are re-writing the events of Jan. 6 into harmless tourists touring the Capitol, I wonder what the gaslighting future holds.
But still. The shout out to Trump as the current party leader by Rep. Stefanik was startling. Think what it came after. Trump attempted to overturn a lawful election in any way he could. After all else failed, he called for protests on Jan. 6 that led to the violent storming on the U.S. Capitol by a murderous crowd.
What if that crowd had found Nancy Pelosi? Or Mitt Romney? Or Mike Pence? What if they caused so much chaos—as they seemed intent on doing—that Congress was prevented from fulfilling it’s role in the election?
Some people died that day—and President Trump was impeached a second time, correctly so, because he incited that violence.
In a rational world, Trump would be retired in ignominy, a shallow, shamed figure shunned by all as the Republicans move on and seek new party leadership. Instead, Rep. Stefanik called for the GOP to retake the House, and seems to be looking forward to the second Trump administration.
It’s all about the base. And there’s the trouble.
Tweet this week by Iowa's Republican Governor, Kim Reynolds. Odd how she doesn't ask about any credible news sources in her "where do you get your news" tweet. That's part of the problem.
Trump, term 2? God helps us. Not my president again, please.
Anyway, today you can buy a “not my president” shirt today with Joe Biden’s picture on it. As some on the left rejected Trump, so many on the right reject Biden.
The current “not my president” movement, however, is tied to the Big Lie, to the sense that President Trump was somehow cheated of a victory he won.
In reality, Trump was the loser. Neither he nor his fans can face that, but public servants who have sworn a duty to the Constitution, should feel some obligation to speak truth on this point.
Biden won. You can wear the “not my president” shirt with his image all you want—that doesn’t change the fact that old Joe is president.
Sure, Trump doesn’t accept it. Yet Trump edited weather maps and would not believe crowd counts nor images. Trump not accepting something isn’t very strong evidence for the lack of veracity of the thing.
I understood the “not my president’ idea in 2017, even if I didn’t buy it. Today, if Biden is not your president—if you, like Elise, look forward to Trumps triumphant return—you make me shudder.
In 2020, The voters spoke. Get over it, get on with it, and try to live in the fact-based universe.
The Trumpverse is perverse and increasingly out of touch. As Jan. 6 showed, that perversion can even bring anti-democracy violence.
May the Don never be my president again. Rep. Cheney was right, even if she speaks from the right. Donald Trump should never again get anywhere near the White House.
Ousted in the House, but not silenced--Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyoming will probably face many primary challengers. Because she would not speak the Big Lie. Good for her.
