I have no headline for this, and I am pretty good at writing headlines. So there! :-)

Gimme a second and let me figure out where it starts.

People make all kinds of claims about Southern Culture. Most of those people don’t actually know what they are a talking about. The only way to know a culture is to live in it. Internalize it. So today I will try and give you a walk in my shoes.

What if you missed the Civil Rights Movement by a few short years, and you began your life thinking it was all over. Settled. Done? Because apparently everyone was now equal and we we done with all that fighting??

What if you grew up, at least at the beginning, in a household which taught you to not say the N-Word in public, but it was ok to use that word from time to time where only White People could hear?

That whole chain of logic is strange to me to this day. I wasn’t taught to not use it because it’s offensive, hurtful, and a symbol of a system of slavery which was still almost a living memory on the day I was born. I was taught not to use it because it would harm me more than help me. It was a lesson in calculated decisions.

I opened my eyes and said “Hello” to this big, beautiful world for the first time in the early 1970s if that helps. I had no idea what the fuck I was in for. I was born in Mobile, which is in Alabama, which is in the United States, which is in the Northern Hemisphere of this one planet . . . etc.

How’s that for a prologue?

Now, I don’t want to write or share the next part of this, but I am doing it anyway. And don’t applaud me until you see if there is even a next post.

The racism, sexism, ( and more and more these days) militaristic nationalism . . . They trouble me.

One of the reasons I have such a hard time just writing this shit and throwing it out there is that it’s hard to look at, and it’s even harder to acknowledge that it’s real.

But it’s real. Talking about it is better than giving it a pass, because talking about it robs it of a little bit of its power.

Know that I am on your side.

Just don’t be looking for another post from me tomorrow. These things take a long time to write. Not because I’m short on words. What I am short on, these days, is courage.

If I take this up again. I will have more to say about emotional and financial manipulation, with a heapin’ helpin’ of religious fundamentalism thrown in to, you know, save my soul.

I remember when The Christian Coalition took over the little churches and weaponized them in the service of the Reaganites. I lived through the AIDS crisis, as a child, and I am not done burying people who were older than me and were damaged by it more than me because they had a more full understanding of what was happening there.

I am not done.

These words are hard to come by these days, though. Composition time is hard to come by. But I think I have more to say.

Hello, gloves. Enjoy being on my hands for the next little while. I will take you off soon.j

Don’t go mouthing off about Southern Culture on account of things you learned about it on the teevee. Don’t give it a pass, either.

This situation is way more complicated than that.

That is all.


I’m not voting third party in November. Here’s why you shouldn’t, either.

I’ve seen a definite uptick in heated (and worse) conversations between Clinton and Sanders supporters lately, so I’m gonna go ahead and toss this one out.

I’ve been open about the fact that I like Bernie Sanders. I think he’s done great things for us in this election. He still has a chance of winning, but it’s an outside chance at best.


At one time, I was ride-or-die for Hillary Clinton. I’m more ambivalent about her these days and I’m sure I will not like her foreign or economic policies. But I know she’s not a bigoted demagogue who condones violence, and I know she’s not an evangelical fundamentalist who bars “liberal” journalists from his rallies and wants to ban specific musical intervals because they are Satanic. That’s all I can afford to care about in this election.

So, if the time comes when it’s necessary for me to do so, I will cast my vote for Hillary Clinton. My conscience tells me it would be irresponsible to do otherwise. My conscience also tells me to try and persuade as many likely Democratic voters as possible to stay on board and turn out for the nominee in November, no matter who that happens to be.

If Sanders wins, I promise you this. I will do everything in my power to work against the onslaught of ignorant socialist caricatures his enemies will use to erode his support. And to keep my centrist Dem friends on board with him. I could work myself up and become genuinely enthusiastic about Bernie Sanders. But only if he wins the primaries, and that is out of my hands.

Should Clinton win, she gets the same consideration. I’ll work against all the half-truths her enemies formulate by digging through her long career in public service and ripping things out of context. And against the inevitable misogyny that will be slung at her from all directions. I will do my best to work myself up, to be a genuinely enthusiastic advocate for her, and to keep my lefty friends on board.

I’ve stayed out of this primary argument because I tend to make pretty bold, sometimes provocative, statements when I wade off into politics and I have a low tolerance for ignorant bullshit. I’ve felt so far that taking a strong position in favor of either candidate, for me, could only be counterproductive. I think that was the right call.

I’m not attacking either candidate. I’m offering my opinion on how I think things, realistically, will play out for the remainder of this election season. And encouraging you to show up for the Democratic nominee in November.

There have been a few positive developments for Bernie Sanders over the last couple of weeks, but I honestly don’t believe he is on a trajectory win the nomination. If I’m wrong, I’ll good-naturedly admit it and support him in the general election. But I don’t think I am.

From where I am sitting, the only way Hillary Clinton loses this nomination is if the RNC legal shenanigans turn up something so scandalous as be a career-ender and she has to bow out. I doubt that’s happening. I think if they were going to find something that juicy, we’d already have an inkling that it’s coming.

So I’m laying the groundwork to minimize nastiness among Democratic voters and maximize turnout in November. I don’t have much reach or influence, but I’m using what I’ve got to keep people positive and engaged.

Now let’s talk about what the Republicans are doing, and then about what we should do.


Rubio is gone. His delegates will be reapportioned and his exit probably helps Cruz and Kasich more than Trump, but Trump is still in the lead. And he is still Trump.

Kasich is in for awhile longer. He may or may not leave the race. At the moment, he seems to be looking for enough support on the East Coast to play for first or second place in California and New Jersey, then walk into a brokered convention with RNC backing.

This will not happen, in my opinion. Kasich is just a spoiler at this point. The nomination will be won by either Trump or Cruz outright. The country club Republicans and the CEOs are already showing signs of holding their noses and lining up behind the crazy-like-a-fox Tea Party guy, but I think if Kasich stays in through the summer, Trump wins.

As titillating as I find the idea of a contested convention re-aligning the GOP toward the center, I don’t think it’s realistic. I don’t see anyone in their camp with the influence to broker a deal that big, and it’s not the sort of thing parties do all at once. A contested convention can only have three outcomes.

  1. Cruz gets the nomination and the Tea Party ends up in the driver’s seat;
  2. The whole thing descends into chaos, the conservative coalition shatters, and all bets are off but the Tea Party still ends up in the driver’s seat;
  3. Trump makes an alliance with the Tea Party and takes the nomination, then we spend the next four years watching the racists and religious extremists fight it out.

Republican moderates have yielded so much ground over the last 30 years, there simply aren’t enough of them left to restore sanity in the space of a few days at a convention. The GOP moderates are outnumbered and outmatched. They’re losing this one. One of the reasons I can still manage empathy for them even though they did this to themselves is because I know what that feels like. It’s unpleasant.

So we’re likely ending up with Clinton v. Trump or Cruz in the general election. Either way, the Republican will get the most free media time, because even though Trump is playing us all for fools and Cruz does his best to act like a crazy person, they are both more entertaining to the reality-tv crowd than Hillary Clinton.

Pro Wrestling rules are in effect. Airtime decisions are mostly about ratings and ad revenue. Not about giving everyone equal time. Not about what’s best for the country.

So, what do we do with this hot mess of an election? My wife and I have three rules of engagement for November. If you are a U.S. citizen and eligible to vote, I encourage you to think hard about this and consider adopting them, too.

  1. We don’t stay home in November for any reason.
  2. We don’t vote for candidate unless they have a credible chance of winning.
  3. We don’t vote for the Republican.

The rest of this is addressed to all you Democrats, you habitual third party voters who are not represented in any meaningful way, and you people who abstain or write in fictional characters because you’ve lost all faith in the two-party system. I’m even talking to some dyed-in-the-wool Republicans who are shocked at what their party has become.

You seasoned Republicans who remember the days when we were all working for peace and prosperity even though we had strong disagreements about the best way to get there. You Young Republicans who wish we could operate that way again. Everyone, however you identify politically, who would like an economic policy that gives working people a chance at a rising standard of living; and a foreign policy that doesn’t stretch our military to the breaking point and encourage our rivals to challenge us the way Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran are challenging us now. I’m talking to you.

Also talking to all you lovely feminists. I am one of you and I wouldn’t even still be blogging at this point if not for your support. You gals and guys are my soul.Feminism_free

I’ve cast protest votes in just about every way possible at various times in my life. I’ve even written myself in for President. I understand what it’s like to feel marginalized in EVERY election and to wonder if the whole thing isn’t just a rigged game. I truly do. But this is not a year for such antics.

In this election, the right thing to do is to vote for whomever survives the Democratic primaries and wins the nomination.

Just in case you’ve not followed this election and you are too young to remember what happened last time we had a Republican President. Let me catch you up.

First of all, Republicans are not all bad and are not inherently evil. We had a guy named Eisenhower as a President one time. He was a thoughtful Army General from WWII. I’m not sure whether he did us any good or not — I’m not up what he actually did. But my sense has always been that he did his honest best not to do us harm.

Eisenhower Portrait from Wikimedia. Fair use applies.

Eisenhower Portrait from Wikimedia. Fair use applies.

The last Republican President who we can credibly argue did the country no harm left office in January of 1961. Let’s pause and let that sink in for a moment.  1961.

That’s better than 50 years ago. The last GOP President we had was ruinous. We’re still digging ourselves out of the hole he left us in. Bush II officially won in 2000 because he carried Florida by fewer than 600 votes and the Supreme Court handed him the office before a recount could be done. There were so many irregularities in Florida that year they ended up having to pass an election reform law after it was all over.

Bush may well have won that election if the votes in Florida had been counted properly. We’ll never know. Even if the full recount had been done, we wouldn’t know for sure. That’s how serious the irregularities were. But here’s the thing I always come back to when I think about 2000.

More than 93,000 Floridians went for Ralph Nader that year. Nader always insisted he didn’t spoil that election, but I don’t buy it. Here’s why.

I know a lot of the people who voted Nader were Green Party true believers fighting for a win that would get them ballot privileges in all 50 states and were trying to build a long-term thing. I know a lot were people who never vote for one of the two big parties and some were Republicans who liked Nader’s message. But if I recall correctly, Nader’s platform was mostly about environmentalism and reining in corporate malfeasance.

That means many of his supporters had to be Democrats and lefties. I know my tribe. A lot of Dems were disillusioned with the party that year and thought Clinton had yielded too much to the conservatives. A lot bought the false media narrative that Al Gore was a pompous, wooden snob who didn’t have a chance against Bush. But I have to imagine at least a couple of thousand of those Floridians who voted Nader did so because they were pissed off that their favored candidate lost the nomination or because they thought Gore was too “centrist” and willing to compromise.

Nader image from Wikimedia. Fair use applies.

Nader image from Wikimedia. Fair use applies.

Those 2,000 votes, my friends, would have swung the whole election, and the reasons I mentioned above are just about the worst reasons I can think of to cast a protest vote.

I’m not sure what kind of President Gore would have been, but he wouldn’t have handed over the military complex to Neoconservatives who thought they could Anglicize the Middle East without burning the entire region to the ground.

He wouldn’t have handed over the Treasury and the Federal Reserve to the free market fundamentalists who allowed Wall Street to turn our banking sector into a casino and nearly sunk the global economy. Nothing else matters when I assess the Bush II administration. In my opinion, that long string of horrors flows from his choice of military, diplomatic, and economic advisers.

So I urge you. Even if you are disillusioned by the two-party system or you can’t stand Clinton or you can’t stand Sanders. Even if you live in a safe Republican state and feel your vote doesn’t matter. Please vote for the Dem this time around anyway.

The popular vote margin matters, even in safe states. A wide enough popular vote margin can make a razor-thin Electoral College win look like a landslide. And we don’t just want the Democratic nominee to win. We want them to be able to claim a mandate. Because the only way our Republican Party has a chance to right their ship is if the voters repudiate them so emphatically they are forced to examine their tactics and re-commit themselves to governing instead of obstructing their adversaries out of spite and playing to the most base parts of our natures to win elections.

I totally buy the argument here that protest voting just because your preferred candidate loses a primary is indicative of privilege. So, let’s all us who have some privilege and know it check ours this time around in the service of the greater good. I’m a white, hetero, Christian man with a graduate degree. I am privileged. I’m not letting my privilege get the better of me this year.


Wherever you stand philosophically. However you feel about Hillary or Bernie. If you are as alarmed by Trump and Cruz as I am, you’re looking at a situation in which the enemy of your enemy is your friend.

I don’t know how much more clear I can be about all this, and I’ve done my best to provide you with talking points. Short-term alliances and putting aside even deep ideological differences to get it done are the order of the day.

If this turns out to be more than we can handle and we lose, let’s at least face the next four years together with the knowledge that we didn’t go quietly. If we can just make that much progress, this is survivable.

Now get out there and save the soul of your country.

Make America Sensible Again

Last weekend, a Facebook friend of mine explained the Trump situation as the outcome of a Faustian bargain GOP elites made with racists and anti-intellectuals some decades ago. He was riffing on this WaPo editorial which asks “Where Were Republican Moderates 20 Years Ago.?” In the article Fareed Zakaria criticizes the Republican leaders who are now scrambling to fend off Donald Trump for allowing the situation to develop in the first place.


The Trumpster himself.

It’s a fairly stinging critique. Fareed argues that by failing to restrain the right wing of their party from using the virulent rhetoric and vicious tactics that have become a commonplace in U.S.politics — and in some cases actively encouraging it — the Republican leadership fostered the environment in which Trump is now flourishing. The money quote:


I buy this. It tracks with what I said in my last #WeekendCoffeeShare post about why I consider Trump dangerous even if he loses.

When Presidential candidates say racist things to whip up political support, that sends a message to their followers that it’s ok say and do racist things in public. Which makes people who actually have racist attitudes a little more comfortable with spreading bigotry and hate.

Zakaria locates the Republicans’ turn toward toxic rhetoric in the Gingrich era. My own experience agrees with his assessment. When I Iook at how we arrived at this pass as a social/historical process, I can trace it back to the racist backlash against the Voting Rights Act with ease. The now-infamous Southern Strategy and Barry Goldwater’s run for President in 1964 are pieces of this puzzle.


A Goldwater poster and an early example of what we now understand as Political Dogwhistling.

That said, Zakaria has a point. I remember a fair amount of virulent political speech during the Reagan and Bush I eras. And keep in mind, I was 8 years old in 1980, so my memory is a bit fuzzy. “Welfare Queens” and a lot of homophobic things that were said during the AIDS crisis spring immediately to mind. But during the 1990s, the right wing of the Republican Party went absolutely bananas. There was a notable change in the things they were willing to do and say to win elections and policy debates.

The far right hated Bill Clinton and they expressed their hatred in the mass media. Even after the Obama birther madness and all the racism I’ve seen directed at our current President, I still don’t believe I’ve ever seen the level of vitriol spewed at a government official that was directed at Clinton. Maybe the Clinton era made a larger impression because I was younger and hadn’t been desensitized to it yet, but I am not sure.


Rush going all gangster.

We had Rush Limbaugh on television framing the Clinton Presidency as “America Under Siege” and counting the days. There were all manner of conspiracy theories accusing the Clintons of everything from cocaine smuggling to plotting with China to make the U.S. a vassal state of the PRC. The right exploited the Waco and Ruby Ridge catastrophes to score political points by whipping up anti-government sentiment, which ended up fueling the militia movement.

Don’t get me wrong. I think the government deserves criticism for both of these incidents. But criticism should be productive, and the right went too far. I’ll also point out that Ruby Ridge happened in August of 1992. Bill Clinton wasn’t sworn in until January of the next year, so it didn’t even happen on his watch. You’d be surprised how many people don’t know that.

I’ll be honest in the interest of full disclosure. I not only supported Bill Clinton, I liked him. After 12 years of grandfatherly Presidents who smiled and said they cared about everyone while they happily went about the business of punishing poor people for being poor, Clinton was a breath of fresh air. He was dynamic. He was talented. When he said he cared about the rest of us, I believed him. He gave me hope for the future.


Bill Clinton convinced us he had more faith in the American people than any other politician of his generation. And he was a decent sax player. We had no choice but to love him.

Some of the most heated conversations I’ve ever had were during his impeachment trial. I thought at the time he shouldn’t have been impeached because Ronald Reagan wasn’t impeached for Iran-Contra despite the fact that the hearings revealed him to be either criminally culpable or so incompetent as to be unfit for office. I thought the whole sorry impeachment affair was orchestrated by opportunists who wanted to damage the Democratic Party so badly the country would go along with the GOP running the government forever.

I maintain to this day that if the circumstances had been the same, but Clinton had been a Republican, there would have been no trial. Heck, there probably never would have even been a Whitewater investigation. No one will ever convince me otherwise.

The right wing during the Clinton era went way beyond personal attacks and saying bigoted things to score points. They operated, from day one, from a position of contempt for the executive branch itself. These people didn’t want to govern. They wanted to rule.

So yeah, during the 90’s the extreme right escalated the bigotry and hate. The centrist wing of the GOP allowed it to happen by not stepping on it and in some cases, condoning it to win elections. The extremists pulled them to the right and forced them into a position which required them to “go nuclear or go home” any time they had even a slight disagreement with the Dems.

By the end of the decade we had a separatist problem and a militia problem because (almost exclusively white) people were joining what amounted to private paramilitary organizations out of fear that the Clinton administration was scheming to take away their guns or use the military against the population or some such. We’d seen a federal building in a major city bombed. I was never sure why so many people bought all that, given our well-established tradition of leaving problems in the hands of the civil authorities unless things break down to the point that they threaten public safety in a big way or the authorities plead for help.

second amendment

There’s a hard #truth here, and it is a big part of our problem.

We had people being abused and in some cases murdered for not being heterosexual and an uptick in violence against abortion providers. In my neck of the woods, people were using the label “Democrat” as a not-so-sly racial slur. Unless you were a thick-skinned, assertive person in the South, you thought twice about identifying as liberal or feminist. It took a LOT of courage, even at that late date, to be open about your sexual orientation unless you were a hetero, cisgendered person.

It’s tricky to identify causal relationships in these matters. But note the obvious way the escalation on the part of far right people in government seems to have enabled the bad behavior of average citizens who agreed with them. Note how it encouraged even more extreme elements of society to organize and collaborate. I believe this is a real thing I’m looking at.

There’s a relationship here between what our politicians say and how our citizens treat one another. I’m ready for our public discourse to start running in the direction of tolerance and respect. I’ll happily organize with anyone who convinces me they want the same.


I started writing this post almost a week ago. Since then, we’ve seen a Trump rally in Chicago canceled because confrontations between his supporters and protesters became too violent for the event to go forward. Now he and his surrogates are claiming the protesters violated his First Amendment rights. I can’t publish this without saying a few words about all that.


A Trump supporter who has since said she was just doing this because the other side were comparing her candidate to Hitler, and this was her way of thumbing her nose at them.

I’ll condemn violence no matter which end of the political spectrum it comes from. Violence is violence, period. But it’s a huge mistake to allow Trump to put this all on the protesters. The only reason people are protesting his rallies is because for months, he’s been spewing racism and encouraging his supporters to abuse people who object to what he’s saying.

In some cases, people who weren’t being disruptive in any way have been removed from his rallies because they were wearing other candidates’ messaging on their clothing or because they were black. And that IS a violation of the First Amendment, because those people were removed by police and/or Secret Service.

Trump has had every opportunity to dial back his rhetoric and to encourage restraint from the podium. He has not done that. The Republican Party has done very little to call him out for it, and what they have done has been too little, too late.


More #truth, and a more urgent part of our problem.

As Saturday Night Live pointed out in the Weekend Update this week in a much more pithy way than I am. Given the character and history of Chicago, is it any wonder a rally for an openly racist Presidential candidate who regularly incites his supporters to abuse people attracted a large protest and things got ugly? Is it any wonder at all?

Far as the First Amendment argument goes. Freedom of speech protects political speech from government censorship in public spaces. It doesn’t protect political candidates from being heckled by protesters.

Removing protesters from political rallies for disrupting the event to the point it can’t continue, or for threatening the safety of others, is totally legal. Removing people for standing silently with signs or listening attentively while wearing t-shirts supporting other candidates is illegal. One of the reasons Trump is encouraging his supporters to abuse any and all protesters whether they’re being disruptive or not is to create an environment in which those people aren’t safe so the police have an excuse to escort them out.

When you hear someone bemoaning the infringement of Donald Trump’s First Amendment rights, it is appropriate to call bullshit on that. Also appropriate to point out that it’s a classic case of projection. And here’s the funny thing about Trump hiding behind freedom of speech. This may be the only funny thing I’ve seen since he started his campaign.

I know quite a bit about trolling. I sometimes engage in discussions that attract the trolling-folk. I’ve written about their behavior. Donald Trump is using their tactics.

Sometimes I see people obviously trolling a thread with the intent to disrupt the conversation and I tell them to cut it out or step off. One of the most common responses I get when I do that is a rant about freedom of speech. At that point, I usually block the person so they can’t respond any more, and then explain to them that I’m not the government, and that even though blogs are publicly accessible, they are not public property, which means the First Amendment does not apply.

Donald Trump and his enablers are trolling us, y’all. It’s too bad we can’t all disengage and stop feeding him. But people are going to keep showing up at his rallies, and he’s not going to dial back his rhetoric. Even if he did at this point, I don’t think he could restrain the crowds. Trump is not holding these people in the palm of his hand the way he was even a month ago. He’s lost control of his own followers and he’s unleashed a thing.

We can’t accuse Donald Trump of directly inciting what happened in Chicago because he wasn’t even there. But I say no matter who threw the first punch, he bears more responsibility for that incident than any single person — on either side — who was in that crowd. Because if the things he’s been saying for these last few weeks aren’t incitement, I don’t know what that word means.

So let’s hope he somehow inexplicably loses big on Tuesday. But even if he does, be mindful of the fact that his following isn’t going to evaporate. Most will support Cruz if it comes to that. And we don’t want Trumpism to take hold the way the Obama Birthers’ ideas took hold. Because that strengthened the Tea Party and made governing harder for Obama than it had to be.

So, how do we handle this, since we can’t stop feeding the trolls in this case? I say we stay engaged with this election and see it through to November. And we assert our own views at every opportunity.

I’m not saying you have to let it take over your social media the way it’s taken over mine or berate your friends offline. That sort of incessant chatter isn’t for everyone. I know a lot of us are depressed, disgusted, and exhausted already and November is months away.

If it gets to be too much, step away from it for a few days and spend your internet time looking at pet photos and baby pictures. I’ve come to enjoy those over the last year or so and to see them as valuable as anything else we do on the social media. Because they make people smile and they foster positive relationships. We could do with a heap more of both right now.

All I’m saying is we can’t afford to burn out, or to just tune it all out in disgust. If someone asks you for your opinion on the election, give them a polite, honest answer and be firm if you receive conservative jackassery in return for your trouble. And if someone starts blithely extolling the virtues of Donald Trump to you, ask them what they think this country will look like if we elect a guy who has people escorted out of his rallies just for being black whether they are actually protesting or not and who incites his followers to violence.

And have a little faith in the American people, even though that’s getting harder by the day. We don’t always do the right thing, but it is my sincere hope that in this case, we will. I have to believe that even though I’m an unapologetic leftist and my views do not represent the mainstream in any way, most Americans want what I want in this election. I’m running entirely on faith and hope at this point.

We don’t want to make America great again because even though we’re at a low point and we are in a precarious position, we haven’t lost our greatness yet. We just want to make America sensible again.


Let’s all get together and do this, plz!

ed.- I need to acknowledge a few people here because this is a different post than I’ve ever written, and a few people helped me get here, even though they might not realize it.

If not for the many conversations with my sister Diana, who runs the blog Part Time Monster, and our friend Gretchen Kelly of Drifting Through My Open Mind, over the last three years, I would not have found the heart to put a thing like this on the internet.

My friend Luther M. Siler of Infinite Free Time has taught me a lot about blogging, and interpreting statistics, and the dynamics of this election just by sharing his opinions with me these last couple of years and commenting on my threads. Luther is an author and he blogs about a lot of stuff other than politics, but you only need to spend two minutes scrolling through is archives to see he’s one of the good guys. Thank you, Luther, for your kindness, patience, and generosity.

I religiously follow the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation on Facebook. I am not affiliated with them, but they always answer my communications and they post a lot of good stuff. I think of them as friends.

If you care about these things I’ve written about in this post, please give all these nice folks a look, and if you see why what they’re doing is valuable, give them a follow and some likes.

More to come.