Category Archives: Politics

Resist

A letter to my Congressional representatives and to all Democratic members of Congress.

Dear Representative Jayapal, Senator Cantwell, and Senator Murray,

Now that Donald Trump is President, your job has changed. For the past eight years, and indeed for most of modern American history, your job has been to work with the administration and, when possible, with the Republican leadership in Congress to pass legislation for the good of the American people. Now, with a Republican majority pushing the most extreme right-wing agenda in at least a century and a president with unprecedented (and unpresidented) deficits in experience, temperament, honesty, and ethics, your job is to limit the damage.

I urge you to resist. I urge you to do everything in your power to frustrate, obstruct, and delay the legislative and administrative agenda of the administration and the Republican majority.

Do not vote to confirm Betsy DeVos, the profoundly unqualified nominee to lead the Department of Education. Do everything in your power to prevent the confirmation of the worst nominees like DeVos, Pudzer, and Tillerson, and withhold your vote from the rest. Do not vote to confirm any executive or judicial nominee the administration puts forward, no matter how qualified, from Secretary of State all the way on down to the Director of the Office of Paperclip Distribution. And, most importantly, use every weapon at your disposal to deny President Trump the opportunity the Republican majority denied President Obama – the appointment of a new Supreme Court Justice.

Do not vote for any bill advanced by the administration or the Republican leadership. Use the rules of legislative procedure to derail or delay the most damaging legislation, and make sure that every bill passed by the majority receives a full measure of debate, with your opposition noted in the Congressional Record. Do everything you can, short of shutting down the government or defaulting on the national debt, to frustrate the Republican legislative agenda.

If you do find bipartisan agreement on a specific issue – sentencing reform, perhaps – then you should of course work with like-minded legislators from the opposing party. But don’t compromise your core principles when you do so, even in pursuit of a good cause.

You will lose many of these fights, perhaps most. The damage to our country will be awful, but that’s the political reality for the next four years, even with a favorable election in 2018. But while Republican control of both the Congress presents a terrible danger, it also presents a political opportunity. Make the Republicans pass every piece of destructive legislation with only Republican votes. Make the Republicans own every awful thing that happens while they control Congress. If the past eight years have taught us anything, it is that voters will not only forgive uncompromising obstruction, they will reward it. With the new president’s historically low approval ratings and the huge crowds at the Women’s Marches across the country, relentless opposition is looking even better as an electoral strategy.

Resist. Your conscience and your constituents will thank you.

Sincerely,

RE Andeen

Chaos

Donald Trump is going to be the next President of the United States.

He didn’t win a majority of the votes; he didn’t even win a plurality. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by a margin of close to three million votes. For the record, the last time a Republican who wasn’t already president or vice president won the popular vote was all the way back in 1980. Claims of a “historic mandate” are not even close to the mark.

But it was enough, and we need to recognize the legitimacy of the result. We owe that to the office of the President and to, you know, reality, even though elements of the Republican party have refused to accept the legitimacy of any president in recent memory, maybe any president since John F. Kennedy. To Donald Trump himself, we owe nothing.

Distressed liberals are offering all sorts of reasons why Trump was elected – voter suppression, media bias, gerrymandering. Trump voters are racist or stupid or insane. Bernie Sanders would have been a better candidate. Anybody else would have been a better candidate. There may be some truth to all of these, but none can explain how almost half of voters could chose such a plainly awful candidate.

The real reason is much simpler. Americans voted to burn down the house.

People are angry at the status quo, and they voted for the opposite of the status quo. They didn’t vote for Trump in spite of the fact that he is an awful human being. They voted for him because he is an awful human being. They voted to tear down all the institutions they feel are rigged against them, and there is no better wrecking ball than Donald Trump. Nobody even comes close. The collateral damage is going to be terrible.

We already know a few things that are going to happen as a result of a Trump administration along with Republican control of Congress. Environmental regulations, especially those targeting climate change, will be rolled back or ignored. Broad immigration enforcement will needlessly ruin the lives of many immigrants and their families. Taxes on the rich and on corporations will go down, without a word spoken about the increased budget deficits that will result. The lives of women, minorities, LGBTQ folks – anybody not a straight white cis male – will get worse, if not because of actual harm from the administration, then at least from indifference to injustice.

The repeal part of the Republican plan to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act will happen very quickly, but the replace part will take much longer, if it happens at all. The Republicans have a few good ideas on health care, like allowing people to buy insurance across state lines, but they have no real plan beyond vague rumblings about “market-based solutions”, which the ACA already was. As a result, ten to fifteen million Americans will likely lose their health insurance in 2018.

And we’ll get at least one new Supreme Court justice. That can’t be good.

Beyond that, though, I’m much less certain what’s going to happen for the simple reason that nobody knows much about what Donald Trump is going to do as President, not even Donald Trump. It’s possible that Republican lawmakers and a cooperative administration will reduce harmful regulation and make the economy more efficient, though I’m skeptical. It’s possible that President Trump will be so preoccupied with settling his personal grudges that he doesn’t pay much attention to the business of governing, and we wind up with a pretty conventional Republican administration.

It’s also possible that President Trump will bumble, completely uninformed, into some issue that piques him and wreck everything in his path. For just one example, he could decide to shred the economy by unilaterally disrupting foreign trade as punishment for companies that have workers outside the US. He can’t generally impose tariffs without help from Congress, but there are plenty of administrative levers he can pull to achieve the same effect.

We really have no idea, because we have no precedent. Most of Trump’s policies are either obviously ludicrous (build a wall and make Mexico pay for it), impossibly vague, or wildly inconsistent. The man has a tendency to contradict himself on issues of substance, sometimes during the same speech.

My biggest worry is foreign policy. Our standing in the world is about to collapse. The world can’t address problems like climate change when the leader of the only superpower (no, China doesn’t count) denies it even exists. And while our role as the world’s policeman has not been especially successful of late, the power vacuum left by American isolationism will be much, much worse. Trump has already jeopardized the legitimacy of NATO’s mutual-defense provisions, maybe even the organization itself, by questioning whether the US should defend NATO members from Russian aggression.

The thought of Donald Trump as commander-in-chief of (by far) the most powerful military in the history of the world is genuinely terrifying. The Trump administration might refrain from intervening in places like Yemen where there’s no possible way to do good, but it could also provoke or even initiate a conflict elsewhere on the flimsiest of pretenses. We know from recent experience that it’s not too hard for a president to take the country into a full-blown war just because he wants to.

Donald Trump is not known for getting along peacefully with others, and he has the potential has the potential to wreak untold death and destruction with the arsenal at his command, even without considering nuclear weapons.

Like the Brexiteers and the Filipinos who elected Rodrigo Duterte (look him up), Americans in their frustration and anger have freely voted to reject institutions, norms, and order.

We have chosen chaos.

I Voted

I filled out my ballot today, and I voted for Hillary Clinton.

There are lots of other decisions on the ballot, many of which will have more practical effects on my life. I urge everyone to carefully consider everything on their ballot – it’s all important.

But in this post, I’m only going to discuss my choice for President.

Above all, I voted against Donald Trump. He is not fit to serve this country in any capacity, let alone lead it, and I will waste no further (virtual) ink on him.

I also voted for Hillary Clinton. I voted for her not just because she’s the least bad option, but because I believe she will be a positive force for this country. I can’t give her my full support, but then I haven’t unreservedly supported any major politician since Ronald Reagan, when I was too young to realize that every politician is a flawed human being.

For a start, it’s important to me to vote for the first woman to become President. Progress on equality for all Americans has been excruciatingly slow since, well, ever, and I believe that President Clinton will be a voice not just for women but for everyone who wants to live up to the declaration that “all men are created equal”.

I generally support the policy positions of the Democratic party, and much of the Republican platform seems downright extreme, especially compared to moderate party I remember from my childhood. But with the exception of climate change, which needs immediate, responsible action, my vote isn’t about whose policies I prefer. Given the extreme intransigence of the Republican party, I expect very little of President Clinton’s agenda to get through Congress anyway.

I want government to work, to accomplish the myriad things large and small that keep the country functioning every day. We clearly can’t trust the Republican Party with this task – they have spent the past thirty years trying to convince us that government is always the problem, never the solution, and that’s even before considering the spectacular ignorance of the party’s current candidate. The Democratic Party’s record is far from excellent – they usually advocate more government rather than better government as the solution to a particular problem – but I do have cause for hope. Hillary Clinton has more and broader experience in federal government than anyone who has ever run for President, and I believe that experience will make her an effective manager of the executive branch. When I voted for Barak Obama eight years ago, my biggest reservation was that he would lack the skills to run the executive branch effectively. His administration has been more competent than I expected – certainly better than the Bush administration – but we can always do better. That is why I’m voting for Hillary Clinton. She may well disappoint, but I have hope.

I do have reservations about the next Clinton administration. Bill Clinton’s policies on criminal justice and welfare reform, though universally supported at the time, have had devastating effects. As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy has gotten American involved in ugly, bloody conflicts across the Middle East, resulting in death and destruction across the region. Unfortunately, no public figure has been able to articulate anything better. Though broad principles apply, every situation is different in foreign policy, and right now an awful lot of those situations are going to turn out bad no matter what.

The rest of my reservations have to do with the general haze of dishonesty surrounding Clinton. The trouble is, the haze is all we can see. In all the hype about Benghazi! Benghazi! Benghazi! or the email server or whatever else, we’ve seen a lot of things that look vaguely shifty or shady, but no investigation has ever produced concrete proof of anything criminal or even seriously dishonest. If there were something real there, we’d have seen it by now.

Lust

A rant from the intersection of popular culture and politics.

I’ve lately been playing a little Diablo III before bed to kill some brain cells so I can sleep (doesn’t work, but that’s another topic). The game’s setting leans pretty heavily on western notions of heaven and hell. Act III focuses on Sin, and the last mini-boss is Cydaea, the Maiden of Lust. Cydaea is a creature rather like a centaur, with a spider’s body supporting a hyper-sexualized human female torso, and she speaks with a pouty, sultry voice. This got me thinking – not about the game (it’s about a millimeter deep), but about depictions of lust in our culture and history.

The personification of lust (specifically the sexual sort) is usually female. From the tortured women carved in Romanesque stone to pretty much anything on the internet these days, Lust is a woman, naked or nearly so.

This seems backwards to me. In the world where I live, lust is more of a male thing.

I’m not suggesting that women are delicate flowers, fainting at the mere thought of intimate contact with a man; quite the opposite. Women are sexual beings, just like men, fully capable of wanting, having, and enjoying sex. Women are fully capable of lust.

But both historically and in today’s culture, men tend to spend more effort in active pursuit of their sexual desires, especially the purely physical sort implied by the word lust. According to all the available data, men on average have more sexual partners than women and are more likely to cheat in their relationships. And prostitution is almost entirely about male customers seeking female prostitutes.

So why is lust depicted as female?

In part, I’d argue it’s another symptom of the double standard. Male sexual desire, even when it’s on the edge, is the norm. It’s excused. Boys will be boys, locker room talk, etc. Female sexual desire is judged by a different, harsher standard. We have a huge vocabulary to shame women who violate sexual norms – loose, easy, cheap, slut, whore, etc. – but basically nothing for men.

I think there’s more, though. The blame for male sexual misbehavior often falls at least partly on the woman. The vixen, the temptress, the painted Jezebel. That’s sometimes justified – two married people having an affair are equally culpable; a single woman is not completely blameless if she’s knowingly sleeping with a married man.

But far too often we blame women for men’s boorish (or worse) behavior even when it’s entirely out of their control. Getting catcalled on the street? It’s your fault for wearing a skirt. Creepy guy grabbed your ass on the subway? Shouldn’t have worn those tight leggings. And how many rape victims feel like they’re being violated all over again when they testify against their accusers, only to have the defense comb through their personal lives to paint them as sluts? How many never testify, for that exact reason?

It’s no accident that Cydaea’s lower body is a spider and not some other demon creature. She’s the black widow who tempts the virtuous man into her sinful embrace and then kills and eats him afterward. I don’t blame Blizzard for their sexy spider-demon; it works in the context the self-serious piece of cultural fluff that is Diablo III.

Lust isn’t always a bad thing; sometimes it’s just sexy fun. But when it’s channeled in the wrong direction, when it reduces another person to a sex object without her consent, it can be quite harmful. The background sexual harassment that women experience every day takes its toll; serious sexual assaults can ruin lives (and no, I’m not talking about Stanford swimming scholarships).

Creative people everywhere, if you want to personify Lust in all its debased glory, you can do better. Make him male, because, obviously. Make him a bloated orange grotesque. Give him a mane of ridiculous blonde fur. Give him yuuuuge genitals (because art is not reality) and tiny, tiny hands.

After all the awful stuff that’s been spewing out of the presidential race, particularly this weekend, I can think of no better avatar for the destructive, dehumanizing power of lust than Donald Trump.