My humble apologies for being so wrong yesterday in stating my belief that Trumpapalooza was running low on fuel.  In defense of my erroneous surmise, I did package it as  a belief rather than a prediction. Nonetheless, here we are with the prospect of a Fourth Reich, with JD Vance as Minnie Me, and Steven Miller and who-knows-what-else-the-tide-will-bring-in as loyal henchmen & henchwomen; (perhaps henchpersons is the proper term ?).

I was reminded of the magnitude of my miscalculation as I recalled the sound advice on a small sign behind the bar of a popular bar in downtown Palo Alto, Don’t believe everything you think.

Purging the system of the virus appears to require another onslaught of dis-ease. I think I was correct in stating that it will be a rough ride with substantial pain and some great losses, but if we can manage to disenthrall ourselves, the probability of future successes quickly multiplies as we are now hobbling ourselves by wasting incredible amounts of time and energy over what can only charitably be called absolute shit, or, to use a popular current euphemism, a hot steaming mess.

It is perhaps fruitful to remember that the entire Third Reich ran from Adolf Hitler’s rise to Chancellor in February, 1933, to his admission of defeat in May, 1945. If we start the clock for Donny Johnny with Escalator Ride to this current low point, we already have a decade in on the job and may be past the worst in a couple of years ? Just a thought. And, if you calculate that our trouble began back in the George W coup of November 2000, and then ceding all moral authority worldwide in protracted senseless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with Authorizing Use of Military Force (AUMFs) fully endorsed by Congress and accepted by the American people, you can get a better idea of how far into the abyss we have sunk in the past quarter century. In fact, if you really desire some insight into what has happened to our country and the Two Party System we claim to revere and support, it can be found in just two words, Gaza Genocide, as far as I can tell, fully underwritten by the USA.

My final advice, to the Democratic Party: Try to pass the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) before attempting again to run a woman for the highest office in the land. You’ve got to learn to walk before you can run.

I am one of millions who want something other than what we’ve got and do not yet see viable political partners in our struggle to combat oligarchy and inequality.

Marx famously once said about sincerity in politics, “Once you learn how to fake sincerity, you’ve got it made” . . . that would be Groucho Marx, not Karl Marx. I must admit I never really mastered the faking of much of anything; and the only other advice from Groucho that I remember offhand is that outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend, and inside a dog it’s too dark to read. Some of my analyses are informed by dialectic materialism and the concept of class conflict, and there is no reason why we should not put to use European ideas that have been in circulation for nearly 200 years if they help us to straighten our paths to political success.

The more extensive rendering of my concept of socialism with republican values as its backbone is stated in the book I wrote under the pen-name of Jean Valjean, titled Delusion and Abandonment, and the 2nd Edition published last year includes a postscript delineating the strategy for my campaign that has been referenced in these posts at this site. Specifics as to the direction that the 117th Congress will need to take are there as is some philosophical background to bolster my attack on binary thinking and the danger we face from reducing complex problems to a false dichotomy by getting muddled up and tied down in oversimplifications. I believe what you have read at this site is not over-simplified; and, yes, it’s a description of the  monopoly in the political arena of United States government through the bifurcation of political alliances into only two groups in such a fashion as to be injurious to our future as a country and more broadly to the survival of our species and planet.

If we are not able to stage an advance on those issues that I referred to as ‘low hanging fruit’, progress on the life and death challenges related to managing climate change will escape us through lost time. We know the basic facts about increasing global temperature and what that indicates about the adjustments that we need to make in a world economy that runs on fossil fuel. The evidence, of course, is more broadly registered in worldwide occurrences such as melting glaciers and ice shelves, collapsing species counts for creatures as diverse as large mammals and amphibians, and catastrophic events such as wildfires, hurricanes and floods. But putting actual numbers to the phenomenon is not hard. We are already over 400ppm in carbon dioxide and we do not seem to be gaining ground on stopping temperature increases. Limiting an increase to 1.5 degrees C above the pre-industrial levels between now and end of the century seems out of reach as we could double that barrier over the next 20 years unless we do better than the 2015 Paris Agreement from which we have conspicuously withdrawn. With world population over seven billion the impacts to peoples all over the world will be such that we need to craft worldwide approaches to public health, education and statecraft that are not based on permanent warfare and economic exploitation and extraction of natural resources. In other words, we need to act even as we talk and plan if we wish to survive as societies that enjoy the benefits that civilization has brought to many all over the world over the last 500 years of history.

It would appear that the Age of Trump has run it’s course as the man himself has been totally unequal to the job. While playing to the cameras the heavy lifting has not been done. In addition, things like logging the Tongass National Forest, opening the Arctic Wildlife Refuge to drilling, and destroying Alaska’s Bristol Bay are suicidal miscalculations. We need to leave all of the man and his approach behind. I always liked Billy Connolly’s take on the old saying, “Don’t criticize a man until you’ve walked a mile in his shoes”. He adds, “and then after you have, what’s the point ? . . .  he’s a mile behind you and you have his shoes”.

In a very real sense the corona virus pandemic has given the world opportunities of time, space and focus to recalibrate and to alter significantly the way that the world has organized itself in the modern age. For me this tempers the pain of my defeat in this election and leaves me optimistic over what we can next do to address our problems.  But act we must, and with some urgency.

Women in the United States won the right to vote 100 years ago when the 19th Amendment was ratified on August 18, 1920; but challenges to removing the vestiges of second class citizenship remain. Although the 14th Amendment went a long way in trying to eradicate the denial of ‘the equal protection of the laws’, ever since it was ratified in1868 there has been a struggle to fulfill its promise. When the 15th Amendment was ratified less than two years later it inserted gender into the document for the first time, and, as Eric Foner has noted, Elizabeth Cady Stanton warned, “If that word ‘male’ be inserted, it will take us a century at least to get it out.”

That century is more than over, and the time is now long overdue for women no longer to be subjugated to any remnants of their chattel status. With the passage of a 28th Amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing gender equality, the state legislatures and the courts will not be able to apply their tortured reasoning to the issues of comparable pay, reproductive rights and other traditional and historical patterns of patriarchal abuse and denial of rights. This will not only help women, but will improve the status of children and men, increased dignity and integrity being only a few of the beneficial side effects of this action.

I believe that this change is supported by a large majority of Americans. Simple justice requires that it be done now.