On Saving America — Grapes Not Wrath
WILD OLIVES, France — Finally, a gleam of hope tinged with euphoria cut through despair down my rutted road in deepest Provence.
America soon might have a leader who speaks plainly and carries a big law book. Its porcine ex-president, intent on an Orwellian Animal Farm where self-anointed pigs rule hapless beasts of burden, now faces a border collie with a taste for pork chops.
Kamala Harris is ready to take on the world. She works hard in the shadows to rally allies and face down adversaries. Joe Biden, spared backbiting from faithless politicians and gotcha reporters, can be a wise old dog who teaches her his old tricks.
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Human nature remains as Aristotle defined it: A greedy few bent on power can cynically exploit others to get it. But far more people are ready to do the right thing once they know what that is.
A groundswell of top-level Democratic support is stirring the grassroots. Donors are back. In just a day and a half, party coffers swelled by $100 million, nearly as much as the Biden campaign brought during all of June.
If momentum carries over to elections for Congress and state legislatures, America may finally pass laws to take its distorted democracy off the free market, making way for future leaders who put patriotism over patronage.
In France, presidential candidates face prosecution if they spend more than 22.5 million euros ($25 million) in a one-month campaign. TV airtime is equally shared. Trump recently promised to give fossil fuel executives free rein if they added a billion dollars to his coffers.
Just look at that pair of distasteful M & M’s — Elon Musk and Rupert Murdoch. Both are immigrants who came to America to make fortunes. One shaped major media into propaganda tools. The other…where do I start?
Until moments before the final decision, each pushed Trump hard to pick a preferred vice president. Money pours in from Peter Thiel, born in Germany and so uncommitted to America that he keeps a New Zealand passport in reserve.
The Wall Street Journal, owned by Murdoch, reported Musk planned to give $45 million a month to a new super-PAC pushing Trump’s return to power. Later, Musk posted on X-Twitter, a personal megaphone for his outsized ego: “FAKE GNUS.”
A new broom in Washington can also clean up the courts. Harris, a tenacious terrier as a prosecutor, promises to ensure that an honest Justice Department and judges with integrity pursue high crimes by an ex-president and lesser ones by the lowlifes around him.
I’ve mostly reported abroad, watching political looniness back home from a distance. After covering war and peace in every part of the world for 60 years, I know why a sane, strong America is so crucial to keep the lid on Pandora’s box. Especially now.
I write this among ancient olives and grapevines in an Old World where a fragile center still holds against the sort of ultra-nationalist racist authoritarian forces that sparked a global clash of civilizations in the 1930s. The mass suffering it caused remains in living memory.
The Republican convention, buffoonish yet bone-chilling, made clear that if Americans cannot restore sanity by November, our world is toast — figuratively as demagogy muscles aside democracy. And then, in less time than we think, literally.
As our ecosystem collapses, Earth is sloughing off inhabitants by the millions while costing trillions. Storms, drought, floods, heat and fire imperil food supplies. So far, nature is only clearing her throat. Aggressive global action is atop the Democrats’ platform.
In Lincoln’s day, you couldn’t fool all the people all the time. Today, you only need fool enough people in a few key states until they catch on and find it is too late. Which bring us to J.D. Vance.
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Like Trump, Vance is a chameleon with blind ambition, ready to abandon a world that needs the opposite. Unlike Trump, he is smart, young and articulate. His personal saga, disputed by many who know him, enthralls voters who put optics above substance.
After an intense investigation, that assassination attempt appears to have been a troubled misfit’s dramatic suicide, perhaps influenced by Trump’s years of hate speech. Yet within hours, while the nation called for unity, Vance blamed it squarely on Biden.
If Trump wins and does not implode before half of his term, Vance would have more than eight years to stamp out what remains of the America that picked up the pieces after World War II and then championed global accords to protect basic human values.
Biden managed near miracles at home and abroad to clean up Trump’s shambles despite a Republican stone wall. But a New Yorker cartoon nailed with rueful humor the dis-United States he faced.
Labeled “Audio Recording Session,” it shows a man at the mic trying for a tone that would resonate among listeners. “Instead of careful interpretation of the prose,” his technician tells him, “maybe try pronouncing even the most basic words like an insane person.”
Now it seems the buffoonish, yet bone-chilling Republican convention jolted Americans back toward reality. Republicans will cheat, massively and shamelessly. Beyond the White House and legislatures, every public office down to dogcatcher now matters.
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Americans who care about their progenies’ future now need to see in detail what has gone wrong – and why. Equipped with hard facts and big-picture context, they can energize others to drive informed voters to the polls in November. There is not a day to waste.
An ex-president dragged America down Alice’s rabbit hole and now blames the havoc he wreaked on the administration that is cleaning up his mess. Expect him to come back as a vengeful monarch who shouts, like the mad queen, “Off with their heads!”
A brush with near death produced no kinder, gentler Donald Trump. At the convention, he spoke a bit more softly. He wore an outsized white patch on his ear and played to sympathy. But jackals don’t change their stripes any more than leopards do their spots.
His 93-minute acceptance speech, incoherent and often nonsensical, was so larded with the same old assault on truth that no amount of factchecking can make a dent in it. (Stephen Colbert’s and John Oliver’s monologues are attached.)
Trump instinctively goes for the gonads when anyone challenges him. His skill at whipping up mass adulation forces political rivals to forget his past cruel slurs to secure their own place at the public trough.
While he golfed and fired off tweets in office, aides blunted his worst depredations. A vice president and generals thwarted his coup d’état. This time around, voters may simply hand over America’s keys like those befuddled animals Orwell imagined.
Vance’s disregard for global crises is barely mentioned in crazy talk that dominates American discourse. He harps on the border backup, for which Trump is responsible – and who now blocks bipartisan solutions so he can blame Democrats.
The party line says, yes, Vance called Trump “America’s Hitler” but saw the light after looking beyond media distortions. Not exactly.
He wrote a friend in 2018: “I go back and forth between thinking Trump might be a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad…or that he might be America’s Hitler. How’s that for discouraging?”
He told Charlie Rose he was a “never-Trump guy.” In another interview, he called Trump “the most-raw expression of a massive finger pointed at other people.” Some who know him well say he railed against Trump at length in private.
Today, Vance amounts to America’s Goebbels in line to be Führer. That sounds extreme. But top-down control in a big-money plutocracy backed by Christian zealots and one-party ideologues is bad enough.
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A first Democratic priority is to unpack the courts. The Supreme Court has the last word on everything that matters. Blatantly corrupt, clearly biased and inept justices are untouchable. So are Circuit and District Court judges, also appointed by the president.
It is hard to image a crime higher than a president purloining top secrets restricted to only five trusted allies. He hid them from the FBI, and classified documents were strewn around Mar-a-Lago where Chinese and Russian agents might find them.
Unless, of course, it is extorting a new Ukrainian president facing Russians on his border for dirt on a political rival. Or inciting an armed mob to storm the Capitol with a noose for the vice president.
Judge Aileen Cannon, appointed by Trump, disqualified special prosecutor Jack Smith, breaking a 30-year precedent on such investigators.
Besides renting political influence, big money funds a propaganda deluge with partisan “news” organizations and websites that follow Steve Bannon’s plan: “Flood the zone with shit.” Rightwing groups buy up once-trusted newspapers, TV channels and radio networks.
A lot of solid factual reporting helps Americans get the story straight at home. Abroad, few seasoned correspondents stay in place long enough to put “breaking news” into essential context. Misleading narratives implant themselves as established fact.
But the First Amendment is sacrosanct. Governments cannot muzzle free expression as Trump vows to do. Instead, America needs professional educators in well-funded public schools to teach kids civics, curiosity about the world and how to think for themselves.
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When I began making Biden’s case in 2020, I only expected a sturdy old shoe with a lifetime of experience and contacts to lead America back to firm ground. In office, he exceeded all expectations.
The World Bank’s annual report, out last month, credits the U.S, economy for doing the most to help rich and poor countries alike emerge from the pandemic. Its 2023 growth rate, 2.5 percent, was twice Japan’s and a half point above Europe’s.
He pushed vital infrastructure and poverty-reducing legislation through a Republican stone wall. He managed to keep much of his promise on student loans. Bernie Sanders calls Biden the most progressive president in his lifetime.
In my own lifetime, about as long as Biden’s and Bernie’s, no president has better handled foreign affairs. He rallied NATO against Russia and mollified a hostile China. Despite political pressure at home, he forced concessions from Israel while keeping Iran at bay.
Guesswork analysts on nonstop babble TV say Biden clung to his job after that turning-point debate because of power lust — the presidency is addicting. A common narrative says he was furious because Barack Obama favored Hillary Clinton over him.
Facts suggest a truer narrative. Biden, grieving over a son who died after service in Iraq, was ambivalent. By the time he decided to run, Clinton had a strong lead. He settled gracefully into family life.
I believe what he says. He stepped up after Trump goons in Charlottesville paraded in Nazi getup chanting, “Jews will not replace us.” He knows history and what Aristotle meant about human nature. After undoing much of Trump’s damage, he wanted to finish the job.
But reporters scrutinized his every word and gesture while ignoring Trump’s demented gobbledygook. Democrats squabbled aloud. Biden made way for his understudy with impeccable timing and his full support.
Harris offers fresh energy within the same effective administration. Biden has six more months at the helm. Then, free of ageist slurs, he can work in the background. Jimmy Carter, dumped after one term, went on to spend three decades making the world better.
Voters have 100 days to compare Republicans to Democrats. The case is open and shut.
Deceit underlies Republican simplifications of the main issues: the southern border and inflation. Their twist on Robin Hood — take from the poor to help the rich — has global repercussions. It does much to answer that hoary question: why they hate us?
Cheap alternative energy can phase out fossil fuels. Yet Republican leaders bolster big oil, depending on funds from industries that poison everyone’s planet for short-term profit. No court can regard this as a crime against humanity. But voters can.
Wars bleed out Ukraine and inflame the Unholy Land. A look at cause, not effect, points to Trump. His fanboy crush on Vladimir Putin and disdain for NATO triggered the first.
Bias toward Benjamin Netanyahu’s hardliners and his Iran folly led to the second.
Dozens of conflicts engulf places few Americans can find on a map. Poverty forces families to find refuge across borders. New pandemics are almost inevitable in a world not equipped to contain them. Yet Republicans want to slash “foreign aid.”
An authoritarian America would help China and Russia push global totalitarian control. India is the world’s largest democracy only on paper. A hermit tyranny in Korea, contained under Barack Obama, now plays nuclear chicken. Soon, so might Iran.
Last on this abbreviated list — hardly the least — are the estimated 500,000 Americans who are dead because of Trump’s self-focused Covid-19 response.
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Down here at Wild Olives, I’m uncorking the pastis and crossing my fingers. Americans have 100 days before the most important election in human history. Chances are good that Democrats will get it right.
Republicans drafted a platform this year, but their vindictive demagogic leader can do whatever he wants. Late last year, he was blunt about what that is:
“We pledge to root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections. They’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American Dream.”
If that’s not enough to fortify hope with action, nothing will.
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