Op-Ed

“The president reiterated his firm support for Israel’s right to defend itself against indiscriminate rocket attack,” The Guardian has informed us, as conflict flares once more in the Middle East. But, oh the humanity! Good guy Joe also “encouraged Israel to make every effort to ensure the protection of innocent civilians.”

Bombs and missiles are one thing, but the United States and its allies have learned how to soften their effect with public relations. So yes, shoot missiles into Gaza — it’s the only way to be safe, apparently — but “make every effort” to shrug your shoulders and bleed regret that more than 200 Palestinians, including 61 children, have died, as of a few days ago, in this effort to punish terrorists and keep Israel safe.

It’s the job of progressive advocates and activists to tell inconvenient truths, without sugarcoating or cheerleading. To effectively confront the enormous problems facing our country and world, progressives need to soberly assess everything -- good, bad and mixed.

Yet last week, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Pramila Jayapal, made headlines when she graded President Biden’s job performance. “I give him an ‘A’ so far,” Jayapal said in an otherwise well-grounded interview with the Washington Post. She conferred the top grade on Biden even though, as she noted, “that doesn’t mean that I agree with him on every single thing.”

America is not a racist country,” Republican senator Tim Scott of South Carolina said in his party’s official response to President Biden’s address to the nation on April 28. There are reasons that should have been a laugh line: Biden did not say America was a “racist country,” the Black senator was rebutting the president’s call for racial justice across all ethnicities, and the reality is that America was founded as a country in which owning and selling Black people was justified and legalized on the basis of the racist doctrine that they were part of an inferior race. Scott didn’t get a laugh. He wasn’t trying to be funny. He was being intellectually dishonest and uttering a coded racist call to the white supremacist cohort of the Republican party that he is tolerant of their different, racist point of view. That’s where denial takes you, into crazy-land.

Basically, Derek Chauvin was convicted of enforcing the status quo. Because his behavior was caught on video — his knee on George Floyd’s neck, oh my God, choking him to death — and looked so disturbing to most of the public, official American “justice” had to take some sort of action.

He became a scapegoat.

Let’s use up the planet and bless the future with its corpse.

If politics involved speaking the truth, those words could well be the core slogan of mainstream politicians and their media cohorts, with the purpose of the election process (you know, democracy) being, simply, to choose the specific ways in which we continue exploiting the planet and ignoring the consequences.

Should we destroy the rainforests quickly or slowly? How much should be invest in the next generation of nuclear weapons and — come on! — when do we get to use them to protect our freedoms? We can’t afford to save the planet but we can definitely afford to kill it. But let’s do it carefully and responsibly.

There’s an alternative to this thinking, but I’m not sure when or how it will gain sufficient political and economic traction in today’s world to have an impact: to change official thinking and basic assumptions about the nature of reality. This alternative emerges from wisdom at the core of human consciousness, which the “developed” world chose to abandon and forget in millennia past. It’s often referred to these days as indigenous thinking, but it doesn’t belong in a museum.

“Get out of the car! Get out of the car NOW!!”

The officer — the mad man with a badge — probably shouts those words 50 times at the driver, Second Lt. Caron Nazario, at a gas station in Windsor, Va., all the while holding a gun a foot from his face. Nazario, who is black and Latino, had just been pulled over for not having a rear license plate (he did have one but, you know, we all make mistakes) and . . . fasten your seatbelts! . . . driving with tinted windows. Of course the cops had their guns drawn.

The anniversary of his assassination always brings a flood of tributes to Martin Luther King Jr., and this Sunday will surely be no exception. But those tributes -- including from countless organizations calling themselves progressive -- are routinely evasive about the anti-militarist ideals that King passionately expressed during the final year of his life.

You could call it evasion by omission.

The standard liberal canon waxes fondly nostalgic about King’s “I have a dream” speech in 1963 and his efforts against racial segregation. But in memory lane, the Dr. King who lived his last year is persona non grata.

The Lorax speaks for the trees.

Trump canceled him.

Trump’s Zombie Cultists are in a snit about Dr. Seuss. They whine about questioning his older books over issues of racism, sexism, and antisemitism. They moan about a “cancel culture.”

WE CALL BS!!!!

Theodore Seuss Geisel’s sixty-plus books have sold more than 700,000,000 copies worldwide. They are uniquely brilliant …charming, funny, irreverent, sassy, thought-provoking. They preach tolerance, fellowship, responsibility, good will, creative thinking … all the stuff Trump and his disciples so clearly hate.

Anti-authoritarian (Yertle the Turtle) and anti-materialistic (The Grinch Who Stole Christmas), Seuss provoked (like Mad Magazine), some of the first out-of-the-box excursions for millions of readers, young and younger.

Like early Disney, the Marx Brothers’ Day at the Races, and other ancient icons, some of Dr. Seuss’s early works have cringe-worthy passages with racist and sexist imagery.

Pardon me while I break the fourth wall.

I’m in the human stew right now, you might say: drowning in politics, technology, the weather and my own crazy ego. I’m trying to write a column.

What makes this one different . . .well, I’ve been forced today to set aside my certainties, norms and expectations — virtually all of them. Certainty number one: that my computer will keep functioning as I write.

This morning — a dozen or so hours ago — I sat at my machine and it was working fine except for one thing: letters didn’t appear on my screen when I hit the keys. This is called writing. I’m an excellent writer, or so I tell myself, but my computer pointed out to me that if I can’t create letters and form them into words, then I can’t write. This was certainly an infuriating mystery, but I still had a few possibilities I could access to maintain situation normal. Well, I had one possibility. Call Geek Squad.

Imagine a “USA!” that has truly outgrown – transcended – racism. Would it still have a Republican Party?

One recent and shocking – but hardly surprising – piece of news is the huge scramble in legislatures, especially the Republican-controlled ones, all across the country to draft and pass legislation restricting the ability of Americans (some of them, anyway) to vote. It’s as though there’s a national effort going on to repeal the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and return to a happier time: Let’s make America great again!