Shamelessness and Disrspect.

All I'm askin'
Is for a little respect when you come home (just a little bit). . . .
R-E-S-P-E-C-T
Find out what it means to me
R-E-S-P-E-C-T
Take care, TCB
Oh (sock it to me, sock it to me
Sock it to me, sock it to me)
          Otis Redding "Respect," 1965; a breakout hit by Aretha Franklin, 1967

President Trump laid down a marker. His Truth Social video depicting him in a fighter jet, wearing a crown, dumping loads of poop on the heads of demonstrators sets a new low in presidential decorum. We can learn from it.

I have heard not a single tsk tsk from Republicans because the video is not a gaffe. It is intention. The glue that holds the GOP together is not policy on immigration, tariffs, taxes, health care, diversity, or anything else. It is cheering for the red team. It is getting Democrats to cry or sputter with frustration. That's the glue.

Do a thought experiment. Could Trump change positions on tariffs on a whim, and would Republicans go along? Yes, and indeed they have done so. Could he switch on Ukraine? Yes, and Republicans went along. Could Trump say that now he only wants to deport only 500,000 people a year, forget mass-deportation? Republicans would consent. GOP policy is whatever Trump wants. Policy is not the glue.

The glue is open contempt for Democrats.

What goes around comes around. Democratic politicians don't respond in kind, not exactly, but Democratic comedians do. South Park's animated characters show Trump with a tiny penis eagerly entreating Satan for more anal sex.

College classmate Erich Almasy seems almost old-fashioned as he bemoans the loss of shame and respect in our culture. He is right. But he reminds me of the Quaker wife of the sheriff in the movie "High Noon." She is morally right -- the killing should stop -- but the gang of murderers came on the noon train and the matter will be resolved with guns. She wants what she cannot have. (She ends up picking up a gun to save her husband. She bows to reality.)

Gary Cooper's sheriff character took off the badge and leaves town in the last scene of the movie. In the long run, she and Erich are right.

Trump's presidential style will end when we have the electoral version of a western shootout that resolved the issue in the movie; either the gang or the sheriff is shot dead. The way to get Trump-ism out of the American system is for voters to hand him decisive electoral defeat. Maybe we are better than Trump. 

I give Erich the last word, as did the movie.  He and his wife are retired business consultants, now living in Mexico. 

Erich Almasy and Cynthia Blanton

Guest Post by Erich Almasy

Two things worry me the most about the current state of politics today. The first is that “shame” has left our vocabulary and our psyche. Shame has Old English roots with a Proto-Germanic connection to the word “skamo.” Meaning disgrace, loss of esteem, and a feeling of guilt, the Germanic root also refers to “covering” oneself in it. 

Where has our shame gone? Do young Republicans (adults in 20s and 30s, not teens) feel no shame in using the N-word (and worse) to discuss Blacks? How do they ascribe good to Hitler without feeling something? Will anyone remember Joseph Welch’s famous riposte to Joe McCarthy, “Have you no decency, sir, at long last?” Note the use of “sir,” for even with Welch’s visible rage at the Wisconsin senator, this special counsel to the U.S. Army retained a sense of decorum. As a reminder of the cause, McCarthy had just named a young lawyer on Welch’s staff, Frederick G. Fisher, as a “subversive,” because he belonged to the National Lawyers Guild. The NLG was and is a national non-profit that provides legal assistance and technical support to immigrants, legal pratitioners, and advocates - sort of an ACLU comprised only of lawyers. Subversive was McCarthy’s dogwhistle word for “Communist,” and tarring someone with that brush in the days before social media (all Democrats in “No KIng” rallies are Marxists) was best done before House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) meetings. Of course, McCarthy had no decency, but, in those days, that actually mattered. Within six months, the Senate had censured McCarthy by a vote of 67 to 22. The result for McCarthy was that his committee assignments were taken away, his influence waned, and the press ignored him. Within three years he was dead.

My second big concern, relates to respect. So much of how the United States’s government operates, is based on a precedence of respect. Manner, positive behavior, and “couth,” have traditionaly been reflected in the way people treat each other. I first became concerned about an erosion of these values, when, in September 2009, President Obama gave a speech before a joint session of Congress about health care. After Obama stated, “There are also those who claim that our reform effort will insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false—the reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.” Before Obama could say another word, South Carolina Representative and Assistant Republican Whip, Joe Wilson, yelled out, “You lie!” Republican legislators quickly condemned the outburst, headlined by Senator John McCain’s comment, “Totally disrespectful, there is no place for it in that setting or any other and he should apologize immediately.” However, the die was cast and to this day, Republicans claim (falsely) that undocumented immigrants can apply for Medicare and Medicaid. 

My concern for respect cuts both ways. This past March, during President Trump’s State of the Union address, Texas Democratic Representative Al Green, shouted, “Mr. President, you don’t have a mandate,” right after Trump’s reference to cuts in Medicaid. Green was forcibly ejected from the chamber, and there was later discussion of his removal from office. Green’s outburst was no more acceptable than Wilson’s sixteen years earlier. Nor was the follow-up by Republicans with their shouts of "U-S-A! U-S-A!"

So where does this leave us? The loss of shame and the denigration of respect can both be traced to the approach Trump and MAGA take toward communication; communication that appears to bear no consequences. What happens next with the return of a Democratic Congress or president? Will this use of disgusting memes and abusive name-calling continue? Will Democrats choose “tit-for-tat?” Will we fire any civil servant who doesn’t swear to vote for Democrats? Will we fill the courts with ludicrous indictments? 

In the Godfather Vito Corleone says, “Revenge is a dish best eaten cold,” which is a paraphrase of the nineteenth-century French saying, “La vengeance est un plat qui se mange froide.” Will Democrats insist on taking vengeance later, because it will be so enjoyable? Can we ever again feel chagrin for our actions while respecting those who disagree with us?

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The winding Boomer journey

I was not a hippie.

I was clean-cut and "straight" by the standards of the time. 

I wanted to change the world for the better and thought that politics was the way to do it. Bad politics brought the war in Vietnam; I thought good politics might end it. I wanted to look acceptable to the adults who held political power so that I could persuade them to end the war in Vietnam before I was drafted to fight it. 

I have been thinking about what constituted good politics from childhood, when I watched school budget elections. In my teens I took the speech and debate classes taught by Jerry McDougle at Hedrick Junior High and by DeVere Taylor at Medford Senior High. I was hooked.

My post yesterday expressed concern that the "No Kings" rally was populated predominately by Boomers. Where were the people in their teens and twenties angry about the cost of college and the mismatch between incomes and housing prices? Aren't they pissed off that our generation is trashing the democratic norms of our republic? Where are the young idealists, the next generation of people like me back in the day?

Michael Trigoboff took a different path, but we ended up in a similar place, wondering what went wrong with the politics of our generation.

Young Michael Trigoboff

Trigoboff, taxi license

Trigoboff reports a more countercultural youth than mine. He makes a different point about young idealists. He observes that young people have ill-considered, dangerous ideas, so it is best that young idealists not get their way. They would mess things up even more than we Boomers did once we came into power.

Trigoboff recently, age 78

Both of us are at an age where we reflect on our generation. We succeeded in getting old. Readers might prepare themselves for his comment by listening to his humorous re-work of a song by Steppenwolf, "Born to be Wild." We were born to get old, and we can chuckle about it.

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1CsVaROYDY

Guest Post by Michael Trigoboff

I was one of the hippies who heard that Jefferson Airplane song back then and thought we were part of a cosmic consciousness revolution. But in the mid-1970s, about 9/10 of my generation suddenly stopped being hippies and started doing cocaine, wearing polyester leisure suits, and dancing to stupid music at discos. We hippies thought we were the revolution, but it turned out that most of us were just trend victims.

Not me, though. I am still a Grateful Deadhead hippie Buddhist. I never went to a disco in my life, and never wanted to. Tried cocaine twice, didn’t like it, and never did it again. Those experiences and a number of others taught me that my naïve youthful utopian idealism was dumb and needed a huge dose of practicality to have any hope of improving things.

We hippies were lucky that our revolution did not succeed, unlike the ones from then that did: the Chinese Cultural Revolution and Pol Pot in Cambodia. If we had succeeded, the bad karma from that “success” would likely have led to our next 10,000 incarnations being the caterpillars that get paralyzed by wasps and eaten alive from the inside out by wasp larvae.

Now the young people call us Boomers, and they say we are the problem. I won’t be around when they get to be my age and discover that a lot of what they thought when they were young was just plain wrong, and that now the even-younger people are blaming them for the state of the world.

But what goes around comes around, and they, too, will someday have their turn in the harsh light of condemnation by the clueless young.

 

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A joyful "No Kings" rally in Medford, Oregon

Trump: “I hear that very few people are going to be there."

Medford, noon Saturday

 

Trump: "I looked at all the brand new signs… I guess it was paid for by [George] Soros."

 

Trump: “The demonstrations were very small, very ineffective, and the people were whacked out. When you look at those people, those are not representative of the people of our country.”

 

It was a lovely October day. I felt a strong sense of déjà vu. 

Paul Simon's song, Kodachrome (R), went through my mind. He was stuck in the past. The nice bright colors, the greens of summer, and all the girls he knew when he was single who wouldn't match his sweet imagination. Laura Nyro played in my head: "Gonna wash you up, and wash you down. Gonna lay the devil down, gonna lay that devil down." And then, 

Save the people! Save the children! Save the country!

The lyrics to Jefferson Airplane's "Volunteers" came to mind. They were "Volunteers of America."

Hey, I'm dancing down the street
Got a revolution
Isn't it amazing all the people I meet
Got a revolution
One generation got old
One generation got sold
That generation got no destination to hold
. . . 
One generation going ahead
One generation went to bed
Come on now, we can do it
We can do anything, yeah

The "we" in that song is young people. 

The crowd on the sidewalk Saturday was a wonderful crowd, but I could not fail to see what I saw. The crowd skewed heavily toward people my age. Good people, people with good values. Boomers like me.

Boomers may not like it, but we are likely standing in the way of the change we want. We may need to open our minds to a future that is better for young people and worse for us. This was a crowd that wanted to restore something: democracy. We are conservative, in that sense. We are preservers, not creators. We are resisting bad change.

I suspect a revolution that brings change that benefits young people’s ability to buy homes, get out of debt, and get established as adults will be led by a young person who inspires young people. 

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Easy Sunday: Getaway

"No Kings" rally: There was a wonderful, glorious, friendly crowd in Medford yesterday. 

Pictures and a report tomorrow.

But what is a person to do if he wants to avoid the crush of other people -- even a friendly crush? He drives out of the city into the higher elevations that surround our valley. He finds a quiet place to enjoy nature in transition from green to yellow leaves, and from brown rock to white snow.

Tam Moore has been doing photojournalism for seven decades.

Photo from the late 1960s

Guest Post by Tam Moore

While tens of thousands of people hit the streets of America protesting what’s unfolding in this second Trump administration, my wife and I headed for the Cascade Mountains Saturday.

It’s time to look at the aspen trees as they shed their chlorophyll, carotenoid-laced leaves turning to yellow and orange. Here in Southern Oregon, the show unfolds along state highway 140 from its Cascade summit near Lake of the Woods east to the flats bordering Upper Klamath Lake.

Mount McLoughlin, a steep extinct volcano located about 10 miles north of the lake, keeps watch over the changing forest. Its peak is 9,493 feet above sea level, heaped with rock from the last eruption about 30,000 years ago. Conifers cloak the mountain below its jumble of volcanic rock. When terrain levels, and abundant water exists beneath the surface, families of aspen creep up to joust with the taller pines and fir trees.

Fresh snow dapples the higher peaks. Bright October sun warms the clumps of golden aspen. No one is talking about “hate America rallies,” or how the United States birthed itself, rejecting an autocratic king. It’s a good Saturday to be out in the high country.

The big display of fall color in Southern Oregon takes place less in high-elevation nature than it does in cities, where home landscapers and city arborists planted trees with the intention of getting a splash of bright fall color. In town, at the elevation of 1200 to 1600 feet, we have another week or two to wait for the bright reds and oranges.

Tomorrow:  A report on people, signs, waves, and honking horns.

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Seething MAGA

The First Amendment gives Trump and his MAGA followers the right to believe and speak ridiculous nonsense.

Be careful out there today.

I expect today's No Kings protests mostly to be feel-good events, people encouraged by seeing like-minded people. 

But that is not everyone. Today's post is a reminder that there are Americans who think we are part of a global network at war with the United States.

White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said:

The Democrat [sic] Party’s main constituency are made up of Hamas, terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals. That’s who the Democrat [sic] Party is catering to. They don’t stand for anything except catering to the far-left base, which as I said includes anti-semites, includes far left terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals who they want to let off to freely to roam our American streets.

Trump, Fox, and MAGA people on social media have a story to sell: The opposition to Trump is a dark, foreign, often-Jewish, secret cabal, funded with taxpayer money. It conflates opposition to Trump with subversive terrorist attacks against Trump and America itself. The people attacking the Capitol on January 6, 2021 were patriots; the people on the streets today are terrorists.

Isn't this just cynical propaganda?  Isn't it just exaggerated nonsense to feed the gullible in their party, and to get "likes" and reposts?  

Possibly so. They present a curated story line that comes across as disciplined rather than organic. That does not mean it isn't effective. The find-a-scapegoat-to-demonize campaign has worked. Some Republican voters hear it and believe it -- enough of them to maintain party discipline. That group includes people who should know better.  A Trump-supporting Republican who reads this blog, a well-educated professional, sent me this letter. It is a heads up.

Antifa's Portland stronghold crumbled as police executed precise sweeps, arresting ringleaders and scattering crowds.

TikToker reports: "They thought the streets of Portland were theirs." Not anymore. Antifa's so-called stronghold just turned into their biggest defeat yet. Police swept through downtown Portland with military precision—riot squads, lasers, shields—taking down Antifa ringleaders one by one. The crowd scattered in panic. Some radicals who once ruled the streets now run from the law.

But it's not just about arrests. The Trump administration just launched a scorched-earth campaign to hunt down every single financier and dark-money donor funding this chaos. The DOJ, FBI, Treasury, and IRS are working together to trace every dollar flowing into Antifa's operation. And yes, that means billionaire donors like George Soros, Reid Hoffman, and Neville Roy Singham are officially in the crosshairs. Trump's new directive is clear: if you fund street violence, your books are getting opened. Your tax exemptions are gone.

Now the Government Accountability Institute has blown the lid off Antifa's entire operation—fake charities, bail funds, paid protesters, and propaganda networks disguised as activism. Trump's response? RICO charges, asset seizures, the IRS probes targeting every nonprofit connected to the web. The message is simple: law and order is back. This isn't just about Portland, either. It’s about ending the far-left chaos that's infected cities across America for years. The days of violent radicals burning and looting with impunity are over.

Even Soros’ own allies are sweating bullets as the crackdown expands. For the first time, the people who funded America's destruction are facing real consequences. This is Trump's America-first justice in full force. Antifa is crumbling, the far-left's street army is finished, and their billionaire puppet masters are next. 

Be careful out there on the sidewalks today. Don't let anyone pick a fight with you. There are people out there who have eaten a diet of information junk food, and believe it. Some of them are angry. 

Give them wide berth.

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No King. No Dictator.

I will be busy tomorrow at 11 a.m. 

I will be at one of the thousands of No Kings protest rallies.

No, I am not being paid by George Soros. 

I am not a Marxist. I am not a terrorist. I will have made my sign myself. I will be carrying an American flag. I will be unarmed. I will be assembling peaceably. 

I will be the opposite of everything that President Trump and his MAGA supporters claim we are. 

I have a purpose. Demonstrating will do some real good in the world. My mood will be brightened by seeing like-minded people and some will take heart from seeing me. That will increase the world's supply of happiness and hope -- a good thing.

Trump is selling the idea that anyone who opposes him hates America. He says we are part of the "radical left" and that America is “under invasion from within." He says his critics are anti-American terrorists and our military should “take them out.” 

House Speaker Mike Johnson held a press conference, with other GOP leaders surrounding him in support. These were thought-out, prepared remarks:

We call it the ‘hate America’ rally that will happen Saturday. Let’s see who shows up for that, I bet you’ll see Hamas supporters, I bet you’ll see antifa types, I bet you’ll see the Marxists on full display, the people who don’t want to stand and defend the foundational truths of this republic.

I have a second purpose by being on the sidewalk on Saturday. I hope to change minds, in the way that political opinions can change. I don't expect MAGA cultists to throw away their red hats and start voting for Democrats. It doesn't work that way. But ideas float out in the political atmosphere. Opinions congeal without people particularly noticing it. Often it isn't one thing; it is everything, and then people's realize they feel differently about something.

For example, many of us felt that Joe Biden went from being "old" to "too old," even in the years before the disastrous debate. His brand changed. Something flipped. We could be cautious about Biden in 2020, but OK with him. By 2024 something had crossed over. He was too old, and too stubborn to admit it.

Same with the Tesla brand. It used to imply a paradigm-changing, cutting edge, technologically savvy future.  It was creative destruction in a good way. Tesla was cool. Now Tesla implies quick-and-dirty destruction by a careless, entitled guy on drugs, making shoddily-constructed cars with overpromised features. It wasn't just Elon. It wasn't just the Cybertruck monster. It was everything. The very idea of "Tesla" changed.

Trump has a brand. I hope to be a tiny grain of sand in the gears of that brand. My hope is that my presence will demonstrate that Trump is telling a lie so obviously contradicted by plain reality that even MAGA cultists -- a few of them at least -- conclude that their idol is lying to them. They will see that Trump isn't opposed by some stigmatized dangerous group, but that he is opposed by people attempting to preserve, not destroy, American democracy. Hitler made Jews the enemy of the people of Germany and got enough buy-in to consolidate power. Trump is trying to make Saturday's protesters look like a dangerous enemy of the USA, for his own purposes. I hope to make it hard for him.

Trump has done an extraordinary job of getting thought-conformity among Republicans. Trump sold Trumpism. He controls the levers of government power.

What Trump cannot control, though, is how people think about him. Is he a brave, swashbuckling leader who fixed the immigration problem and got things done -- the kind of can-do leader America can be proud of? Or does the balance tip against him. Maybe, just maybe, Americans will see that Trump's accusations are so full of B.S. that people see through it and Trump himself. I hope, by my presence, to show that what Trump says about his opponents isn't just wrong. It is preposterous.

At some point people see that the king has no clothes. Then everything changes.

Photographed at the June rally in Medford

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Vineyard Update: Reversal of fortune

Birds wiped out my Malbec crop. 

Skip this post if you come for the politics, not the agriculture. 

"Monday morning (bah da, bah da-day da)
It was all l hoped it would be
But Monday morning, Monday morning couldn’t guarantee
That Monday evenin’ you would still be here with me. . . .

     John Phillips, "Monday, Monday" sung by the Mamas and the Papas, 1966

My Malbec crop disappeared. It was there on Sunday, October 12. Wednesday, October 15, it was gone.

The Malbecs had done so well that at the end of August I needed to drop fruit so that the vines could better ripen the remaining fruit. This August 30 photo shows grape clusters on the ground.

Malbecs normally ripen behind Pinot Noirs. The sweetness report I had two weeks ago indicated that the Pinot Noirs were ready to harvest and that we might wait a week for the Malbecs.

We picked the Pinot Noirs on October 6. There was no bird loss at all. My Malbecs looked fine on Sunday. We were waiting for a break in the rain and an available picking crew. It turns out that that wait was a fatal mistake.

Yesterday this. Sometimes picked clean: 

Sometimes half-picked: 

The bees were going crazy with the free sugar on the grapes the birds hadn't gotten to yet:

The grapes that are left aren't worth picking. 

This third year in the vineyard was intended to be a grow-healthy-vines year not a marketable-harvest year. This harvest was going to be a bonus. I chalk this up as a valuable lesson. In the future possibly I have a window of a few days after picking the Pinot Noirs when the Malbecs are ripe and pickable, but before the birds discover the vineyard. I probably could have picked the Malbecs on Saturday had a crew been available. Or maybe, by chance, the birds would have discovered the Malbecs a week earlier and the real solution is stringing up nets to protect the Malbecs and Cabernet Sauvignons. It will take work and money, but I can do that.

We will live and learn. And try to have a happy heart. 

The first popular song that came into my teenage consciousness back in 1962 was a rock instrumental by the Surfaris. It began with a three seconds of laughter and then a drum solo. It was my first glimpse into teen culture and music as a member of that generation. The title is "Wipe Out." If you are lucky enough to have been young in 1962, you will remember it. In surfing, if you are wiped out, you laugh about it and get back onto the board and try again.

https://youtu.be/p13yZAjhU0M?si=uv6Sc7GLNsHZ0-gC

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