Breaking news: The Pope might be Christian

MAGA world fumes: "WOKE MARXIST POPE."

MAGA Christians fear the pope believes in and advocates unrealistic redistributionist "love your neighbor" ideas.

Such teaching is found intermittently in the New Testament, described there as the sum of all Christian doctrine. 

There are indications that the new pope is concerned about "social justice," a left-coded idea regularly condemned by President Trump.

Worse, Christian instruction specifically includes feeding the hungry, curing the sick, helping the penniless, welcoming the immigrant, and other acts of compassion to friends, strangers, and known enemies. This instruction exists in holy texts. There is worrisome indication that the new pope intends to follow that instruction. Self-sacrificing behavior contradicts rational self-interest in a capitalist economy. Humans are a status-conscious social species, and advancing others at personal expense is contrary to human nature, personal survival, and reproductive success. It is a unpromising and rarely-attempted strategy. Trump's first actions as president included cutting U.S. food and medical aid to strangers.

MAGA opposition researchers learned that the new pope took the name Leo, making him the 14th Leo, in honor of Pope Leo XIII who was known to be an advocate for social justice -- a worrisome sign. The new pope had at one point tweeted, "May all hatred, violence and prejudice be eradicated." Influential Trump advisor Laura Loomer condemned this, identifying it as "marxist."

In Pope Leo XIV's first homily, he confronted the improbability and apparent unpopularity and impracticality of a Christian duty of care toward others. Yet he persisted in advocating for it:

"Today, there are many contexts in which the Christian faith is considered absurd, contexts in which other certainties are preferred, such as technology, money, success, power, pleasure, These are environments where it is not easy to witness and preach the Gospel, and where believers are ridiculed, persecuted, despised or, at best, tolerated and pitied."

Pope Leo is correct. Trump and his MAGA base identify those such people as "losers," "woke," and "social justice warriors," which is expressed as a sneer. 

Pope Leo homily referenced the non-Christian behavior of people purporting to be followers of Christ:

Jesus, although valued as a person, is reduced to something like a charismatic leader or superman. And this is not only among non-believers, but also among many baptized people who ultimately live at this level, in a kind of practical atheism. 

The new pope's remarks over the decades include some troubling implications for Trump's coalition of populist conservatives and multi-billionaire tech moguls. The pope had warned that technology may weaken direct human relationships. He has said that "dominion" over the Earth requires balance, which may signal support for a green agenda.

But the primary concern among the MAGA critics is his apparent effort to link the teaching of Jesus Christ, and the obligations of the Christian faithful, to poor, displaced, marginalized people. Trump, especially in this second term, represents an oscillation away from concern for those people and back toward validating the interests of traditional economic and cultural power.  

MAGA political pundit Jack Posobiec opined that perhaps the new pope will understand that the Catholic Church owes Trump a big debt, and the pope will fall in line behind Trump:

We need to see from the jump, from the absolute jump, whether or not Pope Leo is interested in working with President Trump or — as we can see from his Twitter feed — working against him. As a representative of Catholics all around the world, perhaps he'll understand that it was Catholics who delivered the White House for President Trump. And perhaps, just perhaps, the new pope will listen.

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Backlash.

"Keep a clean nose
Watch the plain clothes
You don't need a weatherman to know
Which way the wind blows."
          Bob Dylan, "Subterranean Homesick Blues, 1965

The wind shifted. 

The period of 2009-2020 was a high-water mark of consciousness of harm to the weak and marginalized in America. It showed up most often in universities, where administrations believed they had an obligation to provide safe places for students, and students began to demand those safe places. 

President Barack Obama's Department of Education Office of Civil Rights sent a "Dear Colleague" letter of guidance to universities instructing them that Title IX required formal processes to protect agains a hostile environment. If universities knew, or should have known, of something hostile that triggered discrimination, they neded to create procedures to protect the most vulnerable. Students were taught it was their right -- indeed obligation -- to call out micro-aggressions.

The instruction letter was a bombshell, and its presence helps explain Monday's letter by Trump's education secretary. We are seeing the oscillation.

Click

On its surface, Obama's instruction seemed reasonable and harmless. Who can be in favor of sexual harassment? In its actual operation, it created a climate of fear. Walk on eggshells. Self-monitor what one said for potential objection. We heard protests about the "coddling" of students, but authors of those comments themselves got hounded into resigning their jobs. Comedians stopped performing on campus, saying that they couldn't joke about anything, lest someone feel offended. "Trigger warnings" were a thing. Shut your ears. You might hear something that would send a delicate person into distress.
In his first term Trump rescinded the Obama advisory letter. Trump was ineffective at changing the mood. It remained the high tide of "woke" culture, which shaped the Biden response to immigration. Immigrants escaping poverty or violence are the archetype examples of oppressed people needing protection. Obama had been the "deporter in chief" and was criticized from the left because of it. 

Biden listened to immigration doves on the left. Immigration control was Trump's issue, and Trump was openly, joyfully spreading racist dog whistles. Black Democrats were "low IQ," Black-majority countries were "shit-holes," brown-skinned migrants were unwelcome but people from Norway were welcome, Muslims were presumed to be terrorists, and Haitians ate your pets. He played Democrats and they fell for it. Democrats heard the racism, but didn't hear the dismay of people across the political spectrum who wanted better immigration control. 

 
This created an environment that allowed Trump to get elected. 
This term features a new Trump, making bold, decisive, unmmistakable moves to re-establish the status of White Christian majority culture. His U.S. is great and has always been great.

Theater companies make decisions about performances with a long lead time. The choice of plays produced by the Tony Award-winning Oregon Shakespeare Festival in nearby Ashland, Oregon reflected that prior zeitgeist, with an emphasis on plays that explored non-traditional subjects, with non-traditional casting, generally with an emphasis on the marginalized. The audience response had a dutiful, eat-your-broccoli quality to it. To the alert, it was a signal of a trend pushed past the breaking point.

The winds of change are evident this week in Portland. The National Endowment for the Arts peremptorily cancelled funding of a play 24 hours before its opening performance. The play, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, by Black playwright August Wilson, is an archetypal example of the kinds of plays serious theaters presented under the earlier zeitgeist. It explored the Afro-American experience. 

Prior to this year, last-minute cancellation of funding would be shameful. Unfair. Disrespectful. Now it is on-brand as an act of political theater by Trump. Why should taxpayers pay to hear about poor Blacks? Let liberals cry. It is part of the larger project of focusing on American greatness, not the people who have been injured by injustices. It is why Trump eliminated mention of Jackie Robinson and the Tuskegee Airmen from federal government websites. Trump is communicating with broad strokes. Cruelty and insensitivity are messages that he means business.

Trump's assault on the rule of law and the authority of the executive may turn out to be the catastrophe the left fears. It worries me. We may be in a constitutional crisis. 

I am less concerned about Trump's refocus in the arts. This is just an oscillation. Art will survive. Artists cannot be suppressed for long. New art will emerge under a new wind. Suppression is the fertilizer of art.




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Crazy rant letter to Harvard. Response is mockery.

Secretary of Education Linda A. McMahon's letter to Harvard is real. 

It was direct from her office over her signature.

The marked-up responses are not real. 

At least they are not the official response from Harvard. Other people are posting these, because it is both funny and easy to do. 

Versions of the response are circulating. You may have seen this one:

Or this one:

Don't fall for the claim that this is Harvard's official response. It is citizen trolling. Secretary McMahon's letter says the federal government will stop making grants to the university, implying, and perhaps herself believing, that the federal government is essentially providing generalized gifts to Harvard, maybe funding the football team or dining halls. In fact, the federal government contracts with Harvard, especially its medical schools and teaching hospitals, to carry out research on projects of national interest. It is more a matter of paying a contractor to do work of mutual benefit to the mission of Harvard as a center for research and of the National Institutes of Health to fight disease. Or NASA's mission. Or the defense contracting that Harvard does and doesn't talk about.

It isn't clear that Secretary McMahon understands that. Or that she cares.

The mockery brings her letter to public attention for its extraordinary sloppiness, its incorrect capitalizations, its misused words, its skipping around from subject to subject, its slipping into ALL-CAP emphasis. It reads like a Trump "Truth" written with thumbs in the early morning, and sent with minimal proofreading. 

More important is what the letter reveals about the real motivation for the attack on Harvard, Columbia, and other universities. It isn't about being offended by pro-Palestinian protests on campus or by the universities ignoring antisemitic language as part of a larger university tradition of allowing free expression of unpopular ideas -- the original complaint. 

This is a generalized political attack. Universities are the enemy. They are institutions coded and positioned as liberal, as Democratic, as the source of resistance against Trump's larger populist MAGA project. Trump has an agenda and it is carried out by loyal partisans. It must overcome obstacles, including laws, courts, Congress, respected institutions, and public opinion that might slow the work. Getting it done in this second term of office requires making clear that friends are helped and enemies are attacked from any direction possible. Universities are the enemy, right along with the news media, with lawyers who represent clients that oppose Trump or his allies, with former Trump administration officials who crossed or slow-walked Trump, with businesses that might dare to embarrass Trump by splitting out a surcharge required by a tariff. 

Pardon friends. Prosecute enemies. Scare people into compliance or silence.

The points of attack in this letter are ones chosen to create populist resentment. Who is admitted and who is not, the politics of international students, the size of the endowment, the presumed antisemitism. This is a political rally speech designed to get cheers from people who hate the libs.

In that respect, a mocking reply in the form of marked-up errors is a response in kind. It is a fun response, but it isn't useful for Harvard in the great political and culture war that it finds itself. No one likes being mocked, and this is exactly the kind of smarty-pants show of contempt that creates ill-will, as in Hillary Clinton's "deplorables."  

It becomes a schoolyard shouting match:

McMahan:  You are rich elitists and you aren't as good as you think you are!

Response:  You are too stupid to write a coherent letter!

There are more people who write sloppy letters and don't want to be shamed for doing so than there people who notice the rampant errors. This is probably a "win" for Trump.

The McMahon letter needs to be taken seriously for what it is, a formal letter outlining the political case against Harvard and institutions like it, written as a political rant.

Here is the letter as written, taken from screen shots:

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Faculty lounge thinking

"Oligarchy" is more precise,

"King" is simpler.

Elissa Slotkin, a U.S. senator from Michigan, is in the news for having offered up political advice to Democrats generally and to Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez specifically. Use language that motivates people, she said. Don't try to give a political science lecture.

She was referring to the "oligarchy rallies." Accuse Trump of trying to be king, not the leader of a new political system, oligarchy.

It isn't an issue of dumbing things down, she argues. It is a matter of using simple, clear language that connects with people emotionally, especially the non-college voters of all races and ethnicities who have been abandoning Democrats. We decide that we don't want a government run by a wealthy and connected class of people mixing private and governmental power, an oligarchy. We feel resentful of an all-powerful king.  

Go with the emotional connection.

Slotkin's advice parallels that of Democratic strategist pundit James Carville who says that Democrats should abandon the language, tastes, and policies of university faculty lounges. He argues that Democrats are led by advocacy nonprofit groups, by congressional staffers, by media pundits, by privileged elitists who defend positions that are out of touch with most Americans. They defend positions -- now swept into the idea of "woke" -- that come across as theoretical and extreme.

A gender theory professor might assert that sex is exclusively a cultural artifact, a social convention, and therefore biology-based distinctions based on the false notion of "sex" are profoundly mistaken and discriminatory. Most people, in their general experience, think sex is pretty darned real.

Similarly, people might understand the distinction between "equity" and "equality" in a Power Point slide deck in a DEI training presentation, but home from the seminar, wonder if maybe the organization shouldn't just hire the person who can best do the job.

I had that experience personally. I was a multi-decade member of the board of my Southwest Oregon Planned Parenthood affiliate. We had a three-hour DEI training on equity hiring. After the presentation the director of operations said she had misgivings about a recent hire. One candidate for a maintenance position was Black, had several years of experience, and good recommendations and work history. He was hired instead of a second candidate, a Hispanic, with limited work experience and a troubled job history with time missing from drug and alcohol use and lack of reliable housing. She semi-apologized for having hired the Black man, who was a victim of racial prejudice, sure, but he did not have as many problems as did the man with substance problems and unsettled living conditions that contributed to his lack of work experience. The second person, she said, needed the extra consideration to give him equity in hiring. That got murmurs of assent and praise.

I sat silently wondering if maybe the operations manager's real task wasn't to hire the person who could best help the organization carry out its own mission.

I was later gently asked to leave that board by the board president and CEO. Planned Parenthood is the "tip of the spear" in progressive advocacy, they explained, and I wasn't keeping up.

On issues of abortion, gender, immigration, racial equity, climate, rights of people to camp on sidewalks, gun rights, land use planning, protection of endangered species, plastic straws, microaggressions, and similar issues, Democrats have a set of orthodox, acceptable positions. Those positions are enforced by policy advocates who pounce on apostasy. 

Democrats need not admire or respect Trump. I certainly do not. He is endangering American democracy. But Democrats can observe and learn from him what works politically. He abandons GOP orthodoxy when it is unpopular. He is credited for his courage and independence for doing so. He told anti-abortion extremists that he would not ban all abortions; he told trickle-down free-trade Republicans that he disagreed with them; he said he would not cut Medicare or Medicaid.

Policy advocates brag about "holding politicians' feet to the fire." The result is politicians with damaged feet. They appear to be agents, not principals. They look obedient and weak, pushed around by people with extreme views in their own party. Who can trust such a person? Trump looks crazy and opinionated, but he doesn't look like he lets his party push him around. It makes him look like a strong leader.

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It isn't all politics. We've got to get ourselves back to the garden.

"I really can't stay
     Baby, it's cold outside
I've got to go away
     Baby, it's cold outside"
            Frank Loesser, "Baby, It's Cold Outside," 1944

"We are stardust, we are golden
We are billion-year-old carbon
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden."
          Joni Mitchell, "Woodstock Song," 1970

Life goes on. 

Even amid today's too-consuming political news, the business of life continues. Babies get fed, people go to work, crops get planted. And I try to protect the fragile grape buds from freezing.

I don't fret about the weather or the farm. There are tasks to do, yes, but some things are just out of my control.

My vineyard is on nearly flat ground bordering the Rogue River and gently sloping toward it. It is below the higher ground of the two Table Rocks on either side of the farm. The river itself is at the lowest elevation in the area, of course, because water seeks that lowest elevation. So does cold air.

Cold air hugs the ground over my vineyard, and freezes buds. I deal with it by stirring up the air. This is why I am out here observing the fans at 4:30 a.m. The "A" in the photo below signifies that this is the ambient air temperature on the control panel at the base of the fan: 33 degrees. The fan just above this control panel is on full blast, turning fast and loud in the pre-dawn morning.

I needed two fans to protect the eight acres, because of the spread-out configuration of the vineyard. At this temperature, one fan, the fan nearer the river, had come on by the time I arrived. The control panel on the fan 250 yards away, the one farther from the river, showed an ambient temperature of 34.4 degrees. It was not on at 4:40 a.m. but it came on shortly after I took this photo. The fans are set to precise temperatures because the difference of just a half a degree one way or the other is important.

The fans are set to come on before the frost comes, and there is a degree or two of difference between the temperature four feet off the ground and along the ground. I am trying to give the grapes a margin of safety,

Here are the fans at 5:00 a.m. on full blast, both illuminated by a spotlight at the base of the fan tower.

Over the course of a minute the direction the fan faces rotates 360 degrees, providing air-mixing on all sides of the fan.

The fans worked this morning. The temperatures were the same this morning as they were back on April 13, when the photo below was taken. Then the fans had been set to come on at 32.5 degrees, which, in hindsight, was too close to the frost point. They did not come on in time, and as can be seen in the photo, the ground frosted before the fans got to work stirring up the air.

The fans run on propane, and I am told to assume they cost about $30/hour to run. This morning they each ran for about two hours. 

Here is a Cabernet Sauvignon plant directly below the south fan, looking healthy in the morning sun, protected from the frost.

The plant is nearly ready for the May pruning cycle, when the lower leaves and root sprouts are pulled off and the plant growth is directed toward the cane wire at 31 inches. It is best to wait on that pruning until all risk of frost is gone. It is the nature of this area to have cooler nights than in the more marine climate of the Willamette Valley. There are pluses and minuses for that for getting the high quality that Willamette Valley pinot noirs are known for, but a minus is the need to protect against that hour or two of pre-dawn frost, even on a day with an expected high temperature of 77 degrees.

I spent a full minute looking at that Cabernet Sauvignon plant in the photo above. It made me happy to look at it. It looks so healthy and green and natural and alive in the morning sun. We need to take care of ourselves.

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Easy Sunday: Stunning, mind-blowing ignorance

Donald Trump "Truthed" the following:
 

The United States' contribution to the war effort was consequential and ultimately decisive in shaping the resolution of the war and the shape of the postwar world. But it wasn't mostly us. American schoolchildren may not learn it this way, but about three quarters of the overall effort to stop Nazi Germany took place on the Eastern Front. 

A Soviet epigram put the war effort simply: 

The British gave it time, the Americans gave it money, and the Soviets gave it blood.

The landing at Normandy, the Western Front, and the Battle of the Bulge took place in the last 11 months of the war. The Soviet Union lost 24 million people in the war. The Chinese lost 15 million -- don't forget them. Poland lost 5 million. The United States lost 415,000.

Ignorance matters. Americans cannot understand the current Russian effort to re-unify with a Ukraine that has been part of Russia for centuries (and should always remain such, as Putin sees it) without understanding the sacrifice the Soviet Union made to keep this giant battleground area part of the greater Slavic people, i.e. Russian-facing.

I write this as an opponent of Russia's invasion and as someone who would prefer that Ukraine look westward toward Europe and NATO, now centered by Germany, rather than east toward Moscow. Still, it is important for Americans to know the history. Russians know it. Russians bled to keep that land. 

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Guest Post: A look back at Hitler

Trump supporters scoff: 

"There you go again, with Trump Derangement Syndrome. Another lib claiming Trump is Hitler. Or a Hitler wannabe. Or early-stage Hitler." 

There is a reason MAGA people hear the Hitler comparisons, Trump is doing things that parallel Hitler during the time that he consolidated authoritarian power in Germany in the early 1930s.  Hitler -- the idea of Hitler in the popular American mind -- is shaped by the Hitler of the war years and the holocaust. That was late-stage Hitler, and easy to condemn. The Hitler who consolidated power looked less frightening. The takeover was gradual. Germans -- good Germans -- let it happen.

Jack Mullen spent his youth playing sports and reading history in Medford, Oregon in the 1960s, that Golden Age for young healthy White youth. We picked and thinned pears together in local orchards in our teens, and then both worked as aides to a Democratic U.S. Representative Jim Weaver in our 20s. Jack lives in Washington, D.C.

Guest Post by Jack Mullen

Like many Americans, I see a comparison between the first months of the Trump administration and Germany in the early 1930s.

Both American and German societies are steeped in enlightened reason. Long before Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence, the Prussian government contributed to the Age of Enlightenment, embodying the thoughts John Locke, Emmanuel Kant, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Frederick II, also known as Frederick the Great, modernized Prussia in the mid-18th century by promoting reason and intellectual exchange. He reformed the judicial system, allowed a free press to flourish, encouraged scientific inquiries, and promoted the arts and music.

Frederick’s influence on German history was two-fold. He set the table for a future enlightened democracy. He also nurtured the martial ethos that became emblematic of Prussia, the proto-state for 20th century Germany. He led wars of territorial expansion into Silesia and Poland, turning the enlarged Prussia into one of Europe's Great Powers.

It was this highly-militarized Prussia that was described not as a state with an army, but an army with a state.

Weimar Republic (1918-1933)

Kaiser Wilhem II, the last Prussian leader, abdicated after the World War I Armistice. In a time of political instability, Germany emerged as a parliamentary democracy known as the Weimar Republic. The first national assembly was held in Weimar, giving the republic its name in history books.

 

After the 1921-22 period of hyper-inflation subsided, so did of much of onerous burdens of the Versailles Treaty. Berlin matched Paris and London as the 1920s cultural center of Western Europe. Still, certain WWI veterans and hyper-nationalists felt their government let them down by settling for a stalemate in the Great War, not all-out victory. They wanted Germany returned to its former greatness.

Mass unemployment during the Great Depression provided fertile ground for a rising nativist, xenophobic, white supremacist National Socialist Party. This Nazi party, which garnered only 2.5 percent of the vote in the 1928 elections, increased its electoral presence to over 30 percent in the 1932 elections. This set the stage for the National Socialist leader, Adolf Hitler, to become chancellor, upon the death of war hero Paul von Hindenburg. 

How an authoritarian takes over.

There are eerie parallels between the present and 1930s Germany.

1. Both Hitler and Trump had failed coup attempts, but continued undaunted with the same nationalist, nativist message. Hitler’s failed 1923 Munich Beer Hall Putsch and Trump’s failed January 6 coup resulted in disdain for courts and his country’s justice system. By having survived the coup setbacks -- and in Trump's case the assassination attempt --  each became a symbol of indomitable will, which drew popular admiration. 

2. Both were successors to very old men, and therefore represented strength and vitality by comparison. President Paul von Hindenburg was a beloved 86-year-old World War I war hero who led the German Army in the 1914 defeat of the Russians in Battle of Tanneberg. When von Hindenburg died in 1934, Hitler became President. The June debate with President Biden set Trump up as the energetic, forceful leader by comparison.

3. Trump appeals to white Christian nationalist prejudices in much the same way Hitler and the conservative German right felt about non-Christian minorities. Trump flouts the rights of disfavored immigrants and defends it as a necessary war power. In Germany conservative industrialists allied with Hitler. In the U.S., the tech industry, out of a mix of ideology, business necessity, and fear of offending Trump allied with Trump. 

4. Hitler and Trump invoked selected past glories to inspire patriotism. Hitler pointed to Charlemagne’s First Reich as a sign of Germanic past glory. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” new hero is William McKinley, not a leader in the same vein as Charlemagne, but a leader Trump believes made America a world power by use of tariffs and territorial expansion from the Caribbean to the Philippines.

4. Both Hitler and Trump favored government run by executive fiat, with little regard for their respective legislative and judicial branches. Both simply ignore old rules and norms and dare anyone to stop them.

I often think of the great German boxer, Mac Schmeling, the Muhammed Ali of his day, when asked years later if he knew what was going on in his country during Hitler’s reign. He said he did, so did his friends, who sat in outdoor cafes sipping beer and decided to just let it all slide. Muhammed Ali stood up for what he thought was right. Max Schmeling and so many other Germans did not.

Essential to an authoritarian takeover was the willingness of people to go  along, to "obey in advance" as laws were broken. Keep your head down. Maybe he will target someone else. Trump, like Hitler, is using personal and arbitrary state power to generate shock and awe. Many Americans celebrated the psychological and moral effect of unexpected military violence when it targeted the Iraqi military. We are seeing it now, targeting political opponents of Trump in the courts, law firms, universities, the press, businesses, and people in disfavored groups.

Who will stand up to stop Trump, in this, the early stages of centralized authoritarian power? Congress lacks spine. Will our courts stand up? 

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