Some things money can't buy

"I'll buy you a diamond ring my friend if it makes you feel alright
I'll get you anything my friend if it makes you feel alright
'Cause I don't care too much for money
But money can't buy me love

Can't buy me love
Everybody tells me so
Can't buy me love
No no no, no"
     Paul McCartney and John Lennon, 1964

Wisconsin voters elected Susan Crawford to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, defeating the Donald Trump and Elon Musk-backed Brad Schimel by about 10 points.

This Rolling Stone headline has it backwards:

Crawford did not win despite Musk's money blitz. She won because of it.

Or, to be more precise, Schimel lost because of it.

An ongoing theme of this blog is that political messages often backfire. The messenger intends one message but voters receive a very different one. Sometimes that is because the message is flawed. Sometimes the medium of the message is flawed. And sometimes the message is completely shaped by the identity of the messenger and the messenger is flawed. This is a case of all three.

Powerful images from the Wisconsin campaign

Voters in judicial races cast votes based on a general impression of the candidates. We evaluate judges based on their reputation and the reputation of their public supporters. Judicial races in Wisconsin have become partisan races. Everyone knew that Crawford was the Democratic-aligned candidate and Schimel was the Republican-aligned one. 

Schimel was not blindsided by Elon Musk's sabotage of his campaign. He willingly walked into the trap. News stories about Schimel describe him as being openly and proudly part of the Trump/MAGA team. 

From: Wisconsin Examiner

Wisconsin is a purple state, nearly perfectly balanced between Democrats and Republicans. It was not crazy for Schimel to let the world know he liked Trump, agreed with Trump, and was supported by Trump. But it turned out to be disastrous because he tied himself to a political anchor.

Popularity is the engine behind Trump's power. It is also the Achilles heel in the Trump MAGA movement. Trump was a powerful demagogue at the high tide of popularity in January because he looked like a man of action, taking up arms against the sea of troubles facing America. The idea of a strong leader is popular, but that leader loses the power to intimidate others if and when he takes unpopular actions. Trump and DOGE immediately began doing so. Elon Musk -- ever the child genius showboat -- waded into the Supreme Court race and made it a referendum on himself and his ability to throw his money around and get results. He grabbed center stage. The implicit message in front of Wisconsin voters was whether or not they supported a fabulously wealthy outsider openly trying to buy their Supreme Court with patently insincere cheese-head hats and million-dollar vote-buying schemes. Musk hijacked the Schimel race. Schimel perhaps would have lost organically, in the normal course of politics in a closely-divided polity, but he lost big because of Musk. 

Political consultants guide candidates to the proverb attributed to Napoleon: that God is on the side of the army with the big battalions. It is true. Big-spending campaigns with lots of ads can overwhelm small ones. "Free" money from a giant donor like Musk, or from a large state party "Majority Fund" in a local race, is a hard-to-resist temptation. Raising money $50 or $500 at a time from local supporters is hard and slow, and sometimes sacrificial for the donor. Isn't it better for everyone to let the outsider raise the money so the candidate can concentrate on his message and meet voters without hounding them for money? So tempting.

The problem is that outside money shapes the message. In the Wisconsin case, the message was that manic billionaire Elon Musk wants to buy your vote. Are you okay with that, yes or no? The same dynamic happened in a local state Senate race I have written about in the past between a Medford mayor, Randy Sparacino, running as a Republican against an incumbent Democrat, Jeff Golden (and coincidently, yet another college classmate). The upstate Republican state Senate PAC spent over a million dollars on attack ads against Golden on behalf of Sparacino. The intended message was that Sparacino was the better candidate. The received message was that if elected to the state Senate Sparacino would be a reliable errand boy puppet of his upstate handlers. They hijacked his message. He was a victim --  but he let them do it to him. 

The election results in Wisconsin sends new messages into the zeitgeist. Musk and DOGE are, indeed, unpopular at the ballot box, fatally so in purple polities. GOP officeholders are refiguring whether they dare openly advocate for anything other than total acquiescence to DOGE cuts. Maybe they can, after all. Billionaires are observing Wisconsin and protests against Musk and Tesla, and recalculating the perils of open support of Trump. Association with Trump may be bad for business. Donating to Republican candidates may be bad for business. The zeitgeist is now questioning whether Trump's tariff activity has changed the story on Trump. Maybe he is a loser, after all. Maybe MAGA is a powerful minority, but, at bottom, a minority.

Most importantly, the renewed idea floating in the zeitgeist is that Democrats can win elections.

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Up close: A protest over the arrest of Rumeysa Ozturk.

     "As Americans realize how much harm is being done, we get angrier, maybe even angry enough to get up off the couch and do something."
            Jane Collins

Democrats had been oddly quiet in the aftermath of the 2024 election. After the 2016 election, Democrats were angry that victory seemed to have been snatched from their hands. But after this election, Democrats were dealing with a discouraging realization, that a plurality of our fellow citizens preferred Trump to the Democratic nominee. There was more sadness and contemplation, less outrage.

That has changed. Now, six weeks into Trump's second term, dismay has turned into anger. Democrats are seeing that Trump wasn't bluffing about seeking "retribution." He had an enemies list and he is expanding the power of the presidency to squash opposition and make an example of opponents. It sends a chilling message. If you said or did something Trump didn't like, he will blackball you or your employer, call for your impeachment, "primary" you if you are a squishy Republican, sue you for defamation, threaten you with tariffs, take away your federal funding, fire you, or round you up and deport you. Trump's action is sudden. Decisive. It comes directly from an executive order, not through legislation. It is a performance to elicit shock and awe. "My God! Look what Trump just did!"

Shock and awe aroused opposition. U.S. Senate Minority Leader and college classmate Chuck Schumer's response struck many Democrats as weak and accommodative, not smart and strategic.  Schumer's strategy divides his party because it misses the mood of  a great many Democrats. It isn't enough. It isn't angry and indignant and resolute. Many Democrats want to do something, something visible and in the streets. Show the world that we are in opposition. 

Another college classmate, Jane Collins, is part of that group wanting more. She has a long history of political protest. She lives in the area of one of Trump's shock-and-awe operations, the arrest of Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk. Collins joined a demonstration condemning that action. She wrote about it on own personal website, https://aliceT4.com. 

Her guest post is a shortened version of her full post: https://alicet4.com/2025/03/28/the-people-speak/

Guest Post by Jane Collins 

                      The People Speak
Ever since Trump and Musk began to take a chainsaw to the work of generations, I’ve been hearing, “Where is the outrage?” Go to a protest near you; you will find that outrage.

On Thursday, March 26, I went to Tufts for a rally against the abduction the day before of Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish doctoral student at the school. She was snatched by masked federal agents as she walked toward a friend’s house, handcuffed, and driven away in an unmarked car. Before a judge could order that the government not take her out of Massachusetts, she had already been spirited away to an ICE detention center in Louisiana.

Ozturk was grabbed without any form of due process. She was in the United States legally on a student visa. She had done nothing wrong. About a year ago, she objected to Tufts’s refusal to divest from Israel in an opinion piece in the student paper. Trump & company have decided that anyone who uses their freedom of speech in a way they don’t like is a threat to national security, maybe even a terrorist.

Outspoken international students are low-hanging fruit. Trump means to pick them and throw them somewhere to rot. He doesn’t have to abduct all of them, just enough to shut the rest of them up.

But students are not shutting up. Ozturk’s abduction, added to the equally outrageous detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia student, three weeks ago, and the rendition of more than 250 Venezuelans to the worst prison in El Salvador with no proof that any of them were criminals or gang members, has pushed many into activism.

The Tufts rally comprised about 2000 people, most with handmade signs. Never mind the speakers, whom I couldn’t hear anyway. This is what their signs said:

An injury to one is an injury to all.

Free Rumeysa!

Democracy -- NOT deportation -- protects Jewish students

We will not be silenced!

Silencing dissent is the REAL cancel culture

If not fascism, then why fascism-shaped?

Democracy > Deportation

Release all prisoners of the secret police

Democracy is under attack!

Speak out against injustice or you’re gonna be silenced next

I love inclusion, equality, diversity

Stop doing evil shit

Abolish ICE

ICE out of our communities! Free Palestine!

Jews Against Deportation

This Tufts alum affirms the equal dignity and humanity of all people

Nice Jewish Students for Democracy

Project 2025 indicates that it won’t be long before Trump uses the military against peaceful demonstrators. There will be tear gas, pepper spray, and water hoses, mass arrests, and eventually, rubber bullets or worse.

Meanwhile, Trump is damaging everything we love: our communities, education, alliances with other democracies, the environment, and most of all our rights. Democracy is clearly under attack. As Americans realize how much harm is being done, we get angrier, maybe even angry enough to get up off the couch and do something.

The protests are becoming more frequent, and the crowds keep getting bigger. If you’re not on the streets already, I hope you will join us soon. The homemade, passionate, outraged signs at every rally help me to believe that maybe we can save democracy. Not leaders or heroes, or the corporate-owned Democrats. We, the people.

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Repositioning Portland

Portland used to be the place that was crazy-liberal, and in a good way.

Then Portland was the national example of Democratic misrule, a willing victim of riots, vandalism, and homeless encampments.

Portland is getting a new brand: an oasis in a country that has gone MAGA.

Story in Sunday's Oregonlive

Vibe is hard to measure, but it is real.

For a decade Portland, Oregon had developed a reputation as the best city on the West Coast. It was liveable, prosperous, and growing. It was a tech center. It was less expensive than Seattle, San Francisco, L.A.,  and Silicon Valley.

Portlandia image of local residents

The TV sketch comedy Portlandia parodied it. Portland was the place where waiters showed diners family photos of the happy lives of the chicken, before it was served for lunch on a bed of organic kale. 

Then the summer of 2020.

I have been very critical of the way Portland handled the demonstrations -- and then riots -- following the suffocation of George Floyd in 2020. Over the course of a hundred days, anarchists and hooligans positioned themselves amid Black Lives Matter protests. The vandals carried out a campaign of statue-toppling, arson, and window-breaking. Portland's system for civic order broke down. The Multnomah County District Attorney, Michael Schmidt, came into office in August, 2020 as a "reformer," announcing that he was opposed to "mass incarceration" and racial disparities in the criminal justice system. He would not prosecute anarchist vandals. In response, Portland police went on an informal work-stoppage. They weren't going to arrest or stop vandals and arsonists if they weren't going to be prosecuted. Some people within the liberal BLM protesters were conflicted, so they did not identify and exclude the vandals. On one hand, the hooligans were hijacking the protests and destroying their message of peaceful protest. On the other hand they claimed to be ideological allies, also angry about the status quo but more willing to walk the talk. Liberals knew the argument that "violence is the language of oppressed," so one should expect some violence to protest the greater systemic violence done to marginalized people. 

Meanwhile, court decisions in the Ninth Judicial Circuit made it impossible for Portland to control homeless encampments which grew up on sidewalks and roadways. 

Within that mix of opinion and behavior, the very blue Portland sustained a summer and fall of disruption, destruction, and ugliness. The downtown hollowed out. Images of fires showed nightly on Fox News. Portland became the national poster child for Democratic inability to govern. The Portland reputation and vibe went negative. 

Portland is coming out of the funk. Portland citizens voted a major change in its governance. The mayor was replaced by Keith Wilson who ran as a "common sense businessman." The city created a city manager position and expanded the council to 12, which makes them neighborhood representatives, not operational department heads. Mike Schmidt got replaced by a district attorney who said he would prosecute crime. It is too soon to see if the organizational change will improve governance, but it is not too soon for there to be a vibe-change. Portland projects competence again.

Portland -- and Oregon -- is still liberal, and that gives it a brand position. It is still an immigrant sanctuary state. A trans male-to-female high school athlete won races, and is being supported by government officials. There are reasons to think Trump may target Oregon and try to make an example of it, as he is now doing with Maine, which has a female governor who refused his demand for a public apology for saying she would obey Maine laws. Portland and Oregon are giving off a proud don't-tread-on-me vibe. That is the new brand.

It isn't all rosy. Oregon's largest private employer, Intel, was behind the curve on AI and it is laying off people. The federally-sponsored CHIP Act expansions will take place in Arizona, New Mexico, and Ohio -- not Oregon. Nike, headquartered in Oregon, is struggling. With stock at $64/share it is in a four-year slump from a 2021 price of $155. And the supposed Trump increases in timber harvests off federal lands cannot get started if there isn't staff to manage the process. 

Still, Portland is regaining a national role and brand as a leader in the resistance to Trump, DOGE, and MAGA. A premise of this blog is that the Trump movement is now experiencing the exhilarating feeling of winning big. He is overreaching and doing the one thing that will end the MAGA movement's quest for power. Trump's populist movement will be stopped by the public because he does unpopular things. He is beginning to do them. 

Portland is ahead of the curve in being an example of resistance to Trump. DOGE, and MAGA, but the curve may catch up.

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Easy Sunday: I bought an electric vehicle yesterday to be my primary car.

It is a Chevy. A Chevy Blazer EV.

No. Not a Tesla.

I did not want to make a "statement" with my choice of car. It is just a car. I did not want to explain it or need to explain it away, as this Boston-area driver chose to do:

Hiding a Tesla in plain sight by disguising it.

The Chevy Blazer electric model has a small "EV" symbol in the back but it otherwise appears identical to the gas-powered Blazers. From a statement point of view, the car happens to be an EV, but it is not about it being an EV. 

A Tesla vehicle is now a political statement. Tesla is Musk. Musk is Tesla. Trump stood in front of the White House and urged people to buy Teslas. 

I have driven German-or-Japanese-branded cars for 25 years. My experience is that they deserved their reputation for reliability. In changing to an EV, I expected to stick with a Japanese brand, a Honda. Their Prologue model is nearly identical to the Chevy Blazer, which isn't surprising because Honda bought General Motors technology for the EV, and both cars are assembled in Mexico, based on the same GM platform and in the same GM factory at Ramos Arizpe. 

The Chevy model was less expensive than the Honda I considered. The Chevy lacked some of the Honda's optional features, ones I don't care about. I figure that air-conditioned car seats are just one more thing to go wrong, and I don't need special refrigeration for my rear end.

Both dealerships urged I get a three-year lease, not buy the cars, for reasons involving the various federal rebates, factory incentives, and other "bonus" deals. Those are included into the residual value after the lease ends. That three-year drop in value over the lease term determines the lease cost. Car buying has some unintuitive elements. I got $1,000 off because I have a Costco card, which seems crazy. I got another $300 bonus because I own a Toyota, and General Motors considers me a "captured" brand-switcher. Now maybe I will speak well of GM instead of praising Japanese cars. 

The Blazer is made mostly in North America from North American parts. The batteries are made in Ohio. The car sticker does not specify USA content, but by subtracting from Canadian and Mexican content it might be something over 40 percent USA content.

I have no need to be a cutting-edge early adopter of new technology, be it cars or computers. I prefer to let others grab the lead and the attention while the manufacturers work out the bugs. Electric vehicles have gone from new and exciting to routine. I suspect I now have reliable, unexciting transportation, which is what I wanted. 

This scene would have been avant-garde five years ago. Now it is happening in garages all across America. 

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Professors leave Yale. They are getting out while they can.

Professor Tim Snyder is the world's top expert on Ukraine and modern Eastern Europe.

He is leaving the U.S., for his own protection and to protect Yale. 

Snyder and two other professors are leaving Yale to join the Munk School of Global affairs at the University of Toronto in Canada.

Snyder said his warnings about Trump's authoritarian actions put him -- and Yale -- in Trump's crosshairs. Trump has been targeting attorneys whose work puts them at odds with Trump personally or with the MAGA agenda. He uses a blunt, but effective weapon: blackballing the entire firm that they work for, including forbidding any attorney working for that firm to enter a federal courthouse. Universities are at similar risk. Snyder said he saw what happened to Columbia University, and its threatened loss of $400 million in research grants. Columbia capitulated to Trump, as did the law firms Paul Weiss and Skadden Arps.

Also leaving Yale is Snyder's wife, Marci Shore, a specialist in European intellectual history, and colleague Jason Stanley, a philosophy professor and student of fascism. Shore is the author of The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of totalitarianism in Eastern Europe. Stanley's most recent book, published in 2024, is Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future.

Tim Snyder is likely a familiar name and face to readers of this blog. His academic specialty -- Ukraine, twentieth century authoritarianism under Hitler and Stalin, and the slide of democracies into tyranny -- is center stage in current public discourse. He is visible on Substack, on YouTube, and is a frequent guest on opinioin shows on television.

Lesson One: Do not obey in advance

Snyder's book, Bloodlands, described the process by which Hitler and Stalin carried out their own "Manifest Destiny" of mass murder in Ukraine. Snyder's newest books and public statements are warnings about the methods authoritarian leaders use to solidify power: undermining the media, the law, the universities, non-profit interest groups, and businesses. 

Readers of this blog may have observed Snyder giving practical instructions on how to stop an authoritarian strongman. Do not obey in advance. The social skill of picking up cues as to what is desired and expected is dangerous when dealing with an authoritarian leader. Instead, make the leader spell out exactly what he wants and is doing. Disagree, and make him win in court, if he can. If the leader wants to arrest and deport people based on vague rumors and mass dragnets, then make the ruler say explicitly that that is what he is doing. Let the courts and the public judge whether they think that kind of police power might be directed against themselves. Don't cover for him. 

Trump has put into the zeitgeist the fear that innocent and completely legitimate actions of a member of a large institution might jeopardize the entire institution's survival. Prudent leaders are surveying the landscape for potential risks to their own institutions. What have our people already done that might displease Trump, Elon Musk, or a MAGA-led federal agency? Trump's executive orders blackballing the entirety of giant law firms send a warning: Never let any employee displease Trump. Worse, it may already be too late.

Perhaps the judicial system will rule against Trump and prohibit the blackballing, but the damage is done and the message was sent. There are a thousand ways that a strongman can indicate pleasure and displeasure to subordinates -- a raised eyebrow, a smirk -- and favor and disfavor trickles down. Trump can get to you. You might not even know it, but the contract-not-awarded or the adverse administrative ruling may be Trump's way of punishing his enemies.

Snyder said he was "an embarrassment" to Yale. Not so. But he was unquestionably a risk to Yale. 

Yale is a research university dependent upon federal grants to carry out that mission. It has an endowment at risk of being confiscated by special-punishment taxes. Its law school graduates hope to get clerkships from judges who themselves may have ambitions of nominations to higher courts. The tiniest suggestion by Trump that Yale Law graduates should be avoided as punishment for Yale tolerating Snyder would be disastrous to Yale's position as a launchpad for career success. Yale is vulnerable. 

Snyder saw what happened in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s to disfavored people. Snyder sees the early warnings and is getting out now, with all three becoming department heads at the Munk School of Public Affairs. He will continue his warnings, but from a safer place.

President Reagan said the U.S. was the world's "beacon of freedom." Not anymore.

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We are re-writing the Constitution

Historians may look back and write that this moment in America was a gigantic aberration, when the country lost its way.

Or they will look back and consider us a second "founders generation," like the Americans of 1787-1791. We would be the people who changed the USA from a republic into an empire led by a strongman.

James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and the other authors of the Constitution believed in a democratic government that could avoid tyranny and protect minority rights because it was protected by structure and process. We are in the midst of a constitutional revolution, replacing a constitutional presidency with a personal leader, in the manner of Vladimir Putin today, strongman dictatorships in Latin America or Africa, or the monarchs of prior centuries. We will keep the term "president" and pretend nothing has changed, but we have indeed changed. We have made Trump into a leader exercising personal power as state power.  Trump is the state. L'État, c'est moi, as Louis XIV put it. "He who saves his country violates no law," as Napoleon and Trump said it.

This current founding era started on election night in 2020 and has continued through the Mar-a-Lago exile, through Trump's inauguration, and is in the finishing stages now. Trump sold the idea of a new form of government. Only he can solve America's problems. Trump sold it first to Republican voters by convincing them that his assertion of a stolen 2020 election was more credible and dispositive than was the electoral process, audited and recounted and judged by the courts. That idea spread to Republican officeholders who voted not to count Pennsylvania's electoral votes. He got compliance and support from billionaire oligarchs and business leaders in the run-up to the 2024 election. The revolution operated throughout the Mar-a-Lago exile, with Project 2025 planning to complete the revolution after Trump won a return term. Trump denied their plans were his, but word leaked out. The premise that Trump argued and successfully sold was that America needed a dictator, perhaps for a day, maybe for much longer, because the problems of the country weren't being solved by people using the democratic process.  

The public is experiencing shock and awe at the speed and audacity of Trump's second term of office. Wow! The government can act!  Trump understands optics. Recipients of U.S. foreign aid are far away. He rounded up Venezuelans to send to an El Salvadorian hell-hole, where they are publicly abused. Trump had demonized them as a group, and they are other people. Musk orders arbitrary mass firings of government employees. There were probably some ineffective employees in the group. As long as it is someone else being hurt, Americans are on-balance okay with decisive lawlessness. The low public esteem of Congress makes decisive action by a president seem like a reasonable workaround. Someone has to be in charge.

Trump is effectively eliminating independent sources of potential opposition. Trump intimidated the news media (CBS, Disney, the NYTimes and Washington Post), law firms (Paul, Weiss), businesses (Meta, Amazon), universities (Columbia), and manufacturers (auto tariffs). 

Trump is destroying the procedural safeguards built into the Constitution and the legalistic bureaucracies of government. He suspended enforcement of the Corrupt Foreign Practices Act, he fired inspectors general, he flouts ethics rules against self dealing. He rewards his friends and punishes his enemies. Don't worry about obeying the law. Worry about angering Trump.

What will end this era? Monarchies can be a stable form of government. Oligarchies can be stable as well, although rampant corruption and erosion of the rule of law reduces their effectiveness. In a world where the leader can subject your business to a tariff or block its access to the mail, roads, or the courts, incentives for survival change. Efficiency and profitability become less important. More important is courting favor with the leader and securing a monopoly advantage. 

Strongman government can badly misjudge public sentiment. It can make enemies. At some point, arbitrary government doesn't just affect someone else. It affects you. Trump's strongman rule will end when he does something unpopular. The question is whether, in that moment, the U.S. can re-establish process-oriented constitutional government.

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Primary Source: Field notes on Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Wokeness

Everyone has a DEI story.

Every story is different.

At some point in our childhoods we encountered people who were different from ourselves. Someone explained things. We looked around for ourselves. We put diversity into context.

My own story is short. As a Medford, Oregon boy and youth, I encountered no diversity at all. Because of my school district's "tracking" policy, people of similar interests and skills got assigned to a narrow set of the same classes. In my case that was college-bound students interested in debate and public affairs. My story, such as it is, was having my eyes opened when I entered college. I met a Black person, and a Jew. 

However this photo of my section of the Freshman Register -- a predecessor of Facebook -- indicates what diversity there was. It was mostly diversity within the subset of academically ambitious White males.

I am on the lower-left corner of the left page. Future senator Chuck Schumer is in the lower left corner of the right page. 

College classmate Tony Farrell encountered diversity and inclusion early. Tony is the guest-post author famous for having managed the Trump Steaks account at The Sharper Image. He also worked as a marketing executive for The Nature Company and The Gap. But before all that, he had a childhood and youth.

Farrell, 1967

Farrell, 2025

Guest Post by Tony Farrell

Random Notes from the Field: Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, and Wokeness

By the summer of 1965, I’d completed 8th, 9th and 10th grade at Bremerhaven (West Germany) American Military Dependents High School. My father, a civilian, chose to move our family there, on the North Sea, because my three siblings and I could attend respectable American schools for next-to-no money, as he headed European sales for States Marine Lines.

At the end of our three-year European family adventure, we moved back to the States and Mom guided me into an impressive private school to complete my last two high-school years. Sidwell Friends is the elite Quaker school in Northwest D.C. where Obama’s girls graduated, as did Chelsea Clinton. (Julie Nixon had been in my class. Charles Lindbergh attended when his father was a congressman.) I graduated Sidwell Friends in June, 1967—its first year to ever graduate any student who was Black. Good grief!

Today, Sidwell Friends is about the most “woke” school in America. But they certainly have a history. When I entered in the fall of 1965, they were busily but painfully patting themselves on the back for having integrated. Before, they were yet one more Southern prep school in the Washington area; white as snow. But in the early 60s, incoming New Frontier parents shamed the Sidwell board into integrating. (The chair resigned in protest.) Sidwell handled it sort-of okay. Nonetheless, the only female classmate to join me at Harvard, one of the four Black pioneers, was lauded (quite infamously) in our yearbook as an “outstanding Negro girl.” You can’t make it up.

As a 16-year-old, I did not “get” all this. My Department of Defense (DOD) school in West Germany had been integrated since Truman’s order in 1946. (Bremerhaven HS was established in 1948; its predecessor had been established in nearby Bremen in 1946.) Heck, even my parents’ high-school yearbooks from the 1930s in Yonkers, New York (Gorton High, a Catholic institution, and Yonkers High) had many Black faces. 

Daily, I engage on Facebook with the “Bremerhaven American High School Alumni” group. From my long-ago era (1962 to 1965), fellow military “brats” celebrate the experience there as the best of their lives. Unlike States-based schools, overseas DOD schools turned-over the student body every two years or so. Therefore, no cliques! Newcomers were genuinely welcomed with open arms and sincere inquiries: “What sports can you play?” And “Do you sing?” And “Do you do theater?” It was a uniquely positive social experience. At Bremerhaven HS in 1964, I saw Southern crackers comfortably bond with Northern Blacks, easily and naturally. Why not?

The American military was 20 years ahead of American society—and certainly ahead of the closer-to-God-than-thee Quakers at Sidwell Friends. I didn’t know it; I just felt it. When I settled in at Sidwell, I had no idea what they were talking about—all that celebrating of integration as something notable. Hurrah for them, I thought to myself, with quiet cynicism.

Fast forward a few decades. Sidwell’s alumni magazine lauds a school-wide student protest that results in banning the wearing of any “Redskins” apparel at the school. The headmaster wrote that this showed so much awareness and courage and empathy. Sidwell students were doing such brave and righteous things, right? Oh, sure, there might be genocide somewhere, but this is so important! (“Redskins” was the long-established name of the local professional football team.) Hard to express, but I deeply loved the Redskins, and how my father and I bonded over them. When Dad was in hospice, my last words to him, literally, were, “Hail to the Redskins,” the fight-song lyrics which were shorthand for so many years of joy and sweet memories. I detected a faint smile in Dad’s stroke-frozen face, the last time I saw him.

I’m not here to debate anything. I’m just here to say the word “Redskins” did not mean anything but love and joy to me. I and no one I knew had ever said or heard it spoken pejoratively. (And why is “Yankees” still okay? Ask the citizens of any banana republic…or Boston.)

I’ve been married more than 45 years. Our first child was born in 1992. (I joke that I decided to have my own grandchildren—skip the middleman!) Around 2000, it was time to check out local Bay Area private schools, to see if any would be right for our young daughter. On the application for one particularly earnest institution, they asked (with glaring superficiality), “How will your family add to the diversity of our school?”. With perhaps too-visible spite, I responded, “We’re white; heterosexual; long married, once each to each other; never divorced; natural child; Republican; military veteran.” 

We did not get in. I guess there’s only so much diversity one can handle.…

For more than three decades, I’ve interviewed high-school seniors applying to Harvard College. It’s something the College has required for more than a century, and it’s good. It can also be frustrating, because Harvard admits fewer than 4 percent of applicants; we interviewers can go for many years without “getting anyone in,” (as we like to say). But one interviewing season, after 15 years of futility, I got in four applicants—in a row! I was famous for this. 

My applicant draw, I now realize, had given me an unfair advantage: Applicant #1 was an albino Black girl from Ethiopia, raised in Italy and now at Berkeley High. Applicant #2 was an forever-home-schooled boy with two moms, who also was close to his sperm-donating “uncle” dad. Applicant #3 was a girl who had transitioned to male (so, a trans-boy) who’d led a student protest, in “his” freshman year at an elite prep school, against various not-PC Halloween costumes at some random school event. Applicant #4…I can’t remember! (I’m sure they were equally unusual.) When I tell this story to my fellow interviewers, they go nuts.

Soon after the turn of this century, a friend from my Navy days in 1970s Norfolk, Virginia, invited my family to an outdoor play at the California Shakespeare Theater, in nearby Orinda. He was on their board and, for years, had donated significant money to support the company’s four plays each summer season. We loved it and became season ticket holders for 20 years, raising our daughters to appreciate live theater. 

At some point, Cal Shakes went crazily all woke. Just before Covid, they premiered a new play titled “Romeo Y Juliet,” a lesbian love story (of course)—half in untranslated Spanish (why not?). The following (and final) play was pitched as a “modern language” interpretation of “Macbeth”, based in San Francisco’s Fillmore, a Black neighborhood, before it was overrun by development. What does that even mean, Shakespeare but in "modern language”? (Even the 17-year-old high-schooler Orson Welles wrote to pay no attention to Shakespeare’s “plots” but only the language.) 

My Navy friend quit the board; I’ve since met other good-hearted supporters who also quit (protesting in the same way). Anyway, Cal Shakes is gone now. Decades of goodwill tossed aside for what I see as dimwitted wokeness.

All the foregoing had occurred when, two seasons ago, my daughter and I were attending a Stanford football game when, at halftime, the stadium announcer introduced the Stanford University’s Vice President of “DIVERSION, Equity & Inclusion.” 

He did not correct himself, and I loudly exclaimed, “Sign me up!”

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