Easy Sunday: I am trying to grow great grapes.

You may want to skip this post. It is about my vineyard, not politics.

And it is about something pretty mundane: pulling grape leaves off of vines to expose grapes to the sun. 

The task is for a good purpose: to make superior grapes.

On Saturday my nephew and I got updated vine management advice from Adelberto Paz from Valley View Vineyards. We were plugging away at the job of removing selected leaves from the east side of Pinot Noir plants. He said we needed to pick up the pace and start on the Cabernet Sauvignons soon. 

I am hoping Valley View Vineyards will buy my grapes this year, the first real harvest year at scale. I am growing them under their advice to meet their standards, but they are under no obligation to buy them. And given the hazards and uncertainties of farming, I cannot guarantee that I will have them to sell. There is a wine-grape crisis underway. Tariffs have badly damaged our export markets, and there has been a downturn in domestic wine consumption. Alcohol suddenly became less popular. Instead of being, maybe, a little bit good for you, people have decided that red wine is, maybe, a little bit bad for you. Markets change. Then sometimes they change back. People have been drinking wine for thousands of years, and people like how it makes them feel and how it lubricates sociability: cheers! Supply and demand will balance out, but maybe not this year.

My best shot at selling my grapes is to grow spectacularly good ones.

Last year the Cabernets were the weakest of the three varieties. Still small plants. Few grapes. The Cabernets are the  most commercially viable of the three varieties this year: I have a heavy set of good-looking grape clusters. Cabernet Sauvignon vines blossom, ripen, and are picked later in the year than Malbecs and Pinot Noir grapes. My Cabernets hadn't blossomed yet when the April frost came that hurt the earlier varieties in my and many other local vineyards.  

The rows are in a north-south direction. Leaves that cover the grapes on the east side of the plants get pulled off so that they are exposed to the morning sun. Leaf-pulling reduces the chance of mildew that might grow from dew that lingers on grapes amidst dense foliage. Exposed grapes also means that the spray program against powdery mildew is more effective. The sun also sweetens grapes and improves flavor. We let the leaves grow on the west side of the plant where they would otherwise get the hot afternoon sun in the hot dry summer days of the Medford-area climate. Direct sun is a mixed blessing. 

Here is what the Cabernet vines look like before the leaf-pulling job that we are starting now:

Here is what that vine looks like after those leaves are removed:

Take 14 seconds to view this video to see how an experienced vineyard worker pulls leaves. He is amazingly fast. He won't be replaced by artificial intelligence anytime soon.

Click here: https://youtu.be/QHwpfQ99x-A

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Constitutions: Our North American neighbors.

   "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

               The Declaration of Independence, 1776 

American schoolchildren learn that the Founding Fathers were great men of unsurpassed wisdom, and that the Constitution is a near-sacred document. 

We grow up to learn there were problems with it, problems that persist. 

Posts the past two days have looked at what may come to be understood as America's "third founding." There was the first one in the 1770s and 1780s.  There was the second one when the Civil War and Reconstruction Amendments established equality as a value along with life and liberty. This third founding did not require formal constitutional amendments. It is taking place now through new practices and norms. We have a strong executive who does as he pleases, rewarding friends, punishing opponents, using Congress as a force multiplier -- a squad of synophants and applauders -- not as a check and balance. We have a unitary executive immune from prosecution for breaking the law. 

The U.S. has never been stuck with the old way of doing things. There have always been options on how to organize a government. Erich Almasy makes that point with today's guest post by describing the U.S. in the context of our two North American neighbors. Almasy is a college classmate who had a long career in business consulting and management. The photo shows him wearing class reunion gear from the 55th reunion in front of racing boats: shells. He rowed in college.

Guest Post by Erich Almasy

SPQR (Senātus Populusque Rōmānus)

(The Senate and People of Rome, i.e. the Roman Republic)

 

The Roman Republic lasted over 480 years, from 509 to 27 BCE*. Ours is now at 250 years. I have had the luxury over the past thirty years of living in all three republics that comprise North America: Canada, the United States of America, and the United States of México. I have lived in each of these distinct cultures, each with a different approach to governance and social welfare. Here are some thoughts about what I have witnessed.

 

Form of Government

The United States was founded in 1776 as a breakaway set of thirteen colonies of Great Britain. It chose a form of democratic republic with a President, a bicameral (two houses) legislature, and a judiciary headed by a Supreme Court. All members of each branch, except the judiciary, are elected either by direct election via congressional districts or through an Electoral College. Canada, colonized by both France and England, became the Dominion of Canada, a self-governing entity within the British Empire, in 1867. Canada is a constitutional monarchy, with the English monarch as the ceremonial head of state, a lower house elected from electoral districts (ridings), an appointed upper house, and an appointed Supreme Court. The Prime Minister is considered the Head of Government and is elected by the Members of Parliament (the lower house). México became a democratic republic after its independence from Spain in 1821. However, until the 1920s, it had two emperors, was invaded by the United States and France, and had one President (Porfirio Díaz) who served for 31 years. México has three branches, including a President who serves a single six-year term; a bicameral legislature with a Chamber of Deputies elected every three years and a Senate elected every six years. As of 2025, México’s Supreme Court justices are elected to staggered 12-year terms.

 

Citizenship and Voting

The United States originally granted citizenship only to White men. Ratified in 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granted citizenship to anyone born within the United States. Canada and México also honor jus soli (right of the soil) for any child born within their territories. Women in the United States got the right to vote after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Women in Canada got the right to vote at different times: as early as 1916 in Manitoba and as late as 1940 in Quebec. Asian and Indigenous Canadians had to wait until 1948 and 1960, respectively, to vote in federal elections. Women in México got the right to vote in 1953. México’s political parties are required by the Constitution to offer gender equality with a 50/50 split in legislative and executive positions at all levels of government. Women in both México and Canada are also legally guaranteed equal pay for equal work. Both Canada and México have established paths of roughly 5 to 7 years toward citizenship for immigrants. Grandchildren of both Mexican and Canadian citizens are also eligible for direct citizenship via jus sanguinis (right of blood).

 

Health Care and Social Security

In the United States, health care is paid for individually until age 65 federally or based on income level, according to state mandates. Two federal government systems established in 1965, Medicare and Medicaid, support older and poorer citizens. In 1947, Tommy Douglas (actor Kiefer Sutherland’s grandfather), the Premier of the province of Saskatchewan, created a universal hospital plan that, in 1957, became Canada’s national health program, Medicare. This provides free health care to all citizens and permanent residents of Canada. México is finalizing a national public health system for all citizens to be completed by 2027. It also has extensive private hospitals for those with higher incomes. All three countries have Social Security systems funded by employees and employers, with retirement benefits available after age 60 or 62.

 

When living in Canada, I used to tease Canadians that their system depended on a benevolent Prime Minister because he or she appointed the Supreme Court and the Senators, and ran Parliament. So far, I guess they’ve been lucky, smart, or both. In theory, the United States has coequal branches of government with distinct roles that provide checks and balances to prevent the consolidation of power in the Executive. Neither the Founders nor I ever anticipated a party and President that would usurp power as we are seeing today. For 71 years, from 1929 to 2000, México essentially had a single party, the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party). That monopoly was broken in the new century, and while parties tend to dominate for years, there is still competition. And a female Jewish President!

 

*While the Republic of San Marino has been around for over 1,700 years and the Venetian Republic lasted 1,100 years, Rome was by far the largest republic in history. So far!

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Guest Post Response: "Peter made a compelling, if infuriating, argument."

Here was yesterday's audacious idea:

In 20 years the January 6 attack on the Capitol will be celebrated the way we celebrate the Boston Tea Party.

The Capitol rioters were advancing a new constitutional system for America: serial dictatorship.

The Boston Tea Party was citizen direct action. It was illegal and destructive. But Americans celebrate it because it was part of a process of forming a new government. We won the war, so we write the history and celebrate the milestones. 

President Trump, by his willful and energetic flouting of laws, and his contempt and disregard of the checks and balances written into the Constitution -- and by his getting away with most of it -- is creating a new de facto system of government. The president is a strongman, a dictator, the CEO, limited only by impeachment and conviction, an impossible burden in a two-party environment, unless the president really, really screws up. This new form of government is settling into place. It was ratified by Trump's election in 2024. A majority of voters are OK with an elected strongman. After all, Congress is worthless and someone needs to take charge.

I am unhappy about this, but it is what is happening.

John Shutkin is a college classmate. He is a retired corporate attorney with experience both at Big Law firms and as in-house general counsel for two large accounting firms. He jokes that the photo shows him to be an "old timer."

Shutkin is holding up the time-keeping device at a 55th college reunion panel 

Guest Post by John Shutkin

My college classmate and friend Peter Sage is one of the most open-minded people I know. And I say that as 95-percent a compliment. After all, as a litigator for many years, I am used to starting legal analyses with the phrase, “On the one hand….,” so I have enormous professional respect for such a viewpoint. My reservation is only because, in my view, open-mindedness should be waived on occasion, especially in extraordinary times. Sometimes there are simply black-and-white issues and, as to those issues, to be blunt, I am right and anyone who disagrees with me is wrong. And yes; I’m still open-minded enough to know there are people who feel the same way who are on the opposite side of the issue. But they’re wrong.

Which brings me to Peter’s latest post, “What if school children are taught that the January 6 rioters were heroes?” Of course, Peter gives away the game as to where his heart really lies by using the term “rioters,” rather than a more neutral word like “participants,” but I do appreciate his forcing us to think about this issue and making some compelling, if infuriating, arguments. And certainly there are good examples, like the Boston Tea Party which he cites, where “heroes” and “rioters” depended mainly on which side of the Pond one lived on. And, indeed, even in 1773, there were plenty of Loyalists in the Colonies who had strong criticism of the Tea Party “participants.”

Moreover, I am well aware of the observation (misattributed to Churchill, but still valid) that “History is written by the victors.” And, more specifically as to January 6th, we are already seeing clear evidence of Trump and his MAGA followers, both in the federal and red-state governments, trying to re-write history into their fever dream of European white male Christian heroism. Here’s the most recent example: CNN.

And Peter is also correct in noting that Trump has proved that the US Constitution allows for this country to have an elected dictator as president who is both willing and capable of such an historical re-write. Simply put, the Founding Fathers never believed that a megalomaniacal President, an enabling Supreme Court and a feckless Congress would allow it. Jennifer Rubin aptly noted this exact point in her recent column, “Founders Maybe Weren’t Geniuses,” channeling Larry David’s equal parts hilarious and terrifying episode of “Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness”: Contrarian News.  

As Larry delicately put it in his tag line. “We’re f*cked.” And, of course, Trump’s pardoning of all the January 6 rioters (for that is what they were) and his equally odious effort to create a $1.776 billion slush fund (note the non-coincidental amount) for them underscores that this is precisely what he is trying to do with regard to that horrific, treasonous event.

Finally, if one wants analysis of this phenomenon that is substantially older and viewed with more gravitas than Larry, one can always look to “1984.” As Orwell famously concluded: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

In short, full credit to Peter for acknowledging what we are currently seeing, no matter how much we in the fact-based universe know that it is both entirely wrong and incredibly dangerous. To put it in Larry’s vernacular, “It’s total bullsh*t.”

As for me, I am much more closed-minded than Peter, but I like to consider myself at least an optimistic realist rather than a despondent cynic. As such, I look for inspiration in MLK’s famous declaration, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” And I’d like to think that that arc begins on November 3 of this year (Election Day) and starts to truly soar on January 20, 2029.

Otherwise, we’re f*cked.

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Here's a twist: What if schoolchildren are taught that the Jan 6 rioters were heroes?

My Independence Day post sparked an audacious idea:

In 20 years the January 6 attack on the Capitol will be celebrated the way we celebrate the Boston Tea Party.

Sure it was illegal and destroyed property, but it was the voice of the people, and it helped us create new, better government. They were patriots!

1976: Celebrating Heroes

2046: Celebrating Heroes

My July 4 post described an exhibit I worked on 50 years ago for the Boston Bicentennial. Our goal was engagement and relevance. We asked exhibit visitors, "What would YOU do?" The exhibit confronted visitors with current day choices that were parallel to the events of the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, and the skirmishes at Lexington and Concord. We had filmed scenes of those key Revolutionary War milestones, doing so in a way that made them recognizable as versions of current news. 

The Boston Massacre looked suspiciously like an anti-busing demonstration that got out of hand. The Boston Tea Party looked suspiciously like an anti-tax demonstration that turned violent and destroyed property. Lexington and Concord involved caches of weapons intended to be used against the government.

Visitors were startled to realize that maybe -- just maybe -- the issues were complicated and they did not sympathize completely with the patriots and Minutemen militia.

Acts of lawlessness and violence have been important milestones in the creation of the government of the United States. There was the Revolution itself. Suppression of the Whisky Rebellion established that the federal government would maintain order against rural anti-tax rebellions. The Civil War led to a second set of constitutional amendments to establish Black equality and equal protection of the law. The civil rights demonstrations led by Martin Luther King, Jr. were noteworthy for their effort to avoid violence, but they took place at a time of riots and arson in Watts, Detroit, and other cities. Cities in flames were a message to Americans that the legal and financial condition of Black Americans had become untenable.

Mass demonstrations are messages to government. Sometimes they get hijacked and backfire. The George Floyd demonstrations are an example. They started out making a point about discriminatory policing, but were hijacked by thrill-seeking vandals. Some cities failed suppress this violence in astonishing acts of political malpractice, with the result that the message was reversed. That happens.

President Trump is the most consequential president of my lifetime. His audacity and willfulness are changing the American form of government by demonstrating the structural weakness of the Constitution. There are no effective checks and balances against an executive who chooses to ignore them. American presidents were not restrained by laws. They restrained themselves by obeying norms and expectations and patterns of practice. They nibbled at the edges of their power but never blasted through them. Trump does exactly that. He does what he wants and dares others to stop him. He doesn't try to be "fair." He picks winners and losers to increase his power and influence. This week he allocated FEMA disaster money to red states and denied it to blue states, and said openly that he is doing this because he can, and he proudly favors states that voted for him, so take note.

Trump proved that the USA has always had a Constitution that allowed an elected dictatorship, if a president chose to act as one. Trump is an American strongman. Congress and the courts have only a single power -- impeachment and conviction -- and in a country with a well-disciplined political party system, getting a two-thirds majority of the Senate to convict would require an extraordinary failure of governance. But that is the new operating system for America, and Americans are beginning to realize it: The president leads freely until he screws up very, very badly. 

Americans may well settle into this new arrangement and decide that they are OK with it. Trump is currently unpopular, but an economic upturn could change that. His gerrymandering, and the fecklessness and division of Democrats, may preserve his majorities, but in any case he is conviction-proof in the Senate. There is little appetite in America to restore Congress to centrality of policy. Congress has an approval rating of less than 15 percent. The president leads; Congress is a Greek chorus, applauding or cheering. 

If this new form of serial dictatorship is confirmed by one or two more elections in which we elect a Trumpish successor, then it will have been established as the new form of government structure and practice. Voters in 2024 took a giant step toward sanctioning this form of government when they elected Trump notwithstanding the January 6 events.

The January 6 attack on the Capitol turns from transgressive into heroic when the event is interpreted as a necessary growing pain of political change. It becomes a Boston Tea Party event. It makes the point that the voice of the people tried to keep a strong president in office.  Presidents will be understood to embody the will of the people, replacing the out-of-date notion that the will of the people is represented by the mishmash of competing ambitions described in the Constitution. Historians and political scientists and opinion journalists will confirm the new reality, perhaps reluctantly, but more likely understanding that the change was underway and Trump just made it visible.

The Boston Tea Party is understood as a heroic act by patriots because the Revolution was successful. History is written by the victors. The official White House website on January 6 expresses this point of view already.

Will this predicted future happen? It might well. Americans care about peace and prosperity, not democratic process. "It's the economy, stupid."

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No empathy.

"It was worse than a crime. It was a blunder."

Attributed to diplomat Charles Talleyrand, commenting on Napoleon's execution of a French aristocrat. 

We assassinated Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei.

Iranians closed ranks around their country and its leaders. 

No surprise there.

We watched the funeral this week. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians in the streets of Tehran, mourning a man we killed. 

This funeral and demonstration were even larger than the mass funeral for the 165 girls killed in the southern city of Minab.

Ayatollah Khamenei was 86 years old. He had run a repressive, corrupt, unpopular government for decades. Iranians, especially young ones, wanted him gone. Civic discontent was on the rise. The Iranian Revolution had worn out its welcome, and its leader was in poor health.

Did anyone in the Situation Room put themselves into the minds of Iranians? Did anyone think of our own history, how Americans reacted to assassinations and foreign attacks?

If President Trump died tomorrow of a heart attack, I would not be angry. I would probably feel some sense of relief, and then worry. What kind of government comes next? But a death from natural causes doesn't raise the specter of a national need to settle a score or take revenge. The death of a leader by assassination, however, creates a victim and maybe a martyr. Along with the funeral you get a moral structure. They attacked us.  Someone else interposed themselves into our home, our business. You get a funeral that becomes a referendum on the murderer. 

The grievance against Khamenei, real and earned over 40 years, got shoved aside by something bigger and simpler: We stole from them. We took something that was theirs. We insulted them. Abas Aslani, a senior research fellow at Tehran's Center for Middle East Strategic Studies, told Al Jazeera that the U.S. and Israel wanted regime change, but "what actually happened created a rally around the flag" — that "the government did not fall but became stronger." 

Well, of course. We know this mechanism from our own history. Abraham Lincoln morphed from controversial into a martyr. In my lifetime, and Trump's, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. They are named in monuments, airports, cultural centers, sports stadia, and national holidays. What irony. Trump seeks that kind of recognition for himself while giving a feeble and unpopular enemy a shortcut mechanism for martyrdom.

In late 1941, isolationist sentiment had kept our country out of a war for two years. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor ended that. The insult! The injury! Japan had no right! Public opinion coalesced behind our joining the war.

It happened again in 2001. President George W. Bush, drifting through his first year, elected by the thinnest of margins, saw his approval rating jump above 90 percent within days of the World Trade Center towers falling. That's what an attack does to a fractured public: It closes ranks. There was a stronger sense of "we." There was also a hardened sense of "they," Muslims weren't just unusual to most Americans. They became dangerous, an enemy. 

An assassination by the U.S. fit a well-learned template for Iranians. In 1953, the CIA helped topple Mohammad Mossadegh, a democratically elected prime minister, and installed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi the Shah. It bought us 26 years of a friendly autocrat, then delivered 1979 — the hostage crisis, the Islamic Republic, decades of enmity. Every Iranian schoolchild learns that story, the founding grievance of the regime. We just did it again.

This White House thinks in leverage, not empathy: Find the pressure point, apply it, expect compliance. It is happening again this morning as I write, with renewed bombing. Our tools are bombs and missiles, and from that we will change minds. That may be effective in forcing militaries to change. It is tone-deaf when it comes to persuading public opinion to align with us. Didn't we learn in Vietnam that we don't win the "hearts and minds" by bombing them? Apparently not.

Trump thinks like a predator. He knows what he wants: The target is prey to be eaten, not persuaded. He negotiates by force; it is zero sum. Their loss is our gain. 

Our tool is pain, and we deliver it: Double the tariff! No, triple it! Then maybe Canada will decide it wants to join the U.S. as the 51st state.

It hardened Canadian opinion against the U.S.

Talleyrand's line was about the execution of a duke, not an ayatollah, but it fits. Killing Khamenei was strategically self-defeating. We have watched this reflex in our own mirror, in the assassinations, in 1941, in Vietnam, and in 2001. The Iranian crowds are not chanting "thank God our monster is dead." They are chanting "Kill Trump."

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The Hero Shot.

Gavin Newsom looks like a president.

He is getting us accustomed to seeing him as the next president.

Of course Gavin Newsom is running for president. The question is whether California is a future the public wants.

He taped an eight minute video saying all the right things in the right way: https://youtu.be/RCKGYFZTgEY?si=nNKDsBLskErrRcHL 

His media people cut this talk into one-minute segments to get airplay on the various places where people scroll and glance at videos: Facebook Reels, TikTok, YouTube. 

I continue to believe that no California politician can win a general election for president in 2028. But Newsom can win the Democratic nomination, and his rivals need to start making bigger moves if they are going to displace him. 

Newsom will have vocal detractors from his home state who say he isn't progressive enough. Democrats have their own silo of true believers, not unlike like Trump's MAGA base.The heart wants what the heart wants. They were Bernie Sanders supporters in 2016 and 2020, and "Democratic Socialist" or "Progressives" now. The activist Democratic base wants a hell-raiser who doesn't communicate "compromise," and Newsom is trapped by his success in California. If he adjusts to win votes in battleground states, he will be called a flip-floping, hypocrite, corporate sellout -- and inauthentic. If he doesn't adjust, he is a pie in the sky, big-spending, crazy-woke Californian defending $7 gasoline and unaffordable housing. Lose-lose.

Democrats are looking for the thrill of new possibilities. In the mindset of the people who shape the soul of the Democratic Party -- people who work in a job of political advocacy on climate and the environment, abortion rights, Medicare for All, etc. -- it is all in reach now. They think they learned the "Bernie lesson." Reach higher. Be bolder and give voters something new and great, something to get out the vote of angry, frustrated people who want real change, because Bernie could have won in 2016, and we would have reached the Promised Land if we had only had vision and courage. The secret sauce is to be a change agent, like Trump, except good change, not corrupt change.

Newsom is doing the only possible thing: he is selling himself for what he is, a polished California governor. His brand, and California's, is baked in. Newsom is Hollywood-handsome, a vineyard owner and winemaker, and rich. He has succeeded in California, where taxes are high, home prices are stratospheric, gasoline prices are the nation's highest, and the businesses that California has created are so stupendously great and valuable that they are off-putting. It would be different and better for Newsom had he gotten his way to the top as a working actor, or better yet for winning battleground states, as the owner of a chain of tire stores or something that reads as blue collar and masculine. He could then have images of thick-bellied, male, unionized workers doing something that gets their hands dirty. After all, there are tire shops in both California and Pennsylvania. But in San Jose a home that costs $1.8 million is the same size and quality as one in Pennsylvania that costs $300,000. A guy who fixes tires can afford a $300,000 home.

California can brag about being the world's fourth largest economy -- and Newsom does this -- but it is a mixed message. A company like GM or Caterpillar, with factories and shift workers and objects sold at a profit, seem real; billion dollar enterprises. California created trillion-dollar industries created by genius nerds at screens making algorithms that exist as invisible data in metaphoric clouds.

That is Newsom's "California problem."

Newsom is doing what he can do: which is openly, actively selling. He isn't remaking himself. He is getting us accustomed to him as a president, showing himself in settings that look presidential and credible.

Newsom has Democratic rivals who come from battleground states: Mark Kelly, Jon Ossoff, and Josh Shapiro. I think they each have an easier path than Newsom for appealing to voters in battleground states. But a big part of success is showing up. Newsom is showing up and he is selling what he has to sell, that California under his leadership is standing up to Trump and doing so effectively. Trump sells strength and domination. Newsom is doing it, too, and saying he is winning. That is a strong message: a resolute fighter who wins. He is stealing Trump's brand. 

Newsom's problem is that he also needs to persuade Americans that California is a future that they want. 

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Littering as metaphor.

     “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
          ― F. Scott Fitzgerald,  The Great Gatsby, 1925

Writers cite this quotation frequently in this Era of Trump.

Trump is the change-agent a great many Americans wanted, and still want. Change-agents destroy things. They challenge norms. Trump reveals weaknesses in the American system of government and its institutions: Congress, especially, but also our campaign finance system, our law enforcement, our news media, our currency, our trade relationships, our alliances, our immigration system, and our laws regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Trump is often spontaneous and inconsistent in his disruption, which reads as "careless" to observers, which is why we see the quotation at the beginning of this column.

It is unfair to blame littering on Donald Trump. We had careless littering before Trump and we had performative political littering, too. It was celebrated by the political and cultural left as graffiti in opposition to oppression. It was "people's art." It was sticking it to "the man." 

But today's guest post by John Coster makes a fair point. Trump is changing what it means to be a good citizen. He is a reversal of whatever residue there is of JFK's call for patriotic sacrifice, bear any burden, pay any price, ask what you can do. 

Trump's patriotism is each person winning. We are a nation of winners in competition with losers. Trump's norm-breaking behavior includes selling our country and the world on the notion that this is a dog-eat-dog world and always has been, and Trump is just revealing and acting on that simple truth. People and businesses and countries look out for themselves, Trump included. Survival is about power, not some high-minded, noble, rules-based courtesy to entities larger than yourself. Take what you can because that is what everyone else does. Look out for number one. If you can grab a benefit, do it until someone stops you. If you can transfer a duty to someone else, do it until somebody or something stops you. Don't be a sap.

In that mindset, only a sap would bother taking fireworks litter home with them.

John Coster is a technology investor who managed, and now consults to, multimillion-dollar electrical installations for major technology firms. He also does hands-on missionary work among the homeless population on the sidewalks of Seattle.

Guest Post by John Coster

Is the way we live a symbol of who we have become?

I live on Alki Point in Seattle, which is on a remarkable urban beach with both city and mountain scapes. You can Google pictures. It's a beautiful stretch of coastline. The entire three to four miles is blend of sea walls, sandy beaches, boat ramps, ferry docks, fishing piers, shops and restaurants, old shipyards and of course, bike lanes. There is even an underwater city park for scuba diving (where I got PADI-certified). The tide flats during king tides are a marine life lover’s dream. It’s one of the city’s most popular playgrounds. Summer nights mean you’ll see cruisers showing off their custom bikes and classic (and not so classic) custom rods. There are volleyball tournaments all summer, art fairs and street food. 

Yesterday people staked out their spots early on the stretches of beach and park areas. Wall-to-wall canopies, beach chairs, grills and music of every style and ethnicity. 

Last night my wife and I walked down to see if we could catch a glimpse of the big fireworks being held across Eliot Bay. We didn’t need to. The entire stretch of beach was lined with commercial-grade fireworks being fired off by ordinary people along the boardwalk and beach. Just people blowing off serious fireworks in the middle of crowds. The air was thick with smoke as hundreds of mortars shot up and boomed around us. The few police sat in their parked cars with red and blue lights and watched. We watched for a while but decided it was pretty unsafe, especially after a mortar went off on the ground, so we waded through the crowd and walked home. 

I was up early today and walked the beach. It was a mess. Trash everywhere as you might expect, but what shocked me was how much garbage was left from all the illegal fireworks. Everything just left for someone else to clean up. 

I was thinking how maybe that’s appropriately symbolic of who we have become. Or maybe with few exceptions in our nation’s history- we tend to make a lot of noise, blow things up (and even flaunt its illegality) and let someone else deal with the aftermath. Maybe our current administration with its selfish and narcissistic leader is just a mirror of our broader culture (not everyone of course) which is why so many see nothing wrong with his worldview. 

Your Up Close correspondent in Seattle.

 

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