Here's a twist: What if schoolchildren are taught that the January 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 must be heard 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.

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 exprsses 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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Easy Sunday: The Magic Laundry Basket

"Take it easy on yourself
The world will keep turnin'
Without any help"

     Don Williams, "Take it Easy on Yourself," 1998

A 90-second Easy Sunday YouTube video.

Funny. 

It's good to have a day off from politics.

CLICK: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SqQgDwA0BNU

     "I've been doing this since you moved in. I don't know how it happens, is it the house or what, but any dirty clothes you put in this basket. . . ."

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Bicentennial memories

The American Revolution came early in Boston. 

By 1776, the action had moved south from Boston to Philadelphia. 

Boston was the hotbed of anti-tax, revolutionary fervor in the British colonies of North America. Boston was the problem child. Britain had to station troops in Boston, which brought public order while simultaneously exacerbating an angry public mood.  

We can relate. Consider the National Guard troops Trump sent to Minneapolis.

The Revolutionary War events we learned about in school preceded the Declaration of Independence. The Boston Massacre took place in 1770; the Boston Tea Party in 1773; Lexington and Concord's "shot heard round the world" took place in April,1775; George Washington took command of the Continental Army in July, 1775 on Cambridge Common.

I helped organize the celebration of the Bicentennial celebration. It was my first professional job after college and my one year of a Ph.D. program in history at Yale. I decided that the world would not change for the better because of the work of historians. I thought politics was the way to do it. 

My job at Boston's celebration of the bicentennial was a job in politics. I was hired by the office of the mayor of Boston, Kevin White. He hoped that a city in celebration would give him a  national reputation as a can-do, effective big-city mayor and a potential vice presidential pick in the 1976 or 1980 election.

The bicentennial programs avoided "rah-rah" flag-waving. It wasn't the mood. In Washington, D.C. Nixon was caught in the tar pit of his Watergate crimes and cover-up and Boston was experiencing ugly disorder in opposition to court-ordered busing to integrate schools in the racially-segregated neighborhoods of Boston and its nearby suburbs.

We staged a large exhibit in a newly-redeveloped Quincy Market, three huge century-old buildings converting from derelict into a vibrant "festival marketplace" crowded with shops, restaurants, and tourists. The years 1974 and 1975 were at the front end of that process. Our job was to bring people into the free exhibit and make sure they left exhilarated and ready to tell their friends and neighbors about the goings-on in the redeveloping city.

We used a prominently displayed Honeywell computer to tally the votes of people as they confronted several contemporary issues that closely mirrored issues that led to the revolution.

South Boston, October, 1974

-- We showed a brief movie of police attempting to control an unruly crowd, and then asked: Would you be part of, or at least be in agreement with, a crowd throwing rocks and snowballs at troops trying to maintain order? Or did you support the police? That situation depicted student protests five years prior and police trying to restrain crowds at anti-busing protests. Were we doing it today we might have shown anti-ICE demonstrations now. This was analogous to the Boston Massacre, when harassed British soldiers fired into a crowd.  

--  Would you protest a small, lawful tax by participating in a riotous takeover and destruction and looting of private property of merchants trying to obey the law and sell their goods? The exhibit showed then-contemporaneous vandalism. 

Today it might show organized shoplifting looters, feeling righteous anger over Lululemon selling leggings for $99. The looters consider the price ridiculous and unjust; the stores need to be sent a message. We see this on loops on Fox News. Bostonians who threw tea into Boston Harbor felt entitled and righteous, too. 

--  Would you support semi-organized local militias stockpiling guns and ammunition in a suburban warehouse, or would you be happy that lawful authorities travelled to the site to seize these items to protect public safety? That was the issue facing Bostonians surrounding the events at Lexington and Concord.

We showed a half-dozen scenes of then-contemporary controversies. What would YOU do? People marked their ballots, and they received a score: Which of ten prominent Bostonians were their responses most similar to. Sam Adams? John Hancock?  The exhibit was a hit because of the surprise factor and the controversy the exhibit created. Many people who presumed they were "patriots," i.e. on the side of the revolution, found that when the events were translated into contemporary events, they were instead on the side of law and order. 

I left Boston in the fall of 1975 to return to Medford, Oregon, and pursue my own, brief political career. The ethnic politics and endemic racism of Boston baffled me. I was a fish out of water there. 

Forty-five years later, in 2020, I watched rioters storm the Capitol in an attempt to overturn an election. It looked like revolution to me; a coup d' état. I sided with the Capitol Police. President Trump called people storming the doors and windows to take direct action to install the government of their choice "patriots."

I think they were traitors to their country. Of course, so was Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, Hancock, and the rest of the signers of the Declaration.

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Corruption: That was then. This is now.

I was in office in the Post-Watergate Era.

What Trump is doing would have been unthinkable.

I used to be young.

Sometimes I irritated my fellow commissioners

The 1976-1985 era was not some Golden Age of everybody-get-along. There was plenty of controversy. Amid the controversies, the era was characterized by a bend-over-backwards effort to demonstrate that government was free of corruption. It was a reaction to Watergate.

Jimmy Carter was famous for being corruption free. He kept his brother at arms length. He put his peanut business into a blind trust. He asked us for self-sacrifice by turning down our thermostats and driving 55 mph on roads engineered to be driven at 65 and 70. Appointees to the Carter administration were prohibited from doing the revolving door of leaving the administration and then getting a high-paying job in the industries one regulated. 

In the trenches of local government in Medford and Jackson County, Oregon, it mean obeying the Public Meetings Law, first passed in 1973, which involved a complex set of public notices of agendas, public disclosure, and requirements that all meetings among members of a majority of any public body be done in public, with recordings and written minutes  In a three-person governing body like the Jackson County Board of Commissioners, it meant that I could not talk with my colleague in the next office. 

There were reporters out there eager to bust our chops if they thought we did. In those days the news was a watchdog.

I won election in 1980 because I was the "clean government" candidate. My Republican opponent was a civic leader, very tight with the local business, labor, and governmental establishment. They loved him, his ads said. My campaign argued that I stayed clear of the special interests. 

It was an era of full disclosure of conflicts of interest and potential conflicts of interest. The county commission heard land use appeals to zoning and building issues directly, in public. At each hearing I would report in a flat, matter of fact tone, that I had received campaign contributions of $10 from Mr. John Doe, $20 from Mrs. Mary Roe, etc.   

At no point in four years as a commissioner, in which we were making land use and other regulatory decisions with enormous financial consequences for the people involved, did anyone every ask me to have lunch. No one bought me coffee to visit about their case. There was never the hint of a whiff of feeling out whether I was amenable to "giving a break" to someone on a decision. There is enormous latitude of gray area in making zoning decisions. Where land stopped being zoned "rural residential" and developable into five-acre parcels, and where it began being "agricultural open space" — a designation that prohibited parcelization and home building — had life-changing, million-dollar consequences for the landowner.

It wasn't that I communicated prickly ethical character. It was the era. It was the norm. Government was clean. The umpires were straight-arrow fair.

Trump has reversed the polarity of clean government. Corruption and favor-granting is open. Trump gives pardons to campaign contributors who are guilty of major felonies. Trump openly helps political allies and punishes political opponents. Trump awards contracts to friends, campaign contributors, and to family. He holds banquets to recognize people who purchased his crypto coin, a direct payment to Trump. He doesn't pretend a blind eye. He thanks them at a banquet to let them know their tribute is noticed. 

Newsweek

I am hopeful that Republican voters become uncomfortable with what Trump is doing. I see signs of it among some opinion leaders in the media, but not among Republican politicians; they dare not confront Trump. Politicians will change when Republican voters change, and it hasn't happened yet.

I am hopeful that Democrats nominate a leader noteworthy for his or her straight-arrow history. Someone who hasn't traded stocks in Congress. Someone who demonstrated some self-sacrifice and patriotism in his or her personal life. 

I am ready for the pendulum to swing back to clean government. It will happen only if voters demand change because they are offended by what they see right now. I am.

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