Greenland And Slanting The Truth

Politics

Today we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity. The modern champions of communism have selected this as the time, and ladies and gentlemen, the chips are down, they are truly down. Joseph McCarthy, communist hunter and US senator, circa 1950

I do not think the mainstream press is equipped or capable of covering ideological white nationalists and eugenicists as such, or even capable of noting that this is what they are. it is related to the wide belief that racism is simply a matter of manners. ‪jamelle‬ ‪(at)jamellebouie.net‬ The real jbouie. Columnist for the New York Times Opinion section. Co-host of the Unclear and Present Danger podcast. b-boy-bouiebaisse on TikTok. National program director of the CHUM Group.

When I was a freshman in college, sometime around the end of 1957, we were shown a propaganda movie made by HUAC as part of our orientation package. HUAC stands for the House Un-American Activities Committee, and, according to the Harry S. Truman Library, it was created in 1938 to investigate alleged disloyalty and rebel activities on the part of private citizens, public employees, and organizations suspected of having Communist ties. Citizens suspected of having ties to the communist party would be tried in a court of law.

The power that HUAC had, and the fear that power generated, seems absurd now – or it did, six months ago, anyway – but 1957 was a different time. Sometime in the thirties, we – well, some of us anyway – became obsessed with fighting Godless Communism, which was a threat, or a perceived threat anyway, to our national religion, Capitalism. 1957, when I saw the HUAC movie which was required part of Freshman Orientation, was four years after Senator Joseph McCarthy, a Republican from Wisconsin, embarrassed himself and the country as the Chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Senate Government Operations Committee, whatever the hell that means, and I thought – as I remember it, we all thought – that the going-after commies hysteria had passed.

As an aside, I knew HUAC was a house committee, and I knew that McCarthy was a Senator, but somehow, over the last 68 years, I’ve connected them in my psyche. But they were not connected, and the December 1954 censure of McCarthy by the Senate did not slow down the craziness of HUAC. End aside.

All that I remember about HUAC’s movie was how ridiculously exaggerated it was, and while I haven’t thought about that movie in years – probably 65 years – I was reminded of it by another ridiculously exaggerated movie that I just saw on FOX. Apparently, it was commissioned by President Trump to promote his Greenland adventure.

I ended up at FOX because I got angry at the reporting of the Wisconsin Supreme Court fight in the New York Times and Washington Post. I’m not angry that we won, I’m very happy about that, it’s my side that won after all. I’m angry at the biased reporting. I want my reporting to be unbiased and neutral (fair and balanced, if you will). Otherwise, I can’t trust it and can’t rely on it.

But, not surprisingly, FOX way outdid the New York Times in terms of craziness. They didn’t bother with the Wisconsin Supreme Court fight, choosing instead to feature the afore mentioned movie (displayed on Trump’s X account to aswage the doubts that this is real).

(The end of this post has been changed as the video that was originally posted here was preventing the post from loading properly).

Happy Spring

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Wow, having my hand in a cast – even a u-shaped pseudo-cast? – was more constricting than I expected. And so was the cold weather. But yesterday, I went to my hand doctor, who said my bone was healing faster than expected and removed the cast. When I was young, I used to be a fast healer, but it has been a long time since anybody told me that. It feels liberating.

Next week, I’m going to the eye surgeon for the cataract – s? – removed from my left eye and replaced with a silicon lens. Life is already looking better; at the end of next week, it should be looking better and brighter.

Trump Is Destorying the Country We So Love…But First

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Oh, I am heartily tired of hearing about what Lee is going to do…Go back to your command and try to think what we are going to do ourselves instead of what Lee is going to do. General U. S. Grant (on the second day of The Battle of the Wilderness [I think]).

We want to hear what the plans are — are we just going to be sitting on our behinds, talking a lot? Or are we actually going to be doing something? Leanna Terrell, a 75-year-old retired Navy intelligence officer 

You are meant to feel powerless. That is what a strongman wants: to make you feel as if nothing can stop the takeover of your country. Ben Rhodes is a contributing writer for the New York Times Opinion.

Fox News and the right wing would have you believe that these American values are something out of The Communist Manifesto. But let me tell you, Fox News, I don’t believe in healthcare, labor, and human rights because I’m a Marxist. I believe it because I was a waitress. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

The But First part is my poor, broken hand. I am now wearing a half cast – which I guess is technically called a splint – that was given to me by the hand doctor at PAMF. BTW, PAMF’s real name is Palo Alto Medical Foundation, and it is part of Sutter Health, one of the three major groups that dominate medical care in our area (medicine and eldercare are very profitable). My hand and arm are wrapped in bandages and covered with what we used to call an Ace Bandage. Everything around my left hand, arm, and shoulder hurts, and it is hard for me to do almost anything more than watch TV or my computer monitor. I am not what I would call fine. (When I wrote this, it was true, but it no longer is; I feel much better.)

Still, much of why I’m not fine is because of President Trump. I knew he was going to be disruptive and would do a lot of damage; he has plans, such as eliminating DEI, that I think will hurt our country. What I didn’t expect was for Trump to be so mean to so many people. It didn’t occur to me that hurting random people was his goal. I thought it was only settling old, real or imagined, grievances. I didn’t expect The President of the United States to be such an asshole.

As an aside, what a miserable, petty, human being he must be, even though he won the presidency. And he did win the presidency, which raises a question in my mind: If Trump is so inept, and I think he is, how inept are the Democrats who lost to him? What are we doing wrong? End aside.

I’ve been going through the five stages of grief over the Presidential Election: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and, now, acceptance that Trump won. He even won the popular vote this time. I think he won because his understanding of the United States – paradoxically, especially the discontent – is closer to reality than what the Democratic establishment sees as reality. Trump sees that the government clearly doesn’t work for most people. I watched parts of Trump’s rallies, and he doesn’t talk to the crowd; he talks with the crowd, he dances with it, and he listens to it. I don’t want to give the impression that he will actually do anything. He won’t; he probably can’t. But he didn’t get elected for what he is actually going to do; he was elected for what he said he would do.

I think the Democratic establishment is reality-blind. And why shouldn’t it be? Most of its money – and don’t forget that in Washington, money equals influence – comes from well-read, socially concerned people who want to do good without hurting themselves. Unfortunately, that makes it very hard to pass laws like a minimum wage that reflects the cost of living or free medical care. I am still a Democrat; being a Democrat is rooted in my ancestral humus and it’s not my choice. Still, I think that most of the current Democratic lawmakers are not capable of bringing the much-needed change.

To be continued…

Well, That Was Unexpected

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To keep a short story short, yesterday, I slipped on our stairs while taking out the garbage. Sequoia Hospital’s Emergency Department Patient Discharge papers say that I have minor hand and elbow injuries, including a broken metacarpal. I had the garbage bag strap wrapped around my hand, and it tried to remove the skin from the back of my hand. The stairs did a pretty good job of removing skin from my elbow.

When I got to the hospital, the hospital x-rayed my hand and elbow, cleaned up the blood – on my hand and elbow only, Michele got the blood out of my jeans and sweater – glued the skin flap back down, put a splint on me, patted me on the popo, and sent me home.

Tomorrow, I am going to the hand specialist, and I expect to have an interesting scar.

Michele provided the documentation and reminded me five times to warn you, dear reader, not to scroll down if gore makes you uncomfortable.

A Post I’d Rather Not Make

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I was deeply sad and afraid after listening to—I’m tempted to say ambush, but let’s call it—the special meeting between President Trump, Vice President Vance, Secretary of State Little Marco Rubio, who was trying to disappear into his chair, assorted handpicked press, and the ambushee and begger, Ukrainian President Zelensky for the third time, I was sad more than angry. And I was disappointed. I was disappointed in my country, the country I thought I was too cynical to become disappointed in anymore. and disappointed in myself for being part of our country’s fall from grace.

Now, sitting at my keyboard on a beautiful but cold spring day, I am still sad. Maybe I was not cynical enough or maybe Trump is just being open about who we, The United States of America, really are. I am beginning to realize that Trump’s America is the real America, and that makes me deeply sad.

In 1991, Ukraine was the third largest nuclear power in the world. By 1994, Ukraine had no nukes; they had given them away for a guarantee that Russia, Great Britain, and the United States would protect them. It was called the Budapest Memorandum of Security Assurances. Russia was the first signer to break the Agreement when they invaded Crimea and part of Eastern Ukraine in 2014. Great Britain and the US, under President Obama, were next to break the Agreement when they didn’t protect Ukraine as promised (although we did instigate some sanctions against Russia).

Without going deep into the details, most of which I don’t know, by the time Joe Biden took office, Congress had voted some military aid to Ukraine. We increased that in 2022 by about $67B, in 2023 by $47B, and $61B in 2024. President Biden said “We are with you as long as it takes”, however, he refused to define “it”, for some reason not known to me, considering an undefined “it” a sign of good diplomacy. To quote U.S. Lieutenant General Ben Hodges “These statements that ‘we are with you for as long as it takes’ mean nothing to me.” We don’t want Russia to disappear Ukraine, but, seemingly, we also don’t want Ukraine to win the war, even though we carefully didn’t say that.

Now Trump has said we don’t want Ukraine to win. Well, Trump may not have said it, but he has certainly strongly implied it. All this preamble has led me to the realization that our actual reality will never match our shared, professed reality. I still believed that our shared, professed reality was a shared dream if not a reality. Now I am sad that we, much of the majority of our collective we anyway, really do not want our actual reality to ever match that professed reality.

I first realized we were not who we said we were when I was about 17, or 18, or 19, when I read Hiroshima by John Hersey. About the same time, we had a Black housekeeper, Cary, who cleaned our house every couple of weeks. One day, on her way to our place, her car was hit by a couple of young kids going the wrong way down a one-way street. The police were called and gave Cary a ticket. I wanted to fight the ticket, but we didn’t, we paid for the ticket and the damage to Cary’s car in a sort of “don’t make waves” way.

Sitting here, I remember that there were other clues, clubs we couldn’t join, hotels we couldn’t stay in because we were Jewish, cousins who were harassed by HUAC for essentially nothing, being treated as different when I changed schools in the seventh grade. I grew up being taught that White Europeans first brought civilization to California with the Missions; and the Jewish Holocaust survivors who had taken over Palestine and who were making the desert bloom. I was taught that we saved the world – for freedom and Democracy – in World War II.

I was not taught that the Missions were essentially slave camps that the Indians themselves were forced to build, or that Palestinians even existed, or that, months before the Atomic bomb, we set Tokyo on fire. I was not taught that the Tokyo firebombing was planned to kill as many people as possible, and that we set the record for the number of human beings killed by other human beings in one day.

But I was taught, OK, we’re not perfect but we are getting better. And we were. I could see it with my own eyes. What I didn’t see was that we have the highest incarceration rate in the world, by far. What I didn’t see was the minimum wage stuck at $7.25 an hour as if anybody could live on that. But, even when I did, I believed that we aspired to be more perfect. More perfect in our acceptance of other people, more perfect in our national treatment of people, more perfect in acting out the Ideals we say we believe in. More perfect in acting in accordance with The Christ’s teachings. And all that’s true for the people in my life even though very few of them are Christians. It is true in the books, magazines, and papers I read, and the people I see on television or Instagram.

But that is what I believe, not what many Americans believe. We blame Trump, but it is not just Trump. That makes me deeply sad.

Cartoon by Michael de Adder