Category Politics/Culture

We are a nation rent asunder, in a horrible mess, increasingly hard and loud at each other and dismissed—or worse: pitied—by our former allies, while our enemies busy themselves with furthering the work of our Mad King in undermining the very foundations of our democracy. Millions of us are voting frantically, in fear and trembling that it won’t be counted, will be challenged, hidden away or burned while armies of lawyers descend on a newly stolen Supreme Court with petitions to sow yet more chaos and perpetuate the reign of an obviously demented Divider-in-Chief.

What kind of man summons his followers to tightly packed worship rallies that expose them to a potentially deadly virus, all the while denying its very existence and ridiculing those who seek to keep us safe us from it? One can’t help but feel we are not so much approaching but are now fully submerged in lunacy under the most wreckless man ...

So we lurch from crisis to crises, seeming to come in multiples now. Pandemics, hurricanes and fires. Protests erupting anew with each same-old same-old death-by-police of a black person. A mad king’s 98-minute prime time tantrum giving way to a shocking mid-of-night revelation, and before the sun descends again, a 5-minute helicopter lift straight to a fabled army hospital’s “presidential suite.”

Things falling apart, the center (was there ever a center?) no longer holding, dark possibilities going darker with the coming winter and its portents of an ever greater discontent.

We gasp at the news, the world going freeze-dried, suspended, instantly unforgettable as we take quick stock and begin to consider the implications, vast and sprawling and mind-bending as they are.

Up against that dismal constellation, just why is it that I walked out into the slightly chill October air yesterday morning and discovere...

(How Joe Biden might consider following up today in the aftermath of last night’s historic—for all the wrong reasons— presidential debate…)

My fellow Americans,

If you watched my “debate” last night with Donald Trump, you were perhaps as horrified at what you beheld as I was. I will not belabor all the ways in which the president of the United States degraded his office, himself, and most importantly, you, the people of our beloved democracy. It was a performance so over the top as to leave observers not only stunned, but grasping for commentary that would befit the unprecedented spectacle they had just witnessed.

As difficult as I know it was for you to watch, and as excusable as it was if you simply gave up early in the proceedings and curled up with a good book or your children or the family dog, I will tell you it was a very challenging circumstance for others in that hall last night as well—inc...

As a means of preparing for the first presidential debate of 2020 this Tuesday night, I entered a You Tube time machine this past week and traveled back to late September, 1960, almost exactly 60 years ago. That’s when Vice President Richard Milhous Nixon of California squared off against Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy of Massachusetts in the first of a series of four debates that stretched into mid-October, each of them lasting just under an hour.

Yes, I took one for the Traversing team by watching all four over a few days, feeling mostly, I am glad to report, riveted. Just underneath that feeling, though, I noted a mixture of lamentation over how much has changed—mostly not for the better—in presidential debates over the subsequent decades.

Let’s get to the one glaring improvement right out of the blocks here. In the four 1960 debates, there were four panelists and one moderator for each debate...

It had already felt like this country was fraying like a worn and long unwashed jacket. And now this.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg is dead.

The very words rocked me back on my heels last night as I climbed the few stairs to the utility room after depositing some recyclables in the blue bin and my phone lit up and those words presented themselves from a “Washington Post” alert and my mind groped for a few seconds to make sure I was reading and comprehending correctly and to my horror I realized that I was and I knew, with sudden and absolute certitude, that I would always remember this moment, just as I do the President Kennedy and Bobby and MLK and my parents’ and my brother’s moments of passing.

I also knew, with equal certitude and immediacy, that as bad as things appear to be now, they are about to get very, very much worse.

That’s because I had zero doubt that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would wa...