Category Politics/Culture

In my fever dreams about November 3, 2020, I see the summer of 1968 having unfolded all over again. Donald Trump, like Richard Nixon then, will have been elected to the presidency (Nixon on his second try, Trump re-elected) by parlaying a summer of urban riots, racial discord and the fear they engendered among threatened white voters to eke out an election victory despite attracting less than a majority of voters, and in Trump’s case, by once again losing the popular vote to his Democratic rival.

This is every Democrat’s and disaffected moderate Republican’s worst nightmare, and it could unfold exactly that way unless Democrats get very strategic, very measured, and very sober—very fast.

Central to that effort will be making their peace with the few hundred thousand swing voters in a few purple states who decided the 2016 election and will very likely do so once again.

And what will making that peace ent...

So at the conclusion of the Democratic National Convention, we are reminded that Joe Biden will allow “No religion. No anything.” Not only that, but he will “Hurt the Bible. Hurt God. He’s against God.”

Against God—dear me!

Whom he will “hurt.”

Poor God! We had better buck that boy up, send him a condolence or “I’ve been thinking of you” card to restore whatever confidence has been shaken by the Biden campaign’s assault against his very person.

Cheesh, for a “Sleepy Joe” whose doddering, demented, cognitively declining ways have become the butt of Republican Party campaign ads, it’s a rather remarkable feat to be able to “hurt” the omnipotent, omnipresent Creator of the Universe. Were it true, that kind of power would be something of a resume builder.

Maybe he could restore the luster of IBM!

Resurrect the Lehman Brothers!

Exhume the “Excite” search engine!

Get ...

With one of this morning’s tweets ending with the question, “Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote?”, President Trump has confirmed what he has been telling us in almost straightforward fashion ever since the 2016 campaign. Consistently trailing Hillary Clinton in polls back then, he warned in ominous tones about forthcoming election “fraud,” preparing the ground, in no uncertain terms, to contest the election and throw the country into disarray if the results did not go his way.

Four years later, he is now pushing the notion that perhaps the election should not be held as prescribed by law on November 3, after having waged an overt campaign against mail-in ballots over many months. He’s convinced making voting easier and safer in the midst of a pandemic will bolster Democratic turnout more than it will Republicans...

Back in 1951, the publication of John Howard Griffin’s “Black Like Me” landed like a bomb on American culture. Griffin was a white man who had spent months working with his dermatologist to turn his skin black before setting out on a bold odyssey from his New Orleans home through the deep South. His intention was to experience first-hand what it would feel like to be a black person in Jim Crow America. The result was a stark, shattering testimony to the virulent racism still prevailing in American life nearly a century after the Emancipation Proclamation. The book’s power resonates to this day.

So much so that country singer Mickey Guyton, one of the few African Americans navigating the sometimes treacherous shoals of her genre with its predominantly white artists and audiences, had it very much in mind when releasing her song of the same title just weeks ago...

We seem to be tumbling down a long dark shaft toward a reckoning. A reckoning of our history, of the dreams that helped build us, the denial that sustained us, the sins that defiled us, the nightmare of oppression that too many of our people have endured. Our shadow of racism fully exposed, the light from a thousand video feeds burning a hole through our willful ignorance, we stand before the world, and even more grievously, before ourselves, naked and fully exposed.

And now, beset by a pandemic that has been aggressively scorned by the leader of our land, with millions out of work and hundreds of thousands in the streets, we face the furnace of a heating planet and an already overheated political season, a presidential campaign in the offing that will not look or sound like anything that has ever come before.

“Who are we?”, we will be asking come November. Or perhaps more to the point: “Who will we be...