Persuaded to be Embarrassed

didn’t want to watch the news as the congressional Republicans booed Liz Cheney out of leadership. It was too troubling. Her offense was that she refused to stop telling the truth. God bless her.

That truth-telling has become grounds for removal from a Party’s leadership is itself shocking. Even more shocking, to me, is that no one doing the booing and subsequent voting seemed to suffer even a slight pang of shame. There was no evident embarrassment. It was just “good riddance” to a problem, where truth was the basic problem…

The Power of a Whisper

President Biden has given his first address to a Joint Session of Congress. It was delivered to a smaller-than-usual, socially distanced assembly.

For me, what distinguished the President’s speech most wasn’t its content — although I found that encouraging — but its volume. As veteran journalist Jeff Greenfield wrote (Politico), “His speech was delivered almost as conversation, rather than a series of declamations. He kept his voice, for long stretches, at times a near-whisper of empathy or concern — a tone that would have been completely unworkable in a full room.”…

Delicious Ambiguity

What’s clear to me now is that, while enduring the Trump Years, I suffered no uncertainty about how I saw him. He was, and is, a self-serving crook evading all consequences of his despicable behaviors. I felt suffocated under his relentless affection for authoritarian power and White nationalism. I was never ambiguous.

I’m grateful for the Biden Harris team. I don’t miss the brutal ugliness of Trump’s assaults. But having “my side” win, which is how their November victory seemed to me, isn’t necessarily a victory for democracy. As Nate Cohn opined in a recent New York Times’ essay, the most evident threat to American democracy is the danger “of a hostile and divided citizenry.” In other words: sides….