A burst of cruelty

Just six weeks back Ellen and Dia and I stopped  on a sand track along the Chobe river, shut off the engine our Toyota pickup truck and watched as a herd of elephants twice the size of our vehicle passed quietly to our right. It was a scene that will remain forever in my memory, as the creatures who are literally mammoth in size lumbered past us. Only a few of the males bothered to look up, turning their trunks and giant heads toward, eyeing us to make sure we knew they were there.

They left us to sit there undisturbed, to marvel at their massive, mobile beauty, to enjoy their family outing. At one point, later in the day, I counted 74 elephants crossing in front of us.

We knew that a momentary burst of cruelty, or fear - or anything really -  on their part could kill the three of us. These African bush elephants weigh as much as six tons each, and there were dozens of them.

But there in the Chobe National Park in northern Botswana, hunting is banned, poaching is contained by police action, and the elephants, accustomed to visitors with binoculars, left us alone.

Two days ago we learned from a friend in Botswana that more than two dozen of the elephants on the Chobe had been killed by raiding poachers. The invaders, most likely from across the river in Namibia, cut the faces from the grass eating elephants, who flock to the Chobe by the hundreds in search of water. They cut off their trucks and amputated their tusks, which are like gold in some markets.

In an instant, Chobe, the sole safe and wild sanctuary for wildlife in southern Africa, was violated and changed forever.

Horse sense

This post is about #MeToo. This is not about me. It starts with a horse, but bear with me, because it ends with a serious proposal to stop sexual harassment and assault in the entertainment industry.

In a 1939 Henry Fonda movie, Jesse James, a horse was pushed off a cliff. The horse survived the fall, but got a bit flustered and drowned shortly thereafter. If you are horrified, you should be. Many people were, and the film industry was forced to accept outside supervision of any animals used on set. The Humane Association has ever since kept on eye on the non-human actors and provided the filmmaker with the seal of approval pictured above.

(Does it work? Not always)

Now we have learned  of (or now we have been forced to stop denying), powerful men in the film industry routinely use that power to obtain sexual favors from women. It is not just Harvey Weinstein. It's endemic. My question is - if the death of one horse led to an industry wide enforceable ban on a vile practice, why shouldn't the violations wreaked upon dozens of women by Weinstein lead to a similarly enforceable ban on his nasty practice?

My proposal is simple - an outside human rights group, presumably including lawyers, would verify that they monitored the filming of the movie (or TV show), and that no woman was harmed in the making of it. To ascertain this, the lawyers would interview every woman involved in the project under veil of anonymity. Any scoundrels would be prosecuted or banned, or the label would not be attached to the film. That would leave the producers with some 'splainin to do.

Why not give it a try? They saved horses, didn't they?

Clear Eyes over Syria

The US military, following orders of the 45^th President, did something in Syria this week. Lots of people were heard to say, “finally”. The Commander-in-Chief who boasts he has never changed a diaper grieved publicly for the lost Syrian children who died slow deaths choking on sarin gas. “No child of god should have to suffer such harms.” A statement no one save atheists can argue with.

You might be tempted to see this as a rupture with the recent past, but if we listen carefully we will see not a break with the 44^th President’s policy, but rather continuity. The current administration, like its predecessor, is reacting not to the generalized horror of the Assad regime’s assault on its people, but on its use of this specific horror – chemical weapons. Since World War I, with few and notable exceptions, the world has agreed that chemical weapons should not be deployed.

When Assad used these poisons in 2013, the previous administration reacted. We’ve grown so accustomed to hearing the chorus saying that Obama did “nothing” at the time. Which is only because in the minds of too many in the media and among conventional thinkers in both parties, you are doing “nothing” unless you are doing “something” that involves weapons.

The previous administration did react. Here is what they did: they forced Syria to sign a treaty against the use of chemical weapons, charged Russia with removing and destroying them, and put the force of the United Nations behind that sentiment.

That action, frequently described by commentators and hawks as “doing nothing” worked for four years. Four years without a chemical attack in this war – if I were a Syrian family trying to stay alive, I would take that. Four years to find safe haven, to find more effective means of resistance, four years to stay alive. I would take that. Call it what you will, it’s not nothing.

Enter 45. Assad attacks Idlib with chemical weapons, probing to find out if the current President really means what he said in 2013, that this was not really our concern, and that we should stay out. Assad learned when the US launched the 59 missiles that destroyed his 20 planes and shut down his airfield for 24 hours, that the ban on chemical weapons - a red line, if you will – was still in effect.

Both actions – Obama’s diplomacy, Trump’s gunplay – have the same result. They remind Assad that there is no percentage in using these particular weapons. And that is, by any realistic standpoint, about all we can do in this situation (that plus open our doors to those who flee).

The partisan bickering that goes on just masks this fundamental consistency. If you needed any more proof of continuity you should watch Hillary Clinton, hours before the Tomahawks flew, egging on the man who she beat by 3 million votes in November to rev his engines.

The good news in all, a sanity within the unbearably painful insanity of this conflict, is that both administrations seem to recognize limits. There is little that we can do to end this war, short of sending an army as populous as the city of Miami to spend decades in Damascus, and so every day we stay away, and every day that chemical weapons remain in their sheaths, is what passes for a good day.

Sigh.

Happy Botswana Independence Day, Everyone

Happy Botswana Independence Day, Everyone!

Across the Atlantic Ocean, in a dusty village south of the Tropic of Capricorn, a few hours from the border with South Africa, our daughter Dia has been up all night with her neighbors singing and praying and cooking, as apparently most of Botswana’s two million people are doing, to celebrate fifty years of independence.

Botswana isn’t a place you hear of much in the news. It’s a big country, about the size of Texas. It’s very sparsely populated, and a lot of it is given over to the forbidding Kalahari desert. It’s got the largest inland delta in the world (two years ago I didn’t even know there were such things), and the most numerous elephant herd of any country in the world.

On the subject of elephants - Paul Allen, who founded Microsoft along with Bill Gates, recently paid for a crew of scientists to fly small planes all over Africa and count elephants, and his Great Elephant Census reports that there are about 130,000 elephants in Botswana.

I don’t have Paul Allen’s money, but we did go to Botswana earlier this year, and one afternoon I stopped our pickup truck on a dusty sand track near the Chobe River because an elephant had just emerged from the bush right in front of us. I shut off the engine (the only prudent response when a six-ton mammal lumbers anywhere in your general direction). Then I began to count.

Seventy four.

Seventy four elephants paraded in front of us on their way to the river that morning. That is a lot of elephants. In Botswana the elephant herd is growing – and that’s not the only thing. The preservation of wildlife has made the country a magnet for tourists around the world, a boom that employs one in every 20 working age Batswana (that’s what you call a citizen of Botswana).

Driving around Botswana (the highways are modern even by US standards) you see a country undergoing rapid growth. Stopping for breakfast in a chain restaurant in Francistown, the first thing the waitress asked me was if I wanted the wi-fi code. (Sure, I said, but mostly I needed coffee – the Bats do not share my addiction to caffeine). As we drove from Dia’s village back to the capital of Gabarone, (a city without stoplights as recently as 1989) a colleague of hers told us that the four-hour trip, again along a splendid highway, would have taken 10 or 12 hours just a few years back.

Botswana has some advantages that other post-colonial African nations do not. Landlocked and sparsely populated, it was not considered a prize by predatory European colonists, who preferred to pounce on South African and Namibian mines and coastland. Botswana asked to become a British protectorate in the early 20^th century, and then dissolved the pseudo-colonial relationship with a handshake fifty years ago.

A year later they discovered the diamonds. It was like finding a winning lottery ticket in your pockets as you sort laundry.

The first President, Seretse Khama (whose two sons now serve as President and Minister of Tourism) had been disowned by his own tribe when he married a white British woman. Khama’s interracial marriage also greatly irritated apartheid South Africa. As a result, Khama set out to develop a national, not tribal, political base, and a multi-racial democracy. He let foreign companies bid on mining rights to the diamonds under terms favorable to Botswana, and invested the funds in public health, education and infrastructure. This served the country well and by the mid 1970’s Botswana was doing well enough to ask the Peace Corps to cease and desist in its development efforts.

Then came HIV. As many as one in four adults in Botswana were infected in the early years of the epidemic. Life expectancy dropped from first world levels (65 years on average) to below 40 years. In 1995, a 15-year-old in Botswana had a 50% chance of dying from an AIDS related illness.

Botswana responded to the epidemic slowly at first, but in time adopted educational, treatment, and preventive measures that are considered models for other countries.

Since 2002 it has been policy for the government to make anti-retroviral medications available free of charge, and nearly 70% of those infected are receiving the life-saving drugs. And Dia’s work with the Peace Corps is a part of that effort, one that makes her mother and I smile with pride.

So tonight, if you hear dancing and singing late into the night in a tongue that only the most devoted non-natives can master (we hear that Dia has gotten very good at it!), raise a glass to Bots 50, a proud moment for a small country that is trying, against some pretty heavy odds, to do right by its people.

Obama "Directly Responsible" for Orlando Murders, says McCain

This used to the be image of the two wings of the Republican Party. Independent minded war hero John McCain of Arizona, and, to his right, Alaska governor Sarah Palin. McCain chose Palin to run with him in 2008 against Barack Obama in hopes of winning the votes of Republicans who felt he was too liberal, or too much of a "maverick" to earn their support.

I resist the urge to say that Palin was selected to win over more "conservative" voters, because I do not wish to dishonor legitimate conservatives. Palin was, and remains, a part of the growing sector of Republicans who portray themselves as conservatives but are in fact either lazy politicians allergic to facts or opportunists who build their careers on encouraging ignorance. That Palin lives and dies by this is no surprise - her inability or unwillingness to think things through even got her fired from Fox News, no small feat. Some call it "shooting from the hip", which Donald Trump has elevated to an art form. President Obama called it "making stuff up", which I second, substituting a shorter and stinkier S word.

The news is that Palin's former running mate, the senior Senator from Arizona, a man whose name is half the moniker for our one standing piece of campaign finance reform (McCain-Feingold), has joined the fringe. As if Donald Trump's victory in the Republican primary process was not enough to convince us, John McCain's surrender to the fantasy land created by Fox News and nurtured by folks like Palin confirms - the moderate wing of the Republican party is dead.

McCain yesterday called President Obama "directly responsible" for the massacre in Orlando. Then a few hours later he mentioned that he "misspoke". Misspoke? Misspeaking is when you get the capital of Ohio wrong, it's when you confuse the budget deficit with the national debt, it might even be when you say, as Donald Trump did, that the murderer who shot up the Pulse nightclub was born in "Afghan", wherever that is.

When you call the sitting President an accomplice to mass murder at the very moment he is consoling the survivors, that is no misstatement. It is a clear statement of McCain's beliefs. And his core belief is this - that without the support of the crazy people in his party, he cannot win his sixth term in the Senate. Eight years ago a similar calculus pushed him to pick Palin, but we had the good sense to kick her to the curb. Whatever once passed for decency and common sense even among principled conservatives is no longer viable in the age of Trump.

Don't be confused by McCain's subsequent apology for his misstatement. All he needs is that tape of himself blaming Obama to serve up as red meat to the lunatic fringe, while the mainstream media allows him to "walk back" his story.

And all the rest of us are left to do is to watch as the party of Lincoln and Rockefeller, Jacob Javits and Dwight Eisenhower, tumble into incoherent rambling divorced from the truth and the serious business of running a country.

Bernie Fans, Is this just a campaign, or is it a movement?

What happens next will tell us if Sanders supporters are in this for the long haul, or just along for the ride.

I voted for Bernie Sanders.  He stands for most of the things I’ve stood for my whole life. A foreign policy that respects other countries. Domestic policies that put the poor and working class first. Addressing climate change with the urgency that this aching planet demands. He is demonstrably the candidate who understands these issues best and has the commitment to address them. Whether that means he would make the best President is an open question, but I voted for him on the issues.

Now that his fight for the nomination has failed, his supporters have a choice to make. We can howl that the process is rigged (pointless), we can vilify Clinton as a Wall Street lackey (yawn), or we can act as if we actually believe the words and the example of Bernie Sanders.

I’m not talking only about the Bernie Sanders who enchants with his straight talk, who pals around with Pope Francis, who charms tiny sparrows. I’m talking about the Bernie Sanders who has spent a lifetime as part of a movement for social justice, a pursuit that has always been secondary to his personal political aspirations.

The choice for Sanders’ supporters will be whether we can transform the organization and the energy of the campaign into a lasting movement. It will be about whether the Sanders’ followers, often criticized for being too young and too idealistic, can show the Democratic establishment and the rest of the country, that we are serious about radical change. We have to decide if we are in this to feel good, or to do good. (We also have to make sure that those in our ranks understand that we will be paying for the changes we hope to bring about – no small task).

Real change, as Sanders points out relentlessly, can only begin when we remove money from its central role in our politics. Sanders’ campaign, funded by folks with twenty-seven dollars to spare, nearly propelled him to the nomination. Now we must unite behind the Clinton candidacy from now until November, and, come January, be prepared to push her to uphold the campaign promises that Sander’s movement has forced her to make.

We will have to hold President Clinton’s feet to the fire on campaign finance reform. Every change that progressives hope to see is dependent on serious campaign finance reform, an end to what Sanders rightly calls a corrupt system and which many of us see as legalized bribery. No one has articulated this issue more clearly than Sanders. It is the key to returning power to the people and not just the people who can afford it. Overturn Citizens United. Banish the notion that corporations are people. Provide public financing for campaigns, and let ideas, not fund raising power, lead our public discourse.

It’s not an idea that we can let die just because more Democratic primary voters chose Hillary Clinton, with her ties to big money, as their candidate for President. It is far too important.

But how can a defeated Sanders hold sway over his one-time opponent’s policies? As Vice President, as some of his supporters suggest? Worst idea ever. Why lock Sanders away in the White House when he could be in the Senate and out in the country campaigning for change? Sanders has laid the groundwork for a movement that combines support for progressive causes, and support for progressive candidates with a fundraising power that can rival a Super Pac. Imagine a movement sweeping into key Congressional districts and swing states to turn out voters and flip some key Congressional seats this fall. Imagine what that movement could do in 2018 with a similar strategy.

Can Sanders’ supporters make this adjustment? Presidential candidates have tried to convert their campaigns into movements before. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition comes to mind; President Obama’s Organizing for America group was somehow supposed to keep the grassroots involved even as their man sat in the Oval Office. Usually they end up as top down entities serving their leadership, and they peter out or lose relevance.

This time it could be different, because of the type of campaign he ran.

Many of the Sander’s troops seem to so enjoy vilifying Clinton that it makes unity seem unlikely. But a united Democratic Party this fall could open the door to progressive changes no one was even talking about before the Sanders surge. All because of the campaign he ran. A mature movement would recognize its victory even while conceding the failure of their Presidential campaign.

Clinton devotees must recognize that they will not win over the Sanders’ voters by simply noting that she is the lesser of two evils. We have heard that lullaby too many times. They must fully recognize that Bernie’s brigade not only rejects the triangulation politics that made the Clintons so successful in the 90’s, but that they are speaking to the concerns of a new generation.

A friend of mine who loves Bernie posed a common complaint – he just doesn’t trust Clinton. That is an excellent first step. Our political system is not based on trust. If we think our job is to vote once every four years and then let the elected run the country, we have misunderstood what it is to be a citizen of a democracy. We should not trust any politician to do anything other than what we have to power to make them do. Barack Obama in meeting with a group of environmentalists early in his first term was reported to have quoted FDR to them. “I agree with you. Now make me do it.”

If Hillary Clinton is our next President, Bernie Sander’s aroused following don’t have to like her or trust her. As Sanders has made clear, his political revolution is not solely about deciding who sits in the Oval Office. It really is about mobilizing the millions who have rallied to his cause, and then continuing to organize pressure that will keep a progressive agenda on track.

Decision Time for Those Who Are Feeling the Bern

Is this a movement, or a campaign?

What happens on Wednesday will tell us if Sanders supporters are in this for the long haul, or just along for the ride.

I’m voting for Bernie.  He stands for most of the things I’ve stood for my whole life. A foreign policy that respects other countries. Domestic policies that put the poor and working class first. Addressing climate change with the urgency that this aching planet demands. He is demonstrably the candidate who understands these issues best and has the commitment to address them. Whether that means he would make the best President is an open question, but I’m voting for him on the issues.

If Bernie doesn’t win  (and there is, no one can argue, at least a 50/50 chance that he won’t), his supporters have a choice to make. We can howl that the process is rigged (pointless), we can vilify Clinton as a Wall Street lackey (yawn), or we can act as if we actually believe the words and the example of Bernie Sanders.

I’m not talking only about the Bernie Sanders who enchants with his straight talk, who pals around with Pope Francis, who charms tiny sparrows. I’m talking about the Bernie Sanders who has spent a lifetime as part of a movement for social justice, a pursuit that has always been secondary to his personal political aspirations.

The choice for Sanders’ supporters will be whether they can transform the organization and the energy of the campaign into a lasting movement. It will be about whether the Sanders’ followers, often criticized for being too young and too idealistic, can show the Democratic establishment and the rest of the country, that we are serious about radical change. We have to decide if we are in this to feel good, or to do good. We also have to make sure that those in our ranks understand that we will be paying for the changes we hope to bring about – no small task.

Real change, as Sanders points out relentlessly, can only begin when we remove money from its central role in our politics. Sanders’ campaign, funded by folks with twenty-seven dollars to spare, just might propel him to the White House. If it does not, it must unite behind the Clinton candidacy from now until November, and come January be prepared to push her to uphold the campaign promises that Bernie has forced her to make.

That has to begin with vigorous support for grassroots efforts to promote public financing for campaigns. No one has articulated this more clearly than Sanders. It is the key to returning power to the people and not just the people who can afford it. Overturn Citizens United. Banish the notion that corporations are people. Provide public financing for campaigns, and let ideas, not fund raising power, lead our public discourse.

This should be the first course of action for a Sanders’ Presidency, or the first challenge that the Sanders’ movement lays at the feet of a President Clinton. Sanders has laid the groundwork for a movement that combines support for progressive causes, and support for progressive candidates with a fundraising power that can rival a Super Pac. Imagine a movement sweeping into key Congressional districts and swing states to turn out voters and flip some key Congressional seats this fall. Imagine what that movement could do in 2018 with a similar strategy. Let’s call it a People’s PAC.

Can Sanders’ supporters make this adjustment? Presidential candidates have tried to convert their campaigns into movements before. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition comes to mind; President Obama’s Organizing for America group was somehow supposed to keep the grassroots involved even as their man sat in the Oval Office. Usually they end up as top down entities serving their leadership, and they peter out or lose relevance.

Many of the Sander’s troops seem to so enjoy vilifying Clinton that it makes unity seem unlikely. But a united Democratic Party this fall could open the door to progressive changes no one was was even talking about before the Sanders surge. A mature movement would recognize its victory even while conceding the failure of their Presidential campaign.

Clinton devotees must recognize that they will not win over the Sanders’ voters by simply noting that she is the lesser of two (or more) evils. We have heard that lullaby too many times. They must fully recognize that Bernie’s brigade not only rejects the triangulation politics that made the Clintons so successful in the 90’s, but that they are speaking to the concerns of a new generation.

A friend of mine who loves Bernie posed a common complaint – he just doesn’t trust Clinton. I thought that was a good first step. We should not trust any politician to do anything other than what we have to power to make them do. Barack Obama in meeting with a group of environmentalists early in his first term was reported to have quoted FDR to them. “I agree with you. Now make me do it.”

If Hillary Clinton is our next President, Bernie Sander’s aroused following don’t have to like her or trust her. As Sanders has made clear, his political revolution is not solely about deciding who sits in the Oval Office. It really is about mobilizing the millions who have rallied to his cause, and then continuing to organize pressure that will keep a progressive agenda on track.