Upstairs Maude

My cat Maude lives upstairs. That is, she never ventures downstairs where most of the action is: cooking and eating, working on my laptop, reading, listening to music, hanging with the dogs. The dogs may be why Maude remains upstairs, but there are other factors at play, I think.

I “rescued” Maude from my neighbor Matthew’s house, where she was contending with a puppy and a kitten by hiding under any furniture inaccessible to the puppy and kitten. Matthew had taken Maude in due to her previous owner’s allergies—no information beyond that as to age, previous tenure, etc. Seeing as how she has to claw the spread to climb up the beds where she spends most of her days, I suspect she’s an old gal. But once there, she’s an affectionate bedtime partner, snuggling up to convey warmth both ways.

Cats in El Valle are an endangered species due to coyotes and owls (and unfriendly dogs) so it’s good Maude lives upstairs. As a guilty enabler, I’ve had plenty of them over the years—both here and in Placitas, another dangerous rural environment—who had to navigate these dangers. It all began with Alley Cat, a little gray girl who facilitated my relationship with Mark, my partner of 34 years, way back in 1976. At the time I was working as the fire lookout on Mount Taylor and I took Alley with me to the tower (I also took my dogs Chani and Judge). She played on the catwalk surrounding my tiny little room and I tucked her in my jacket on evening walks. But one week when I left her home with my roommates, I came home to find she’d been poisoned, probably with antifreeze, and the vet couldn’t save her. Mark was with me at the vet’s and stayed with me while I grieved.

Mark had two cats himself, Belle and Pie, so when we moved in together in Placitas, we had a full household of cats and dogs. But it soon expanded. A young yellow tabby showed up one day and decided to stay. During one of her climbing forays she knocked over a bottle of salad dressing that drenched her, thus becoming her name. Next, a beautiful gray guy decided he preferred living with us rather than our neighbor, who graciously relinquished him. We named him Merle. While living in the village we started building a house out near Tunnel Springs. That’s where Cisco turned up one day, a short-haired gray tabby who we of course brought home.

No, we didn’t have five cats at one time. Belle and Pie were fairly old cats and we lost them to age as we accumulated Salad Dressing, Merle, and Cisco. And we didn’t get to have Cisco very long. He had a very weird habit of sleeping over the back of a chair, standing on his hind lets with his head and front paws hanging down. It turned out he had a tear in one of his heart valves and this position allowed him to breathe better. But the tear got worse and he struggled more and more to breathe, which resulted in one of those horrible situations most of us with animals have had to confront: whether to have the vet put him down. When the vet told us he couldn’t fix the tear, we had to say goodbye.

Fern showed up next. A long-haired gray tabby, she was one of my all-time favorites—sweet, affectionate, yet fearless and independent. When we moved out of the Placitas village to the new house, she’d go for walks with us into the forest, warily darting from tree to tree in case those coyotes or owls were watching. Neither Fern nor Merle did well with the move from the village to new house and decided numerous times to return to their home of origin. This is a fairly common occurrence with cats, but Merle took it to the nth degree: I think we drove back to retrieve him at least 10 or 15 times. He finally decided to stay.

While we loved living next to the forest, it’s probably why we eventually lost Merle, Fern, and Salad Dressing, who all disappeared without a trace. So by the time we gave it all up and moved from Placitas to El Valle—my book Culture Clash: Environmental Politics in New Mexico Forest Communities, documents in excruciating detail why we left—we had no cats. Alas, that was not to last. My friend Susan Larson, a veterinarian, gave us a going away present of two tortoise shell sisters whom we named Thelma and Louise. Thelma disappeared within months of our relocation, but Louise lived to a ripe old age of 15 because she, like Maude, liked living inside (though Louise did venture downstairs).

The tale of many cats continued during our almost 30 year residency in El Valle. Honus, named by younger son Max who was besotted with baseball cards (named for Honus Wagner, slugger for the Pittsburgh Pirates) showed up one day and became one of our favorites. He was also well liked by our neighbor Tomás, whom he would visit to hunt gophers, or “rattas,” as Tomás called them. We had Honus for a good number of years and were heartbroken when he, too, disappeared.

We also took in Blanche, a black feral cat that Mark’s sister-in-law dumped on us while visiting. She found her lurking around our friend’s house where she was staying for the visit and figured Blanche could be domesticated. She couldn’t. While she came in the house to eat and sleep, she basically lived outdoors and disdained human contact. She soon disappeared.

Then we took in Ernie, a black and white kitten who was sweet and playful, which extended to putting his head in our dog Django’s mouth as they rolled around the living room floor. But one day Ernie took sick and we took him to the emergency vet in Taos, who announced that he had cancer and was dying. The vet put him down and in shock we brought him home to bury. Max was completely caught off guard and distraught that we came home with a dead cat. It was probably one of the first times he’d been around a dead creature; he cried and cried.

After the kids left home we acquired an orange tabby named Mavis from a young friend who went off to work for the Forest Service. Mavis exemplified what is lovely about orange tabbies: affectionate, smart, independent, and quirky.

After Mavis disappeared, I swore off cats. I was by myself by then (Mark died in 2010) and didn’t need any more heartbreak. Suffice it to say, I ended up taking in several more cats for short term stays that I won’t go into detail about as it’s all too depressing. Maude is here, though, safe and sound upstairs. Even though she doesn’t come downstairs, the mice in the house seem to have sensed a cat is in the hood and have disappeared. And bird lovers can’t chastise me for having an indoor/outdoor cat. But reading back through this post I’m appalled: in my almost 50 years of rural residency I’ve had eighteen cats (OK, I’m admitting to the three I took in after swearing them off)! My friend Jan, who lives in town, has had two over the course of almost 40 years (long lived cats). My only defense is that I never actively solicited any of them. They came to me (and to Mark). While it means I have a soft heart, it also means that in the larger scheme of things the human population is not dealing very well with the cat population and should probably heed the bird lovers’ advice and stop domesticating them. In the meantime, I hope the universe does not send me any more cats.

On Getting the Vaccine and Being White

I was given the Moderna vaccine at Las Clinicas del Norte in El Rito yesterday because I’m old, immune compromised, and white. I’m not casting aspersions on the El Rito Clinic, as it has probably inoculated more Hispano and Native American people than just about any provider in New Mexico. We’re blessed with a relatively good rural health care system in el norte that reaches into many areas that suffer other kinds of inaccessibility. It’s just that I found out the clinic was vaccinating from my network of white friends.

I’m talking about being white in the world. This discussion has been in the crossfire lately between the pro- and anti- cancel culture crowds over the legacy of white privilege and the absolutism of first amendment and civil liberties. On the one hand, there’s a movement to chastise, censor, and fire white people who do stuff that’s reactionary, bigoted, racist, misogynist, or any number of things that are deemed denigrating to the liberal code. On the other hand, there are those who see the actions that big tech companies have taken to kick these people off their platforms, or newspapers that have fired columnists or editors for these “indiscretions,” is an abrogation of their first amendment and civil rights.

This is all quite complicated and I’ve written before about it, in my #MeToo Part 2, December 14, 2017, of the difference between Roy Moore of Alabama, a pedophile who ran for the U.S. Senate, and Al Franken, a sitting senator who committed stupid “sexual misconduct.” Then there’s the incident where Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton wrote an editorial in the NYT saying President Trump should invoke the Insurrection Act to put down protests across the country after the murder of George Floyd, that resulted in the editorial page director being forced to resign (I just saw where he was rehired by The Economist).

When you make a distinction between depravity/immorality, and misconduct, then you need to also figure out where to draw the line between what constitutes free speech and what constitutes incitement. I doubt that Cotton’s editorial rises to the level of “incitement,” but what about the Proud Boys in Charlottesville who chanted, along with other neo-Nazis and anti-Semites “Seig heil,” “blood and soil,” and “You will not replace us.” That’s the first time I remember thinking, as a card carrying ACLU member, that maybe there were limits to free speech. Here’s what the First Amendment guarantees: “The First Amendment guarantees freedoms concerning religion, expression, assembly, and the right to petition. It forbids Congress from both promoting one religion over others and also restricting an individual’s religious practices. It guarantees freedom of expression by prohibiting Congress from restricting the press or the rights of individuals to speak freely. It also guarantees the right of citizens to assemble peaceably and to petition their government.”

The Charlottesville protestors didn’t assemble peaceably. They beat up the counter demonstrators, they almost beat up Cornell West, and one of them killed a woman with a car. Was this protected free speech and if not, should the authorities have arrested all of them (the city tried to deny a march permit but they marched anyway)? Some ACLU folks raised this issue, but not Glenn Greenwald, former constitutional lawyer turned journalist. Writing in the Intercept, which he co-founded but has now left for Substack: “ . . . those who favor free speech suppression, or who oppose the ACLU’s universal defense of speech rights, will create results that are the exact opposite of those they claim to want. It’s an indescribably misguided strategy that will inevitably victimize themselves and their own views.” By exact opposites, he of course means the dangers of suppressing the free speech of the left.

Journalist Matt Taibbi is Greenwald’s partner in protest over the abrogation of free speech and the promotion of cancel culture. When YouTube announced in December of 2021 that it was removing any content that misleads people into thinking there was widespread fraud in the 2020 Presidential election, Taibbi claimed there wasn’t a “better way to further radicalize Trump voters.” Same argument for Twitter blocking Trump’s tweets. While they both acknowledge that Silicon Valley tech companies are monopolies that should have never accumulated the power they have to disseminate misinformation, it’s even more insidious if they are endowed with the power to suppress speech, no matter how misinformed or incendiary.

So where do you stand on this? Did kicking Trump off Twitter for insisting the election was a fraud help staunch the dissemination of propaganda? Was it too late? Should it have been done sooner? Did it recruit more crazies? We’ll have to leave it to the pundits to keep trying to find the answer.

Rightwing Populism, or Anti-Populism Writ Large

One hundred and twenty-four years ago the Populist Party collaborated with the Democratic Party and ran the young radical William Jennings Bryan for president of the United States on the Democratic ticket against Republican William McKinley. His platform: “There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-do-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through to those below. . . . if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them.” This, of course, turned out the entire business class against him—journalists, academics, clergy, and vast amounts of Republican money—and McKinley won the election.

In 2016 Independent Party member Bernie Sanders collaborated with the Democratic Party and was screwed by not only the entire business class but by the Democratic Party as well. Bernie’s platform: support the working class by unending an economic system that supposedly “leaks to those below”—in today’s parlance called “trickle down economics”—with one that yes, makes the masses prosperous.

In between, we had the New Deal with FDR, which conquered the Great Depression, discredited capitalism around the world, established a safety net, strengthened unions, and created a middleclass America, where auto workers and construction workers could afford to buy the things they built.

Today, the only time the word “populism” is used is to describe the populist right, signified by Donald Trump. Instead of reflecting a progressive economic agenda to empower the working class, it’s associated with authoritarianism, bigotry, anti-immigration, deregulation, and tax cuts for the rich.

On the campaign trail, Donald Trump was planning a similar game to the one Steve Bannon cooked up: citing the financial crisis and the bailouts as the “inciting incident” for the global populist rebellion he wanted to lead (Thomas Frank, The People, No: a brief history of anti-populism). On the issue of trade, for example, Trump took an unusual stance for a Republican, constantly criticizing NAFTA and trade with China, the bêtes-noires of organized labor, and reaching out to alienated white, working-class voters, the rank and file of so may historical protest movements. He said he cared so very much about the people of the deindustrialized zones and their sufferings. He claimed to feel for the victims of the opioid crisis.

And then . . . the working-class hero in the Oval Office delivered a landmark tax cut for the rich. Trump deregulated Wall Street banks, too. With his attacks on Obamacare, the president did his part to make our capitalistic system just a little more brutal and Darwinian for ordinary people. He turned over the judiciary to the elites of the Federalist Society. He turned over the economy to the Chamber of Commerce. He turned the EPA over to polluters. He ran the US government in a way designed to enrich and empower himself. The one leadership task to which Trump took with enthusiasm—rolling back the regulatory state—is essentially an attack on one of the few institutions in Washington designed to help working-class Americans. If this is populism, the word has truly come to mean nothing.

Now that Trump is banished to Mar-a-Lago we have senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz ready to pick up the populist cause claiming Republicans represent the “party of the working class.” It’s enough to make you an anarchist: Republicans and Democrats alike spinning their claims like Rumpelstiltskin spinning straw into gold.

Nineties Feel Good Movies

When the pandemic hit in March of 2020 my son Max, 31 at the time, was living in Santa Fe. Just as so many other Gen X and millennial livelihoods and lifestyles (I don’t like to use that word but I’m afraid it does kind of apply to many in these age groups) were severely impacted by the stay-at-home restrictions and shutdowns, so was Max. He made it through the summer, riding his bike, meeting a small group of friends at outside parties, hanging with Jakob, Lulu, Marcos and me in the park, and playing poker on a few websites that still exist (online poker was shut down in the U.S., forcing Max to play at casinos).

But as winter came on bringing renewed shut downs, he started coming up to El Valle to stay with me for a few days to decompress. Max, raised as was Jakob, in an environment where the main forms of entertainment were hiking and backpacking in the summer and skiing in the winter, substituted these activities as an adult with city ones: going to the gym, movies, parties, restaurants and bars. To my surprise, he discovered that he actually liked being here, walking my dogs, whom he loves (he desperately wants a dog of his own), bringing in the wood, then cross-country and downhill skiing with me once the snow fell (not enough yet).

We also found an indoor activity in which we could indulge: watching 90s feel good movies. I’ve often watched these movies, geared to a general audience before the onslaught of super hero movies (only Star Wars), as an antidote to the blues, with their familiar movie stars, their funny/sad narratives, their blur between the ordinary and extraordinary. Max, jangled enough by the events of the day, found that they worked wonders on his nerves as well.

We started with High Fidelity. There may be no greater comedic role than the one Jack Black creates as the clerk in the vinyl record shop who doesn’t let customers buy any music he thinks is crap. If he had his druthers, it wouldn’t be in the shop in the first place, but the boss of the shop is John Cusack, who also has impeccable musical taste but is a little less judgmental. Max kept calling him a jerk as he meets up with former girlfriends to explore the demise of their relationships as a means of parsing the one he’s just fucked up. But I love John Cusack, not only for the quirky roles he plays in the movies but the role he plays in real life: he went with Arundhahti Roy and Daniel Ellsberg to interview Edward Snowden stuck in Moscow after his release of National Security Administration documents revealing the extent of national surveillance and war crimes. The sound track of the movie, is, of course, straight out of my playlists, which Cusack makes endlessly, like I do, of songs that are the records of our lives.

We next watched Moonstruck, which apparently thousands, if not millions, of other people in America were also watching during the pandemic. There were articles in the New York Times Magazine (Wesley Morris) and in the New Yorker about the joy of watching Cher kick the can down the streets of Brooklyn after going to the opera with Nicholas Cage (they are both stunningly beautiful). It’s basically an Italian soap opera that plays fast and loose with reality: Cher agrees to marry Johnny Cammareri, whom she doesn’t love, and then agrees to marry Ronny Cammareri, his brother, after knowing him for two days. But it seeps right into your heart as scene after scene is exquisitely played by the likes of Vincent Gardenia, Cher’s father, who makes a very good living as a plumber by convincing clients they need copper pipes; Olympia Dukakis, Cher’s mother, who wants to know why men cheat on women (her husband is having an affair); and John Mahoney as the clueless NYU professor who keeps getting drinks thrown in his face by young students he’s trying to seduce.

We went onto the The Paper, Michael Keaton’s best movie, IMHO, with the wonderful Marisa Tomei, and Groundhog Day. There’s not much I can add to the latter’s position in the movie canon: “Fantasies work because at some level they act as a metaphor and help us relate to the real life. And the best way a fantasy could work is to be subtle and allow the viewer to make his own metaphor. Groundhog Day is in that way, a great movie. It plays like a comedy while giving a feel of philosophical undercurrents which resonate deeply within us.” (Nallasivan Valasubramanian). There are many more movies to be had: Crimes of the Heart, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and An Ideal Husband, to name a few. I have them all on VHS if you can’t find them on Netflix or Hulu or Criterion or wherever. There’s something to be said for keeping your own video library. Let me know if you want to borrow one.

Good Old Democracy Now!

Amy Goodman’s been at it a long time, and while lately she’s been driving me kind of crazy with sloppy editing (they always have to cut people off mid sentence when they run out of time at the end of the program), too much introductory talk that should be given to the interviewee, and a too strident tone, this week’s shows reveal how relevant and incisive she continues to be.

This, of course, was the week after the mob of white nationalists and neo-Nazis stormed the Capitol and set off alarm bells that have been ringing for years on deaf ears. The ensuing media frenzy had everyone and his or her uncle trying to put their finger on how this could have happened, too often ending with the sigh, “This isn’t who we are.”

Amy and Juan Gonzalez, her co-anchor, brought together the journalists, sociologists, and historians to contextualize and deconstruct our arrival at this stunningly complex moment. They started off with Allan Nairn, a longtime contributor to Democracy Now who covered the horrendous killings in East Timor along with Amy, who immediately addressed the “This isn’twho we are” meme: “Well, it’s always been the case that the U.S. establishment was willing to use terror and kill civilians overseas, either to do things like seize oil, seize political power, or basically on whim. The presidency of George W. Bush was a prime example of that.”

He also reminded us that as we take on the white supremacists who stormed the Capitol we can't let the establishment use this, as Bush did after 9/11, to further erode our civil rights, first amendment rights, and rationalize even more money for a bloated military budget: "don’t let this Trumpist movement coopt the idea of rebellion. Rebellion against injustice is a good thing. The problem is that they — and the U.S. system is indeed unjust and murderous."

A few days later the Filipino author Walden Bellow, whom I’d never heard of (Counterrevolution: The Global Rise of the Far Right), succinctly laid out the struggle between the left and right over late state capitalism, or a dying neoliberalism on a global scale. After the global 2008 financial crisis, the Dems failed to take steps to control the banks, save homeowners, and bring outsourced industrial employment back to the U.S. So the neoliberalism model continued to exacerbate economic inequality, and with the eruption of Covid-19, conditions were ripe for the ultra right to exploit them with racism and “dog whistle-type Republican politics that started with Richard Nixon with the Southern strategy.” The white working class could no longer see the Democrats as the party that represented their interests, but only as elites who were giving away what was theirs to minorities: “And let me just say that with respect to Trumpism, you know, that Trump is as much a creature as the creator of that base. There’s this synergy that’s taking place there." While the left was able to mobilize under the campaign of Bernie Sanders, it was never able to sustain a mass movement as the establishment Dems took over, once again.

Finally, Yale historian Timothy Synder was interviewed about the article he wrote for the New York Times Magazine, “The American Abyss: A historian of fascism and political atrocity on Trump, the mob and what comes next.” The white supremacists who invaded the Capitol were emboldened by Trump, who when he speaks about voter fraud essentially means allowing African Americans to vote, and Ted Cruz, who compared what he was trying to do in 2021 with 1877, when Congress essentially initiated a century of Jim Crow, or American apartheid.

Snyder also laid out the make up of the Republican Party and where its future may lay. The largest group is the gamers, the “ones who work the system with the gerrymandering, with the dark money, with the voter suppression, who are in favor of the, quote-unquote, ‘democracy’ that we have in America now, the unfortunately very limited democracy we have, because they know how to work it.” A smaller fraction, the breakers, is represented by the likes of Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, “who have understood that one could actually come to power in the United States by entirely nondemocratic means, by way of the mob, by way of throwing an election and lying about it.” And the smallest group is constituted “an honorable few who believe in the rule of law and telling the truth.” Snyder thinks—hopes—that a coalition of the “gamers” and “honorable few” will take back the party. I’m not so sure.

I’ve been somewhat surprised that Amy hasn’t had either Glenn Greenwald or Matt Taibbi on her show in a while. Both are frequent Democracy Now guests who recently left their media organizations and joined the new platform Substack. Throughout the Capitol attack fallout their focus remained on where it’s been for the recent past: intense criticism of the Dems for aligning with the cancel culture movement, which they see as an abrogation of first amendment rights (Greenwald was a constitutional lawyer before he became a journalist) and the censorship of far right sites by big tech, which they see as a harbinger of indiscriminate censorship. I don’t know if their absence reflects a judgment by Democracy Now on their journalism or just that they don’t see this focus as their priority right now. I guess we’ll see what the future brings, in more ways than one.

2020 Election: It's About Much More Than Defeating Trump

I broke my vow to refrain from engaging in Facebook political arguments with “moderate Dems” (what moderate Republicans used to be) when one of them, for about the 10^th time, referred to Bernie Sanders as a “Bolshevik.” If people weren’t so stunningly gullible it would be an hysterically funny one-off. My brief response was: “So, was FDR a Bolshevik?”

That opened the floodgates. The so-called moderate Dem, who apparently sits in front of his computer all day long posting nasty comments on Facebook (and in letters to the editor in various online newspapers) and calls people who disagree with him assholes, dupes, or Bolsheviks, told me that FDR wasn’t a Bolshevik because his economy was nothing like today’s booming economy where everyone is enjoying the benefits that Bolsheviks like Bernie want to take away from us. The next day the stock market tanked in its biggest loss since the Great Recession of 2007 because of the corona virus (the 99 percent are already in the toilet).

It wasn’t this guy’s knee-jerk response that drew me further into the den of iniquity, however. In a previous private message to the moderate Dem whose Facebook page hosts much of his vitriol, I had respectfully asked why she didn’t call him out for spewing such nonsense. She sees herself as the voice of reason, an engaged Democrat who is avidly anti-Trump and a big proponent of engaged political discourse. Her response, which acknowledged he is “annoying,” is a climate change denier, and a beneficiary of the booming oil and gas industry, was “I don’t think shielding Bernie fans from the portrait people have of him is helpful.” So much for engaged political discourse.

The rants continued for a while until she accused me of hypocrisy in advocating for socialism while being a community organizer who advocates for local control of resources and government, citing my support for the integrity of acequias. She again missed an opportunity to really explore what Bernie’s agenda, or Elizabeth Warren’s for that matter, actually involves, much of which she and I, as community organizers, endorse: a government that makes sure policies are in place to protect and allow people to flourish in a more equitable society than the unregulated, late stage capitalism one in which we live. The social democracy that Bernie endorses means just what it says: that a society based on a leveled playing field is what democracy looks like.

I responded: “Yeah, Bernie’s coming for our acequias.” That was it for me, and I signed off for good. But if I hadn’t (we all like to have the last word, don’t we, and while I can’t really have the last word I do have Unf*#!ing Believable), I would also have pointed out another disconnect in this kind of group think. While they all rail against their elected Democratic legislators who have supported the settlement of a decades old water rights adjudication, the Aamodt, to which they are objecting parties, they fail to acknowledge those same legislators’ ties to the DNC, which directed the Clinton and now the Biden takeover of the primary (Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Bloomberg). They love Biden but they hate Ben Ray Lujan, who directed the DNCC money flow for many years.

I broke my vow again, the day before Super Tuesday, but this time I had an excuse: I thought I was responding to an old friend from Antioch—ANTIOCH!—who had momentarily lost her mind and was saying she’d vote for Biden. I responded: “Are you crazy? Joe Biden!!??” Her response was: “I don’t see evidence of Bernie playing well with others. He did nothing to support Hillary after he lost the nomination in 2016. He’s too polarizing. We need someone who can heal the body politic. I don’t see Bernie helping the down ballot. I’m following the lead of African Americans who carry so much water for the Democratic Party and get little back for their efforts.” It made me almost nostalgic for the days when the SDSers and YSAers at Antioch were yelling at each other over who knew best how to start the revolution.

But I didn’t have time to point out her lie (Bernie did nothing to support Hilary) or get any further dragged in, as another Antioch friend then replied: “Now isn’t the time for healing with Republicans and oligarchs kicking our teeth in. That was Obama’s saddest miscalculation in his first two years when he had both the House and the Senate (by a large margin.) They strung him out until the billionaire funded Tea Party bullied its way into Congress. Bernie is building a movement (not a campaign) of mission driven activists that is growing daily. When was the last presidential candidate who campaigned on organizing the working class— not in our lifetime. That’s the movement that’s going to raise up candidates at the local level, not Biden’s gaggle of establishment endorsements. African Americans are part of the movement. Bernie’s agenda will lift all boats; well, at least 99% of them. Vote your aspirations, not your fears.”

When I do post articles on Facebook that I think are insightful, it’s to do exactly what my Antioch friend said, to encourage voters to base their decisions on who best exemplifies their values, not who is the most likely to defeat Trump, a futile exercise, IMHO. But today, independent journalist Arun Gupta posted an opinion piece by The Guardian’s Nathan Robinson that was really disturbing but probably prescient: “Stop saying Biden is the ‘most electable.’ Trump will run rings round him.” It’s basically 2016 redux: “Trump is savagely effective at destroying establishment politicians.” And the baggage Biden brings to the table as that establishment politician is daunting: “He has been in Washington since the age of 30, representing Delaware, the ‘capital of corporate America’. He is infamous for his connections to the credit card industry, and he has lied about his degree of support for the Iraq war. Even Matthew Yglesias of Vox calls Biden the “Hillary Clinton of 2020” for his corporate ties and war support.” Another columnist, Shaun King, posted a heavily researched piece that exposed Biden's lies about his participation in the civil rights movement.

Then there’s Ukraine. They will go after him unmercifully for Hunter Biden’s obscene $50,000 a month Burisma salary even if it’s only nepotism, not criminality.

Joe Biden offers no progressive or radical values like Sanders or Warren offer. He only proffers “virtuousness and decency. But if Biden doesn’t actually look virtuous and decent—because he isn’t—the argument that he has made for himself collapses completely.”

So we’ll keeping plugging away for Bernie. A friend of mine wrote me the other day (another Antiochian), “I wish he would just settle for being Moses, someone who almost single-handedly changed the terms of the debate, but never saw the promised land.” I know he’s an old white man but there will be young women or people of color or atheists (Bernie’s a Jewish atheist!) who will come after Moses gets to the promised land.

It may Involve mud slinging, but we're still trying to make the world a better place.

I followed a Facebook thread the other day that was initiated by someone who said she wouldn’t be voting for Bernie Sanders after all because of his “bros’ ” nasty “memes.” Then someone else told me he wouldn’t be voting for Elizabeth Warren after all because several of her staff members claimed Bernie had told her in a private meeting that “a woman can’t get elected president.” He, of course, denied that he’d ever said this.

A reluctant Facebook responder—saying she didn’t like engaging in these kinds of discussions on that platform—stated that politics has always been nasty and mud slinging in an election was to be expected, particularly when campaigns seemingly last forever. But that was no reason to abandon the candidate whose policies and values are the ones you endorse. Once the mud starts getting slung it really diminishes the character of those doing the slinging more than the candidates, but unfortunately, it also impugns the organization or cause to whom the characters belong.

Those of us on the left are very familiar with this scenario in our organizations and movements that seek to make the world a better place (not to say that the right and alt-right don’t know how to mud sling, it’s just that there’s no pretense that it’s to make the world a better place—just their own pocketbooks). Because the United States is such a massive country, with such a massive and diverse set of ideological interests, it’s always been extremely difficult to bring together those interests, who even though they share an understanding of the kind of world we want, don’t necessarily share a methodology about how to get there.

 I’ve been involved in community organizing all my adult life. I’ve witnessed what happens when groups let their sense of solidarity be eroded by special interests, misunderstandings, and battles among egos. The divide in the environmental community between those who identified as “deep ecologists” and those as “social ecologists” (who helped define the environmental justice movement), was bitter and self-defeating as they argued over how our degraded forests should be managed while they continued to decline and burn and our communities suffered.

There is an example of one of these failures right now in another coalition of groups with whom I’ve worked. I’m not going to be specific; naming names would only contribute to the conflict that I’m trying to help mitigate by writing this essay. This particular conflict has been extant for some time, but has recently been exacerbated by government policies that are immanently threatening to impact all of our lives.

Just as in the Warren/Sanders case, activists of integrity and commitment comprise this movement. And just as in the Warren/Sanders case, there are disagreements  about methodology. But when one of the activist groups continues to try to impugn the integrity and commitment of the other members of this community, it discredits the movement as a whole. It transfers validation to those interests trying to enact the policies the community is trying to dismantle.

Although the group claims it is respectful in its public statements, this is far from the truth. In letters to newspaper editors, in e-mails, and in press releases that address the issues that the entire community is dealing with, it often disparages the work of the other groups and makes misleading, and even false, accusations that constantly confuse the public over the basis of their criticism.

Warren and Sanders seem to have taken a step back from confrontation after witnessing how the media played up their so-called dispute (CNN’s moderation of the debate was disgraceful—they, more than “bros” or “memes” are the problem) and the public sighed in exasperation. The conflict I’ve been describing is being played out in a smaller, more insular world here in New Mexico but the ramifications of its dysfunction loom large. What will it take for this community to come together? I would hope that those who believe they are always right and everyone else is wrong will eventually recognize that this leads to the distortion of facts, blanket accusations, paranoia, and outright lies to support a destructive position.