6/20/24

OUR FRAIDY-CAT ELECTION
Are you afraid to put a bumper sticker on your car?
Should you be even more afraid not to?

THERE’S NOTHING MORE AMERICAN than telling your friends and neighbors how you’re planning to vote, hoping they’ll take the hint and follow your example.
     What could be simpler than slapping a Biden-Harris sticker on the back bumper?
     You’re on the Interstate. It’s night; somewhere rural, dark and empty.You’re alone. But maybe not. Is someone behind you? What’s she thinking about that goddamned Biden-Harris bumper sticker ablaze in her headlights?
     In a kinder era, you wouldn’t have given a second thought to something as mundane as a bumper sticker. Sure, another driver might have tossed you a middle finger; alternatively, an approving motorist  might have shared a couple of happy taps of the horn.
     But out in the badlands of today's politics, you can’t be sure.  
     Seeing that Biden-Harris slur, the fellow traveler’s brain lights up in all the wrong places. Shouting “Let’s Go, Brandon,” she guns the engine and rams the blasphemous bumper. Or, maybe, the other driver turns out to be a  student of the Constitution, who decides to exercise his Second Amendment rights with a couple of blasts from an AR-15.
      Actually, I haven’t heard of anything like that happening.
     But I can imagine it. I worry about it. Which is why I haven’t put in my order, not yet, to  Shop Joe Biden for bumper stickers, $6 a pair. Or, for that matter, I haven't  signed up for a $20 yard sign; or a $35 baseball cap.
      I’m just thinking about it. And not proud of that.

 IT’S A LOT EASIER to scold others for being Election Fraidy-Cats, so cowardly, so silent as the 2024 election bears down and democracy is at the cliff’s edge.
       It's the Fear Election.
      Fear is at work among GOP Senators and Representatives whom Donald Trump put in harm’s way when he set his violent supporters upon the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
     The congressional folks feared for their lives that day, while the mob shouted “Hang Mike Pence,” Trump’s ultra-loyal vice president, who for one brave moment refused to go along with Trump’s scheme to upend the election.
      But post-riot,  the rescued GOP lawmakers decided that what they most feared was political suicide. Which is why you have an entire political party pretending  that Donald Trump is not a psychopath, criminal,  racist,  rapist and traitor.
    There are many other instances in which fear has scrambled our moral compass. Here are three:

 #1 -THE MOVIE YOU CAN’T WATCH
     The film “The Apprentice” received a standing ovation at the Cannes film festival on May 20, but has yet to find a U.S. distributor, so you probably won’t be  streaming it or seeing it at a theater.
     According to those who have watched it, the film depicts the young Donald as he was “apprenticed” to Roy Cohn, the master of the political dark arts. Here’s how the New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg described the movie:
     “ 'The Apprentice' also gives you a sense of the audacious glamour Trump projected before he became a caricature, and it makes his decision to pursue Manhattan’s Commodore Hotel in the 1970s, when midtown was a sleazy wasteland, seem visionary. It offers a fresh way of understanding how Trump — under the tutelage of Cohn, who once served as chief counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy — evolved from an almost charming Queens striver into the lawless predator now bestriding American politics."
     "I wish you could see it,” Goldberg wrote. “Unfortunately, you may not get a chance to anytime soon.”
     The reason?
     “Many studios fear a MAGA-led backlash to movies perceived as too ‘woke,’ which can include anything from having a diverse cast to the mere mention of the LGBTQ+ community,” according to an account in the Hollywood Reporter.
     The news outlet quoted a producer knowledgeable about the discussion about U.S. distribution as saying that the country is too divided to risk offending one side or the other.
     “If an audience is pro-Trump, they won’t watch an anti-Trump movie,” the producer said. “And the other side won’t watch a pro-Trump one.”
     According to the Reporter, the film has some alarming depictions of Trump, including “scenes of Trump abusing amphetamines, getting liposuction and scalp-reduction surgery and, most controversially, one graphic sequence showing him raping his first wife, Ivana. (Ivana made the rape claim during her divorce proceedings with Trump in the early ’90s, but later disavowed her deposed testimony, saying she didn’t mean rape in the “literal or criminal sense.”)”
     The real problem isn’t just old-fashioned censorship, it’s self-censorship, which I think is more insidious, along with the ludicrous fact that Trump fear is at work without Trump even being re-elected.
    
#2 - THE DISINFORMATION YOU WON’T KNOW ABOUT
      This one is just as disturbing, because it involves a respected university, where you expect independent thinking, commitment to truth and some institutional gumption.
     California’s renown Stanford University has turned its back on its “Standford Internet Observatory’s” which has done substantial work about election disinformation.
     According to Platformer, a newsletter that tracks technology platform  issues, Stanford has cut the Observatory’s staff and “will not conduct research into the 2024 election.”
     The reason is a Republican attack on Stanford’s and other universities’ efforts to investigate political lies and other disinformation.
     Stanford, according to the Washington Post, has spent millions of dollars to defend its researchers from lawsuits and Congressional probes.
      Dee Mostofi, a university spokesperson, said that the Observatory, under new leadership, will continue to work on issues such as child safety.
     But with bold doublespeak, Mostofi told the Post:
     “Stanford remains deeply concerned about efforts, including lawsuits and congressional investigations, that chill freedom of inquiry and undermine legitimate and much needed academic research — both at Stanford and across academia.”
     You don’t need precision instruments to measure the depth of the university’s “deep concern” about attacks on academic freedom and the work of its scholars.
      Of course, the retreat couldn’t come at a worse time, with Russia and China launching sophisticated cyber attacks on American voters.
     Brown University professor Claire Wardle told the Post  that
“closing down a lab like this would always be a huge loss, but doing so now, during a year of global elections, makes absolutely no sense.”
     Wardle said: “We need universities to use their resources and standing in the community to stand up to criticism and headlines.”

 #3 - THE FOLK SONGS YOU WON'T HEAR
      I don’t have authoritative sources on this one, just my own experience over the last nine years of the Trump nightmare.
     But I have yet to hear a folk song devoted entirely to Trump and his attack on democracy, whereas folk music provided the soundtrack of the 1960s and 1970s civil rights movement and opposition to the Vietnam War.
      As far as I can tell, there’s radio silence, and silence, too, on streaming services and on other media featuring songs about political and cultural threats to freedom and the just plain evil of the man they're not calling Donald John Trump.
     I listen to two outstanding folk music sources, WUMB radio out of Boston and Folk Alley, an internet channel. Both feature “new music” by today’s singer-songwriters. And I haven't heard what I’m hoping for.
     My guess is that early into the Trump experience, musicians and others made a calculation that if they sang about freedom and Big Bad Don, they’d lose half their audience and be subject to social media and physical threats.
     If I’m wrong, please let me know. I'll order an old-school CD right away.

BACK TO BUMPER STICKERS – So, it's easy to belittle protest-free folk singers, university double-talkers and self-censoring movie moguls.
     But how brave are the rest of us?
     Is my paranoia off base about  what can go wrong on the highway? Putting it bluntly, am I a bumper sticker Fraidy-Cat?
     Then, I remember  the threats against election workers, who aren’t even political partisans; or the care which the Manhattan judge took to protect jurors and witnesses in the case that convicted Trump of trying to hide hush payments to Stormy Daniels.
      Do I want to drive a car with a road-rage target stuck on its bumper, with only me or my wife at the wheel?
     So, I stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the Election Fraidy-Cats on that one. Just too many manic drivers, so much ambient road rage, too many opportunities for mischief and worse.
     As to a yard sign, that seems okay to me. My house, my fortress, at least sort of.
     Same thing with the baseball cap, the t-shirt and other official and home-grown displays of where I stand in this election.
     I wish I wasn't making these kinds of choices,  because democracy is diminished when citizens compromise fear and free speech.
      But I don’t live in a state that puts “Live Free or Die” on its license plates. I live in the place with “Hope” on the state flag.
     What I’m hoping for is that the compromises I’m making will be good enough.
     But what I  fear is that, to survive, democracy needs something braver.