Elijah the Prophet: A child’s view of plagues, miracles and the open door

Jack Doppelt

March 26, 2021

[This is the first in a series of three stories published in preparation for the upcoming Passover holiday. A version of this piece has been incorporated into our family's Passover Haggadah since 2001.]

They don't see him. They never do when they open the door. I've gone from one Seder to another and I see him. Maybe that's what happens when you grow up. You stop seeing and you stop believing. I've been seeing him for a few years now. I hope I don't stop seeing him now that I'm b’nei mitzvahed. He doesn't have a shape, like Santa Claus. No beard. But he carries the traditions with him. Not in a bag either. I can see them. I can hear them too. 

The tradition of telling stories. The tradition of enough stories, of being antsy and hungry, of sneaking a peek at the last pages while no one's looking to see when Shulchan Orech -- the dinner being served -- will finally come. How many pages to go? That's the tradition of the matzah right there. No time, gotta go. Can't wait until it's finished. Can't wait for the dough to rise. Same thing really. 

The tradition of the four questions, of watching us, the younger ones, show off for the grown ups. Okay,

                                Traditional Four Questions

they want us to show off. But I get that tradition. They call it qvelling. I like that word. What if, just what if, I didn't know the four questions or much of anything else about my past? 

As I think about it, I don't know much about the past, what my grandparents did or were like or thought about. But I do know they asked the four questions. I can see them. I can hear them at a table just like this, with family, with friends, with strangers. Doing what we're doing. Eating what we're eating. Remembering the bad, fearing the worst, and finding hope in it all. Because it's there. That's what he comes to remind us about.  

They keep talking about plagues, about ones I've never heard of. The grown ups keep having to look them up. What's a boil? What kind of vermin? How bad can hail get anyway? There are real plagues around. Every day. Wars, famine, starvation, disease, things people face every day, one worse than the last. I could count ten in just the people I know, at this table, at any table. 

The part I really don't get, every time I hear it, is Dayenu. Don't get me wrong, I love the song. See, just thinking about it brings out the rhyme in me. But it's about all these miracles. One for each plague. More. Bringing the Jews out of Egypt, dividing the sea, providing Manna, the Sabbath, the Torah. And at the end of each line, we sing Dayenu. Any one would have been enough. I don't think so. It's not that I'm not grateful. I am.

But plagues don't go away. They're here all the time. We're not done needing miracles. Sometimes the plagues don't seem so bad, so the miracles don't have to be so miraculous. But they're still miracles. And they happen all the time. That's why he comes every year. The door is always open. 

And in walks the tradition of the miracle.

#####

Action figures who heal and summon implausible miracles

 Jack Doppelt

March 26, 2021

[This is the third in a series of three stories published in preparation for the upcoming Passover holiday. A version of this piece has been incorporated into our family's Passover Haggadah since 2004.]

As I recall the Seders of my youth, what has stuck with me even more than the Maxwell House sponsorship was how ridiculous much of the service seemed to me at the time yet how much I cherished it. 

If this year’s Maxwell House is Zoom, may the children of today come to cherish it too. 

I looked forward to Seders as a time when I would almost pish in my pants with laughter over some of the traditional passages that linked the core themes of slavery, freedom and Jewish survival. 

It came right after the Kiddush and the Four Questions, right in the heart of the answer that started with, “Because we were slaves unto Pharaoh in Egypt.” It seems that Rabbi Eliezer, Rabbi Joshua, Rabbi Elazar the son of Azariah, Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Tarphon met in B’nai B’rak for “a pilpul” or a discussion of biblical text. From one store-sponsored Haggadah to another, the names were spelled differently, so that I got hopelessly confused among Eliezar, Elazar, or Azariah. It was clear that they were the action figures of the Jewish people -- my people -- and my dad expected that I would come to revere them and respect their wisdom. 

But they didn’t seem to have much to offer. They were puzzling over the meaning of “a mighty hand and an outstretched arm” and over “the days of thy life” or “all the days of thy life” as it referred to how long we Jews were to recall the going forth from Egypt. They seemed to get mystical guidance from the son of Zoma, another action figure, who seemed to solve the riddle by concluding that we were to recall the Exodus even longer than life itself, into the time of the Messiah, whatever that meant to someone like me who was having a hard enough time recalling the earned run average and career strikeouts of Sandy Koufax, a true action hero. 

Sandy Koufax's career statistics

W	L	ERA	G	GS	CG	SHO	SV	IP	H	R	ER	HR	BB	SO	HBP	WP	BF	WHIP	ERA+	WAR
165	87	2.76	399	314	137	40	9	2,324.1	1,754	806	713	204	817	2,396	18	87	9,497	1.106	131	53.1

[Source: Wikileaks [not available in those days]

Then later in the Seder service, we eavesdropped on another discussion of the sages. At some other time way back when, Rabbi Jose the Galilean, Rabbi Eleazar and Rabbi Akiva were puzzling over whether there were 10 plagues or 50 plagues, or 40 or 200 or 250. It became an involved math problem over whether each plague stood for four, that in the end was not resolved other than to break into song with a round of Dayenu. 

 Today we face one plague or is it thousands or tens of thousands for each inflicted person or family? 

 It seemed to me then, and seems to me now, that we the Jews, and we the people of the world, could use action figures who devote themselves to healing who are capable of summoning grand and implausible miracles. 

 #####

Because We Can? Pondering oppressor and oppressed

Jack Doppelt

March 26, 2021

[This is the second in a series of three stories published in preparation for the upcoming Passover holiday. A version of this piece has been incorporated into our family's Passover Haggadah since 2014.]

It is disorienting to be in the holy land in 2014 as Passover looms, to be in occupied Palestine, pondering oppressor and oppressed. 

The Passover Seder is my bedrock as a Jew. My father’s stature in my eyes is rooted to his role as searching leader of the multi-hour dinner theater cabaret. I've never met either of my grandparents or anyone who came before them. 

Yet I take on faith, something more real than Biblical faith, that they read from the Haggadah from generation to generation. Did they honor the Passover story as one in which we were the Chosen People protected by a discriminating God or one in which we were the oppressed guided into liberation by a just but vengeful God? For generation after generation, the two parables were inextricable. Are they now? 

Years ago, I wrote my first Haggadah and I’ve been revising it irregularly ever since. There are my emendations that call upon Sholem Aleichem’s Helmites, Sandy Koufax, an Elijah who brings with him the tradition of the miracle, and Grace Paley’s realization that there were neighbors where she grew up in New York who were not Jewish but who nonetheless "often seemed to be in a good mood." 

To be sure, it is more confusing being a Jew with eyes open in the occupied territories than it is being a Jew with eyes restfully closed in the comfort of privilege. I process the story of Sheldon Adelson declaring from on high in Las Vegas that Republican candidates are not to use the term “occupied territory.”  It is understandable for Jews to fear relenting, and to need to say with resoluteness that this land is our land to live in and to protect. It is also almost unbearable to ignore the arrogance and brutality that comes with being an occupier and an oppressor of others who share that land. It strains reason or imagination to see Adelson as Moses on the Mount and not Pharaoh on the throne. It also mocks my father’s sense of decency, and he was a learned man. 

Still it is confusing. Within 15 minutes on the main road running the length of the West Bank of the Jordan River, I was drawn into the enigma of the day. I was being driven around by a young Palestinian couple who were kind enough to offer to show me the land. We were heading south from Nablus to Ramallah and we hit a traffic snag. 

Photo credit: Jack Doppelt, April 2014

We sat, as one car after another in front of us peeled off from the stalled line of cars, and paused to our left to explain briefly in Arabic that it was settlers raising some kind of ruckus. We complied, and turned around, not knowing what alternative road we would take. We knew nothing more, and my hosts thought better than to try to find out. I asked why, do they think, and they said, “because they can.” A few minutes later, on a different stretch of road, we encountered four young, loosely masked boys, in Palestinian red and green. They were gathering stones and preparing for a confrontation they seemed intent on provoking. My hosts again did not want to know more. We drove on. 

Photo credit: Jack Doppelt, April 2014

Passover looms. It has always been a celebration of spirit and perseverance and justice for me, one in which we thank God as we recall grand gifts we’ve been given - getting out of Egypt, dividing the Red Sea, surviving 40 years in the desert, and being given the Sabbath, the Torah, the Temple and a place to live. Dayena. Any of them would have been enough. And yet with that celebration, I feel a personal and collective shame that it is not enough, and we seem to rejoice in using our power to oppress. 

Why? Because we can?

Photo credit: Jack Doppelt, April 2014

#####

Baseball, Ray

                                                                                                                                                 Jack Doppelt 

March 21, 2021

This started out as an appreciative email to my friend Pat Reardon to let him know how much I love his piece - The Sights and Sounds of Baseball, Fans Optional. My note has mutated into a blog for reasons that will be apparent momentarily. 

First, read Pat’s essay. It’s a keeper for the annals of baseball writing. For those more inclined toward writing than baseball, some of the most evocative writing is about baseball. Or as Terrence Mann said in the 1989 movie version of W.P. Kinsella’s Field of Dreams, “The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time.” 

Expressed like a true Canadian, which Kinsella was almost 35 years before the first Canadian team was admitted into the major leagues in 1969, and 12 years before Jackie Robinson broke the major league color barrier on April 15, 1947. 

Pat’s essay inspired me to mark my time through baseball. What resonates most for me are the five phases of my baseball life: watching games in person, playing ball, playing catch with our kids, watching our son Noah play, and the love and marriage of the double play. As Pat captured, none of the phases come with sounds other than the ones from the action itself. 

Pat had me hooked from the start when he referred to the hand protector as a mitt, not a glove. We midwesterns, Chicagoans specifically, grow up in a galaxy all our own, with a vocabulary all our own. We stand in line, not on line; we drink pop, not soda; we say “roof” like a barking dog, not like it’s the noun form for rueful; and we recognize Chicago folksinger Steve Goodman as the preeminent troubadour of baseball. Pick your want: Go Cubs Go, Hey, Hey Holy Mackerel (which he popularized), A Dying Cub Fan’s Last Request, or his killer version with Jethro Burns of Take Me Out to the Ballgame. 

I never wore a mitt to a major league game, as Pat did. Players on the field do that. If I’m going to snare a foul ball, it’s going to be bare-handed, preferably with my left hand only. Two hands are for rookies. At a game, until relatively recently, the fan experience came without play-by-play, color commentary or replays. If you missed a homer or a defensive gem, you missed it. Admittedly, being able to see it on a big screen replay at the park is a convenience, though a 21st century misconception nonetheless. As a kid, I was the kind of fan Chicagoans scorn. I liked both the Cubs and the Sox. I’m a North Sider but when I was a formative seven years old, the ’59 Sox of Aparicio and Fox wound up in the World Series against the Dodgers who were nurturing the maturing process of a young Sandy Koufax, who a few years later would become unhittable. The Sox teased Chicago into thinking the unthinkable by winning the first game 11-0. It didn’t last. The Sox lost the series. Koufax? He lost the one game he started 1-0 though he struck out seven White Sox. What more could a Jewish kid from Chicago want? 

Truth be told, though I do have some literary license, being the one writing this, I was not much of a little league ballplayer. A year or two at Henry Horner Park and the allure of baseballs peeking out from under the fence of a commercial batting cage that allowed balls to fly off into the distance rather than penting them up in the cage. 

My game was softball, the 16-inch kind. No mitts. When I got to college, I discovered that almost no one outside Chicago heard of 16-inch softball, much less played it. Arrogance being a New York virtue, my new New York friends, who were the most adept at correcting my pronunciations, favored the term “cabbageball,” I suspect from exposure to the only delis on the planet worth their time.

No, not a cabbageball, but a clincher, the official 16-inch softball,
hard at game time, squishier as the game went on

I was, and always will be a shortstop. If I knew Pat in those days, the avowed first baseman and I would have made for a veritable vacuum cleaner to ground balls. I fashioned a unique approach to the ground ball. If a grounder came within easy reach, the harder hit the more impressive, I would scoop it up while down on my left knee. If the runner was fast, I’d whip it over to first without getting off my knee. For slower runners, I’d get up to throw it. No need to be a hot dog. Sure, I might benefit from the boardinghouse reach of a Pat Reardon, but I had a pretty accurate arm. And as a shortstop I could go into the hole to my right with the best of ‘em. 

When college intramurals bastardized the game down to 12-inch baseball with mitts, for Pete (Rose’s?) sake, I adapted, seldom to return to 16-inch in young adulthood except for one memorable refuge. A group of we post-college misfits organized a team that played 16-inch for years at Loyola Park along the lakefront in Rogers Park. We went through 4-5 neighborhood sponsors without ever bringing home a championship. The same probably could be said for a winning season. Now that's the Chicago baseball we know, love and endure. I attribute the scarcity of 16-inch softball, even to most Chicagoans, to a phenomenon much like the vanquishing of neighborhood stores by strip malls. This is nothing less than the 12-inching of America at work. 

With adulthood came the ubiquitousness of little leagues. We didn’t turn over our kids to the professionals that easily. We kept very much alive the sacred tradition of playing catch and throwing a ball around. I separate the two because in addition to playing catch in front of the house or at our neighborhood park, we would have a ball with us as a family no matter where we were. On walks, on trips, or in the house. Nona, the kids’ grandmother, frowned on the home version. Grandpa Zayde didn’t. Tie goes to the tosser. We used it as a form of connectivity. The random tosses were sometimes well-signalled, sometimes blind. It taught our kids how to be alert for strangers who might attack them with a hacky sack. In front of the house was our default. Catch is a more versatile game than bridge, for instance. It can be played by one, two, three, or our family of four. We still needed the neighborhood park. How you gonna practice “divers” without enough grass to cushion the blow? Fear or even hesitance in diving for a grounder eliminates the element of surprise from the game and takes the oohs and ahhs out of baseball. I’m prepared to acquiesce to the “no crying in baseball” axiom. The scene with Tom Hanks and Bitty Schram is worth it. But what about Lou Gehrig’s iconic tear-jerking farewell in Yankee Stadium in 1939 on the 4th of July? 

Take the oohs and ahhs out and baseball is just cricket with bases. The most vivid surprise I ever experienced in baseball, and I’ve had plenty, was in Game 1 of the 1988 World Series between the Athletics and Dodgers. For baseball fans, I need say no more. For others, decide for yourself. Vin Scully, the poet of baseball announcing, guided us through it. Kirk Gibson, one of the Dodgers stars, couldn’t play. Both his legs were hobbled. He was not even listed on the team roster for the game. With two outs in the ninth inning and the Dodgers down by one run, Gibson was called on to pinch hit. The Dodgers stadium crowd erupted. Gibson’s at bat featured five foul balls and four throws over to first base to keep the runner close. Each throw produced boos from the crowd, signalling their disapproval of the delay tactics. The runner stole second anyway. With each foul ball, Gibson hobbled. As Scully put it, Gibson was “shaking his leg, making it quiver like a horse trying to get rid of a troublesome fly.” The count inched its way to a full 3-2. As Zayde often said, “now this is drama.” 

With the crowd on its feet all this time, Gibson yanked a pitch into the right field stands. The experience took 7 minutes, 14 seconds from the announcement that he was pinch hitting until he touched ‘em all and fell into the flailing arms of his teammates. A walk-off homer, as it’s called, though this was possibly the only limp off homer in the annals of baseball. Take in the experience if you want to appreciate the gold nugget of surprise in baseball. 

Click here for the full 7 minutes, 14 seconds 

I visited the Googles, wanting to give equal time to cricket, and to my pleasure, and surprise, you may want to check out the BEST Ever Catches in cricket. No wonder the rest of the world is beyond making fun of cricket. I sure feel sheepish. Enjoy. 

Click here for the top 40 catches in the rarified history of cricket 

Son Noah played baseball his entire childhood and youth. Skokie little leagues, Evanston little leagues, Evanston Township high school (ETHS), Wash U in St. Louis. He was a starting infielder at almost every turn - shortstop or second baseman. He also made time to play the piano. 

Shortly after Noah got to high school, ETHS engineered a fundraising campaign to erect a blue monster as the left field wall. It was a crowning achievement for the athletic department. Understandably, they may have oversold it a bit. At the community meeting for parents, the coach and athletic director painted a vivid picture of an Evanston kid, like Noah, standing at the plate and gazing admiringly at the Blue Monster. Everyone knows if you’re up at the plate, your eyes are trained on the pitcher and his every motion, not at a far off wall, no matter how impressive. 

The games, home and often away, were a family affair. Nona, Zayde and I seldom missed a game. Wife Margie and daughter Sylvie came as often as they could. Sylvie, when she wasn’t at gymnastics or playing team tennis. Margie when she left work early. Shhh. Zayde was an equal opportunity razzer. He expressed his inner maven to umps; innocent, impressionable opposing players; innocent, impressionable teammates of Noah; everyone except Noah. Periodically, he’d yell out after a good defensive play by Noah, “who is that kid at second base?” Toward the end of Noah’s high school run, the team honored Zayde by allowing him a stint at the mike in the booth. Only Bill Murray had a better time of it as guest Cubs announcer. 

On the high school team, each player got to pick his walk up song that would be played over the loudspeaker as the kid walked from the on deck circle to the plate. I defy baseball fans to come up with a more inspiring walk up song than Noah’s. John Fogerty’s Centerfield was a common choice, and a good tune, but come on, it’s about center field. Picture yourself in the stands and you hear This for 25 seconds. Noah is a country music fan and Darius Rucker is now ingrained in family lore. 

One fateful day - April 12, 2011 - Noah was up at the plate with his eyes trained on the pitcher and the pitcher’s every motion, and he jacked one, marking the first home run in his young career, over the wall just to the right of the blue monster. The dad of one of Noah’s teammates took off immediately and came back minutes later with a memento. For all I know, he had to pay a neighborhood kid a pretty penny for the ball. 

As any fan of baseball movies knows, there has to be a love interest. Field of Dreams has Amy Madigan as Ray’s feisty wife; Bull Durham has hometown seductress Susan Sarandon; Trouble with the Curve has Amy Adams, a baseball loving pool hustler to hook up with Justin Timberlake; Bad News Bears has Tatum O’ Neal and her wicked curveball; A League of their Own has Marla Hooch fall for a guy in a bar. 

For me, my love interest is now me wife Margie and mother to our children. After college, she helped organize a weekly 12-inch softball game called “SoFummerTBall” at Elks Park in South Evanston. The game got its name from the T-shirts Margie’s dad made. The t-shirts had the words Summer Softball in a circle so to the casual observer, it read something like this: 

The teams were divided into professional allegiances. Health professionals were the Hatfields, I guess, and journalists were the (Real) McCoys. By the time I got into the game, a few years had elapsed. Margie had secured her position as pitcher for the Healthies. Whether I was awaiting a turn at bat or batting, I couldn’t keep my eyes off her, being true to the adage of training your eyes on the pitcher and the pitcher’s every motion. 

Some time passed, and I was at the Major League All-Star game at White Sox Park on July 6, 1983, with David Orr and 43,799 other fans. A lot of people -  though admittedly the smallest crowd for an all-star game in ten years. Not long after Harold Washington was re-elected Chicago Mayor, Orr was re-elected to his second term as 49th ward alderman. Still of all the beer joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into the same game. She’s with her dad. David and I stroll around the park and pass them. We walk back. David is gallant enough to return to our seats, as Margie took David’s place in my walk around the park. It’s announced over the loudspeaker that George Burns, the comedian who was 87 years old, would be performing soon in a venue around Chicago. Margie and I declared our mutual admiration for him and decide to arrange a date to see him. The rest would have been history, but for our decision to not see George Burns. Instead, our first date was to SummerFest in Milwaukee to see Steve Goodman. Now, the rest is a history that comes full circle. 

 ####

For the people – Three counter-maneuvers for Biden

                                                                                                                                              Jack Doppelt 

                                                                                                                                              Feb. 25, 2021 

Let me propose three interlocking stratagems for the Biden administration. They have a common imperative; designed with laser focus on “the people.” Each is a counter-maneuver needed after years of deception from the right.

Biden should start by eliminating the misconception of bipartisan cooperation. 

CNN story on GOP efforts to undermine Biden

More than half the GOP members of Congress have become such blindly partisan Trumpers that they’ve frittered away their privilege to negotiate legislation. Taking both the House and Senate into account, there are far more members of the current GOP (Gimme Only Partisans) than of any semblance of the Grand Old Party. The current GOP is easy to define and steer clear of. They are those: 

• who voted to not impeach Trump on his 2nd run-through at impeachment (either in the House on Jan. 13 or in the Senate one month later, on Feb. 13). Only 10 GOP House members and 7 Senators didn’t fall in line; 
• who voiced opposition to the electoral college certification at some point before or on Jan. 6 when the Capitol was breached; 
• who claimed by Dec. 15, after the election was six weeks over, that Biden was not lawfully elected or that the election was stolen from Trump or refused to say, according to the Washington Post, AND 
• who clung to the contrived pretext that Trump had a right to appeal his loss, though he racked up a nearly unbroken string of 61 court losses, according to USA Today. He won one in PA. 

If you think about it, that’s more than three months of time and latitude to act as a responsible lawmaker from the old Grand Old Party. Yet, of the 261 GOP lawmakers (211 in the House and 50 in the Senate), there are fewer than 30, by my casual count, whom the Biden administration should trust to do anything other than undermine his efforts as president. 

That’s a paltry 10%, at most. Looked at from the glass half-full side if you tip the glass, that’s 13 in the House and 14 in the Senate, both chambers in which the Dems have a working majority for most votes without any of them. 

That’s fortuitous because accounts from just Tuesday report that “Republican leaders in both chambers are maneuvering to keep all of their members in line against Biden’s $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief plan.” Under the headline, “GOP begins new push against Biden’s relief plan as Republican leaders expect no defections in the ranks,” CNN framed its significance as a move that would deny Biden “a bipartisan victory.” 

Though Biden has often spoken of his desire for bipartisan cooperation, he should be taken to mean bipartisanship with those Republicans whose partisanship isn’t calcified by party hostility, knee-jerk fears of blind constituent loyalty to Trump, or their own obeisance to Trump. 

Better yet, Biden should use this opportunity to reclaim the language with which the GOP wants to hang him. What he should seek is nonpartisanship. 

Consider the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) as the model. It produces independent analyses of budgetary and economic issues to support the Congressional budget process. It’s been at it and respected since 1975. That’s through eight presidents. Now into the 9th. The CBO notes proudly on its website that it is “strictly nonpartisan.” Its employees are hired “solely on the basis of professional competence without regard to political affiliation.” About the only periodic criticisms of the CBO in nearly 50 years are that its work can be politically inconvenient. Just the attributes I’d want in a political party. 

Nonpartisan is a more accurate, inclusive and dynamic trajectory for Biden and the future. Blue and red are intrinsically divisive. They’ve become cancerously divisive. More prospective voters approaching the last election self-identified as independent than as either Democrats or Republicans. The public is driven to partisan choice by party leaders, closed party primaries, and now partisan bickering and incendiary partisanship. 

Biden’s inaugural pledge was to “be a President for all Americans. I will fight as hard for those who did not support me as for those who did.” 

From that get-go, the GOP recognized how righteously devious they can be by taking that pledge and blaming Biden for giving up on bipartisanship if he fails to urge "congressional Dems to actually negotiate with GOP,” and instead tries to “force through a leftist agenda.” Those are the tweeted words of GOP Minority Whip John Thune (R-S Dakota). 

Senator John Thune (@SenJohnThune)
Feb. 4, 2021

On Thune's official Senate website, he elaborated on what he meant by a leftist agenda. His release replaced the tweeted words with "forcing through an agenda that lacks the support of half or more of the country."

CNN noted the political risks for Republicans, “with polls showing clear majorities of Americans supporting an emergency rescue package and with the economy still reeling from the coronavirus pandemic.” 

Biden shouldn’t negotiate in good faith with representatives less intent on serving their constituents than on undermining the president and ginning-up the likelihood the Democrats will be vulnerable for the 2022 election. He should ignore them. The GOP members of Congress are the people’s representatives and if they misrepresent their constituents, there’s an intrinsic time lag until the next election before the distortion becomes apparent. 

Biden should serve and pay attention to the constituents. They’re his constituents too, as he aptly said in his inaugural address. The people in red states or in red districts don’t get ignored. They don’t have vaccines diverted elsewhere. They don’t get fewer federal dollars. They shouldn’t be targeted for political retribution. They should be served fully and fairly. The GOP representatives whom the people elected will have to figure out how to claim credit for work and service done in good faith by others. 

By my count, 11 states have two out of two senators who boast of being card-carrying members of Gimme Only Partisans. The states lay fallow from meaningful and discriminating representation by their Republican senators.

Roll call: Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Wyoming. Eleven. 

That’s almost ¼ of all the states in the union, and my conservative estimates exclude from those 22 Gimme Only Partisan senators, some Republican senators who may be worth talking with, as Biden did with 10 of them three weeks ago to work out a COVID-19 relief package. 

The good news for the millions of people in those 11 states is that for every McConnell or Paul or Graham or Blackburn or Rubio or Lankford or Scott #1 or Scott #2, there are handfuls of public servants who are willing, able and eager to serve the people of their states. I am not referring to challenges in upcoming elections. I’m suggesting that Biden deploy a nonpartisan public service corps to ensure that the people are consulted and served, using town hall meetings to hear and discuss, and communications to report back. The GOP lawmakers are not needed for legislation to pass. Presumably, they will continue to poison the waters rhetorically and through right wing outlets. 

All you need to do is listen to Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell who told the news media after Tuesday's GOP’s private get-out-the-Biden harpoon lunch that Biden’s $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief plan is "totally partisan,” yet a challenge for the GOP in the face of public support for Biden’s plan for the Gimme Only Partisans’ messaging campaign.

 -------------

I will post the next two installments in my three interlocking stratagems for the Biden administration over the next few days. Each focuses on “the people.” The second is on job creation offsets for green economy advances; the third is on the paths to citizenship for immigrants. 

#####

The advantages of earplugs and blinders

 

                                                                                                                                               Jack Doppelt 

                                                                                                                                               Feb. 12, 2021 

As the Trump impeachment trial team introduced its defense today of the former president for “inciting insurrection" by encouraging the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, maybe the GOP senators will discard their earplugs and blinders. The sensory protectors must be annoying to have to resort to. They apparently need them so they don’t hear or see what they can then deny without facing up to how utterly shameless and hypocritical they are. 

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who was one of the most vocal supporters of Trump’s incendiary “Stop the Steal” narrative and one of the 44 GOP senators who voted that the trial is unconstitutional because Trump is no longer president, said publicly yesterday that Trump shouldn’t be convicted because the House managers had not come "remotely close" to demonstrating that Trump's conduct on Jan. 6 constituted incitement. 

Kaleidoscope of dots
[Image: Part of Mandelbrot set -
Smily Kaleidoscope-
Creative Commons

I can appreciate that. If you don’t hear or see any of the statements or videos that clearly connected a kaleidoscope of dots leading up to Jan. 6, you too might think that there’s no difference between heightened, insensitive, angry or inflammatory rhetoric in political campaigns, in demonstrations or in the media on the one hand, and what happened on Jan. 6, on the other hand. 

“The right” mass produces the earplugs and blinders. Ken Starr fulfilled his consulting gig on Fox News in the morning. He characterized The House manager’s case as political theater and prepared us to anticipate that Trump’s defense team is “going to run the ‘First Amendment-free speech’ play.” 

Starr is a former Appeals Court judge who turned legal hit man for the right when he led the impeachment prosecution of Bill Clinton in 1998 and became one of Trump’s legal team in Trump’s 2020 impeachment trial. He was also one of an even more impressive legal team in 2008 that represented Jeffrey Epstein, the politically connected billionaire and sex offender. In a revealing interview on Fox News in July 2019, Starr called it “nonsense” that any of the abused women whose cases were compromised by a cozy non-prosecution agreement with Epstein were bowled over by the influential lawyers. Starr would know, he boasted. “I was in the room.” [where it happened, with homage to Lin-Manuel Miranda and Hamilton]. Alexander Acosta, who was the then-U.S. Attorney who cut that deal, later stepped down as Trump’s Secretary of Labor because of the incident. As Starr put it, by resigning, “[Acosta] took one for the team.” A federal judge saw it differently. In Feb. 2019, Judge Kenneth Marra rebuked the phalanx of big name attorneys, including Starr, who had written Acosta at the time that it would be “wholly inappropriate” for the U.S. Attorney’s office to issue victim notification letters to the women, though failing to do so violated Florida law. 

With Starr pointing me to the play action, I listened closely to Trump’s defense team and focused on their videos. They summoned plenty of rhetoric by the likes of Maxine Waters, Kamala Harris, Chuck Schumer, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders. All Democrats, of course. Similar rhetoric can be invoked of Republicans. Of course, speech and rhetoric can be heated. 

Trump’s defense presentation was a testament, as were some of the House managers videos, to harnessing the wonders of digital video searching and to the craft of selective editing. The word “fight” repeated hundreds of time…by Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris alone. How’s that different, the point was, from Trump saying the words “fight” 20 times in the paroxysm of the Jan. 6 Capitol riots. 

Language like “fight like hell” and “don’t give up” and “you have to get your people to fight,” “punch him in the face,” “fights may need to be in Congress, in the courts and in the streets,” and “I want to tell you…you have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price.” 

The only two soundbites in the whole series of montages that pinpricked me were: CNN's Chris Cuomo: “Show me where protesters are supposed to be polite and peaceful.” Chuck Schumer: “The patriots were protesters.” 

Once Trump’s defense rested, we were left where we expected we’d be. It takes 67 votes to impeach. The votes are not there. Trump will be acquitted. Despite the expected and caricatured “he says (without listening to her), she says (without listening to him)” nature of our political landscape, the call about whether he should be convicted is a tough call, with the 1st Amendment guarding the door.  

Did Trump intend to incite his MAGAs to commit “imminent lawless action” on Jan. 6 specifically and were those actions likely to happen then and there? As I wrote the other day, that’s where the virtues and ambiguities of the videos before and on Jan. 6 matter. We shouldn’t be punishing people or impeaching a president for speaking passionately. But Trump’s speech and actions on Jan. 6 were singularly unique. 

As Justice William Brennan wrote more than 50 years ago in New York Times v. Sullivan, which is one of America’s proudest exports to the world, “debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.” That freedom is defining of America. It is not absolute. People forfeit that freedom by perjuring themselves, by convincing co-conspirators to break the knees of mob victims, or by intending to incite people to commit “imminent lawless action” that is likely to happen then and there. 

Did Trump forfeit that freedom? Because if he did, he cannot avail himself of a First Amendment protection, and he should be impeached and not allowed the privilege to seek public office in the nation where I live. 

Maybe Bruce Springsteen put it best in “Dancing in the Dark”: “You can’t start a fire without a spark.” 

I believe with all the conviction of someone who sees before me not only a dangerous, unrepentant, charismatic demagogue who kicked down the 1st Amendment door, but almost half a Congress who’ve traded in their political pedigree as the Grand Old Party for membership in Gimme Only Partisans. They preserved the acronym. 

Please tell me, though, that there is hope that the 70 millions of my fellow citizens who were sycophantic believers in a con man no longer have use for earplugs and blinders. 

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Where does "the right" get this stuff? The Impeachment edition

Jack Doppelt

 Feb. 9, 2021 

Again, I’m watching Fox News’ coverage, as I did on Jan. 6. I’m not watching to be convinced whether or not Trump should be convicted on one count of "incitement of insurrection" for encouraging the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. That’s about Trump.

I’m watching to fathom one underlying question that will define our futures as a nation: Where does "the right" get the stuff that has them believing dangerous nonsense? Of course, the media, including social media, propel this stuff. Yet, what stuff catches fire and why? 

A primer on one place where the right gets this stuff can be found in one program that aired the day before today’s impeachment trial. It aired on Newsmax, a fellow right wing network that is giving Fox News a run for its ratings. 

Co-hosts Sean Spicer (yes, that Sean Spicer) and Lindsay Keith interviewed Alan Dershowitz, whom they welcomed as a constitutional scholar, legal professor at Harvard and “author of a million books.” Bona fides to impress. 

Newsmax-Feb. 8, 2021

Dershowitz was on the team of lawyers who represented Trump at his first Senate impeachment trial. His novel argument in that hearing was that if Trump believed he was acting both in his own political interest -- and at the same time in the country’s interest in withholding military aid to Ukraine until Ukraine announced an investigation into then-former Vice President Biden -- those actions cannot be impeachable. As he put it, "If a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment," he argued. The irony was that his argument, laughably bizarre as it was, seemed to be what caught on with the GOP and the right. Bona fides enhanced. 

Spicer and Keith last night gushed over every word of Dershowitz. At the end of the interview, they thanked him for breaking things down so the audience could get the answers as they try to make sense of the impending impeachment trial. 

The simple answers Dershowitz divined were these: 

Trump can’t be impeached for speech. He claimed that Trump’s speech was no different from other speech, which of course is protected by the 1st Amendment. He went into professed con law mode by conceding at least that speech can go beyond 1st Amendment protection when it is “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action” and is “likely to incite or produce such action.” 

The issue clearly is whether Trump’s speech in the context of the election fraud buildup he harnessed for his electoral college day rally did that. Dershowitz pointed to the 1969 Brandenburg case about a Ku Klux Klan rally in Ohio to make his distorted points. He failed to say that the landmark holding in the case was directed at an Ohio law that went too far in limiting speech. In striking down a clearly over-broad Ohio law, the case rejected a doctrine that emerged from WWI called “clear and present danger.” 

The justices in Brandenburg were struggling with the line that preserves the advocacy of abstract ideas but can punish speech that incites imminent lawless action. Justice William O. Douglas recalled the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes who wrote prophetically in 1925: “Every idea is an incitement. It offers itself for belief and if believed it is acted on unless some other belief outweighs it or some failure of energy stifles the movement at its birth.” The justices warned: “Eloquence may set fire to reason… If in the long run the beliefs expressed in proletarian dictatorship are destined to be accepted by the dominant forces of the community, the only meaning of free speech is that they should be given their chance and have their way.” 

Without needing to refer to Trump’s incitement as eloquent, it had the power to “set fire to reason.” The incited Trumpers came to DC because he had provoked them “to stop the steal.” Still, they all had time to resort to their perverted reasoning in coming to DC or attending the rally. That took time. Trump’s persuasiveness had won those days with them, as his persuasiveness had attracted 74 million votes. That’s speech, and as the justices put it, “government has no power to invade that sanctuary of belief and conscience.” 

Once in DC with Trump ranting persuasively to his MAGAs, did he incite them to commit “imminent lawless action” and was action likely to happen? 

That’s where the virtues and ambiguities of the videos of Jan. 6 leave us. That’s what makes Jan. 6 and Trump unique, as they should be. We shouldn’t be impeaching or punishing impassioned speakers? 

Dershowitz actually claimed that Trump couldn’t have intended to incite “imminent lawless action” that was likely to happen. After all, as Dershowitz conjured, “most of the people who heard the president didn’t even go to the Capitol, most of the people who went to the Capitol didn’t go inside, most of the people who went inside didn’t destroy property, and hardly anybody killed people.” 

Apparently, it can’t be intended incitement to “imminent lawless action” if not everyone is fomented to act instinctively, lawlessly, violently and murderously? Pardon? 

Imminent lawless action needn’t result in people being killed. Though it did. Invading the Capitol, threatening people, destroying property, putting lawmakers, their staffs and their families in fear of their lives will do just fine. Watch the videos. Hundreds did that. 

Many of the lawbreakers chanted: “Stop the steal.” “Treason.” Defend your Constitution.” “Fight for Trump.” Listen to the videos. 

Trump had pledged as he dispatched his followers to the Capitol: “We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you.” He must have gotten waylaid after that. Like any ersatz movement leader, he abandoned them to march on their own. What good are lambs if they need to be accompanied to the slaughter? 

Dershowitz wants the right to believe that the impeachment trial is about run-of-the-mill speech, the kind that, as he puts it, could result in political activists from the right or left put at risk of government encroachment. 

Even more scary, Dershowitz envisions, is to allow impeachment any time an office holder leaves office. Who’s next, Nikki Haley? Be very worried, Republicans. Bill Clinton? Could happen to you, Dems. Dershowitz knows a straw man when he creates one. 

Trump is being impeached for actions he took and actions he fomented while he was president, not years before or after. 

To the credit of Democratic impeachment managers, they opened today’s proceedings by re-framing what the Dershowitzes and right wing “thinkers” call the unconstitutionality of impeaching a former official. 

What it really would be providing is a January exception that would allow a Trump-sort to do whatever he wants with impunity in the final days in office to prevent accountability because days later, he’s no longer in office. As we all know, Donald Trump would never reserve audacious acts like rampant pardonings until the final days in office. 

Dershowitz reserved his most virulent pent up anger yesterday for his legal scholar colleagues, led by his nemesis and Harvard colleague Laurence Tribe. Dershowitz seemed to hanker for a food fight with Tribe. To Dershowitz, the difference between himself and the Tribes of the legal establishment is that he, Dershowitz, is principled. 

The constitutional scholars, 144 of them of all political stripes, issued a public letter to Trump’s legal team [read it here], that, according to Dershowitz on both Newsmax and in The Hill, demanded, “in effect, that they not make arguments to the Senate regarding the First Amendment.” Dershowitz referred to the letter as blatant intimidation, as did The Hill’s headline: “Impeachment scholars are wrong to intimidate lawyers of Donald Trump.” Dershowitz characterized the letter as “threatening” in advising the Trump team that they “don’t you even dare” raise the First Amendment. “If you do, it will be unethical and subject you to disciplinary proceedings, including possibly disbarment,” he said raising his voice in emphasis, which elicited a Pavlovian snicker from Spicer. 

I don’t interpret the letter as intimidation. Moreover, I don’t find the quotes used by Dershowitz to be in the letter. What the letter says is, “No reasonable scholar or jurist could conclude that President Trump had a First Amendment right to incite a violent attack on the seat of the legislative branch, or then to sit back and watch on television as Congress was terrorized and the Capitol sacked.” 

The letter reads more like a petition, speaking of the First Amendment. 

Uncanny, though that Dershowitz would invoke the term “intimidation” when part of the argument to convict Trump of impeachment includes the lead up to the Jan. 6 events when Trump four days earlier called election officials in Georgia to convince them to find votes that would undermine Georgia’s election results. [Listen to excerpts or read a transcript from the Jan. 2 call here.] Trump had it all planned. The election was rigged, 11,780 votes need to be found, and if they’re not found and the election officials don’t report the missing votes, it’s a criminal offense and it will be incumbent on Trump to report their crime. 

Now that’s intimidation. the severity of which is being investigated by Fulton County prosecutors in Georgia.

As for Dershowitz, now that’s chutzpah (חֻצְפָּה), the attributes of which he prides himself as having.

https://www.facebook.com/jack.doppelt/posts/10159360929711098

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