Tragedies follow the same formula. Someone gets themselves into an easily avoidable situation and suffers the ultimate demise. Usually the cardinal sin is hubris. Hubris can be defined as “exaggerated pride or self-confidence.” Nearly all of our tragic characters think of themselves as invincible for one reason or another. They are all tragically wrong.

There are any number of days that go by when I lose faith in the universe. The universe can be loosely defined by whatever cosmic force you choose to adhere to. Some traditions call it karma. Others say it is fate. The idea is that eventually everyone gets what is coming to them. That could be positive or negative depending on what we render.

That brings us to our ex-president. He has been found liable in civil court for sexual assault. He has a judgement against him for business fraud even though the total amount is still up in the air. It could be that he will end up owing upwards of 400 million plus in those combined judgments. That can seem like justice, but as we know, those numbers can seem about as real as Monopoly money. You have appeals. You have cries of poor. You have numerous delays and running out of the clock.

E. Jean Carroll might end up fetching a small portion of the money owed to her. After you consider the fees her lawyers will collect you have to wonder if she gets anything other than a symbolic victory. The same will be true for the state of New York. Meanwhile, millions of addle=brained meth heads will send in their five and ten bucks to shield their orange Jesus from feeling the effects of his own stupid crimes.

At each step of the way I have been overwhelmed. I never thought he would be charged with anything. He has found ways to weasel out of these things before. His life has been a life free of responsibility for anything. So, when asked how much jail time he will serve for his 91 counts I still set the over/under at zero with zero being the heavy betting favorite. I don’t know what the excuse will be, but I’ll bet it will be a good one.

The ultimate irony is that none of this needed to happen. He could have continued to live a responsibility free life well into sand trap induced dementia. He could have accepted defeat following 2020 and been a fairly benign figure in history. Most of the 91 counts are directly related to his inability to accept defeat. Some of them are loosely related like the documents case. Sure, the documents aren’t directly related to him refusing defeat but I’m sure he convinced himself they belonged to him because he was still the rightful president.

Even the Stormy Daniels stuff would probably have gone away if he had just walked away. Hubris thy name is Donald. I have no idea if the civil fraud case would have continued, but he probably could have stemmed the tide on all of his civil trials by simply walking away. You got to have a pretty big ego to be president. None of the other presidents have had trouble walking away. He is alone in that regard.

The hope here is that somehow the inability to accept defeat will bring it all crashing down on him. The universe demands it. Our collective sense of judgment demands it. Our own faith in the universe is at stake here. True accountability would be death in prison. Obviously, someone guilty of treason as he most certainly is deserves far worse, but I have to be consistent to my own convictions. I do not believe in the death penalty. So, I’ll take death in prison. Let’s go universe. Let’s get a move on.

For people from my generation, there was nothing quite like the show South Park. It is still going on, but like most things it has lost its edge after awhile. While the show centers more or less around four characters, the single thrust of the show seems to be the antics of Eric Cartman. The show’s creators (Trey Parker and Matt Stone) once called Cartman “the junk in everyone’s soul.” Nearly every episode has him doing something incredibly stupid, evil, or better yet, evil and stupid at the same time. He is incredibly manipulative, devious, and yet his plans usually always fail because he doesn’t know basic things that would be necessary to make such plans work.

For most of us that have watched the show, Cartman reminds us of someone we see in the news. Of course, the difference is that Cartman is a child and fictional. He has a plucky kind of charm even though there really are no redeeming qualities there. He is sexist, racist, and anti-Semitic and fairly obvious about it. I just can’t put my finger on who that sounds like.

We are usually shaped by those that we grew up watching on television. Our parents grew up watching Ronald Reagan in movies and on television and it made perfect sense that he should become president because people felt familiar and comfortable with him Fast-forward to our current generation and it makes some sense. We grew up on talk shows. Not everyone watched all of them, but between us we can probably recite memories of watching Geraldo, Sally Jesse Raphael, and Jerry Springer. The general idea about these shows follows a pretty precise formula.

Those talk shows provided for a pretty interesting dichotomy that I am sure is the basis of some pretty comprehensive psychological study. On the one hand, we enjoyed them because we could feel superior to someone. As messed up as our lives might have been or might be, at least we aren’t THOSE people. The ability to feel superior to someone is powerful and that power is pretty alluring to those that don’t have any.

The second part of that dichotomy is fact that a little piece of all of us wishes we could act like those people. The idea of telling people exactly what I think of them is alluring, but we know we can’t do that and maintain our careers or our relationships. These talk shows have found a magic formula that has us simultaneously feeling superior, disgusted, envious, and wanting more all at the same time.

The talk show generation is now in their forties and fifties. We are the prime age for most voters and provide for the base of people most likely to vote for the real life Eric Cartman. Younger voters don’t really get the whole talk show thing. They can stream their entertainment. They don’t have to worry about what is on the television at that particular time. They can choose their programming and they aren’t motivated by the same primal forces we were.

I think the biggest swing between 2016 and 2020 was the group of people that really didn’t agree with Trump but were oddly entertained by him. He said things we would never think of saying, but many secretly hoped they could. They felt disenfranchised from politics and felt the system had failed them. So, why not install the real life and adult version of Eric Cartman?

A majority of Trump voters would never vote for a Democrat and so you aren’t winning those folks over. However, enough switched because they saw what an Eric Cartman presidency wrought. They simply need to be reminded. As they told us when we were kids, “it’s all in good fun until someone’s eye gets poked out.” The pandemic wasn’t fun. Being a laughingstock around the globe wasn’t fun. Watching kids in cages and racists emboldened wasn’t fun. Eventually, you find something that touches on something that directly impacts them and President Cartman wasn’t good for any of that.

You might recall a dust-up over here on the Left Coast between the uber conservative Christian dominionist school board majority in Temecula Valley, California, and the community that they were elected to represent.

It’s what passes for MAGA news here in snowflake heaven.

The school board passed measures to, 1) forbid CRT instruction (where none existed), 2) forbid classroom display of any flag representing a particular unacceptable cultural point of view (gay pride), 3) oust a well-regarded and respected school superintendent, 4) decline to adopt an entire social studies curriculum because of an offending paragraph about a gay San Francisco County Supervisor who was murdered by a homophobic colleague, and 5) recently voted to require notification to parents if their child makes a change to their gender identity on campus.

This three-person board majority was foisted on the community by a local mega church pastor and his flock when they encouraged their neighbors to vote for “protecting parents’ rights and ridding schools of…left-wing indoctrination and pornographic material.”

Things change. For years, Temecula was regarded as a Libertarian heaven and is still represented by MAGAmaniac Darryl Issa in the US Congress. But population shifts and migrations have tempered the collective conservative angst in the local area, and people have been raising objections to the school board’s policies.

Their objections have now taken form in a successful recall petition to remove the board’s president, Dr. Joseph Komrosky. Per The Press-Enterprise via KTLA news:

“Riverside County election officials announced Monday, Jan. 22, that they had verified 4,884 signatures from voters in Komrosky’s district who signed recall petitions. That’s 604 more than the minimum needed to force a recall.”

They need to oust only one board member to break the 3-2 majority, but we now have a two-fer. It seems that another member of the trio, Danny Gonzalez, has announced that he has sold his house and is moving his family back to his 40-acre ranch in Texas (sorry Texas).

Unfortunately, the recall issue will not appear on the March 5 primary ballot since the publication deadline for that has now passed. It is now more likely to be voted on in a special election to be held between April 19th and May 26th.

A special election.

Turn out being what it usually is in a special election, I can’t imagine that giving Komrosky a farewell send-off is going to be easy.

I hope to be pleasantly surprised

I am but am amateur at this political game. I am what they call a support facilitator. I go into other teacher’s classrooms and work directly with students with disabilities. They could include learning disabilities or developmental disabilities. Occasionally, we deal with students with behavioral issues, but the other two kinds represent the bulk of what I do. So, when asked to come up with a national platform for the Democratic party I can only offer my best guess.

My platform is labeled, “let freedom ring.” Beyond the obvious what exactly does this mean? One of the things we have done as a party is cede way too many arguments to the right. I’ve mentioned these before and I won’t belabor them here. What we are in danger of doing is ceding freedom and liberty to them as well. There is nothing remotely freeing about what the Moms for Liberty are proposing. The so-called Freedom Caucus is anything but about freedom. This needs to be highlighted over and over again.

So, how do we do this? Simply put, take the words from their platform and simply use them against them and their group. Take what Moms for Liberty has to offer and completely tear it apart. At the same time you offer an alternative view of freedom and liberty. I think most of us here (with notable exceptions) would agree that it is the real version of freedom and liberty. Hell, you can bust out a dictionary to prove your point. How does your platform differ from those specific groups and from the Republican party in general? How is our platform closer to the vision of actual freedom and liberty?

One of the things I have talked about in the past is the idea of issue framing. I can’t take credit for it. It came from the book “Cracking the Code” by Thom Hartmann. Essentially, the idea is that rooted in every issue is a common story. Conservatives have just been better at this than we have. Get to the root of every one of their stances and you will see this story. It usually is centered on the idea of rugged individualism. You too can succeed if the damn government will just get out of your way and let you do it.

We need our own competing story. Our story has to have the true definitions of freedom and liberty at its core. Sure, live and let live is a simple offshoot of that. The idea that someone can be religious or not is basic. The idea that someone can be gay or not is basic. The idea that someone can live an alternative lifestyle or not is basic. We need to expand this outward. We need to describe how our health care system actually limits freedom. If the vast majority of bankruptcies in this country are caused by medical costs and debt then that system is antithetical to freedom. We need to free people from the anxiety related to crippling medical care costs.

That’s just one example. You essentially take this model and expand it outwards. It means simplifying issues and making it all about freedom. How does our plan make you more free? How does their plan make you less free? Millions of voters simply don’t understand how they become less free if they vote GOP. They think to themselves that they aren’t immigrants, women, people of color, or LGTBQ+, so why does it matter if those people have less freedom? In fact, wouldn’t that mean that I have more? Life is a zero sum game to them. You won’t catch them all, but you have to repeat the notion that less freedom for them means less freedom for all. Keep repeating that over and over again and give them examples. Then, we have a fighting chance.

It occurred to me that I made a New Year’s resolution to offer more constructive suggestions in the new year. It’s hard not to complain these days, but at least we can offer some suggestions in the meantime. I talked about concentric circles yesterday without offering any constructive ideas to fix that. That’s on me. I need to do better.

Our mainstream media also needs to do better. They are caught up into a both sides narrative where they feel the need to give exposure to all points of view. In normal circumstances that seems okay. Furthermore, the idea of covering the horse race nature of this thing makes sense. It sells ad space. It sells newspapers. It gets subscriptions to the subscription only services. There is a reason why Steve Kornacki is a thing.

When we were going through journalism school, one of the things they taught us was that it was the journalist’s job to call balls and strikes. Somehow that evolved into making sure there were as many balls as there were strikes. We had an equal number of walks as strikeouts. That has been the case whether it was Greg Maddux on the bump or Nuke Laloosh (from Bull Durham).

Someone came up with another analogy that made more sense. Let’s say that it is pouring rain outside. It makes no sense to run a story where you have one expert saying it’s raining and another ”expert” saying it’s not raining. Look outside. You can see it’s raining, so why in the hell are we quoting some jamoke saying that it isn’t raining? Why do we need to both sides objective reality?

What that does is allow people to believe that objective reality isn’t all that objective. In a free society it is difficult to do anything about right wing media. That toothpaste is out of the tube, but this falls into another false narrative. People just naturally assume that both sides do it. Left wing media may distort the importance of things. They are certainly guilty of overhyping certain stories and ramping up the hysteria, but they generally don’t make shit up.

It’s about pushing back. Both sides don’t operate the same way. One side lies and the other side doesn’t. Period. End of discussion. Then, the mainstream media simply reports what is actually going on. The economy is doing well. Report it. Immigration is not nearly as bad as what it seems. Report it. The so-called crime riddled cities really aren’t all that crime riddled. Report it. Unfortunately, both sidesing this thing just isn’t creating an informed public.

Again, you aren’t reaching everyone. You have a segment of the population watching a steady diet of Fox News, OANN, and Newsmax. They might be reading Breitbart on the interwebs. There is no way you can watch a steady diet of that stuff and come away informed. Still, you can inform everyone else. You can at least allow them to have access to accurate information. If the right isn’t producing truth or building arguments on facts then don’t give them a lifeline. If they aren’t participating in substantive debate then they don’t get coverage. There’s only one serious party right now and they are the only one worthy of coverage.

Iowa in particular is an anomaly. They use an old caucus system that seems a lot more exclusive than newer primary systems. As others have pointed out, about ten percent of the voting public participated in the caucus. So, if Donald Trump got about 50 percent of the Republican vote then he really got somewhere between two and three percent of the state. So, we should hold off before we write off the state of some kind of group of backwards hicks.

To be perfect fair, every state has those folks and it isn’t limited to just two or three percent of the population. Life would be a whole lot better if it was. As teachers, we see this on the front lines. We have a lot of students that are interested in the world around them and finding out more about it works. We also have students that just couldn’t care less.

However, there is a phenomenon that is beginning to cripple our politics. Iowa and New Hampshire are perfect examples. Ask them the issues that are most important to them and they will immediately point out immigration. Why? Is there a flood of immigrants moving into Iowa from anywhere? It’s in the middle of the damn country.  New Hampshire is closer to Canada, so I suppose it is possible they will literally have a higher percentage of immigrants move there, but I am reasonably sure those aren’t the immigrants we are fighting over.

The concept of concentric circles is a pretty easy one. The center circle represents the portion of the population that is directly affected by an issue. They themselves are immigrants. So, immigration policy definitely matters to them. As we keep drawing circles we keep moving further and further away in effect. So, the second circle might by a close family member and close friends. Then, we move further and further away from those directly effected.

You will notice that almost universally the people that complain the loudest are the people in that last circle. That also happens to be the majority of the population. On some level it makes sense. If I don’t care about anyone in that population then I also don’t care if we take care of them. I could be convinced that they are a drain on society and if I can’t put a human face on it then it is more difficult for me to push back against that negativity. Yet, there is a logical breakdown. If I live in Iowa or New Hampshire that what immigrant to sucking up my resources or taking my job?

We’ve had hysterical periods where this has reared its ugly head. We use hysterical in both versions of the word. There is a hysteria here that doesn’t make sense and it is certainly more than hysterical to the rest of us. Towns in Montana and other northern states banned refugees. How many refugees are traipsing up to Montana or Wyoming anyway?

We could certainly find other issues with this phenomenon. The LGTBQ+ community certainly faces this issue front and center. People that don’t have any LGTBQ+ amongst their close family or friends suddenly care deeply about the subject and make all kinds of assumptions about how many it represents. It is spreading like wildfire and yet they still don’t know anyone personally effected. It’s a breakdown of logic and reason.

The key is thinking of politics in terms of concentric circles. I need to vote for those issues where I or someone I care about is in the center circle. If I don’t know anyone impacted by that particular issue then why I am basing my vote on it. The secret is in letting go of the hysteria and using our brain. Am I impacted by this? Even if a politician did everything they promised would it make a positive impact on my life?