Archive: Opinions

Do you know the old joke about the elderly woman who was asked which candidate she planned to vote for?  "Oh, I never vote," she says.  "I don't want to encourage them."

Maybe she was right.  So far the candidates that are getting attention are fairly horrid.  Of course Donald Trump is the leader in horridness.  He would probably own that, saying that makes him a winner in the horrid pool while his opponents are losers.  Pundits are claiming that he is leading the polls because he has gone on the attack against political correctness and says what he really thinks.  I am all for getting rid of political correctness.  But what Trump really thinks seems to me to be an attack on America first and foremost.  An attack on freedom, and on that thing about 'Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!'

He hasn't suggested exterminating those huddled masses -- what exactly is a huddled mass, anyway? -- but he certainly wants to turn off that lamp and get them out of Dodge.  It isn't good to be a Mexican or a Muslim in Trump's world.  The idea that every person in those two demographics are terrorists or out to destroy the US economy is preposterous.  The idea that keeping them out will make America great again is just nasty when it's not busy being outrageous.  Trump's own grandparents were immigrants, as were just about all of ours if we live in this country.  Lest we forget, diversity is what made America great.

Why is Trump so popular?  Is it that he is like watching a train wreck, a guilty pleasure you can't take your eyes off of?  is it his entertainment value?  Or do people seriously agree with the outrageous things that come out of his mouth?  Wouldn't we all be better off if there were a $10 limit on the amount of personal money a candidate could spend on a campaign?  Maybe we'd get people with real ideas about how to make America and the world better.

I was never a great Kennedy fan, but I do think he was possibly the most inspirational president we've had in the past century.  Whatever you think about his policies, President Kennedy was a great orator who had ideas about positive steps individuals could take to make America better and got us all excited about doing them.  Sure, there have been great orators in history who used their power for evil, but Kernnedy's success was based, in large part, on getting Americans to band together to do great things.  With all the candidates on the slate right now, one could hope that one of them would take that approach and appeal to voters, but negativity and predudice seem to be winning the day.

Growing up with stories of Jews being expelled from Germany and other countries when they weren't busy being annihilated, it's hard not to think about that when I listen to Trump talk about immigration.  German Jews lost everything even if they survived.  To this day organizations are trying to restore their belongings to their descendents with poor success.

Germany wasn't the only one.  The United States isn't innocent.  Two things that come to mind are the McCarthy era and the Americans of Japanese heritage that were put in internment camps because Japan attacked the US.

I knew at least one person who was blacklisted by McCarthy.  He had a promising career as a Broadway Designer until McCarthy summonsed him to a hearing in which he refused to name alleged communist sympathizers.  He couldn't work under his own name for some years until McCarthyism finally died out, and then was one of the lucky few who could resurrect his career on Broadway.  The story went that he turned to McCarthy on his way out of the hearing room, smiled, and said, "Don't call us... We'll call you."  (For the theater-uninitiated, that's what casting directors say when an actor isn't getting a part.)  He never admitted to the truth of the story, at least not to me.

The actor George Takei recently launched a Broadway musical about the internment of his family when he was five years old after the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor.  Takei says that these people, many of them second or third generation Americans were stripped of their belongings and subjected to countless indignities simply because their ancestors came from Japan.  The US government called the relocation centers.  Many of them were patriots who wanted to join the American armed services, but were locked up instead.  This is so against what America is supposed to stand for it's almost impossible to believe.  But it happened.  People who looked like Germans weren't interned.

The point is that Trump and some of the other candidates are leading because they are unabashedly bringing out the worst in Americans.  For some unfathomable reason people who are polled are saying that's OK.

It's not OK.  We should stop encouraging them.

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