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The Playbook

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The Book of the Week is “The Playbook, A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War” by James Shapiro, published in 2024.

In the 1930’s, American president FDR implemented programs to help the unemployed during the Great Depression. One was the Works Progress Administration, a sub-program of which, Federal Theater (hereinafter referred to as “FT”), put thousands of people to work. However, there were numerous complications every time the group wanted to put on a play, because there were a dozen unions with whom to negotiate.

FT produced thought-provoking shows that starkly portrayed the dangers and immorality of fascism, totalitarianism, slavery, racism, etc. It risked having its funding cut for its political correctness. In autumn 1936, FT was able to stage the Sinclair Lewis novel It Can’t Happen Here because MGM had decided not to make a movie of it.

FT opened the inflammatory play in eighteen big cities across America. In Seattle the cast was inter-racial. New York City performed the play in Yiddish. The traveling version lasted 133 performances. Fortunately, audiences interpreted the play all different ways politically.

In September 1937, FDR signed affordable-housing (what activists for the downtrodden would call “gentrification”) legislation that was diluted due to fears of:

government competition with the private sector;
over-regulation;
budgetary excesses;
and Southern states’ getting short shrift because they were more rural than urban.

In response to the above, in 1938, FT staged One Third of a Nation. That theatrical production demonstrated how stakeholders treated America’s slums, which accounted for where one third of the nation’s population resided, according to FDR, as of early 1937.

The movie version was Hollywoodized– its funders were purchasers of distressed assets and profiteers. They made it a story about poor whites with a romantic subplot involving a “kindly capitalist” (the absentee landlord, or in the real world– a slumlord). A suicidal arsonist prompted the landlord to rebuild the place with trees and a playground. Everyone lived happily ever after.

Anyway, FT’s most vicious enemy turned out to be Martin Dies, a U.S. Congressman from eastern Texas, first elected in 1930. He had the KKK mentality, with xenophobia and misogyny thrown in. In 1935, he got himself on the Rules Committee, the most powerful committee in the House.

Dies also fast-tracked his power accumulation with his endless persistence. In 1938, he finally got himself appointed the head of a special committee that investigated a hot-button political issue; this, by chance, through teaming up with the exact right person who could help him– Samuel Dickstein, a Congressman from New York City who was equally driven to amass power and attention. They secretly allied with vice president John Nance Garner, who was on their side.

By spring 1938, their committee was claiming it was trying to root out subversives, Fascists and Communists, and prevent violence at Nazi rallies in America’s streets. But they had questioned a politically active Nazi who stayed right under their noses, and they failed to investigate him further!

Their real motive was to execute a smear campaign against FDR himself, in addition to his New Deal, and unions. So FT became an easy target, too. Ironically, “He [Dies] envisioned the hearings touring nationally, moving from city to city, beginning on the West coast and ending back East.”

One of Dies’ star investigators, Hazel Huffman, ignorantly equated Progressivism, racial integration, anti-capitalism and anti-fascism with Communism in her testimony. She recited verbatim lines from the FT’s scripts, out of context as evidence of Communist propaganda. Dies backed her up. They were so entertaining– newspapers, magazines and radio broadcasters presented her nasty, biased utterances about the FT, as fact. Dies realized he needed to keeping directing fresh accusations at FT and the WPA to keep the media in his back pocket.

Read the book to learn yet again, that there is nothing new under the sun, in terms of demagogues who use age-old propaganda techniques to amass sufficient power to commit crimes, oppress their fellow citizens, and spread hatred far and wide with total impunity.

Tip and the Gipper

The Book of the Week is “Tip and the Gipper, When Politics Worked” by Chris Matthews, published in 2013.

Exactly two weeks after Republican (and former Democrat!) Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, he and Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill, both of Irish ancestry and of the same generation but with class differences, met to see how they could cooperate in the new administration. They found little common-ground politically, but were able to socialize outside of work.

Reagan’s agenda on the budget was as follows: pass a tax cut for the rich, increase military spending, and reduce the national deficit at the same time. He expected major savings would be had by cutting programs such as education, the arts, food stamps, college loans and Social Security– the sacred cow of the Democrats. He truly believed that that would balance the budget, and maintain America’s national security against the “evil empire” of the then-Soviet Union.

Reagan ended up needing Democrats’ House votes to raise the debt ceiling. O’Neill shrewdly told the head of communications on Capitol Hill to personally send a letter to each of his fellow House party-members urging them to vote “aye” on debt-ceiling legislation, thus putting a political favor in writing.

The following video details the sleight-of-hand Reagan employed.

An additional way of looking at Reagan’s dogged mentality of refusing to face reality is this quote, from Bertrand Russell: “There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths. Almost inevitably some part of him is aware that they are myths and that he believes them only because they are comforting. But he dare not face this thought! Moreover, since he is aware, however dimly, that his opinions are not rational, he becomes furious when they are disputed.” Also called “hubris syndrome.”

Anyway, read the book to learn much more about how Reagan and O’Neill clashed at work, but were still able to have civil discourse and healthy disagreement, while passing legislation that maintained America’s democracy.

Speaking of democracy, here’s a little song that describes the current messaging of the Trump administration– however unsavory it may be, but allowed, because free speech is a major ingredient of democracy.

WITCH HUNT ON BIDEN

sung to the tune of “Wichita Lineman” with apologies to Glenn Campbell and to whomever else the rights my concern.

They’re the leaders of the Trump PR team,
and they drive the main smears.
Searching everywhere for what his base,
wants to hear.

They put propaganda on the news wires.
They’re desperate to fill air-time.
And the witch hunt on Biden, distracts from Trump’s slime.

America needs a long vacation,
from this criminal reign.
A lot of GOP insiders’ consciences are cracking, from the strain.

Trump’s media thinks it can brainwash you.
They’re doing this on your dime.
And the witch hunt on Biden,
distracts from Trump’s slime.

Troublemaker

The Book of the Week is “Troublemaker, A Memoir from the Front Lines of the Sixties” by Bill Zimmerman, published in 2011. The author was a true activist– he sacrificed his livelihood and risked his life to work for causes he believed in. Kudos to him.

In his twenties, the author made a major life-decision that made him look like a righteous prick (excuse the crudeness). He opposed the powers-that-be via participating in street demonstrations and civil disobedience. Later on, he felt he was more likely to change the world via engaging in humanitarian actions and working within the system.

Born in December 1940, Zimmerman grew up on Chicago’s West Side. In 1963 in Greenwood, Mississippi, he helped African Americans register to vote. In May 1966, the author and other anti-Vietnam-War protesters occupied the administration building at the University of Chicago. He learned from an experienced activist, what to do in connection with making demands of the school officials, to get what they wanted.

President LBJ was running out of cannon fodder (who were mostly non-white, poor men) for his war in Vietnam. So he had the Selective Service System (the government’s military-draft authority) do away with students’ ability to defer their service until after graduating.

The older generation of men– WWII veterans– viewed draft dodgers as cowardly, unpatriotic and selfish. They were unaware that their tax dollars were paying for the U.S. military’s committing of atrocities; one kind involved torturing pairs of enemy soldiers (National Liberation Front guerrilla fighters) by taking them up in a helicopter, and throwing one out the door so the other would be terrorized into revealing his side’s State secrets.

The author wrote, “Flower power [a 1960’s idea pushed by antiwar activists and people in the counter-culture] meant freeing men from outdated norms of masculinity that sapped their sensitivity, their poetry, and their urge to share instead of dominate.”

It was widely known even then, that the three major ways to redistribute societal wealth, consist of: 1) reforming campaign financing practices so that election winners are those who get the most votes, not those who are wealthiest; 2) having the least unfair tax system– encouraging citizens to start entrepreneurial ventures via financial assistance while also taxing the super-rich on the back-end for having taken advantage of existing infrastructure and front-end incentives; and 3) having a social safety net for those individuals who have unluckily been born into sucky situations, and providing opportunities for everyone, as far as egalitarianism is possible.

As is well known, in the first half of the 1970’s, there were lots of behind-the-scenes shenanigans involving president Nixon’s sidekick Henry Kissinger, with his secret diplomatic missions and his role at the Paris Peace Talks, to purportedly end the Vietnam war. South Vietnam’s leader, Nguyen Van Thieu, ran a corrupt regime, and he was eventually forced into exile, compliments of American taxpayers.

That theme– the propaganda-suffused, and CIA-assisted ousting of various dictators around the world– had already become a cliche since the 1950’s. A Mad Lib could be made of it: “He then consoled himself by fleeing to ______ [a place that would accept him] with $_______ [money he had looted from his homeland that supplemented his offshore financial stashes, that also might serve as tax shelters if he had U.S. income] stolen from the aid the U.S. had given to _______ [his former territory].” In recent decades, for obvious reasons, there has been less of this Cold War nonsense.

Anyway, as is also well known, the Japanese in WWII dogmatically would have fought to the last man, guerrilla-style. It was known that America’s supposed enemies in Vietnam had the same mentality. Yet, regarding Vietnam, the unbloodied elites and chickenhawks in the U.S. government failed to take a lesson from both the WWII’s Japanese and from the French in Dien Bien Phu.

Fortunately, the vast majority of current world leaders have had enough of genocide and atrocities, and are ready to sit down at the bargaining table to negotiate the distribution of rare resources (especially those that will fulfill their energy needs) crucial to their homelands’ economic development for decades to come. Slowly but slowly, the world is making progress in the humanitarian arena.

Nevertheless, worldwide, human beings have evolved so that the super-rich now own:

show business;
professional sports teams;
gambling entities;
Silicon Valley, and
Wall Street.

They have become one big, incestuous network, married to politics. The situation has spawned excessive (especially in the United States):

pardoning of criminals;
lawsuits;
deregulation;
smearing;
lies;
conflicts of interest, and
deception via AI-generated images, and pre-recorded video clips (especially of the president!)

This calls for a funk reggae fusion rock parody.

ELITIST REVENUE

sung to the tune of “Electric Avenue” with apologies to Eddy Grant and whomever else the rights may concern.

[Ploys. Ploys.]

Now ov’r resources, there is violence.
And profi-TEER-ing to be done.
One hand washes the others.
And in charge, are fortunate sons. Oh, no

They gotta LOCK in their, elitist revenue.
They’re power-whores for hire. Oh
They gotta LOCK in their, elitist revenue.
They’re power-whores for hire.

Abortion, wars, and the border.
Can’t bear to watch a thing on TV.
In their world, it’s a challenge,
to push the envelope infinitely. Good God?

They gotta LOCK in their, elitist revenue.
They’re power-whores for hire. Oh
They gotta LOCK in their, elitist revenue.
They’re power-whores for hire. Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. Oh no.

They gotta LOCK in their, elitist revenue.
They’re power-whores for hire. Oh
They gotta LOCK in their, elitist revenue.
They’re power-whores for hire.

We’ve gone extreme in this country.
Money and revenge are job-one.
Lawyering and manipulation,
and our Constitution is done. Oh no

They gotta LOCK in their, elitist revenue.
They’re power-whores for hire. Oh no
They gotta LOCK in their, elitist revenue.
They’re power-whores for hire.

Oh, Trump is discreet.
So is Wall Street.

Locking in the payday. Ratcheting up the spite…

Oh, they gotta LOCK in their, elitist revenue.
They’re power-whores for hire.
They gotta LOCK in their, elitist revenue.
They’re power-whores for hire.

Trump is discreet.
So is Wall Street.

AI is Fox’s playground, on the dark side all-around.

Oh, they gotta LOCK in their, elitist revenue.
They’re power-whores for hire.
They gotta LOCK in their, elitist revenue.
They’re power-whores for hire. Oh yeah

Locking in the payday. Ratcheting up the spite…

$ $ $

Anyway, read the book to learn much more about Zimmerman’s life and times.

Yankee From Olympus

The Book of the Week is “Yankee From Olympus, Justice Holmes and His Family” by Catherine Drinker Bowden, published in 1944. The bulk of this volume recounted the lives of the members of Supreme-Court-Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ family, beginning with his grandfather.

Born in March 1841 in the Boston area, Holmes was born to the white male privilege typical of his generation. His father was a prominent medical doctor. The Protestant Work Ethic dominated the aristocracy. Due to the potato famine in their homeland, Irish families were arriving on America’s shores in droves. “Boston had developed a caste system toward them almost like the Southern feeling for the Negro.” The South End neighborhood’s Irish boys threw hard snowballs or mud at boys such as Holmes, who attended private school.

Holmes acquired life-experience in psychological and physical trauma as an officer in the American Civil War. After his military discharge, he simply went over to Harvard Law School to sign up, paid the $100 a-year tuition, and in autumn 1864, began attending lectures. There was a total of three professors at the school. He didn’t need to take any tests, or do any assignments. Yes, times have changed.

Holmes practiced debating fellow students, though, and was told to read various texts written by law students or attorneys, that expounded on contracts, jurisprudence, or jurisdiction. At that time, academic culture consisted of males who were (presumably passionate about the law) mostly self-starters, sufficiently mature and disciplined to undertake independent study. Working at a law firm after graduating, Holmes became somewhat famous for writing articles for the Harvard Law Review.

Through the 1870’s, Holmes hated the drudgery of practicing law, and basically wanted to be a one-man legal think-tank. At the dawn of the 1880’s, he presented a Harvard lecture series to lawyers and their ilk, but his new theory was heretical for his generation. He suggested that public opinion should play a role in how the law was shaped. In 1882, as a Harvard law professor, he used the Socratic method along with the newly instituted case-analysis curriculum.

In 1904, a case reached the U.S. Supreme Court that tested the Sherman (antitrust) Act. If the monster-sized Northern Securities Company of merged railroads was going to restrain trade, then it should be dissolved. President Theodore Roosevelt believed in free-market competition and therefore became known as a monopoly-buster. But he was a political hack, and aroused public opinion whichever way was expedient for himself. Holmes (by then a Supreme Court justice) believed the law should be crafted pursuant to the economic tenor of the times, without regard to conscience, morality, politics, self-dealing or art.

Holmes was a quick study. He had already formed his opinion about each case before arguments of both sides were even finished. The other justices took months to give the impression that they had spent a long time thinking about a case, so as to come to the correct decision. That’s still the situation today.

The reason some justices make everyone wait, is that they use the delay as a form of control. Or, they are putting on a show of discussing weighty issues because they have big egos– they think they’re saving the world with their decisions, though some issues are not a matter of life and death, and affect only a tiny percentage of ordinary Americans. Anyway, Holmes’ fellow justices complained that his writings were too brief, so his meanings might be misconstrued.

As is well known, in early 1932, the United State was suffering extreme economic hardships from the Great Depression, at which time Holmes humbly realized he was no longer mentally competent to do the job of Supreme Court justice. The nation shuddered at the scary prospect that President Herbert Hoover got to choose the next justice. Ordinary Americans were crying out for more regulation. The Court already had a solid conservative majority, and adding another conservative would worsen most Americans’ situations by (excuse the cliche) making the rich, richer and the poor, poorer.

Read the book to learn much, much more about the lives of the Holmes family members.

Speaking Out

The Book of the Week is “Speaking Out, Inside the Reagan White House” by Larry Speakes with Robert Pack, published in 1988.

Born in September 1939, the author grew up in a small town in Mississippi. He suffered from impostor syndrome when he began working in the Reagan White House as deputy press secretary in early 1981. However, he gained confidence as he witnessed the gaffes committed by self-important alpha-males amid their power struggles in his rarefied workplace. There were the usual inter-agency rivalry and scapegoating when things went wrong. “State blamed the White House, the White House blamed Defense, and the CIA blamed everybody.”

As is well known, in March 1981, Reagan was shot in the chest, but survived. Immediately after the president had become incapacitated, Alexander Haig, then-secretary of state, made a major misstatement to the press, saying HE was in charge of the administration, and could act on the president’s behalf. Haig was a publicity hound, stopping for a photo opportunity whenever he could.

Speakes, pursuant to the U.S. Constitution, clarified the succession of power of the president: vice president; speaker of the House; and then president pro tempore of the senate; after that, secretary of state.

Pat Buchanan was another troublesome coworker. In March 1986, he wrote an inflammatory Op-Ed piece–unvetted by Speakes’ department– that was published in the Washington Post. That piece said if Congressional Democrats voted against the bill giving financial aid to the Contras, they were as evil as the Commies supporting Daniel Ortega, leader of Nicaragua. Additionally, Buchanan praised Oliver North after the Iran Contra scandal broke.

Reagan finally made a speech equivalent to Nixon’s “Checkers speech” when his people were forced to admit that Israel helped the United States sell weapons to Iran; a secret operation orchestrated primarily by Oliver North, John Poindexter and Robert McFarlane. The president declined to pardon them, because pardoning them would indicate they had committed a crime! He maintained they were innocent.

Another interesting factoid: During president Reagan’s eight years, approximately seventeen hundred people were provided with press passes to report on the administration.

Read the book to learn of Speakes’ experiences managing the optics of the administration, given the tenor of the times and the difficult personalities involved.

Evil Geniuses

The Book of the Week is “Evil Geniuses, The Unmaking of America, A Recent History” by Kurt Andersen, published in 2020. In this large, redundant volume, the author described how wealth inequality in the United States has been increasing at an alarming rate in the last forty years, as evil geniuses– economic royalists and self-made empire-builders (who take advantage of existing resources and infrastructure)– have rigged the system to compound their spoils and re-distribute it among themselves in a self-serving cycle.

Lots of research has shown that financial inequality in society actually hinders economic growth in developed nations. In connection therewith, in 2014, the OECD conducted a United States study that showed a 20% slowdown in economic growth since the 1980’s.

The author argued that the year 1980 was the turning point at which America’s hegemony started to decline. Both the Republican and Democratic parties’ elitists (other evil geniuses in addition to the above-mentioned) actually hurt America’s ability to remain economically dominant in the world. They brainwashed a significant number of ordinary Americans into:

believing that government is the enemy;
agreeing to tax cuts for the rich (also called “trickle down” economics);
favoring excessive deregulation; and
bashing unions

because such actions would make everyone wealthy!

The author cited ample evidence that the above actions do NOT make everyone wealthy.

The author contended that conservative Republican 1964 presidential candidate Barry Goldwater paved the way for Ronald Reagan’s wrong-headed economic agenda (described above).

Politics cannot be divorced from economics. This is a simple idea that has been hardly ever EXPLICITLY SAID in historical, political and economic literature read by ordinary Americans, through centuries. The author calls this the “political economy” and former president Bill Clinton had the line, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

Politics involves the making, monitoring, changing, and enforcing of society’s laws. The evil geniuses in the legal field who helped perpetrate the insidious brainwashing of the American masses, actually conveyed the following attitude in writing and speaking:

“So if you happen to think it’s a good idea for judicial decisions to also consider fairness or moral justice, or other values or versions of social happiness that can’t be reduced to simple metrics of efficiency,

Law and Economics [a body of legal theory from Robert Bork and his fellow Chicago School libertarians] says you’re a fool.”

That is how the 1980’s saw the American legal system start to focus on efficiency– favoring profiteers. The author argued that old men who are resistant to change are the conspirators of the current state of affairs. Well, SOMEone’s got to be oppressed.

Another indication that Americans’ attitude was becoming even more inclined toward rule-breaking greed and showing off wealth, could be heard in a 1980’s SUV TV commercial, which featured a visual of a white, 40ish male driving. The voice-over says, “It doesn’t just say you’ve arrived; it says you got there any way you darn well pleased.”

The author cited evidence that taxing the rich would be the largest factor in more evenly distributing wealth. The first Trump administration passed a tax cut for the rich that gave rise to the “…largest percentage reduction in tax revenues of any developed country on earth.” This was BEFORE COVID. And “…the federal debt increased by $1.5 trillion more than it had in Obama’s final three years.”

Nonetheless, the most hurtful president ever was George W. Bush, whose unconscionable greed and unmitigated hubris led to the crashing of the American economy and the commencement of two wars that enriched him and his cronies.

LBJ and Nixon were two other war-criminal presidents. Their war policies, too, wasted an excessive amount of taxpayer dollars on needless deaths and ruined lives. At the same time, they tried not to foul their own nest. They attempted to maintain this country’s economic dominance in the world, and salve their own consciences by funding domestic social programs. LBJ did some profiteering, but not nearly as much as Trump.

Trump is an angry, vengeful old president who, at the end of his career, is hurting not only his own political party, but also ordinary Americans. His excessive financial criminality has incalculably hurt society as a whole.

In 2018, Trump said NAFTA was the “worst trade deal ever made.” But in 2025, after all his bluster, the trade deals he’s going to make with Mexico and Canada, are going to be largely similar to NAFTA’s, all over again! And through his spokespeople who draft the words spoken by his deepfake image, he will take full credit for “great, great trade deals.”

His threats are causing a panic that certain sectors of the American economy will crash. Even the threat of a soft economy will deter some illegal immigrants from coming to this country. Given financial cycles, it is likely that some people will be hurting financially in the next few years. Trump is using a scorched earth strategy on his way out of office in order to be able to brag that HE reduced the number of illegal immigrants who are coming here. He will brainwash his base into believing that the economic downturn was all Biden’s fault!

Anyway, the author also commented that the internet changed American culture in accelerating the automation of the exchange of information, obsolescing a humungous number of jobs. Machine-learning is also making the job situation even worse. It could be said that the internet is the “new television” for the Millennial and Z Generations. However, there are major differences in the ways television changed American culture, and the ways the internet has changed it.

Television was a passive entertainment / infotainment / education source that, for most Americans, was consumed at home only, in one’s leisure time; perhaps on average, most students and workers (there were many more of those then than now) watched three to four hours a day, at no extra charge (except for electricity)– for the lifespan of the set. Then came recording of shows, but also cable TV– whose costs are many times higher for shows and sports games that used to be free.

The internet is an interactive source, and can be accessed globally, 24/7. So the younger generations are wasting so, so, so much more time obsessing over politics, than did the older generations. People have been bamboozled into paying big bucks to purchase electronic toys on which to subscribe to the internet, for which they have to pay even more!

So the amounts of time and money most Americans are spending on the internet are infinitely higher than that of television (and movies, and reading books, magazines, and newspapers). The early years of the internet (up to the single-digit 2000’s) brought emotional comfort to Americans. They flocked to websites that featured relatable, entertaining user-contributions with few or no ads that interrupted their viewing pleasure.

Once the entrepreneurial dot-commers mastered monetization and propagandizing, users became victims of their mind-control techniques. Arguably, the cultural transition from television to the internet has been economically and psychologically regressive for most Americans.

Anyway, read the book to learn much more about the depressing developments in politics, economics and culture that will eventually lead to the collapse of American civilization.

The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon

The Book of the Week is “The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon, The Life and Times of Washington’s Most Private First Lady” by Heath Hardage Lee, published in 2024.

The future first lady Pat Nixon was born in March 1912 in Nevada. She was orphaned as a teenager. She faced numerous other hardships, so she was forced to play well with others; making her a skilled diplomat. In the second half of 1959, when her husband Richard (“Dick”) was running for president, she got her own campaign in order to attract female voters. There were buttons, banners, songs, and speaking engagements at social events such as teas and gatherings at women’s clubs.

Pat usually refrained from publicly expressing her opinions on her husband’s political activities, but she felt most strongly about gender equality. When he was finally elected president in 1968, she campaigned for the Equal Rights Amendment, and urged Dick to nominate female U.S. Supreme Court justices when two vacancies arose.

However, he hid behind the sexist American Bar Association’s assessment that the whole list of female nominees was unqualified for one reason or another, when he had to finalize his choices.

During Dick’s time as president, both individually and with Dick, Pat traveled extensively internationally to maintain friendly relationships with America’s then-allies. She still kept her personal life as private as possible, but complained she felt underappreciated in her diplomatic role.

People offered to help her write a book about her world-peace making. Yet, in her mind, publicizing her political activities was akin to her usage as a prop to promote her husband. But– isn’t that what politics is– managing the image of the big boss?

Beginning in the summer of 1973, the media covered nothing but the Watergate investigation. The special counsel who prosecuted the bad actors in the Nixon administration judged that the president “had entered a criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice.” This, pursuant to the “smoking gun” consisting of a conversation between Dick and his aide Bob Haldeman, recorded on tape in June 1972.

John Dean, the president’s former attorney, participated in the cover-up by urging the labeling of the break-in as a matter of “national security.” Therefore, the FBI and CIA shouldn’t interview two key witnesses in the case. When Dean was charged with crimes, he provided damning testimony saying that Nixon was aware of all the wrongdoing all along.

In May 1976, Woodward and Bernstein, the two investigative journalists who broke the Watergate stories, revealed the whole incident-crowded affair in a book. According to Heath Hardage Lee, some of its contents were tabloidy. The book made the claim that Pat became a drunk loner in the last several months of her husband’s presidency. The TV comedy-sketch show Saturday Night Live (“SNL”) portrayed her thusly, too. But Lee pointed out that Pat’s image had been conflated with that of Betty Ford.

Another reason why Pat was smeared in this way, might be that it was actually the president who had become the drunk loner when his crimes were coming to light. This assertion has been recounted in various primary sources that described the president’s behavior in the presence of Kissinger, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman.

It is likely that the SNL writers were reluctant to mock the former president, as they might still have been subject to lawsuits and political retaliation. Anyway, read the book to learn much more about the public life Pat chose to have, and her struggles in trying to stay private.

ENDNOTE: Speaking of privacy, lawsuits and political retaliation– along with the issues of free speech, exploitation and the public’s right to know about how much of what their government is doing– modern communications technologies have muddied the waters. Even so, Donald Trump’s extreme litigiousness is his legacy.

Trump can dish it but he can’t take it. That’s why he’s suing everyone all the time. It’s a way to trot out the “victim card” to elicit sympathy from his base, and harass anyone who displeases him. Here’s what he’s singing now.

I WANT TO FORCE YOUR HAND

sung to the tune of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” with apologies to members of the Beatles, their estates, and whomever else the rights may concern.

I SUE, to tell you something: You’re under my command.
When I, sue-over everything, I want to force your hand.
I want your criticism ba-anned.
For your excuses, I won’t stand.

You must, cave in to me.
I’m a defamed man.
Oh jeez, you’ve pained me.
I’m in conTROL of this land.
You’re thwarting my best-laid plans.
You’re hurting THE Trump brand.

And when I crush you, I’m still not, satisfied.
It’s such a feeling that your abuse, I can’t abide.
You hurt my pride.
You all lied.

I SUE, to tell you something: You’re under my command.
When I, sue-over everything, I want to force your hand.
I want your criticism ba-anned.
For your excuses, I won’t stand.

And when I crush you, I’m still not, satisfied.
It’s such a feeling that your abuse, I can’t abide.
You hurt my pride.
You all lied.

I SUE, to tell you something: You’re under my command.
When I, sue-over everything, I want to force your hand.
I want to force your hand.
I want to force your hand.

I want to force your hand.

What’s Left Unsaid

The Book of the Week is “What’s Left Unsaid, My Life at the Center of Power, Politics, and Crisis” by Melissa DeRosa, published in 2023.

Born in the early 1980’s in Rochester in New York State, DeRosa worked in New York State politics. By April 2017, she had achieved a high-level job in governor Andrew Cuomo’s administration.

The author wrote that the federal government under president Trump handled the 2020 COVID pandemic in a way reminiscent of the movie, The Hunger Games, pitting states against one another for scarce medical supplies.

In mid-April 2020, the president declared that lifting the COVID lockdown in different areas of life nationwide, would rest on his authority. But conditions varied widely nationwide. Governors in seven northeastern states banded together to invoke the Tenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution which allows state governments jurisdiction over local law enforcement in the event of a public health emergency. Trump reversed himself in short order.

In late April 2020, DeRosa had a falling out with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. He was more worried about: voter-polling results (opinions) on COVID policies in swing states (that indicated whether his father-in-law was winning the then-presidential race!) than statistical medical data used to take actions to minimize the death rate.

According to the author, Cuomo’s people didn’t pick their battles with the media. They tried to fight them all– over every word in their every communication, making them appear contentious and petty. By May 2020, the collective mood of the nation was downright hostile over the COVID situation. The media took out its anger on Cuomo’s personnel.

As is well known, Cuomo became the victim of various acts of mean, nasty political retaliation. “Suddenly, you had a bizarre coalition calling for the governor’s resignation: Democratic Socialist AOC on the same side as MAGA Elise Stefanik in Congress, locking arms with the Democratic and Republican extremists in the state legislature.”

Read the book to learn about DeRosa’s experiences as a close Cuomo adviser in one crisis after another.

ENDNOTE: In order for public officials to achieve effective leadership of the United States: Numerous, diverse people must take years to analyze contemporary political issues while considering historical perspectives in order to understand how to make the necessary compromises required for workable solutions.

The top leader of the country has no time to do so after he or she has been elected. So, the public servants who accomplish the most to improve the lives of the highest number of people, are those who not only possess sufficient maturity and social skills, but those who have specific proposals that have been shown to work long-term, at-the-ready, before they get elected.

Not those who play well with the political machine, the media and their donors.

John Lewis

The Book of the Week is “John Lewis, In Search of the Beloved Community” by Raymond Arsenault, published in 2024. Lewis was America’s Nelson Mandela.

Born in 1940 in Alabama, Lewis became an extremely influential civil-rights activist and politician beginning in the 1960’s. He was fortunate to have teachers at his high school who inspired him to earn a higher-education degree in liberal arts. Ironically, the colleges which historically catered to blacks, had curricula that taught trades related to agriculture and construction, that kept blacks economically disadvantaged.

By the late 1950’s, Lewis had already met Martin Luther King, Jr.’s family. When Lewis applied to the all-white Troy University in Alabama, King warned him that he and his family could: receive death threats, get doxed (the pre-internet version), and even be physically harmed.

Starting in the 1950’s, major federal laws had been passed in order to eliminate the separate designations of eateries, restrooms, schools and other public areas for whites and blacks, in the Southern States. Historically, through such segregation, the blacks had been provided with inferior facilities and services in connection therewith. White inciters of hatred continued to obstruct the integration process.

Lewis became a leader or member of civil-rights protest groups such as the Freedom Riders, CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), and SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee). The groups adopted Gandhi’s nonviolent, “turn-the-other-cheek” philosophy. Lewis helped plan, organize and execute protests, marches and other events. He also participated in them. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a leader in the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference). King could be arrogant, and invoked God in excusing himself from protests he chose not to participate in.

In spring 1961, collaborating with CORE, the Freedom Riders planned to take interstate rides in Southern States on Trailways and Greyhound buses, and eat and use the restrooms at the bus stations along the way. Approximately half of the Riders were white, but the blacks (and the whites) still became victims of violence when they sat in the front of the buses or entered the (illegally) still-segregated facilities in the bus stations.

In one particularly ugly incident, the KKK had been tipped off as to where and when just over a dozen Riders on a bus going from Birmingham to Montgomery, Alabama, would get off at a rest stop just beyond the city limits. Haters (men, women and children(!)) were waiting for the passengers. The Riders were physically beaten to a pulp with common household items such as baseball bats, chains, tire irons, hoes, rakes– and the bus was firebombed. Law enforcement deliberately took its time in acting to stop the violence. It was the Riders who were arrested. During the first half of 1961, more than 300 of 436 Freedom Riders who took sixty protest-bus-rides ended up in a prison in Mississippi.

The elephant-in-the-room question is, with all of the scholarly readings Lewis and other civil rights leaders had done in preparing for protests and marches, why did they (and media workers, too) not protect themselves against the worst-case-scenario?

In other words– wear full riot gear just like law enforcement officers did in later incidents when those officers were bashing heads and beating limbs with billy clubs? The Riders and other protesters also should have known and used ways to minimize the physical harm done by tear gas, water hoses and attack-dogs. Why did they not protect themselves? That would have been defensive (still nonviolent), not offensive.

The Riders’ goal was, through civil, peaceful disobedience, to overcrowd the jails. That would generate more good publicity than harming other people or destroying property, as did splinter groups that later branched off from the original aforementioned civil-rights organizations. The Riders endured disgusting jail conditions. Yet they opted to stay in jail even when they could have been released on bail.

In the early 1960’s, government leaders at all levels– with their reputations and thus reelections on the line– were initially at wits’ end about all the bad publicity they were getting for treating the protesters so badly. But eventually, they came up with some dirty tricks to influence public opinion and cause the groups to devolve into dissension.

Read the book to learn much, much more about Lewis and his times.

On a related note, it’s deja vu all over again (in terms of othering, civil rights and all that). “You-know-who” has become the poster boy for continuing to make incivility socially-acceptable in American society. His political opponents are the perfect target for his smears and hating on immigrants.

Yet, according to the History Channel, Trump is the descendant of immigrants– his grandparents, who came from Germany and Scotland. The German ones lied, saying they came from Sweden. “Trump maintained the ruse at the request of his own realtor father, Fred Trump, who had obfuscated his German ancestry to avoid upsetting Jewish friends and clients.” Heritage-whitewashing was not uncommon; the Schicklgrubers did it, too, the opposite way.

Anyway, if the truth makes you angry, you’re living a lie. Here’s a little ditty Trump has been singing of late. Of course, ladies and gentleman, the views of this man are not necessary….

SUPERIOR PEOPLE
sung to the tune of “Everyday People” with profuse apologies to Sly and the Family Stone, Mijac Music, Sony/ATV Music Publishing, and to whomever else the rights may concern.

I’m always right.
I’m never wrong.
My own beliefs are in my song.

I’m a birther, a big star, all-American and then,
you know I’ll make us great again.

I-I-I am superior people, yeah, yeah.

THERE are lots of FOReigners who SHOULDn’t
get a green card.
We’re MAKing them the fat ones
while DE-priving our excellent ones.

We’re way too nice. I’ll transform ICE.
I-could GO on and GO on.
De-PORT you and you and you.

(you’re caca) We CAN’T live together.

My family’s better. Yours might be too,
if your genes are GREAT in my view.

If you-elect me, you know,
I’ll breed the best.
You know, you can put me to-the-test.

I-I-I am superior people, yeah, yeah.

I’LL make a border that KEEPS out these CRIMinals.
YOU’LL be a rich one.
WE’LL keep out the POOR ones.

We’re way too nice. I’ll transform ICE.
I-could GO on and GO on.
De-PORT you and you and you.

(you’re caca) We CAN’T live together.

I’LL look at the yellow one but think-TWICE about the BLACK one,
and possibly the RED one,
but the BEST one will likely be the WHITE one.

We’re way too nice. I’ll transform ICE.
I-could GO on and GO on.
De-PORT you and you and you.

I-I-I am superior people.

In the Shadow of the White House

The Book of the Week is “In the Shadow of the White House, A Memoir of the Washington and Watergate Years 1968-1978” by Jo Haldeman, published in 2017.

As is well known, at the time this book was written, America was entering the Trump Era, some of whose aspects smacked of the Nixon Era. In addition, the author also could not escape writing with 20/20 hindsight, as almost fifty years had passed since her husband was implicated in the major historical event known as “Watergate.”

In October 1970, while backing his Republican party’s candidates at rallies during the midterm races amid expletive-shouting hecklers, Nixon said,

“The four-letter word that is the most powerful of any in the world is ‘vote.’ “

Strangely enough, in 1972, Nixon was reelected in a landslide due to low voter turnout– possibly due to influential propaganda and dirty tricks that discouraged or kept Americans from voting.

Bob Haldeman was the president’s advisor and lapdog, at his beck and call 24/7. He got the most face-time with Nixon as chief of staff, giving orders to underlings from wherever he was; it was not uncommon in the course of two weeks for the two to travel from Camp David to a foreign country to Key Biscayne in Florida (where Nixon had a residence) to another foreign country to New York City to San Clemente in California (where Nixon had another residence). Haldeman’s wife Jo and their four children sometimes accompanied them.

Nixon vacillated between: deep insecurities that required frequent consulting with his gatekeepers Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and Henry Kissinger; and megalomania that led him to install a taping system in the Oval Office and Cabinet Room in February 1971. This, in an effort to record his administration’s every word and move, for posterity. He wanted to give his name undying fame. The listening devices of the two previous presidencies had been removed years before.

The author commented in her notes that in May 1974 (three months before Nixon resigned), “Although [Nixon] proposes national health insurance in a radio address, it goes nowhere and his public support continues to erode.”

The author’s husband was one of five defendants (there were many more) who were all tried together in a court of law for their roles in the Watergate scandal. Their cases dragged on through 1974.

The tenor of the times was such that alpha males with hubris syndrome populated the White House, Haldeman included. On August 6, 1974, he beseeched Nixon to pardon him and all his alleged Watergate co-conspirators (twenty-one of whom went to jail), and also to salve the leaders’ consciences– grant amnesty to all men who violated the Selective Service Act during the Vietnam War.

Read the book to learn Haldeman’s fate, and much more about the experiences of the author’s family during a particularly turbulent time in American history.