JACK BERNARD'S TRAVELS

Posted by jdbernard743

· September 14, 2020

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Welcome to the Inferno…

“And he replied: You should already see

across the filthy waves what has been summoned,

unless the marsh’s vapors hide it from you.”

(The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Canto VIII)

The vapors have not hidden it. At this point in the Trump presidency filthy waves and catastrophic fires are devastating America. With only 50 days until the second reckoning on November 3, 2020 the swamp creatures have risen to the surface.

“Many in life esteem themselves great men

who then will wallow like pigs in mud,

leaving behind them their repulsive fame.”

(Canto VIII)

The writing is on the wall; Trump is going to lose if there is a fair election.

But…will there be a fair election?

Not only did Mitch McConnell block the Senate from debating or voting on an election reform bill passed by the House, but the churning waters of the Deep Swamp are implementing a Two Pronged Plan that should scare the bejesus out of any American who holds the United States Constitution sacred.

Prong One, up to and including election day, involves disrupting and slowing processes at the US Postal Service through the removal of mailboxes and dismantling of high-speed sorting machines in parallel with discrediting mail-in balloting, reducing the number of polling places, suppressing voter registration, intimidating voters at the polls, and benefiting from a social media disinformation campaign fed by Russian, Chinese, and Iranian hackers.

Honest candidates who believe in fair elections engage in none of these practices, but Trump has shown us that he is not an honest candidate. He lies, cheats, vilifies, distorts and will do anything to gain a second term.

His supporters are pulling out all the stops and building a set of strategies based on the “Deep State” theory that “coastal elites” have corrupted the democratic process and installed a clandestine network inside the government bureaucracy, intelligence agencies, and other governmental entities to control state policy.

His campaign is fear-based, determined to scare the voters with deep state conspiracies, a black and brown takeover of the suburbs, a tanking economy, anarchy and chaos in the cities, and the return of a socialist/communist ideology.

Rational voters know it’s all bullshit, but today the campaign amped up the rhetoric when Michael Caputo, the deputy assistant for health and public affairs accused Center for Disease Control scientists of “sedition” in their handling of the pandemic and claimed left-wing “hit squads” were preparing for “armed insurrection after the election.”

Caputo, a protégé of Roger Stone, is a minor figure with a big voice but today’s proclamation leads me to Prong Two of the playbook. For months, Trump has claimed the only way he can lose the election is if it’s “rigged.” He said the same thing in 2016, but eeked out an electoral college win while losing the popular vote. This time that is highly unlikely as he trails Joe Biden in almost every swing state. Nevertheless, he’s laying the groundwork for a post-election challenge.

Prong Two is not a George W. Bush/Al Gore hanging “chads” count the votes challenge. Prong Two threatens America with open rebellion. Caputo talks about “armed insurrection” and last week Roger Stone, the Trumpiest of Trump allies, suggested the president invoke the Insurrection Act, declare martial law, and arrest anyone who “can be proven to be involved in illegal activity” if he loses.

Caputo, Stone, Attorney General Barr, and the shrill voices of the Trump family (see the RNC convention tapes) are not rational actors, but David Brooks of the New York Times is and his column on September 3, 2020 should get your intention.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/03/opinion/trump-election-2020.html

Entitled “What Will You Do if Trump Doesn’t Leave,” it begins with Trump declaring early victory on election night. He will capitalize on “day of” returns because they will probably favor him for an early lead. In truth, the election will likely be decided by mail-in ballots. For five years he has been laying the groundwork for a claim that election results based on mail-in balloting would be illegitimate. Get ready for the fight.

It’s not a pretty picture. Will it lead to armed conflict? Will it be decided by the courts? Will Brett Kavanaugh cast the deciding vote? Who will monitor the recount? What about states with no paper backups?

I already had my eyes fixed on his face,

and there he stood out tall, with his chest and brow

proclaiming his disdain for all this Hell.

My guide, with a gentle push, encouraged me

to move among the sepulchers toward him:

‘Be sure you choose your words with care,’ he said.

And when I reached the margin of his tomb

he looked at me, and half-contemptuously

he asked, ‘And who would your ancestors be?’

And I who wanted only to oblige him

held nothing back but told him everything.

At this he lifted up his brows a little,

then said, ‘Bitter enemies of mine they were

and of my ancestors and of my party;

I had to scatter them not once but twice.’

‘They were expelled, but only to return

from everywhere,’ I said, ‘not once but twice—

an art your men, however, never mastered! ‘

(Canto X)

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Categories : Art, Books, Ethics, News and Media, Politics, Uncategorized, Work and Adventure

Posted by jdbernard743

· September 11, 2020

· 4 Comments

Bon Courage, mes Amis…

“Lately one heard the expression ‘Je suis las’,” it meant I’m tired of the way I have to live my life, and this is what Mathieu saw in their faces, in the way they walked. But then, he would think that, he cared for the people of Paris, as though he were a guardian.” Alan Furst – A Hero of France.

I’ve just finished two books about the French Resistance in World War II. Madame Fourcade’s Secret War and A Hero of France. Both are about spy networks. I thought they would provide some relief from the Trumpian news cycle but was surprised to find a number of parallels.

Alan Furst’s novel A Hero of France is the 15^th of his 16 spy thriller’s centered on the origins and early years of WWII. Madame Fourcade’s Secret War is Lynne Olson’s non-fiction thriller about the woman who led France’s largest Resistance spy network from its formation in 1940 to the end of the war. Both are nail biters but that isn’t the only reason they held my attention.

During this 21^st century pandemic, we hear versions of the Mathieu quote, I am tired of the way I have to live my life on a daily basis. American’s are divided, cranky, and undisciplined. Fine people on both sides, as the Commander in Chief is wont to say. We are all exhausted and tired of being locked down. We want to go to restaurants, movies and the gym as we did a year ago.

In the run-up to the 2020 election we Americans are badly splintered – Republicans and Democrats, vaxers and anti-vaxers, “patriots” and Antifa, reactionaries and socialists, Trumpers and Never-Trumpers, Left Coast and Middle America, blue collars and elites, Red states and Blue states – it’s almost as if we were two different countries.

When the Germans invaded France in May of 1940 it was like a knife through soft butter. The French rolled over. In fact, many who feared the invasion celebrated the fact that they wouldn’t have to fight after all. In July of 1940, the country was divided into Occupied France in the north and Germany’s puppet Vichy government headed by the WWI French hero, Marshall Petain, in the south.

Madame Fourcade’s story is thrilling. She was a privileged young woman in her late 20s at the beginning of the war. She and a friend established Alliance in 1941 and for the next 4 years she managed a network of 3000 resistance fighters. Based in Vichy France, and constantly pursued by Germans and their French collaborators, she was captured, imprisoned and escaped twice (once by slipping naked through the bars of her cell), dying her hair and using prosthetic teeth to change her appearance, but always looking out for the people in her network. In interviews with Lynne Olson the question most often asked is “Do you think you would have had the courage to do what Madame Fourcade did if you were in her position?” Probably not was her answer.

These days, the question I most often hear from friends is “What can we do to make sure Donald J. Trump is denied a second term? This is not occupied WWII France, but neither is this a normal election. Trump is not a normal president. The Republicans in Congress have rolled over like the French did in 1940. The rule of law has been shredded and many of our democratic institutions dismembered and compromised. Republican leaders have either abandoned their principles or been bullied into submission.

With a worldwide pandemic raging, Russia mounting another attack on our electoral system, independent leaders of the FBI, State Department, DOJ, DHS and HHS fired or replaced, a Trump loyalist with no intelligence experience serving as Director of National Intelligence, an Attorney General determined to support the president in every way, going so far as to represent him in a sexual defamation suit, a Homeland Security chief who tells his staff to withhold information about Russian interference and white supremacist activity, while directing the Post Office to slow or eliminate services just as mail-in balloting is beginning to be important, it feels like we are fighting a Vichy-style government determined to deliver for the boss at all costs.

This is not Vichy France, but the story of Madame Fourcade is inspiring. She rose to the occasion. She took risks. She put France’s welfare above her own. She was willing to challenge dangerous political adversaries. I don’t know if I would have had her kind of courage under similar circumstances, but I hope to summon the courage to fight the current battle and honorably deprive Donald J. Trump of another term.

Yes, ‘Je suis las’. I’m tired of the way we have to live too. But let’s rise to the occasion to defeat Trump and the pandemic. Let’s do it together. Stop the crankiness. Be disciplined. Suck it up. We don’t need to risk our lives, but we might be risking our lives and the lives of our countrymen and women if we don’t win in November. Courage, mes amis…

Marie-Madeleine Fourcade

Categories : Books, Ethics, News and Media, Politics, Quarantine Time, Uncategorized, Work and Adventure, Writing

Posted by jdbernard743

· August 31, 2020

· 1 Comment

Scrap All Vanity Projects…

In the chaos of the moment, many of us are asking what we can do to right the ship of state. We talk. We read. We watch. We give money if we can. We “like” things on Facebook. We email our friends and urge them to support candidates – and vote. But, somehow it doesn’t feel like enough.

I write a weekly blog, like this one, and because of the president’s actions and the abundance of low hanging fruit I’ve become more political than I wanted to be. It’s satisfying to some extent but not wholly so.

I’ve been working on a travel-memoir project for almost two years. It’s challenging and time consuming, but in one sense it’s also a vanity project. Today, in view of the country’s turmoil, I resolved to put it in secondary position because of the example set by two remarkable women writers.

Kay Boyle and Grace Paley are two of America’s finest and most underrated writers. Ms. Boyle, who died in 1992, was my Master’s in Fiction advisor in the San Francisco State creative writing program. She’s the author of 14 novels, 8 volumes of poetry, 11 collections of short stories, and three children’s books. The mother of 6, a Paris friend of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Beckett, and Joyce, she was a serious political activist as well. Who says we don’t have enough time to do both.

The other writer is Grace Paley who while not as prolific as Boyle is regarded as one of the 20^th century’s finest writers for two collections of short stories, The Little Disturbances of Man and Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, a book of essays, and 3 volumes of poetry.

Ms. Boyle (to this day I can’t call her Kay) was an avid admirer and promoter of Paley’s fiction and once told me she asked her when she was going to write the novel everyone was waiting for. Paley, very active in the peace and anti-nuclear movements replied “Right after I save the world.”

In her own book of essays, Just as I Thought, Paley noted their similarities by relating this observation of Boyle at a peace demonstration;

“I looked at this woman, known by me long ago, long admired, doing work I had barely begun myself. So straight. She had great posture from standing up, I think, to assorted villains and fools. Sometimes the collective bully of the state (ours); sometimes the single-minded nastiness of fools.”

I admired her too. I was in law school at Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement and thought I’d seen it all until one day when the stately Ms. Boyle, then 68 years old, climbed into the back of a pickup truck and shook her fist at S.I. Hayakawa, the president of San Francisco State College, who was rigidly opposing the establishment of an ethnic studies program. Afterwards, Hayakawa denounced her as “the most dangerous woman in America.” Let’s hear it for dangerous women.

These two women inspired me to be a better writer but also to be a better citizen. Now, with only 64 days to the most important election in my lifetime, I’m resolving to put my vanity project on the back burner in order to see the final chapter in Donald Trump’s vanity project.

So… mask up, call your friends, write letters, gather your neighbors, use social media, support your candidates, and get out the vote. This will take all of us working tirelessly. We need this one badly.

Categories : Art, Books, Ethics, Friendship, Personal/Family, Politics, Uncategorized, Writing, Writing

Posted by jdbernard743

· August 27, 2020

· 3 Comments

Doing God’s Work…

Yesterday was the 110^th anniversary of Mother Teresa’s birth. Reading a short biographical essay about her I was reminded of her remarkable life and life’s work – a life we should be celebrating. Born with a club foot into a poor Albanian family, she joined the Sisters of Loreto order in Ireland at age 18 taking vows of obedience, chastity, and poverty, promising to give “wholehearted free service to the poorest of the poor.” While teaching at a school outside of Calcutta she learned nursing and began ministering to the poor, sick, and hungry on the gritty streets of Calcutta.

She had no income, had to beg for her own food and supplies for her ministry. After two years she started a congregation that became the Missionaries of Charity, and by the time of her death in 1997 it had grown to more than 4000 workers in 133 countries. In 1979 she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize which she accepted but asked the Nobel Committee to cancel the dinner and donate the money to charity.

She was canonized by Pope Francis in 2017.

What really struck me as I was reading Saint Teresa’s bio yesterday was the contrast between her life and the life of America’s evangelical religious leaders – many of the proponents of the “Prosperity Gospel.”

Last week we were treated to the sordid details of Reverend Jerry Falwell Jr.’s sexual exploits – a photo of him with his arm around a woman, not his wife, both with their pants unzipped and drinks in their hands, followed by the revelation that his wife had carried on a 6 year-long affair with a pool attendant they befriended while guests at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami 8 years ago, and the final(?) revelation that Jerry enjoyed watching his wife have sex with the aforementioned pool boy.

First question: what were a religious leader and his wife doing hanging out at the Fontainebleau pool in the first place? No…seriously, don’t we expect our spiritual leaders to live modestly as examples to their “flocks”? Apparently not in the time of the “Prosperity Gospel.”

Here’s what we know about today’s evangelical leaders:

Jerry Falwell Jr., son of Jerry Falwell its founder was paid a salary of $926,634 as President of Liberty University (a Christian university with a strict moral code for students but not apparently for its president).
1. Mr. Falwell’s net worth is estimated to be $100million. (International Business Times)
Reverend Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham, was paid a salary of $622,252 as CEO of Samaritan’s Purse, an evangelical Christian organization providing spiritual and physical aid to “hurting people around the world with the purpose of sharing God’s love through his son Jesus Christ.”
1. Reverend Graham’s net worth is estimated to exceed $10million (Wikipedia)
Pastor Joel Osteen, the Houston televangelist, no longer accepts his $200,000 annual salary apparently because with a net worth of more than $50million he is able to live comfortably without it.
1. This is the same Christian pastor who turned away evacuees of Hurricane Harvey flood victims in 2017 though he claims he “is a victim of misinformation.” His Lakewood Church has the ability to accommodate 17,000 of the faithful.

The contrast between the life of Mother Teresa and the lives of today’s evangelical leaders is astonishing. They claim to be Christians but only Mother Teresas is similar to the life Christ modeled. Jesus said, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” (Matt. 19:24.)

Categories : Ethics, Film/Television, News and Media, Politics, Uncategorized

Posted by jdbernard743

· August 21, 2020

· 6 Comments

RICO Time…

Civilization’s veneer is paper thin. William Golding showed us how thin in his novel Lord of the Flies. Given that thin veneer, it’s all the more astonishing that wild-eyed Americans aren’t storming the White House, tearing down its walls, and chasing Donald Trump and his posse of grifters down Pennsylvania Avenue.

Nevertheless, while the veneer is cracking, the center is holding. Despite the Covid-19 pandemic, Black Lives Matter, Putin’s bounty on US soldiers, a Post Office scandal and virtual political conventions, “civilized” Americans are hanging on to the belief that their institutions are durable enough to withstand the swirling shit storm. They believe, we believe, November 3^rd will bring America a new president (and Senate).

Last night a truly civilized American, Barack Obama, delivered an impassioned but somber address at the virtual Democratic Convention. He articulated his fear that democracy is in peril and asked the nation’s voters to defeat Donald Trump. Never before has a former president openly criticized his successor in such terms. He and the three other living ex-presidents agree; Donald Trump poses an existential threat to American democracy.

Today Steve Bannon, Trump’s “chief strategist,” the man largely responsible for the plan that got him elected, was arrested and indicted in federal court on criminal wire fraud and money laundering charges. Bannon is the sixth high level member of Trump’s cabinet or campaign organization to be charged with felony crimes. The others – Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, Michael Cohen, and Roger Stone are already convicted felons.

I’ve said just about everything that can be said about Donald Trump – that he and his administration of grifters are crass, greedy, venal, petty, corrupt, sexist, racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, ignorant, inarticulate, and unfit for office – and he himself is a sexual predator.

Now he’s trying to steal an election by vandalizing the United States Postal Service, eliminating street mailboxes, dismantling high-speed sorting machines, canceling overtime and putting in a hiring freeze. His lacky, million-dollar donor Postmaster General is very good at his job. He says he’ll stop dismantling the service until after the election, but today said he has no plans to replace the boxes and machines already taken. Today, the Seattle Times reported that he’s already removed 40% of Seattle’s sorting machines – machines that can sort up to 35,000 pieces of mail per hour.

**********

Here’s the point: Donald J. Trump is the principal owner and titular head of a vast criminal enterprise comprised of 500+ business entities. He and his accomplices are using the US treasury as their private bank and self-dealing at an unprecedented level. I agree with Donny Deutsch, the branding expert and former friend of the president’s; the real play is the criminality of the Trump Organization writ large. The Mueller Report and congressional investigations are being swatted away like flies by Attorney General Barr and the White House counsel’s office.

Donald Trump, the Trump family, and the Trump Organization are fending off an avalanche of investigations. I have no doubt that when he leaves office he will be charged and found guilty of dozens of crimes. There are so many to choose from – money laundering, bank fraud, wire fraud, serial sexual predation, campaign finance violations, bribery, extortion, Mafia collusion, violation of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, 501C(3) charity violations… and obstruction of justice. Take your pick. My guess is 15–30 years for the financial crimes, 5-10 for obstruction of justice. Served consecutively not concurrently, it would all be over for The Donald—just as it was for Bernie Madoff.

Take note: In a wild spending spree between 2005 and 2015 the Trump Organization paid hundreds of millions in cash for golf courses in Scotland and Ireland, overseas hotels, and houses in Florida etc. He was broke at the time and reputable banks wouldn’t loan him a cent. Suddenly he was flush with cash from the wealth management arm of Deutsche Bank. We know DB was laundering Russian money at the time. It paid a $10 billion fine for it in 2017 and further fines and charges are pending.

In addition to obvious state and federal prosecutions, the Department of Justice, once William Barr is out of the way, should get down to business and charge the Trump Organization and its principles, including Ivanka, Don Jr., and Eric with violations of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, commonly referred to as RICO–a United States federal law that provides for extended criminal penalties and civil cause of action for acts performed as part of an ongoing criminal organization. For decades, in addition to its own crimes, the Trump Organization has been operating in partnership with Mafia groups, corrupt union bosses, and criminal enterprises overseas to build its empire.

Let’s finally put Donald Trump and the Trump Organization where they belong – in prison. Live by the sword, die by the sword.

I believe in playing by the rules. I know it isn’t perfect, but for 243 years the American system of government has withstood many internal and external challenges. I believe it’s the most democratic form of government though not the most efficient. I believe its institutions endeavor to deliver the fairest, most even-handed justice, though sometimes it fails to do so.

I believe in one-man one-vote, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, the right to bear arms (limited), separation of church and state, equal protection of the laws, due process of law, and three independent branches of government. I don’t believe anyone, especially the president of the United States, is above the law or beyond its reach. We may not see justice served until Trump is defeated, but I believe American justice will provide him a fair trial when his reign of terror and greed is over.

Categories : Ethics, News and Media, Personal/Family, Politics, Uncategorized