Christmas 2020

We had a very small Christmas this year: my wife Liz and I and her mother Janet. I have written often about how wonderful our large family Christmas celebrations are. Did that make this a diminished Christmas?

Many things were the same. We had a beautiful spruce tree, which we cut at a Christmas tree farm here in northern Wisconsin, wrapped in plastic mesh, and paid for, even though the farm’s owners were not there. They had set everything up for do-it-yourself customers like us. We put up as many lights as we had, then covered every possible branch with ornaments, most decades old. Presents went under the tree, although this year there was plenty of room.

Our stockings were hung by the chimney with care, and were magically filled up by Christmas morning. After eating some homemade coffee cake, we opened the presents, one at a time, passing them around our small circle. This year there was lots of chocolate, along with the many books that always appear, and photos of the youngest members of the family.

It’s easy to focus on what was missing – the excited delight of children playing with new toys, passing silly gifts around the room, ritual readings of The Night Before Christmas and The Polar Express.

Across the country, Christmas gatherings were smaller than ever this year. Only about one-third as many people as usual took airplanes around Christmas. We did get to see our children on Christmas using the electronic video messaging technology that has allowed us throughout the pandemic to interact with them, and develop and maintain relationships with our little grandchildren.

Was this a diminished Christmas? I still woke up on Christmas morning with anticipation. Opening presents and watching loved ones open their presents was still fun. The chocolates tasted just as good as usual, the fire was warm, and the new books entertaining.

I would have preferred to spend the day with all of our family. But in our separate homes, we are all healthy, while the number of COVID cases has skyrocketed across the country. The moratorium on evictions and renewed unemployment payments do not affect any of us, and we don’t really need the stimulus checks we will soon receive. We survived the deadliest year of our lives and can look forward to a return to normal family life in a few months.

We will have many more Christmases. This one was not the best, but it was one we shall all remember.

In comparison to 2020, the New Year promises to be very happy.

Steve Hochstadt
Springbrook WI
December 29, 2020

Many of my columns are collected in Freedom of the Press in Small-Town America: My Opinions, available from the publisher:
https://www.atlantic-pub.com/product-page/freedom-of-the-press-in-small-town-america-my-opinions
and from Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Freedom-Press-Small-Town-America-Opinions/dp/1620238209/

Happy Kwanzaa!

As we were driving north to Wisconsin for the holidays, we heard a radio story about Kwanzaa. We realized that we knew nearly nothing about it. I use this opportunity to learn more and, perhaps, to inform you of things you did not know.

Unlike its seasonal colleagues, Christmas and Hanukkah, Kwanzaa is purely secular and recently invented. Ron Karenga, a black liberation activist from California, thought up an alternative in 1966 to what he felt were overly white year-end celebrations. He appears to have borrowed the candle-lighting ritual from Hanukkah, adapted to pan-African traditions and emphasizing seven virtues he believed that African Americans should celebrate. For seven nights from Dec. 26 through New Year’s Day, a red, green or black candle is lit to celebrate the “Seven Guiding Principles” of African heritage that he identified: unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity, and faith. Karenga created Kwanzaa in 1966 with the goal of giving “Blacks an alternative to the existing holiday and give Blacks an opportunity to celebrate themselves and their history, rather than simply imitate the practice of the dominant society.”

Karenga was a radical exponent of black nationalism, which generally tried to create black alternatives to white institutions, emphasizing African culture and black economic independence, at a time when anything black was uncommon in white supremacist America. After the Watts riots in 1965, he created the organization US, which became a rival with the Black Panthers for leadership of the black community. The FBI sought to turn that rivalry into violence in its COINTELPRO program, in order to weaken both groups.

Over 50 years later, Kwanzaa has taken hold in countries across the world. That is surprising. This ideological invention of a competitor to the most widely celebrated holiday in the world has not replaced Christmas. But many people know about Kwanzaa. Hallmark issued a greeting card in 1992. The Postal Service issued a Kwanzaa stamp in 1997, and President Bill Clinton made the first presidential declaration recognizing the holiday. It is celebrated on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts.

It is difficult to say how many people light the Kwanzaa candles. There was a flurry of mainstream interest in Kwanzaa for a few decades. A black reporter from ABC News wrote in 2004 that few people she knew celebrated Kwanzaa, outside of big events in San Francisco and Denver. According to the National Retail Federation, in 2012 only 2% of Americans observed Kwanzaa. But if nearly all of those people are black, that number represents about one-fifth of African American families.

Perhaps the avoidance of commercialization has hampered its popularization, but allowed Kwanzaa to maintain some of its original political intent. Black separatism itself has declined as American society has reduced the barriers to black cultural success. Karenga himself now is chair of the Africana Studies Department at California State University in Long Beach, under the name Maulana Ndabezitha Karenga. As opportunities to celebrate black and African culture have expanded with the creation of African American studies departments in universities and increasing attention to black history in schools, the number who celebrate Kwanzaa probably has declined since the 1970s and 1980s.

Black nationalism or separatism is no longer as popular as it was 50 years ago. The current response to systemic racism, a diagnosis that itself is now much more common, focuses on reforming mainstream society, the police for example, rather than separating from it.

Neither separatism nor mainstream reform need be exclusive solutions to the continuing dilemma of racism in America. Karenga’s invention has influenced millions of people, spreading information about African and African American culture well beyond the black community. The seven virtues are potentially relevant to everyone. Whether you light candles or not, Kwanzaa has enriched all of our lives.

Steve Hochstadt

Springbrook WI

December 22, 2020

The Power of Men

A nasty editorial on the conservative opinion page of the Wall Street Journal has set off a cultural controversy just as the Biden family is about to take over the White House. Joseph Epstein called on Jill Biden to stop calling herself Dr. Biden. Epstein begins by addressing her as “Madame First Lady—Mrs. Biden—Jill—kiddo”, then offers her this “advice”: “‘Dr. Jill Biden’ sounds and feels fraudulent, not to say a touch comic.” His complaint is that her degree is in education, not medicine. He makes fun of her dissertation title as “unpromising”, then calls her “Dr. Jill”. He praises himself for refusing the title when he taught, although he hadn’t earned it.

Epstein was editor of “The American Scholar”, the magazine of Phi Beta Kappa, but has no advanced degrees, and apparently feels defensive about that. He asserts the conservative critique of American higher education as if it were fact: “The Ph.D. may once have held prestige, but that has been diminished by the erosion of seriousness and the relaxation of standards in university education generally, at any rate outside the sciences.” “In contemporary universities, in the social sciences and humanities, calling oneself Dr. is thought bush league.” I never knew that.

Most of his argument is irrelevant to his point, instead focusing on how honorary doctorates no longer carry any honor, although he did not refuse the honorary degree Adelphi University gave him in 1988.

I have never been a fan of using the address “Dr.” for PhD holders. My grandfather hoped I would follow in his footsteps and become a physician. When I decided on history instead of medicine, I gave up on being called Dr. Hochstadt. I prefer “Professor”, although conservatives tend to use that title as a pejorative. In Germany, my proper title would be “Prof. Dr.”, which I find amusing.

Epstein blithely ignores the tendency of men to denigrate women’s achievements while doing it himself. A relevant study of the way that men and women introduced each other at a medical conference found that women nearly always used the formal “Dr.” to introduce men, but men only used it half the time to introduce women.

Epstein’s offer of “advice” is hardly serious. If it were, he would not address Jill Biden as “Mrs.” or “Jill” and certainly not “kiddo”. In the guise of making a point about the use of “Dr.” for holders of a doctorate, he is actually just insulting an accomplished woman. One woman’s remarkable memory of being in one of his literature classes at Northwestern University demonstrates the depths of Epstein’s sexism.

Behind his sexism lies the typical right-wing condescension towards higher education. In a 2019 WSJ piece, he called college teaching a “sweet racket”, “essentially a six-month job, and without ever having to put in an eight-hour day.” He hates the recent, long overdue recognition of systemic racism and sexism. “I would also suggest dispensing with courses that specialize exclusively in victimology, the history of victim groups told from the point of view of the victims.” Epstein’s view of higher ed is encapsulated in the title of an essay he wrote for the WSJ 4 months ago: “Today’s College Classroom Is a Therapy Session”. Another thing I didn’t know.

At the moment when Joe Biden is finally declared officially President-elect, six weeks after the election, this clash of cultures may be a minor issue. Its value lies in demonstrating the core of right-wing culture: disdain for higher education; demeaning attitudes toward women, especially powerful women, and defense of sexist and racist language.

Epstein has long been extraordinarily insulting to people whose politics he didn’t like, calling feminist scholars “pit bulls” and “dykes on bikes”. He wrote in 1970, “I would wish homosexuality off the face of the earth.” He used his position at The American Scholar to give cultural conservatives a platform, which he refused to liberals. In 2015, Epstein wrote an essay about Barack Obama as an “affirmative-action president”. He began by claiming that Obama was elected “partly for reasons extraneous to [his] political philosophy or to [his] merits”, but soon moved to asking why “we elect presidents of the United States not on their intrinsic qualities”, “not for themselves”, but “for their status as members of a victim group”.

Despite his pretensions to literary greatness, Epstein’s conservative politics lie behind all of his judgments. In September, he equated Trump’s and Biden’s levels of corruption, sexual harassment, and personal character. For a literary man, he apparently has no objection to the abysmal level of Trump’s use of the English language. Ten days after the election, Epstein called Donald Trump “one of the most effective ... one-term presidents in American politics”. Not a mention of his frauds, his dishonesty, or the pretense he was right then engaged in of claiming that he had won. Epstein liked his conservative policies, exaggerated them, and made it seem that any criticism of him was “bias”.

In response to the storm of criticism that has appeared, Paul Gigot, the opinion editor of the WSJ, took shelter in the usual conservative defense of people who are nasty. The day after Epstein’s editorial, by which time the internet was on fire with criticism, Gigot employed the latest versions of the conservative complaint about “political correctness” to defend his own decision to print it. Gigot lumped all the critics together as “the Biden team” employing “the big gun of identity politics” and “cancel culture”. He defended Epstein’s calling Jill Biden “kiddo” because Joe has called her that. One usage heartfelt, one demeaning.

And that’s the choice we all have. Use words to demean others or embrace them.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

December 15, 2020

The Slippery Slope

Trump always presented a danger to his supporters. Once they signed up for his tales of greatness, perfection, and winning, winning, winning, they were liable to be sucked further and further down his rabbit hole of fabrication. Because Trump never admits that he was wrong and continually embellishes the lies he invents, supporters are unable to draw a line without repudiating their earlier endorsement of his dishonesty. Trump employs his inability to admit anything less than genius to attack everyone who doesn’t buy his whole program. The silence of Republicans in Congress since the election, which has been interpreted as tacit approval of his ever crazier claims about fraud, represents their dilemma: they can’t get off the Trump train as it speeds into uncharted waters.

Sorry for the mixed metaphors. But I’m not sorry for Trump’s sycophants, who deserve the very predictable problem they brought on themselves. The Washington Post surveyed all 249 Congressional Republicans last week, and only 27 acknowledged Biden’s election.

Brian Kemp, Governor of Georgia, is a prominent example of what happens to those who can’t take any more. His support for Trump over many years has been vociferous, and Trump endorsed him in the Republican primary for Governor in 2018, perhaps after seeing Kemp’s ad on FOX News, where he brandished a rifle and threatened to round up illegal immigrants himself. Kemp then narrowly defeated Stacey Abrams, helped by his earlier removal of hundreds of thousands of people from the voter rolls as Secretary of State, overseeing his own election. But Kemp and other Georgia Republicans could not prevent Georgia’s voters from handing the state to Joe Biden, thanks to Abrams’ massive get-out-the-vote drive since 2018.

When Trump insisted that he had won Georgia but for massive electoral fraud there, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger, and then Governor Kemp, defended their state. It’s all or nothing for Trump. On social media, he called Raffensberger “a so-called Republican (RINO)”. He said on FOX News about Kemp, “I’m ashamed that I endorsed him”, and placed Raffensberger in a special category of “electoral officials making deals, like this character in Georgia who’s a disaster.” On December 1, Trump said Kemp should “do something”, because he had allowed his state to be “scammed”. An even better idea: “Then call off the election. It won’t be needed.”

Trump’s demand to follow him or be thrown out of Trump World hit FOX News after the network called Arizona for Biden. Since then, the libelous claims by Sidney Powell, a lawyer so outrageous that even Trump’s campaign had to disavow her, that voting machines systematically changed Trump votes to Biden across the country, have caught FOX’s foxes in a trap. Lou Dobbs let her offer this Trumpism on November 30: “It’s really the most massive and historical, egregious fraud the world has ever seen.” Sean Hannity encouraged her to repeat those claims, also without contradiction. Tucker Carlson, however, demanded that she show some evidence. When she refused and displayed public outrage at this demand, conservatives began to criticize him.

Georgia attorney Lin Wood included Carlson as the new enemy, writing on Nov. 22, “Fox News is now part of the propaganda arm of the leftists/Communists who think they are going to overthrow our Constitution.” At a “Stop the Steal” rally in Georgia last week, Wood shouted at the crowd that they should not vote for either Kelly Loeffler or David Perdue until the electoral fraud is fixed, which means never. “Why would you go back and vote in another rigged election?” I wonder how those 222 non-committal Congressional Republicans would answer that.

At the state level, Republican leaders have mostly followed the law, bringing us to “safe harbor” day tomorrow, when states make final decisions in any controversies over the appointment of their electors. But handfuls of local representatives have openly offered to commit whatever political crime it takes to reverse the election. A group of 64 Republican Pennsylvania state representatives signed a letter to the whole Pennsylvania Congressional delegation asking them to “to object, and vote to sustain such objection, to the Electoral College votes received from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania” when Congress meets on January 6 to confirm the Electoral College results. That’s half of all Republicans in the lower House, including the Speaker and the Majority Leader, and 7 of 28 in the Senate.

It is not easy to predict how those who have so closely clung to Trump will react to his escalating attacks on our constitutional system. Attorney General Bill Barr already transformed his supposedly non-political Justice Department into Trump’s taxpayer-funded legal defense team. Then Trump said on November 29 that the Justice Department and the FBI might be co-conspirators: “This is total fraud ... maybe they’re involved.” Two days later, Barr told the Associated Press, “we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.” Too bad he didn’t tell the whole truth, that there was no systemic fraud at all. Still Trump is pissed at the latest traitor. NBC News reported that Trump wouldn’t say any more that he had confidence in his Attorney General: “Ask me that in a number of weeks from now.”

The “army” representing Trump, people he picked and encourages, is led by a small collection of wacko publicity hounds, who will scream their fabricated claims over and over again, no matter how unlikely and easily disprovable they are, or what kind of people they offend by their accusations. The claim by Giuliani & Co. is simple: the Dems stole the election. But now they are attacking Republicans who won’t abuse their offices in the cause.

The pattern is in plain sight. Since he won the Republican primary in 2016, the divide between pro- and anti-Trump Republican politicians has been their view of the future. Those who saw themselves searching for Republican votes in the future went along. The Republican members of Congress who have criticized Trump’s lies about the election come from the same cohort as those who campaigned against him before the election: out of office or on their way, “formers”, “ex-’s”, soon-to-be-formers.

Maybe it’s still true that the number of Republican Congresspeople who have contracted COVID is larger than the number who have endorsed the election results as fair and free. The vast majority are sliding along with Trump on his slippery slope, with no brakes, no place to get off before crashing. What will that crash look like?

Will anyone pay a price for this attempt to overthrow our constitutional system? The answer lies not with those politicians, who will adopt every possible slippery justification for their actions. We, those who have opposed Trump from the beginning, can’t make Republicans pay an electoral price, because we don’t vote for them. Only Republican voters can decide to stop supporting individuals and a Party leadership that cares much more about winning, than about democracy. Will they hold any of their “leaders” responsible for their choices? How many will make any effort to discover truth and to compare it to the lies with which they have been bombarded? We, however, can urge state prosecutors, state bar associations, and Democratic legislators to seek penalties within the law for all those who are subverting our electoral system by telling lies.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

December 8, 2020

Open Letter to Our Congressman

 

Dear Friends,

Below is a letter that I sent on Friday to my local newspaper, the one for which I wrote for 9 years. Since then, nothing has changed, except that this issue of Republicans in Congress supporting Trump’s mad and destructive effort to overturn the election has gotten worse. Trump’s attacks have escalated to target Republican state officials. The paper’s editor did not respond to my submission.

This is an example of the “freedom of the press” that I address in my book. I can write whatever I want, but I have no public forum where I can publish this open letter and call Rep. LaHood to account. Trump and Giuliani and the others who advance his claims in public will, I believe, eventually pay a price in reputation. LaHood and many like him will cheerfully carry on under the new administration, acting as if they have done their duty. We, the voters, especially the voters in the majority, will pay the biggest price, as public confidence in the American political system reaches its lowest point in my lifetime.

That is apparently not newsworthy.

I wish you all well.

Steve

 

 

Open Letter to Our Congressman

 

To Rep. Darin LaHood:

I read in this newspaper your comments on the election. I fully agree that “fair, legal, and ethical elections are the cornerstone of our democracy and their integrity must be protected.” I wish you would contribute to protecting them, instead of attacking them.

You say that you “support President Trump’s effort to ensure that all legal votes are counted”. Here is the content of Trump’s effort. On Thanksgiving Day, he held a press conference where he used the word fraud dozens of times. He said that Georgia has “a fraudulent system, tremendous fraud”. He said about Pennsylvania, “It was a rigged election.” He said about Detroit, “Dead people voting all over the place.” Over and over again, he said our election was a fraud: “the numbers are false... the numbers are corrupt... It was a rigged election, 100% ... those machines are fixed, they’re rigged. You can press Trump and the vote goes to Biden.... we caught them cheating, we caught them stealing ... You’re going to find fraud of hundreds of thousands of votes per state... they used COVID in order to defraud the people of this country.” The last thing he said was, “This election was a rigged election.”

Those are just the latest versions of his campaign to deny the integrity of the election, to reject legal votes in Democratic cities, and to pursue court cases which judges have called ridiculous.

Trump’s appointee at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Chris Krebs, stated officially, and courageously, that this election was “the most secure in American history.” “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” Less than a week later Trump fired Krebs.

Krebs showed how to protect the integrity of our democratic system. If you were honest, you would have said days ago that Trump lost. If you were brave, you would say that Trump’s claims about a rigged election are harmful to our country.

I worked on November 3 with Republican and Democratic election judges here in Jacksonville to insure that people could record their votes. Most of the people I saw voted for Trump and for you. You won’t say that those votes, and over 150 million other votes in America, represent the best of American democracy.

All American voters deserve to know that this election was fair and free, and that the reported results are accurate. You said that it is important to ensure that “all Americans have faith in the electoral process”. Trump’s actions have caused the opposite: more than half of Republican voters believe that the election was rigged.  Your unwillingness to tell the truth about the election, your support for Trump’s form of election fraud, along with most of your elected Republican colleagues, creates that lack of faith.

Your oath of office committed you to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic”. Trump’s claims that this election must be “turned over” makes him a domestic enemy of our Constitution.

Unlike Krebs, Trump can’t fire you if you contradict him. But unlike Krebs, honesty and courage are not part of your political calculations. The voters of the 18^th District deserve better from their Congressman.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL