The End

 Dear Friends and Relatives,

I’m done. For now anyway.

As much as I regret this, I realize that without making any decision, I have been deciding by omission. Here it is Tuesday, and I haven’t done any work on an essay for today and don’t see how I could complete one.

I had to stop temporarily in order to become Nurse Steve. We are going to move to Boston some time this year and the job of preparing our house for sale is also taking time and focus.

I think the end of Trump has also changed my drive to write in ways that I don’t fully understand. There is still much to say, but I don’t feel the strong motivation to say anything lately about politics. I find myself skimming the news without much interest.

I think that my focus has narrowed lately to our own lives. When I retired, I decided that stressing myself with tasks and deadlines was over, but of course that was illusion. Nevertheless, I am trying to maintain an equilibrium by keeping control over the number of things I am doing at once, which leads me to recognize that writing my weekly essays is too much now.

I am not complaining, because I have nothing to complain about. I am just trying to explain to loyal readers why nothing is coming today or in the near future. In some sense, I am taking back my life.

I have been touched so many times by your interest in my thoughts. You have given me confidence and motivation, the necessities for any writer. I am grateful.

I still have some copies of my book begging for new homes.

Stopping for now means that I can decide later what I want to do without the coercion of momentum, the inner demand to keep going. Perhaps I will find a new format, a different set of subjects, an altered timing. Or maybe I’ll just play with my granddaughters.

Best wishes,
Steve

BYOB

Bring your own bag. What a difference that could make.

One of the rarely discussed, but most appreciated conveniences of modern American life is the universal availability of bags. Everywhere we go, someone offers us a bag to carry even the smallest items. Almost always these are plastic bags, which we carry home and eventually, usually quickly, dispose of.

How much do we really want to fight climate change and pollution of the earth? One way is to bring your own bag.

In America, I do not often bring my own bag. I do find myself refusing the plastic bags, when I can manage my purchases in my hands and pockets. I could be more thoughtful about bringing my own bag, or bags, which have been made so small they could fit in my pocket. I think I’ll do that.

It will make a difference, but not enough. Relying on other people’s plastic bags, given to us for “nothing”, is merely one of the innumerable conveniences of modern life, with which we are thoughtlessly preparing planetary disaster.

I mentioned American life above, because German life, which I happen to know well, does not have this problem. Retail shopping, to an almost unimaginable degree to an American shopper, relies on shoppers on foot bringing their own bags to many small stores on a daily basis. Food purchasing is not based on infrequent trips to giant stores, whose products will be stored for days in large refrigerators. Like other aspects of the retail sector, sellers provide only the most necessary bags, such as the paper containers in which fresh vegetables are packed at the local farmstand.

The plastic bag is our problem, not because we are less virtuous than the Germans, but because our transportation and commerce are structured differently, along with assumptions about how the day should be spent. Every large economy will need to find solutions to the climate crisis that fit its particular economic facts.

And bags are only a partial answer. Bags are one example of the power of convenience to become a natural, unquestionable part of life, no longer convenience but necessity.

Bags also point to the only solution that appears to have any chance of succeeding. The dueling partisan philosophies of “market solutions” vs. “government regulation” have battled to a draw in America, symbolized by the hotly debated political question of whether the US should be part of the Paris agreements. In the race to save the planet, our country is wrestling with itself at the starting gate.

I have much sympathy for regulation. Republicans have tried to make that word a curse, except in all those areas where they want to stop people from doing things conservatives don’t like. Their claims that their version of the “free market” is a commandment from God, broadcast with the financial support of big industry, exist apart from any secular evidence, like other religious dogmas. Democratic reliance on governmental policies always seems to be decades behind the “science” that is so prized in speechmaking. I can’t think of a single bundle of regulations, in banking, manufacturing, energy and food production, or any other sector of economic life, which I am not in favor of strengthening and extending. But that’s not enough.

We can’t expect to reverse the damage our lives are doing to the Earth by voting. Voting is a crucial part of our  much broader responsibility. Voting for Republicans is suicide, not metaphorically, but actually hastening the demise of all those conveniences of modern life that appear to be necessary. That the clownish performances of Senator James Inhofe about climate would become a bedrock tenet of Republican ideology might have been hard to predict. Voting for some Green New Deal is barely meeting one’s civic duty.

Severely reducing the environmental impact of our daily lives is inevitably inconvenient. We will need to spend more time and effort and money doing things differently than we are used to.
We may have to give up pre-washed heads of lettuce in large plastic boxes.
We may have to bring our own straws, cups, containers, and bags when we go out.
We may have to go get our own stuff more often and have other people bring it to our doors less often.
We may have to buy more expensive recycled toilet paper, printing paper, tissue paper, paper towels, until their cost drops.

Bringing our own bags is a good beginning. On the basis of my Berlin experience, it has the power to transform shopping. When I take out my own well-used bags at the grocery store, the vegetable market, and the bakery stand, stuff my purchases inside, then carry it all home, I feel more in control of my environmental footprint.

That can’t be reproduced where I live in Jacksonville, Illinois, where it’s just too far to the grocery megamart to carry all that food. What we can do here and now is examine whether we want to insist on keeping those conveniences which are inconvenient for the planet.

We’ll have to give them up sooner or later anyway. Why wait until it’s too late to make a difference?

Steve Hochstadt
Jacksonville IL
March 2, 2021

Broken Humerus

 Dear friends and family,

Liz just did a few exercises, slowly using her left arm to lift her lower right arm and let it down a couple of times. That was all she could do. Her upper right arm is broken; more precisely Liz’s humerus broke when she fell on an icy sidewalk 9 days ago. In three days, she will get a new shoulder out of plastic and titanium. Not good as new, but much better than now.

Suddenly, without any warning or ability to plan, Liz said this would be a turning point in her life, in our lives. It’s easy to think that the turn would be downward, like a lot of turns in the last few decades of natural human life, the inevitable decline in ability, gradual or sudden. Even so, it might not necessarily mean that everything about this change will be cause for pessimism. She is right, but we don’t know what it will mean for us over the next decades.

I am about to take a turn myself – the much ballyhooed shot in my arm tomorrow. Like much connected with the pandemic, nothing changes right away, as the vaccine process takes a month or so. Anticlimaxes everywhere.

One result is that I haven’t been able to focus enough energy and clear thought to write a normal essay last Tuesday or today. Because we are at another turning point, a big national turning point that seems to be stretching out much longer than I could have guessed, that may also make it more difficult for me to write anything in a normal way. So please give me a bit of patience until I get far enough around the turn to see where I am going, where Liz is going, where we all are going.

On we all go into the somewhat predictable future, where surprises lurk around many corners, and we have little choice but to do our best with the cards we are dealt. Folding them is not a good choice.

Best wishes,
Steve

Absurdity Theories

My brother emailed me to make sure I knew that we Jews had space laser technology capable of starting wildfires out West. Naturally he wondered who controlled it, Orthodox or Reform? But here’s the question I asked him as we corresponded about the suggestion by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene that we, the Jews, in the guise of the always convenient Rothschilds, pointed a laser from the sky to start fires in California: “If we could burn up any place in the world, why would we pick California?”

Greene is absurd to publicly broadcast an idea that stupid. But many people where she lives sent her and her message to Washington. She imagines a plot reminiscent of those scary 1950s movies about some impossible bogeyman. Now the bogeywoman sits in Congress, and everybody is listening.

She is one sharp thorn on a much bigger political club wielded by American conservatives so they can run our governments. That club is the invention and propagation of weird tales of horror, often called “conspiracy theories”, where the monsters are liberals, or even better, Jewish liberals.

If Jews, whatever group of humans that label might bring to mind among her fans, had so much power, why would we burn California, where one out of every six American Jews live? Explaining the central absurdity of that idea, or of the idea that mass shootings whose blood and death we all know about were actually a hoax, or of the idea that Democrats stole a national election, is where these theories fail.

Holocaust denial created a model for modern absurdity theories by focusing on facts. Millions of words and photographs and diagrams and scientific-sounding analyses have been created to explain why any particular known fact about the Holocaust is made up. David Irving, the premier Holocaust denier with historical credentials, sued Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books for libel, because she labeled him “a Holocaust denier, falsifier, and bigot,” who “manipulated and distorted real documents”, as Wikipedia puts it. Richard Evans, the British historian who advised Lipstadt’s defense, made an official report: “Not one of [Irving's] books, speeches or articles, not one paragraph, not one sentence in any of them, can be taken on trust as an accurate representation of its historical subject.”

Like most other crazies who go public, Irving was eventually unmasked, but he screwed around with facts for decades, because his political message about Jews was welcome in many corners of the Christian world. But abstracted from the slippery “facts” that dominate Holocaust deniers’ writings, the most absurd part of their message is rarely addressed. For 75 years, “the Jews” enlisted millions of the most prominent and powerful people across the world to recreate history in word and location, and to promulgate in every way that impossible history as truth.

Antisemites have never underestimated our cleverness, although denying the evidence that some of us actually are smart. So how do they explain how we did that? I don’t mean how we got some old man to talk about non-existent gas chambers in Auschwitz or how we forged a document enumerating the people whom Nazis had just shot. How did we bring that immense conspiracy into being and how have we maintained it all these years? We must be really powerful, beyond the imagining of Greene and her ilk, if we could create these enormous conspiracies without leaving a trace.

Where are the letters, emails, photographs, diagrams, and web pages, even self-constructed á la Irving, showing us, the Jews, creating and leading that conspiracy? Or creating the magic laser to incinerate our friends instead of our enemies? How did the libs manage to both rig elections in Republican states and then create the worldwide spectacle that Biden won?

Mike Pompeo spent two months since the election pretending that Biden’s victory was not legitimate. For years, he has exercised vast control over a network of highly trained people around the world, many of whom had been sent out as emissaries of Trump’s ideology. But none of them sent back a bit of evidence explaining how or why every government in the world has dismissed the stolen election fantasy. If Pompeo had anything that could be bent, twisted, chopped up and regurgitated as proof that Angela Merkel and Boris Johnson and Vladimir Putin and Justin Trudeau all signed on to the plot to rig the election and defend it afterward, why hasn’t he produced it? Is he waiting for his next political campaign?

No, I think there is another reason. It seems to work quite well to just assume that central absurdity without explanation. Somehow it is not important to explain how a group of people, many under constant scrutiny by all forms of media, could be so secretive, so organized, so depraved and evil, to run a vast child abuse ring underneath a pizza place in Washington DC. The original Reddit post that touched off this particular conservative flight into absurdity, claimed in fact the abuse was easy to spot: “Everyone associated with the business is making semi-overt, semi-tongue-in-cheek, and semi-sarcastic inferences towards sex with minors. The artists that work for and with the business also generate nothing but cultish imagery of disembodiment, blood, beheadings, sex, and of course pizza.”

The absence of any explanation of the origins and inner workings of these great conspiracies, the successful veil of utter secrecy that the world’s official bodies have cast over their diabolical plans, implies a much larger conspiratorial network. Pizzagate and Holocaust denial and our space laser require full participation from police and security forces at all levels. Recent conservative absurdity theories have thus transformed the FBI from heroes of the fight against crime into co-conspirators. Trump had no choice but to include denunciations of the FBI in his flights into the absurd.

Holocaust denial is co-terminous with antisemitism. The people whom the deniers reach already believe that Jews are capable of unimagined evil, that we are all in it together, that we exercise unbounded but secret power. They don’t have to be convinced by some sleight of hand of the theorists. Marjorie Taylor Greene doesn’t have to explain to her voters why we Jews would dream up a remarkable plan to burn out our own. Her followers are already there. They just want to know the details. In this case, Greene may be up a creek. No “space expert” has jumped in to explain our technological blueprints. She might have to walk away from that one entirely. She can blame this one on her “team” of social media producers, probably the same people who shared a video on her Facebook page where Nick Griffin, a well-known British Holocaust denier, says an “unholy alliance of leftists, capitalists and Zionist supremacists have schemed to promote immigration and miscegenation.”

The seemingly less absurd absurdity theories that are twisting our national politics, “Stop the Steal” or “I wasn’t defeated, I am really President”, have just enough details to obscure the more potent, unspoken, and fundamentally preposterous idea behind them. The Dems stole the election, they created a Disney spectacle of victory in an endless loop, and they convinced tens of millions of ordinary Americans, everyone’s neighbors and relatives, to go along.  I swear this is true, because some people I don’t know, with no inside knowledge, say it’s true, and I share their hatreds.

The believers in new undetectable conspiracies by vast numbers of satanic people overlap with the generations of promoters of Holocaust denial. That denial began with the perpetrators themselves as they were killing millions of satanic Jews, who were trying to take over the world. Without lasers.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

February 1, 2021

Hypocrites Crying “Hypocrisy”

The right-wing mob was just a few feet away from massacring the Congresswomen and -men who were about to certify Biden’s and Harris’s defeat of Trump. But that was three weeks ago, and Republicans have returned to their pre-insurrection politics, as if nothing happened. The hypocrites are now shouting “Hypocrisy!”

Last week, my own Congressman, Darin LaHood, expressed his concerns about the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act, which had already been passed by the House in September, but then not even taken up in McConnell’s Senate. It has been brought again by Democrats in the wake of the Capitol attack, and would create offices in the Departments of Homeland Security and Justice, and in the FBI to monitor, investigate, and prosecute domestic terrorism. LaHood opposes it: “I have some real constitutional concerns ... I think there are real concerns about the way that the double standard, and the hypocrisy of how the protests last summer by Antifa and Black Lives Matter, and the violence and the anarchy and criminal activity that went on, that that’s not treated the same as what happened at the Capitol.”

Here is why the broad protests this summer involving millions of Americans concerned about racism, that included some isolated local incidents of violence, are not the same as the attempted overthrow of our government this month. Much of the violence, including murders, was the work of far-right extremists. None of those protests threatened to overthrow the federal government or murder elected officials. The Washington Post estimated that of over 7000 protests before the end of June, 96% involved no injuries and no property damage. But Black people’s protests make good Republican campaign slogans.

The agencies in our government designated to protect us against terrorism don’t see the equivalence. They say that the greatest danger comes from right-wing extremists.  In September, Christopher Wray, head of the FBI appointed by Trump, told a House Homeland Security Committee hearing that “racially motivated violent extremism,” mainly from white supremacists and anti-government groups, was the greatest domestic terrorist threat.

Republican politicians like LaHood wanted Wray to say that leftist groups, like Black Lives Matter and Antifa, were equally threatening. William Barr, Attorney General at the time, had called Antifa “the ramrod for the violence”. Before the hearing, a whistle-blower in the Homeland Security Department revealed that the Trump-appointed leadership had blocked release of an August report that labeled white supremacist extremists as “the most persistent and lethal threat in the homeland through 2021.” After the September hearing, Trump tweeted his complaint about how his own FBI treats leftist protesters: “I look at them as a bunch of well funded ANARCHISTS & THUGS who are protected because the Comey/Mueller inspired FBI is simply unable, or unwilling, to find their funding source, and allows them to get away with ‘murder’”. The Trump reelection campaign, and many Republican local campaigns, insisted that the scattered incidents of violence against property during the protests this summer represented the influence of the Democratic Party. No Democratic politician urged crowds to commit violence, as did Trump and his fellow speakers just before the Capitol riot.

That riot was the culmination of months of claims by leading Republicans that the November election had been rigged. Darin LaHood was a full participant in those lies. He was among the 106 Congressional Republicans who supported the December lawsuit brought by 17 Republican Attorneys General challenging election results in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia, that had already been carefully confirmed by recounts and dozens of court cases. He signed on to the statement that “unconstitutional irregularities” “cast doubt” on “the integrity of the American system of elections.” After the Supreme Court rejected the suit, Hood wrote an editorial for the Peoria Journal Star that “we now have some resolution that brings finality to the election results and pending disputes.” But he wasn’t done. On January 5, LaHood told the Springfield State Journal-Register that he was still undecided about whether he would object the next day to the certification of electoral votes from states where urban Black communities had voted overwhelmingly for Biden-Harris.

LaHood and his colleagues convinced millions of Republican voters over two months that the election had been rigged. The extremist fire was already out of control on January 6, when Trump, his son, Rudy Giuliani, and Rep. Mo Brooks poured on the gasoline. Even that horrific insurrection did little to stop Republican claims about the election. On January 8, LaHood spoke out of both sides of his mouth with a local Illinois TV station: “After the elections are over, we need to come together, we need to govern, we need to work on behalf of the people, and that’s what I’ve tried to stress.” He still asserted that there are “election fraud” issues in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan: “We have to have confidence that our election system is working the right way.” He put a video of this interview on his website.

If LaHood wanted Republican voters to have confidence in our election system, he would simply repeat what Republican election experts, even including former Attorney General Barr and election security official Christopher Krebs, said about the absence of election fraud. He would say that Trump’s claims of fraud were not true. He would say that Republicans should believe that the 2020 elections were exactly as Krebs said: “This was a secure election. That is a success story. That is something everyone in the administration should be proud of. That’s the story I feel we should be telling now.”

By equating an exaggerated portrait of Antifa with the Capitol riot, Republicans are trying to divert attention from the attempt by their own supporters to overthrow our government, which resulted in the murder of a police officer. The hypocrisy of LaHood and his colleagues about both the threat of right-wing violence and lack of Republican faith in American elections is notable, if not surprising. I wish the normal double standard of Republican politics was the only thing to worry about.

My Congressman, Darin LaHood, whose victory I helped tally in November, joined his fellow Republicans in unleashing a beast which they cannot control. He and they are now afraid of bogeymen they invented: Democrats who will turn the US into a socialist dictatorship; the violent right wing whom they encouraged but who shouted “Hang Mike Pence”; the majority of Republican voters whom they convinced to shout “Stop the Steal” who might desert them if they admitted that nothing had ever been stolen. LaHood faces the classic liar’s dilemma: if I tell the truth now, I’ll have to explain why I lied before. He hopes the beast doesn’t come for him, so he wiggles and squirms about national security.

He pointed the beast at every Democrat in the land, at Black communities in big cities, at his own colleagues who couldn’t stomach the lies. He pointed the beast at me, a small part of the national web of child-abusing election-stealing liberal-socialist-communist traitors, who threaten the American way of life.

Neither of us knows what violent act will develop in the extremist underground. Maybe if he were as concerned as I am, he would stop lying about it.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

January 26, 2021

A Happy Day

 Dear Fellow Americans, and a European or two,

This is a happy day. Lately happy days have been rare, and we will all struggle many more months. But happiness is nearly always there. Today is the end of Trump and tomorrow the beginning of a new American era.

Joe Biden has taken a lot of heat from progressives and leftists. I belong there, but try to be less judgmental than observant. What I observe right now is that the Biden administration might be the most progressive in my lifetime. Up to now, that honor goes, in my view, to Lyndon Johnson for a civil rights and Great Society agenda that rivaled the New Deal. But at the same time, he brought us so deep into Vietnam that it took years of protests and military defeats to get us out.

I had similar hopes for Barack Obama, with Biden as a sidekick. He had the capacity to move the American mind mightily towards the mountaintop that King saw. But he could not move American politics. He could not really believe and then could not deal with the obstruction, the misuse of democracy, and the magical thinking of the Republican Party. Most of us could not believe the incompetence, the attack on democracy, and the fraudulent words of Donald Trump.

Joe Biden is no longer Obama’s sidekick, no longer his partner in the constant plea to Republicans to play ball. Where he will go and where he can go will be gradually decided over the next years.

What makes today a happy day is that the direction will be positive for the first time in years. I look forward to thinking “Do more!” instead of “Not that!” I look forward to hearing good news at night, at least sometimes.

My friend and index-writer Nancy Gerth wrote to me about her friend’s suggestion to celebrate Biden’s inauguration by displaying an American flag tomorrow. I tried to buy a flag today, but couldn’t. I will ask my neighbor if I can borrow one of her flags.

We can be happy for ourselves and happy for America.

Steve Hochstadt
Jacksonville IL
January 19, 2021