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The Tyranny of the Minority Trumps Again: Elections 2016

By Patricia H Kushlis

The Electoral College versus the Popular Vote

For the second time in 16 years and the fifth time since the founding of the Republic, the Electoral College vote will trump – pun intended - the popular vote for president of the USA.  An archaic institution designed for the late 18^th century is soon destined to turn the popular vote on its head by handing the presidency to an incompetent clown and accused sex offender likely floating on a mountain of debt topped by a summit of law suits.  Meanwhile, the majority of American voters who did not vote for him is told to grin (or grit their teeth) and bear it – that this is how democracy functions:  this is how power is meant to shift peacefully from one administration to another.  That mantra is from what I can figure out, likely courtesy of the GOP.

Nonsense

Unfortunately the transfer of power at the top is based on the will of the Electoral College, a group of 538 individuals selected by the states composed mostly of individuals no one has ever heard of.  On December 19 their decision will permit rural and rust belt states to determine the fate not only of the US but also the world over the next four to eight years. 

What ever happened to one person, one vote?  Forget it. Today’s Electoral College makes a mockery of the 1965 Voting Rights Act which was passed at the height of the nationwide non-violent Civil Rights movement which rocked the country during the early – mid 1960s.  The Act negated the previously widespread suppression of the black vote in former states of the Confederacy.    

Today, not only has voter suppression returned with a vengeance as a result of a 5-4 Supreme Court decision in 2013 that gutted the contents of the Voting Rights Act but even excluding that Supreme Court decision, the popular will of the voters is upended because of the way in which the Electoral College functions.

A voter who lives in Montana, the least populous state, has, for instance, almost four times (actually 362 times) the weight of a California voter in the selection of the president. That’s not democracy:  that’s the tyranny of the rural minority over the urban majority.  As America continues to urbanize this tyranny will continue to worsen:  unless something is done to change it.

This is 2016, for heaven’s sake:  over the centuries since the adoption of the US Constitution in 1789, its contents have been interpreted and reinterpreted to meet the changing times as the franchise has gradually widened from indirect vote restricted to white male property owners to all US citizens regardless of race, color, creed, property ownership, gender or sexual orientation.

Yet since 2008 with the election of President Obama the widening of the franchise has been challenged through rear guard actions by the Republican Party, the country’s minority party which simultaneously gained control of a majority of state governments and which has used stealth tactics to regain – and then to keep - the country’s political control in its own hands through the inherited weakness of with the Electoral College combined with massive voter suppression in critical states.

The latter has consisted most notably of restrictions of Early Voting locations and their accessibly which are particularly important to the working poor, rollbacks of laws allowing people to register and vote at the same time, and new photo-ID laws that placed strict limits on the types of identification are to be accepted at polls (in Texas gun permits held primarily by whites are acceptable, but not state school or employee IDs) according to The New York Times in 2015.  

Annals of Appropriation: The Blue Jeans Scandal

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Levi Strauss is probably writhing in his grave. Let’s set him at peace. The outrageous appropriation of his distinctive contribution to American national dress must end—and it must end soon. I’m calling for global closet searches and bon fires. Blue jeans belong in America on Americans.

Until recently I’ve been willing to classify the global dispersion of denim-wear as an extremely successful form of U.S. aid. It’s clear that no American contribution to world welfare has been more popular than blue jeans. They’re practical. They’re durable. They’re machine washable and don’t need ironing—and they don’t wrinkle, if you get the right fit. Above all, they’re cheap. Any one can afford them.

Correction: they should be cheap, which is why I propose to prosecute especially severely those who have not only appropriated our national dress but undermined our national identity, turning good old blue jeans into obscenely expensive designer wear of the sort affordable only by the 5%, thus discriminating against ordinary Americans, who have a right to display their heritage on their own bodies. At the very least these alien brands must named and shamed. Furthermore, patriotic Americans must boycott the entire fashion line any designer who presumes to exploit jeans without concern for American sensitivities.

Excuse me if I also propose that such shocking rip offs be ripped off any non-American daring to flaunt them within 24 hours after a publically announced cut off date. Those who end up in a mooning posture in the middle of a winter snow storm will have only themselves to blame for their exposure.

For the longest time I believed that it might be culturally sensitive, even generous, to overlook this egregious cultural theft, preferring to see it as a form of respect and admiration. But no more—and I’ll tell you why. I bought a great big fuzzy Uzbek sheepskin hat while I was in Central Asia a few months ago. It gets cold in Santa Fe, and an Uzbek hat would solve the annual frostbitten ears problem. If it’s stupid to reinvent the wheel, after all, it’s stupid to reinvent a superb cold weather hat.

No, I wasn’t going to wear my Uzbek prize to a Halloween party replete with ghouls and witches, Batmen and Wonder Women, wookies and vampires. I wasn’t going to turn it into the Central Asian version of “black face.” I was going to wear it as intended, thank you very much.

But just this week I was informed in no uncertain terms that wearing an Uzbek hat as a winter head covering in America would be a highly visible example of cultural appropriation, an affront to proud, respectable Uzbeks—as if it hadn’t been sold to me by proud respectable Uzbeks out to make an honest living. It would be particularly shocking, I was told, on the part of a person who sometimes thinks of herself as a global citizen.

But whoa! Isn’t global citizenship about coming together, getting to know one another and sharing? Sharing music. Sharing ideas. Sharing food. In sum: treasuring traditions and also mixing things up. The sort of thing that Yo Yo Ma does so well. Also the sort of thing that’s truly American. We are such a mish-mash of cultures and customs that we exist in a constant dizzy state of promiscuous cultural appropriation. It’s creative. It’s exciting. What sane person would wish (or try) to unmix the mix? (Except for Donald J. Trump, perhaps, who prefers to divide and conquer.)

I read not so long ago that an American university cafeteria had been excoriated for serving inauthentic Thai and Chinese food, a particularly insulting form of cultural appropriation evidently. Well, if Thai and Chinese has to be removed from the menu, shouldn’t pizza go, too? And French fries! And tamales? And sushi? And so on. Must I eat nothing but baked beans and succotash because of my New England heritage? Must I close the curtains and swear everyone to secrecy when I cook (highly inauthentic) Indian curries?

And so I’m hitting back. If I have to empty my closet because it’s full of Indian garb I’m now forbidden to wear (although no one in India thought it was offensive), it’s time to put a stop to the promiscuous and heinous appropriation of American jeans. What are young men everywhere in the world wearing? Jeans. What are their sisters wearing? Jeans. What are covered women in Saudi Arabia wearing under their abeyas? Jeans. What’s taking the place of sarongs in Tahiti? Jeans. What did smugglers smuggle into the Soviet Union? Jeans. What did our Uzbek guides in Tashkent wear? Jeans. It has to stop.

Jeans are an American cultural treasure. Given the current thinking on cultural appropriation, all jeans must be repatriated or destroyed. Those who resist must be shamed and shunned, if not shot.  Let Levi Strauss rest in peace.

 

The Trump Election: It's Too Soon For Putin to Crow

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

After PBS called the election in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, I tried to sleep. Nightmares, some involving a nuclear holocaust, kept waking me up. The idea of a President Trump terrified me. But the fact that Trump had won the election fair and square (even if nastily)  was also a reality that I and others who’d supported Hillary Clinton would have to live with, so I decided to see if there was anything I might have missed as I watched his candidacy through oppositional eyes. I think I found something.

As I recall, American President-elect Donald Trump said something like this of Russian President Putin at one point, “It would be nice if we could get along.” Then he added a qualifier, something like, “We’ll see.”

Listening selectively, the Russian power elite is now basking in Trump’s victory.  Putin himself is smirking. Let them. It may well be that the Russians have already been outsmarted by the greatest political con artist of them all.

Sure, when challenged during the presidential debates, Trump refused to concede that Moscow might be giving him a boost by hacking and leaking emails from his opposition. And Trump’s speculation about the possibility of leaving NATO should NATO partners not contribute more appropriately to Western joint defense might also be contributing to the probably false confidence that Moscow appears to be wallowing in.

So, what else suggests that Hillary might have been right when she accused Trump of being Putin’s puppet? For one, his refusal to criticize Putin’s  authoritarianism, calling him instead an admirably strong leader.  Also his pathetic purring when stroked by Putin. Add the Paul Manafort connection with Russia via Ukraine, and although the Trump team has denied meeting with Russian officials before the election, as Russian Foreign Ministry spokespersons have recently claimed, it is true that Trump's national security advisor Lt. General Michael Flynn sat next to Putin during a 1915 dinner sponsored by a Russian propaganda machine masquerading as a  TV station.  And how about Trump's shocking (or convenient) ignorance of Russia's appropriation of Crimea?  Maybe the fear that Trump will indeed be Putin’s patsy is not entirely unfounded.

And yet it's more likely that the Russians are crowing too soon. First of all, there’s nothing about Trump’s personality that suggests that he wants to be anything but top dog, which he will be as President of the United States. Not only is he unlikely to subordinate his (or America's) interests to Putin's, his personal mode isn’t as team player, but as team Captain. What’s more, as leader of Team USA, he’s unlikely to want anything less than an Olympic gold medal, especially since he scorns and abhors losers, which means he’s not about to be one, if he can help it.

Vladimir Putin is clever. He’s very good at keeping the U.S. and the rest of the world off balance. He may have met his match, however. Trump executed almost flawlessly a brilliant strategy for winning the presidency, all the while making it seem as if he were nothing but an ignorant, bigoted boob.  By so appearing, in fact, he's fooled jubilant Russian officials into coming very close to admitting to the hacking they were accused of. 

Putin doesn’t understand any of this yet, because he has fallen victim to a critical element of the Trump strategy, an element that Trump actually made explicit in the course of his political campaign: keep the enemy guessing. Keep him off guard. Why else would Trump have pretended to ignorance of Russian hacking? He was briefed, after all. He knew everything that Hillary knew. Why else would he let it seem as if he wanted nothing more than to be best buds with a rival big power president? Because that’s what deal makers do. Even professional diplomats are nice to those they hope to outsmart.  Then they walk away with the pot. Finally, Trump is an empire builder.   His instinct (like Putin's) is to acquire properties, not to toss them away for nothing.

My hunch is that the new Captain of Team USA has every intention of making sure the country he’s about to head up is a winner and a leader on the international stage.  Yes, he spoke only of domestic policies in his victory speech, he's said a few things about not being over extended internationally and he's not a joiner unless there's plenty in it for him, which means pacts and alliances will be approached warily, but if there's anything we've learned about Donald Trump it's the malleability of his positions.  Weasel word Trump!  And see above for his love of misleading other players.

Nevertheless, I still worry about Donald Trump's twitter tantrums when it comes to nuclear decisions.  And other things, too.