Fire and ICE

“You can’t walk in with guns. You just can’t. You can’t walk in with guns, you can’t do that.”

- Donald Trump

“You cannot bring a firearm, loaded, with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want – it’s that simple. You don’t have a right to break the law.”

- Kash Patel

This is a story of two men who took their guns to a street protest. One is named Kyle Rittenhouse; the other is Alex Pretti.

On the evening of August 25, 2020, Kyle Rittenhouse was in the city of Kenosha, Wisconsin, which was undergoing a second day of unrest in the wake of the shooting death of Jacob Blake, Jr. by a police officer. Rittenhouse was 17 years old and openly carrying a semi-automatic rifle, which, because of his age, it was illegal for him to own.

On the evening of January 24, 2026, Alex Pretti was in the city of Minneapolis, Minnesota, which was experiencing unrest in the aftermath of the killing of Renee Good earlier in the month. Pretti was 37 years old and openly carrying a cellphone. In his waistband or pocket he had a pistol, which he was licensed to carry.

Before the evenings were over, Rittenhouse had used his rifle to shoot and kill two men and wound a third. Pretti never touched his gun. Videos show an ICE agent removing it from his body while he was on the ground being pummeled by five other agents – after which two agents fired 10 bullets into his prostrate body.

Kenosha County prosecutors charged Rittenhouse with two counts of murder. He was tried and acquitted on the grounds of self-defense.

Pretti died at the scene, the victim of 10 shots fired in five seconds.

Aftermath

After the trial, Rittenhouse visited Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, was interviewed by Tucker Carlson, and made guest appearances at Turning Point USA rallies. Trump called him “a really nice young man.” Even before he had been acquitted, then-Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz offered Rittenhouse an internship, an offer that set off a fierce competition: Arizona Congressman Paul Gosar said he would arm-wrestle Gaetz for Rittenhouse’s services, and both Madison Cawthorn and Lauren Boebert also offered internships. Marjorie Taylor Greene introduced a bill to award Rittenhouse the Congressional Gold Medal.

Pretti, who was a nurse in the intensive care unit of the veterans hospital in Minneapolis, was also the object of high-level attention. Stephen Miller called him a “domestic terrorist . . . who had tried to assassinate federal law enforcement.” Calling the Border Patrol agents the real victims, Gregory Bovino accused Pretti of wanting “to do massive damage and assassinate law enforcement.” Kristi Noem accused him of domestic terrorism and assaulting the ICE officers. Pam Bondi blamed Minnesota’s politicians for the shooting.

The common theme running through the government’s reactions to both shootings was to blame the victims. In both cases the victims were dead.

Turning Point?

On Tuesday Bruce Springsteen released his new song, “Streets of Minneapolis” (video). One song doesn’t make a revolution, but Springsteen’s evokes memories of the protest songs of the 1960s, when music was an essential part of the Civil Rights and anti-war movements. Peaceful protests in the face of official violence and lies are the difference between a autocratic state and a vibrant democracy.

I end with a poem Robert Frost published a century before ICE became an acronym.

Fire and Ice (1923)

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Las Vegas on the Levant

“It became necessary to destroy this town to save it.”

- Unnamed U.S. Army major explaining the obliteration of Bien Tre, South Vietnam, to AP reporter Peter Arnett, February 7, 1968

They say a picture is worth a thousand words.

This picture left me speechless.

It is, as the sign says, a schematic for the New Gaza, which Jared Kushner presented at last week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Kushner was speaking for the Board of Peace, the recently formed organization of which his father-in-law, Donald Trump, is chairman for life. A permanent board seat can be had for $1 billion.

When I say I found the image distasteful, I don’t want anyone to infer that my revulsion is merely aesthetic. I certainly find it ugly, but as the Romans used to say, de gustibus non disputandum est (“matters of taste are not to be disputed”); and if you like gold bathroom fixtures, well, good for you. But its garishness is not just an affront to my personal sensibilities; it mocks the land on which it will be built, the devastation which preceded it, and the people it seeks to eradicate culturally once they have been removed physically. That is to say, its ugliness doesn’t just lie on the surface – on the hideous buildings, the swank beaches, and the rich tourists it seeks to attract. It goes deep into the soil of Palestine in its effort to divert us from the devastation of the old Gaza that paved the way for the New Gaza.

REUTERS/Hatem Khaled

Those of us old enough to have witnessed urban renewal in American cities in the 1950s and 1960s will remember the razing of slums, displacement of residents, and gentrification of neighborhoods. In hindsight, most of these efforts have been criticized as misguided, and several of the housing projects were subsequently dismantled, although the urban reformers of the day believed they were doing the right thing.

But the urban renewal of the Gaza Strip is something else entirely. This is a real estate deal designed by real estate dealers, and there is a lot of money to be made. The Israelis and Hamas handled the land clearance, always the most difficult part of assembling large parcels of land for development. More than 90 percent of housing units have been destroyed in Gaza since Opctober 7, 2023; over 71,000 people have been killed; and virtually all of the 2+ million residents of the Gaza Strip have been displaced, most of them more than once.

Who are these people? Over 99 percent are Palestinians, primarily refugees from the 1948 resettlement and their descendants. They are overcrowded and impoverished (almost half the people – and 70 percent of young people – are unemployed). They are young (almost half the population is 14 or under), and they have one of the highest fertility rates in the world. They are literate (more than 97 percent of the people can read and write). And there are more child amputees in Gaza than anywhere else in the world.

Last year, President Trump announced that the U.S. would “take over” the Gaza Strip, "level the site" and rebuild it. He spoke of the United Sates “owning that piece of land” and creating “the Riviera of the Middle East.” His plan calls for evicting the current residents, leveling the place, and starting from scratch. He would disperse them to camps in different Middle Eastern countries. Asked if the Palestinians would have a right to return, he responded, "Why would they want to return?"

Why indeed? The New Gaza is not for them. Reminders of genocide are not good for business.

Blind Patriots

"Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.”

- Mark Twain.

Musing about patriotism: five historic quotes.

1. "My country, right or wrong." These words were part of a toast Stephen Decatur gave in 1816. Dubbed “the Conqueror of the Barbary Pirates,” Decatur was in many ways the founding father of the U.S. Navy,

   Context: What Decatur actually said was, "Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong!” Not as snappy as the oft-repeated five words, to be sure. But Decatur did express the hope that the country would strive to be in the right; and he limited his reach to foreign affairs.

2. “Partisan politics stops at the water’s edge.” Arthur Vandenberg, a Republican senator from Michigan, who reframed Decatur’s theme after World War II.

   Context: Vandenberg had been an isolationist until Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, when he became a committed internationalist. He supported a bipartisan approach to foreign affairs during Harry Trumans presidency, forcefully backing NATO, the Marshall Plan, and the United Nations. While Americans could have political disagreements at home, he believed, we must present a united front to the world. I grew up with that idea, which led me to enlist in the army when the country was entering a war I opposed and against which I protested when my term was up. On May 4, 1970 I was stationed at NATO Headquarters when members of the Ohio National Guard opened fire on anti-war protestors at Kent State University, killing four and wounding nine others. Determining the water’s edge suddenly became very complicated.

3. “My country, right or wrong; if right to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.” Carl Schurz, another Republican senator, amended Decatur’s declaration on the Senate floor in 1872.

   Context: Schurz was an immigrant who had fled from Prussia after the European revolutions of 1848. In his adopted homeland he became an attorney and newspaper editor, Civil War general, early member of the Republican Patery, and the country’s first German-American U.S. Senator. As with so many immigrants, Schurz believed strongly in the possibilities of his new country; as a reformer he sought to correct what he perceived as its faults.

4. ‘Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.’ Samuel Johnson, an 18th-century British writer called “arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history.”

   Context: His biographer, James Boswell, expanded on Johnson’s words: “Patriotism having become one of our topicks, Boswell wrote, “Johnson suddenly uttered, in a strong determined tone, an apothegm, at which many will start: ‘Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.’ But let it be considered that he did not mean a real and generous love of our country, but that pretended patriotism which so many, in all ages and countries, have made a cloak for self-interest.” It was instructive to read these words as Donald Trump addressed the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

5. "We have come to a point where it is loyalty to resist, and treason to submit," Carl Schurz.

   Context: And so we return to Schurz in a speech he gave on March 23, 1859, just a year before the start of the Civil War. As masked and armed ICE members put their “boots on the ground” in American cities – and now in my own state of Maine – and as the president demands the annexation of Greenland, Carl Schurz’s words resonate. Donald Trump speaks for himself, not for me. True patriotism demands more than blind allegiance. It calls Americans to come together in a crisis. We are in a crisis now.

Pretty Baby

“I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation . . . .“ Book of Exodus (20:5)

Hessy Levinsons Taft died on New Years day at her home in San Francisco. She was 91. Born in Berlin in 1934, she had come to New York City with her family in 1949. After graduating from Barnard College in 1955, she entered the PhD program in chemistry at Columbia University. There she met her future husband, a distinguished mathematician named Earl Taft. They both taught at Rutgers until Hessy left academia to raise their two children. Years later she joined the faculty at St. John’s University, where her research focused on water sustainability. I had never heard of Hessy Taft before, and all my information comes from her obituary and from Wikipedia.

Dr. Taft’s life is remembered, not for her academic or familial accomplishments, however, but for a photograph taken of her when she was six months old by a well-known photographer named Hans Ballin. Ballin entered that photo, along with several others, into a contest to find Germany’s “most beautiful Aryan baby.” This was a big deal: Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi government’s Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, was the contest’s judge. Goebbels pronounced Hessy’s photo the winner. What followed was a whirlwind of images of the baby all across the country: in advertisements, on postcards, and on the cover of “Sonne ins Haus” (“Sun in the Home”), a pro-Nazi magazine and one of the few periodicals to have survived Hitler’s press shutdown.

This was, to say the least, ironic. Hessy Levinsons was Jewish.

The closest modern-day equivalent I can think of would be if Stephen Miller anointed, as the cutest baby of the new American empire, a child of Venezuelan immigrants.

Winning the contest was more than ironic. It was dangerous. Hetty’s parents were Latvian-born Jews who had emigrated to Berlin in the late 1920s to pursue their careers as opera singers in what was then the artistic capital of Europe. When the cleaning woman brought them a copy of the magazine cover, they were scared for their lives. “I can laugh about it now,” Hessy said 80 years later, “but if the Nazis had known who I really was, I wouldn’t be alive.”

The odds of Hessy winning the contest were below infinitesimal. First of all, it’s safe to assume she was the only Jewish entry. Second, the Nazis were obsessed with race and eugenics, and they produced enormous amounts of “scientific” research – from measuring ideal facial characteristics and coding eye color to ensuring that no drop of impure blood went undetected – to demonstrate their own racial superiority and to prove that others, especially Jews, were subhuman. (Such efforts were also pursued in Jim Crow America and apartheid South Africa.)

There are two morals to Hetty’s story. The first is that all babies are beautiful, especially to their parents. That’s why politicians kiss them. The second is that, if the most beautiful Aryan baby – chosen by Joseph Goebbels himself, no less – is a Jew, isn’t it time to put all the rancid theories of racial purity and ethnic inferiority in the dung heap where they belong?

Stephen Miller appears to disagree. His target is immigrants, particularly those from “third world countries” – and not just those who are undocumented or newly arrived, but those whose families have lived here for generations.

“With a lot of these immigrant groups, not only is the first generation unsuccessful. Again, Somalia is a clear example here,” he said on Fox News, “You see persistent issues in every (italics mine) subsequent generation. So you see consistent high rates of welfare use, consistent high rates of criminal activity, consistent failures to assimilate.”

Goebbels would be pleased.

The Grace of Tatianna Schlossberg

“Our language is the reflection of ourselves.”

- Cesar Chavez

Gauged by the headlines, the man of the year for 2025 was Donald Trump. He’s undoubtedly very happy, as those are the metrics that matter to him. For me, however, Tatianna Schlossberg, who died less than a week ago at but 35 years old, had a far greater and more meaningful impact on my life in 2025, and I hope that her story will resonate across this country long after the depredations of the current era have passed.

That story, so tragically short, is by now well known. Daughter of Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg, granddaughter of John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Tatianna was an environmental reporter whose most touching story turned out to be her own obituary, which she published in the November 22nd issue of The New Yorker under the headline, “A Battle with my Blood.” Who can forget her opening line? “When you are dying, at least in my limited experience, you start remembering everything.”

“at least in my limited experience”. That six-word phrase, coming between four words on either side of it, takes your breath away. So unassuming and yet so evocative, it pulls you at once into the story of a woman who has something important to say, something that you will not soon forget. Tatianna writes her short essay in plain language, using straightforward declarative sentences that invite your empathy but do not ask for your pity. They break your heart.

I have written before about Donald Trump’s assault on language and why that matters so much. I am hardly the only one to have remarked on this, of course, but I felt as I read “A Battle with my Blood” the hope of a revival of our language, of its role, not as a crude bludgeon of attack and degradation, but as a means of communicating thoughts to others and also to ourselves. For how can I know what I am really feeling until I have put it into words that I can understand? Our common language can be so beautiful when we use it carefully and thoughtfully.

What we have done to our language reflects what we have done – and continue to do – to our country and now to the world. We have vulgarized it, ripped from it any notion of nuance or modesty, deprived it of craftmanship and so of beauty. There is no poetry in it and no humanity. We have weaponized it, so that we can debase those whom we do not like and divide us against ourselves.

“A Battle with my Blood” was published on November 22nd, 2025, the 62nd anniversary of the assassination of Tatianna Schlossberg’s grandfather. He was America’s first Catholic president, a descendent of the nation’s most famous family of Irish immigrants. But Schlossberg, of course, is not an Irish name, and all four of Tatianna’s paternal great-grandparents were Orthodox Jews, born near the Vorskla River in Central Ukraine. They came to this country by way of Ellis Island.

This is the America I want to reclaim, the land where Kennedys marry Schlossbergs, and Orthodox Jews and Irish Catholics settle down to build a life together, one in which diversity, though often difficult, can open us to new customs, new cultures, and new ideas. One in which our language can once again teach us how to laugh and sing together and how to love each other. Reclaiming our language can be one step in reclaiming our country.

This is the message I take from the short life and tragic death of Tatianna Schlossberg.

On hearing that the Kennedy Center had been renamed

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose,
By any other name would smell as sweet.”

- Juliet

Sometimes, these days, words fail me, and when they do I often turn to poetry. Yesterday, for example, when I read that the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts had, without warning, become the Trump-Kennedy Center, I had no more words. With all the carnage going on around us, the renaming of a building might seem a trivial thing. But somehow it symbolized all the pettiness, the self-aggrandizement, the puffery, the strutting dishonesty of this presidency. The board of trustees voted unanimously for the change . . . well, except for Congresswoman Joyce Beatty of Ohio, a board member who had called into the meeting on Zoom. “It was such a surprise to me when they said we’re going to rename it,” she later told The New York Times. “I said, ‘Oh my gosh,’ and pushed my button. But then I was muted. Everything was cut off . . . and then they immediately said, ‘Well, it’s unanimous. Everybody is for it.’”

Of course we are.

In 1818 Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote Ozymandias, a sonnet about the transitory nature of power and the hubris of tyrants. But it is worth noting that the king’s statue is not the only thing that has been destroyed by time and history. He has also turned the empire over which he ruled into sand.

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said – “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

 And on the pedestal, these words appear:

“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

The Debasement of Language and the Rise of Violence

“When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less..”

- Humpty Dumpty

On July 2, 1881, President James A. Garfield was shot at the Sixth Street railroad station in Washington, D.C. For two months he lived in agony, the victim of primitive knowledge and medical malpractice. He died on September 19, 1881, just six months after he had assumed the presidency. On February 27, 1882 Secretary of State James G. Blaine eulogized the late president before both houses of Congress.

I bring this up because several people urged me to watch the recent Netflix series, Death by Lightning, which covers the last years of Garfield’s life, and also because Blaine’s eulogy is considered one of the finest speeches ever delivered in Congress.

We now live in a time when language is daily being debased as never before in our history. It is not just that Donald Trump and his administration seem incapable of speaking in complete sentences or following a coherent train of thought, it is that they have forged their inarticulateness into a weapon. Like Humpty Dumpy, their words mean whatever they choose them to mean. Language is no longer a means of communicating with each other; it has become, instead, another way to attack each other. The more I read Trump’s presidential orders and listen to his toxic, repetitious meanderings, the more I realize they say nothing. And that is why they are so dangerous, for their emptiness points the way to violence, bigotry, and hatred, nothing else. Language has consequences, even when it is inarticulate.

And so, I return to Blaine’s eulogy of Garfield – to the final two paragraphs of his long speech in which he paints the last moments of the life of his sometime rival and longtime friend, in which he demonstrates that words can heal as well as harm:

“Great in life, he was surpassingly great in death. For no cause, in the very frenzy of wantonness and wickedness, by the red hand of murder, he was thrust from the full tide of this world's  interest, from its hopes, its aspirations, its victories, into the visible presence of death – and he did not quail. Not alone for the one short moment in which, stunnedand dazed, he could give up  life, hardly aware of its relinquishment, but through days of deadly languor, through weeksof  agony, that was not less agony because silently borne, with clear sight and calm courage, he  looked into his open grave. What blight and ruin met his anguished eyes, whose lips may tell! –  what brilliant broken plans, what baffled high ambitions, what sundering of strong warm  manhood's friendships, what bitter rending of sweet household ties! Behindhim a proud,  expectant nation, a great host of sustaining friends; a cherished and happy mother, wearing the  full, rich honors of her early toil and tears; the wife of his youth, whose whole life lay in his; the  little boys not yet emerged from childhood's day of frolic; the fair young daughter; the sturdy  sons just springing into closest companionship, claiming every day and every day rewarding a  father's love and care; and in his heart the eager, rejoicing power to meet all demand. Before  him, desolation and great darkness. And his soul was not shaken. His countrymen were thrilled  withinstant, profound, and universal sympathy. Masterful in his mortal weakness, he became the  center of  nation's love, enshrined in the prayers of the world. But all the love and all the  sympathy could not share with him his suffering. He trod the wine-press alone. With unfaltering  front he faced death. With unfailing tenderness he took leave of life. Above the demoniac hiss of  the assassin's bullet he heard the voice of God. With simple resignation he bowed to the divinedecree.

“As the end drew near, his early craving for the sea returned. The stately mansion of power had  been to him the wearisome hospital of pain; and he begged to be taken from its prison walls,  from its oppressive, stifling air, from itshomelessness and its hopelessness. Gently, silently, the  love of a great people bore the pale sufferer to the longed-for healing of the sea, to live or to die,  as God should will, within sight of its heaving billows, within sound of its manifold voices. With  wan, fevered face tenderly lifted to the cooling breeze, he looked out wistfully upon the ocean's  changingwonders – on its far sails, whitening in the morning light; on its restless waves, rolling shoreward to break and die beneath the noonday sun; on the red clouds of evening, arching low  to the horizon; on the serene and shining pathway of the stars. Let us think that his dying eyes  read a mystic meaning which only the rapt and parting soul may know. Let us believe that in the  silence of the receding world he heard the great waves breaking on a farther shore, and felt  already upon his wasted brow the breath of the eternal morning.”

No King

“In a free society, all are involved in what some are doing. Some are guilty; all are responsible.”

- Abraham Joshual Heschel (quoted by M. Gessen in “How to Be a Good Citizen When Your Country Does Bad Things”)

We all know the Declaration of Independence. It’s the founding document of our nation, which declared, 249 years ago, that this country would have no king.

Written primarily by Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration is a document of three parts:

The first is an inspiring introduction with perhaps the most memorable sentence in our history: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The equally rousing third part is the declaration itself: “We, therefore, the representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare, that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states.” It ends with the 56 signers pledging “to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.” They were not signing some random petition; they knew if they failed they would lose all three.

The second part is a long list of grievances that almost nobody reads. But earlier this week, in a class I am giving called “The Soul of America,” we actually read the list – and were stunned by how eerily it reverberates today. From ignoring laws and keeping standing armies in our midst to imposing tariffs and making the military superior to civil authority to depriving us of trial by jury to deporting us to foreign countries, it reads like an 18th-century playbook for the Trump administration.

I had long thought that “No Kings” was a silly name for the weekly protests against tyranny, just more fodder for Trump’s limitless appetite for self-aggrandizement. Now it seems particularly apt.

Here is an abridged list of grievances the signers enumerated in the Declaration of Independence:

The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

• He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

• He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

• He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

• He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

• He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected.

• He has endeavored to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners.

• He has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

• He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

• He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of our legislatures.

• He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to the civil power.

• He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation:

  • For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us;

  • For protecting them, by a mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states;

  • For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world;

  • For imposing taxes on us without our consent;

  • For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury;

  • For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offences.

• He has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us.

• He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us.

In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms. Our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." George Santayana.

Stand Firm, Think Big

“If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.”

- Thomas Paine

That the man who recently declared war on his own country – or at least the urban part of it – did not win the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize should not have come as a surprise. The Trump administration was displeased, of course: "President Trump will continue making peace deals, ending wars, and saving lives,” posted a White House spokesman. “He has the heart of a humanitarian, and there will never be anyone like him who can move mountains with the sheer force of his will. The Nobel Committee proved they place politics over peace." But is the man who wants to rename the Defense Department the Department of War and who told the secretary of that department to “use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military National Guard, but military, because we're going into Chicago very soon” really a man of peace? And is the 19-second video showing a gold-crowned Trump in a fighter jet dropping feces on peaceful protesters how the Nobel committee wants to present itself? We have sunk to a new low.

Mockery isn’t humor. It’s cruelty dressed up for a cheap laugh. It’s the weapon of a bully, and this bully flaunts it. “The Trump gang’s compulsion to debase and cheapen almost everything they touch is far more than a matter of style,” Michelle Goldberg recently wrote. But “what’s curious,” she notes, “is not Trump’s eagerness to degrade us, but his uncontrollable urge to defile himself and his office.” And, I would add, our country.

And, on some level I cannot explain, it’s working. Despite all the polls showing how unpopular Trump and his policies are, he remains unrestrained. That is due in no small part to his dismantling of the institutions that have stabilized our political system for 250 years – from a free press to independent courts, from our trust in elections to our reliance on now-gutted government programs. One result is the accelerating erosion of belief in either the government or in democracy itself, especially among the young, and most especially among young men. “Now, less than one-third of Americans under 30 trust the government,” noted researcher Christina Iruela Lane. “Only 16% believe democracy is working well for young people.”

In their book, Rural Versus Urban, Suzanne Mettler and Trevor Brown found that, on something called the “feeling thermometer,” white rural Americans rate Blacks at 70 (of 100), Hispanic Americans at 67, gay men at 57, illegal immigrants at 39, and Democrats at 14, even though rural and urban Americans “barely disagree” on policy issues. “We are bitterly divided,” Mettler told Ezra Klein. “And the divide is over partisanship.”

That the two major parties in our two-party system agree on many of the same policies but viscerally despise each other is not a good place for the country to be – especially as the president unrelentingly stokes that hatred to keep us divided. Are we on the brink of a crisis comparable to the Civil War? Do the destruction of our institutions and the erosion of public trust prefigure a slide into fascism?

So often I hear these days that people are not interested in ideas, that we must think small. Did Thomas Jefferson think small in Philadelphia in 1776? Or Lincoln at Gettysburg in 1863. Or MLK on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial a century later? As in those times, we are called once again to define the country we want America to be and to resist the one we are in danger of becoming.

That requires us to stand firm, to listen closely, to organize locally, and to think big.

Definition and Diversity

“Our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and the test of our civilization.”

- Mahatma Gandhi

A new Democratic think tank has emerged to challenge the party’s current thinking and policy ideas. The aim of the Searchlight Institute is to: “Disrupt rigidity. Think Big. Spark a Realignment.” So far, so good. Sign me up.

In an interview with Reid Epstein of The New York Times, Adam Jentleson, the group’s founder, singled out two issues the Democrats need to dial back in order to broaden their appeal: climate change and L.G.B.T.Q rights. That’s when the Searchlight Institute and I parted company.

For these are not fringe issues that have been hijacked by narrow constituencies at the expense of the broader party. On the contrary, the future of the planet and the right of each person to define themselves – both as to who they are and who they aspire to be – are foundation stones of any political movement I care to join.

The current Republican party has both caricatured and demonized these issues and presented them as evidence that the Democratic Party has been taken over by woke radicals who are out of touch with ordinary Americans. That message has been gaining traction, not only among Republicans, but also among Democrats.

It’s time for Democrats to stop accepting definitions imposed on them by their opponents and then scrambling to change their policies to accommodate the criticism. If this keeps going, the Trump administration will be soon redefining the entire country right before our eyes. Or have I missed something?

Think about climate change. The issue is too big to tackle, our politicians say. It’s global and other countries aren’t doing their share. It’s also bad for business, and Trump says it’s a hoax. And while we dither, the earth gets hotter, the oceans higher, and the storms more devastating. Some hoax.

On the other hand, we are told that the issue of L.B.G.T.Q rights is too small. Such a fuss over so few people. But this issue goes to the core of democracy, which must constantly navigate between individual rights and community values. My ability to define myself is the essence of individualism, and my neighbors’ willingness to accept me as I am is the lifeblood of community. Together, in tension, individualism and community constitute the two pillars of democracy.

Instead of reducing things to their smallest component – how many trans athletes are there in Maine high-school athletic programs, for example? (four) – we need to see them as part of something bigger. Every human rights movement – from civil rights to workers’ rights to women’s rights to gay rights – began as an assertion of identity. You will no longer define us; we will define ourselves. Over the last century Americans have broadened that sense of identity to include more and more people. Until now.

We need to think bigger, not by pandering to interest groups but by understanding the big issues that bind us together. Instead of caving in to those who would reduce climate change and L.B.G.T.Q rights to fringe issues, we need to create a vision that embraces both our unique individuality and our interconnectedness with all life. The key to this is diversity, a word that is being swiftly banished from both our politics and our language. But diversity is the link between environmental preservation and social justice, and it is fundamental to each. As the guiding principle of nature, it is our only defense against climate disaster. It is also the only way to resolve the tension between individualism and community, for it recognizes the importance of each of us in the mosaic of all of us. For in the end, how we treat the earth is nothing more than a measure of how we treat each other. 

I Dissent

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Martin Luther King, Jr.

Let me see if I‘ve got this straight.

If you live in Los Angeles, and you speak with a foreign accent or have brown skin or talk to your friends in Spanish or have a landscaping job, you can be picked up by ICE. That’s what the Supreme Court ruled Monday in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo. It was, predictably, a 6-3 decision, and since it was unsigned, it’s a little hard to know exactly what the majority was thinking. The three justices in the minority, however, left no doubt about their thoughts. “We should not have to live in a country where the government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish and appears to work a low-wage job,” wrote Justice Sonia Sotomayor. “Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent.”

Los Angeles is a Spanish name; it translates in English to the city of Angels. In fact, the six largest cities in California all have Spanish names: San Diego (Saint James), San Jose (Saint Joseph), San Francisco (Saint Francis), Fresno (ash tree), and Sacramento (sacrament). California is the most populous state in the nation, and its name is believed to derive from Calafia, the mythic queen in a 16th-century Spanish novel.

The Hispanic community has existed in California since 1683 and has long been the state’s largest ethnic group. In Los Angeles Latinos make up almost half the city’s population and are by far its largest group. This should not be surprising because California was part of Mexico until President James K. Polk invaded Mexico in 1846. Two years later he acquired California, as well as New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, and Nevada – all Spanish names that will undoubtedly soon be changed. Gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill in the Sierra Nevada foothills just as the war was ending, and the ensuing gold rush brought 300,000 prospectors from all over the world in search of hitting it big.

I recount this brief history, which will probably soon be stricken from the Smithsonian and future history books – but can still be found on Wikipedia – to illustrate the absurdity of declaring 47% of the population of Los Angeles (probably more if you count the well-tanned residents of Beverly Hills) fair game for federal arrest on their looks alone. Although racial profiling would seem to be barred by the Fourth Amendment, and is specifically prohibited by California law, the Supreme Court appears to have upended all that in in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo. Perhaps immigrant profiling is different from racial profiling.

While five justices were silent about their reasoning, Justice Kavanaugh offered a concurring opinion. (Concurring with what? you may ask, since there was no other opinion. I have no idea.) “To stop an individual for brief questioning about immigration status,” he wrote, “the Government must have reasonable suspicion that the individual is illegally present in the United States” – and while “apparent ethnicity alone” is not enough, it can be a “relevant factor.” He then cited as other corroborating factors the ones Justice Sotomayor listed in her dissent. As for his emphasis on “brief” stops, videos of encounters with ICE officers provide a chilling illustration of what that can mean. One commentator suggested that the reason no other justices signed on to Kavanaugh’s opinion was because they were too embarrassed to set their names to it.

Is this what has become of Dr. King’s dream?

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I can think of many reasons to disagree with Charlie Kirk. I can think of no reason to kill him. This is a personal tragedy for his family and friends. It is also a tragedy for democracy.

Hubris, Control, and the Death of Beauty

"I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness."

- Aldo Leopold

Maybe you seek beauty in nature. If so, you’d better hurry because the United States government has a very different idea about the “value” of nature, one that has nothing to do with beauty and everything to do with control. The current administration has little interest in protecting our few remaining wild places, nor in helping us learn how to live more harmoniously with the natural world. It has but a single goal: to control nature. Only then can we quantify what it can yield, monetize it, and pillage it for profit. Forget about all the values that nature already freely provides, from climate mitigation to ecosystem services to, well, beauty.

"We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us,” Aldo Leopold wrote. “When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect” – and thereby save both it and us.

America’s long tradition of protecting wild and beautiful places was codified in 1964 when Lyndon Johnson signed The Wilderness Act, which had taken eight years to get to his desk. Howard Zahniser, its foremost advocate, wrote perhaps the most succinct and poetic definition of the law’s intent: "A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain."

These days man is more like an unwelcome guest who grabs all the food and won’t leave. The Trump administration’s environmental and wilderness plans are the opposite of the spirit of the: to underfund national parks, build roads in roadless areas, clear cut old growth forests, and, of course, “drill, baby, drill” – in short, to make short-term and shortsighted economic gain the only value of the natural world.

“To those devoid of imagination,” Leopold wrote many years ago, “a blank space on a map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.”

Or maybe you seek beauty in museums and auditoriums, where the works of painters, sculptors, composers, and others have been distilled over time. Here, too, the role of our government is no longer to support the arts; it is to control them: to dictate what gets shown in museums, heard in auditoriums, and taught in classrooms; to ban pictures it doesn’t like and censor speech and thought it disagrees with. Here is a painting, “inspired by Rubens and Valazquez,” that Trump’s administration said proved the Smithsonian Institution is “OUT OF CONTROL.” They don’t like the subject matter.

Rigoberto A. Gonzalez, Refugees Crossing the Border Wall Into South Texas (2020)

Control is precisely the word for Trump’s agenda. Control nature. Control the arts. Control education. Control information. Control the Fed. Too often we focus so intently on the economic aspects of Trump’s policies that we overlook the cultural and spiritual wasteland they foreshadow. When the Nazis gained power in 1933, Joseph Goebbels immediately took over the news media, the arts, and information, and he turned them into propaganda to control the people. He could not see beauty; he could only see power. That is what’s at stake here.

Today, in America, the idea of beauty as a value in its own right – whether in nature or in art – has vanished from the public conversation. It is being removed from museums and bulldozed from the landscape. It is surely not a coincidence that ugliness and meanness of spirit now flourish in its place. For beauty is not ephemeral to our lives, nor to our communities; it is essential to the nourishment of our souls.

One Man’s Dream is Another Man’s Nightmare

“I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

- Martin Luther King, Jr., August 28, 1963.

August 28th, 2025. Today is the 62nd anniversary of the March on Washington. Of all the events I have missed in my life, this is the one that saddens me most. Instead, I had spent that summer with two high-school friends laying pipeline across the Jicarilla Apache Nation Reservation in northwestern New Mexico. It was a summer job before our freshman year in college, and we couldn’t wait for it to be over.

Meanwhile, 250,000 people of all colors and walks of life, from across the country, arriving by car, bus, and on foot from across the country, gathered at the Lincoln Memorial to protest for (for, not against) freedom and jobs. The last speaker of the day was a 34-year-old Baptist minister named Martin Luther King, Jr., who gave the most important speech of his life, which has forever after been known, simply, as “I Have a Dream.” (You can watch it here.)

Warren K. Leffler

Although I did not know it at the time, I had not completely missed that speech, for on a freezing weekend in February, Dr. King had come to a small boys boarding school in central Massachusetts and, in the course of that visit, had spoken to the school’s students, faculty, and neighbors, giving what turned out to be an early and still-unpolished draft of what he would later say in August. Those words changed me in ways I’m still discovering.

While King’s speech was the centerpiece of the March on Washington, there were thousands of others who made the day happen. Most importantly, perhaps, and least remembered, is a man named Bayard Rustin, one of the great organizers of his time.

Bayard Rustin was a living definition of diversity. Black, gay, a pacifist, a Quaker, and one courageous human being. He was absolutely committed to non-violence and had persuaded King to do away with armed guards, despite the constant threats on his life. Rustin was not visible at the march because Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina outed his homosexuality on the Senate floor, but he handled all security matters.

“Bayard was absolutely adamant that this was going to be a peaceful day,” recalled Joyce Ladner years later, “and all the press, before we planned the march, was virtually hysterical, you know, that they’d have to call in the National Guard, that if all these black folks came to Washington, there would be riots. And Bayard was determined that not only would the march be peaceful, but that it would go beyond that, that it would police itself, and that it would be absolutely non-violent” (State of Re:Union (Dec. 3, 2010) called “Bayard Rustin – Who is this Man?”, recently discovered by my daughter Gayley).

For weeks, Rustin trained groups of Washington police, black and white, in non-violent crowd control, and the result was a remarkably peaceful and joyful day.

Rowland Scherman

The march led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1963 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, now under assault from courts, executive orders, and cynical gerrymandering efforts. It also brought out the ugliness of the racism it opposed when, fewer than three weeks later, the Ku Klux Klan bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing Addie Mae Collins (14), Cynthia Wesley (14), Carole Robertson (14), and Carol Denise McNair (11).

Today, August 28, 2025. Can you imagine Donald Trump looking down from his helicopter on 250,000 protesters, most of them poor and working class, black and white together, marching resolutely to the Lincoln Memorial, where a gay Black pacifist is handling security? King’s dream is Trump’s nightmare.

Where does an event like this – peaceful, joyful, diverse, unified, determined – fit into Trump’s rewriting of America’s past? His history is not big enough to hold it. But America’s is.

That day 62 years ago does not yet reflect who we are as Americans. But it shows who we can be. It is beyond time to reclaim that dream and to make it a reality.

This country was founded on disobedience. For what is our Declaration of Independence but a declaration of disobedience? Resist.

Casual Cruelty and the American Dream

 "It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

- Macbeth, briefly King of Scotland 

As the manacles of the police state lock ever more tightly into place –

• Active-duty military members patrolling our city streets

• The dehumanization of immigrants

• The criminalization of political opponents

• The rewriting of history, both old and recent

• The replacement of the arts with propaganda

• The attacks on an independent press and academic freedom

• The politicization of our armed forces

• The defunding of public agencies and the extortion of private entities

• The elevation of “toughness” as the most ennobling of virtues

• The erosion of guardrails between public service and private enrichment

• The building of concentration camps

• The forced exportation of undesirables

• The expulsion of the homeless

• The attacks on voters and voting processes

• Masked and armed agents making unannounced arrests

• The suffocation of dissent

• The replacement of competence with zealotry

• The international realignment from democracies to dictatorships

• Demonizing the most vulnerable among us

• The disappearance of due process

• The cult of violence

• Extreme gerrymandering at the command of the White House

• The emphasis on division at the expense of unity

• The breakdown of civic decency

• The replacement of science by ideology

• The priority of order over law

• The perversion of language

• The ascendance of fear over hope

• The aggrandizement of power

• The cult of personality

• The denial of reality and the triumph of the big lie

• Casual cruelty

– it is time to stop looking away in the hope that four years will quickly pass and our own lives will be untouched.

This list, however incomplete you may find it, does not represent the principles with which you and I grew up. Has America lived up to those principles? No, we have not. But neither has America abandoned them. And we must not do so now.

I have written about some of these issues in earlier postings on this blog, I believe it’s worth going more deeply into what we are in danger of losing – and what we may already have lost. To that end I am planning to offer a discussion class this fall called “The Soul of America” – if America or any other country can be said to have a soul, particularly one that might be worth reclaiming. The course will be in much the same format as “Huck and James,” which I offered in the spring: 4 or 5 zoom sessions of 45 minutes, built around some short, seminal documents from American history, with plenty of opportunities for give and take and for thinking out loud together. We will focus on documents proclaiming what we aspire to be and on the reality of who we have been and are now. And we will see if we can come to some agreement about the soul of America, whether it is something worth saving or reclaiming, and how we can go about doing so.

If you are interested or want to learn more, please let me know at jamesgblaine2@gmail.com.

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* A note from a reader in response to my August 5th post, Sleight of Hand:

“I am surprised you did not touch upon the character aspects of cheating at golf. The reason cheating cannot be tolerated is because it is too easy. Absent the “moral prohibition“ there would essentially be no game at all. Cheating at golf . . . is a serious character flaw. Ask a Trump voter if he would like to have the president in his [golf] club and watch the laughter begin. Nobody would.”

Sleight of Hand

“There’s very few people that can beat me in golf,” Donald Trump

Please watch this short video.

First look for any objects on the green grass to the left and front of the man in the cart. There appear to be none. Then watch the two men wearing red vests walk in front of the cart. They are called caddies. Concentrate, not on the first man, but on the second, the man on the right. Pay particular attention to his right hand. Suddenly a small white object appears on the grass. It seems too small for a polo ball, too big for a moth ball, and too round for a marshmallow. Could it be a golf ball? Why, I believe it is. But where did it come from? Now the man in the white hat spies the round white object, gets out of his cart, and prepares to hit the ball.

That man is Donald Trump, the president of the United States. He is, by most accounts, a good golfer. He says his handicap is 2.8. which is very good. By contrast, I am not a good golfer and my handicap is 20.6. By that measure, the president is over seven times better than I am. In fairness, though, he plays a lot more than I do. How much of Trump’s handicap is due to such sleights of hand as shown in the video is hard to say, but in 2019, an accomplished and very funny journalist named Rick Reilly wrote a book on the president’s golf. It's called Commander in Cheat. In it he wrote of the caddies at Winged Foot Golf Club in Mamaroneck, NY, who have watched Trump kick his ball on the fairway so often that they nicknamed him “Pele.” The book is a good read, and very funny, although from the vantage point of 2025, the anecdotes seem less amusing.

For in the end, a golf score is only a number, and numbers seem to mean less and less these days. When the Department of Labor issued a jobs report last week that showed a weakening economy, the president called the numbers “rigged” and fired the director of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Upset with the environmental regulations that are currently keeping seven billion metric tons of auto emissions out of the atmosphere, Trump rescinded the endangerment finding, which has guided scientific analysis for the last 16 years. When he didn’t like the final numbers in the 2016 election, a mob of his supporters attacked the Capitol in an effort to overthrow the government. And on and on.

Donald Trump is not the best golfer ever to lead a country. That honor goes to Kim Jong Il, the former supreme leader of North Korea. In 1994 he played the first round of his life at the grand opening of the Pyongyang Golf Complex, which has the country’s only 18-hole course. Kim, who was then in his early 50s and stood 5’3”, shot a remarkable 38 under par. At 7,700 yards, the Pyongyang course is longer than the Masters in Augusta, Georgia, and Kim had 11 holes-in-one. “Kim had the best approach to conquering the sport of golf,” reported ESPN. “Have your national propaganda department lie for you.”

It isn’t clear whether Kim Jong Il ever played a second round of golf. But his record has never been equaled. He died in 2011, five years before Donald Trump became president. They never had a chance to play against each other. It would have been a heck of a match to watch.

Here We Are

“There is no daylight.”

“There is no daylight between the House Republicans, the House and the president on maximum transparency,” Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House of Representatives. July 21

Truer or scarier words have rarely been spoken.

For “daylight” is precisely what the framers sought to build into the Constitution in the first place.

Here is what James Madison wrote in Federalist #47: “The accumulation of all powers legislative, executive and judiciary in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many, and whether hereditary, self appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

Madison’s thinking on this derived from Montesquieu, who wrote in The Spirit of Law: “There can be no liberty where the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or body of magistrates.”

While the separation of powers is itself fundamental to democracy and to human liberty, it is not sufficient. It must be accompanied by a system of checks and balances in which each branch can check the overreach of the other two.

“A Legislative, an Executive and a judicial Power, comprehend the whole of what is meant and understood by Government,” wrote John Adams. “It is by balancing each of these Powers against the other two, that the Effort in human Nature toward Tyranny can alone be checked and restrained and any degree of Freedom preserved in the Constitution.”

The language, punctuation, and capitalization of these quotes may seem old-fashioned, but the message could not be clearer. A constitution in which the three branches operate separately but have certain abilities to check the aggrandizement of the others is the bedrock of democracy and of the liberty that comes from self-government.

This is no longer happening in the United States.

Speaker Johnson went on to say, in his very next sentence, that the president “has asked the attorney general to request the grand jury files of the court; all of that is in process.” This is the same attorney general, Pam Bondi whom, The Wall Street Journal reported, had told Trump in May that his name was in the Epstein files. The White House called the report “another fake news story” – and tried to change the subject by accusing Barack Obama of treason. The speaker then refused to hold a vote on the release of the files and sent the house into summer recess to prevent the matter from being brought to the floor. All that remains is for the supreme court to weigh in with yet another 6-3 decision boosting the power of the president. Then there will be no daylight indeed.

And for what? To cover up, once again, the personal peccadilloes of the president of the United States and to make the three branches of government protect him at all costs.

That the future of the republic should rely on such a sordid foundation as the assignations of Jeffrey Epstein and the questions surrounding his suicide in prison (while he was supposedly on suicide watch) is the latest example of how low we have sunk in just six months. Starvation stalks Gaza. Climate change has brought unprecedented heat levels from Houston to Chicago. Almost 12 million Americans are at risk of losing health care coverage, and U.S. Marines have been sent into the streets of our own cities.

That the Congress of the United States spends its time protecting the predations of powerful men at the expense of the lives of the young women who were their victims, not to mention the country they are supposedly governing, defies belief

Yet, to borrow from the last line of the Dorothy Parker story: “Yes, here we are,” she said. “Aren’t we?

State of Alarm

“As Maine goes, so goes the nation.”

With 1.4 million people, Maine ranks 42nd of the 50 states. It is the least densely populated state east of the Mississippi River and the most rural state in the country. Its lighthouse in West Quoddy Head – despite its name* – is the easternmost point in the United States. It is closer to both Africa and Europe than any other place in America.

Politically, Maine has a fascinating history. It joined the Union in 1820 as part of the Missouri Compromise. For 23 of the next the 29 election cycles, the governor, who is elected in September, came from the same party as the president, elected two months later. Hence the maxim: “As Maine goes, so goes the nation.” That ended in 1936, when Maine and Vermont were the only states to support Republican Alf Landon in Franklin Roosevelt’s landslide, which prompted FDR’s campaign manager to quip, “As Maine goes, so goes Vermont."

Currently, of Maine’s two senators, one, Susan Collins, is a Republican with a reputation as a moderate. And while she supports her party the vast majority of the time, she votes against Trump more than any other Republican. The other senator, Angus King, is an Independent who caucuses with the Democrats. A moderate on most matters, he has worked painstakingly to bring members of the two parties together. Because he believes that a major source of dysfunction in Washington is that Democrats and Republicans no longer know each other, he regularly invites members of both parties to share pizza at his apartment.

While Maine’s two House members are Democrats, they have little else in common. Chellie Pingree, who represents the city of Portland and the surrounding area, has a consistently progressive voting record. Jared Golden, who represents the other four-fifths of the state, is probably the most conservative Democrat in the House. Only two Democrats are more likely to vote with Trump than Golden. (The most likely – I kid you not – is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.)

Golden treads a delicate line. Although only 42 years old, he is serving his fourth term representing a district that has three times voted heavily for Trump. The former marine is an old-fashioned “labor and lunch pail” Democrat who carries a gun. He was one of five House Democrats to vote against the assault weapons ban in 2022.# After the mass shootings in Lewiston in October 2023 left 18 people dead and 13 wounded, Golden reversed himself, saying, “To the people of Lewiston, my constituents throughout the 2nd District, to the families who lost loved ones, and to those who have been harmed, I ask for forgiveness and support as I seek to put an end to these terrible shootings.” Those words very nearly cost him re-election.

Governor Janet Mills, a Democrat, is liberal on many issues, notably woman’s rights, less so on the environment and guns. Earlier this year, following a viral exchange over transgender athletes, she incurred the wrath of Donald Trump. He has since withheld millions of dollars in federal funds already approved for Maine’s schools, colleges, and health systems.

So there it is. Five very different officeholders in a small, rural state, with one thing in common: they all oppose the legislation Trump signed into law on July 4th. “The President may call it the ‘Big Beautiful Bill,’” wrote Gov. Mills, “but there’s nothing beautiful about it.”

“I've been in this business of public policy now for 20 years, eight years as governor, 12 years in the United States Senate,” said King. “I have never seen a bill that is this irresponsible, regressive, and downright cruel.” After JD Vance had cast the tiebreaking vote, King could be heard excoriating his Republican colleagues, something the collegial senator has never been known to do.

In 2018, I asked King about the consequences of Trump’s presidency. He told me that things were bad, but he did not believe the republic was in danger. He has clearly changed his mind. On April 29th, he told the Senate: “This President is engaged in the most direct assault on the Constitution in our history, and we in this body, at least thus far, are inert – and therefore complicit.”

This bill should make clear to everyone the danger this administration poses to the future of the nation. They are no longer making any attempt to hide it. Even the name, “Big Beautiful Bill,” is intentionally in your face. That Maine’s five leaders, from across a broad political spectrum, all opposed the bill is a sign of hope. That they fell short of stopping it should be a siren call for us all.

It’s time for Maine to once again become a bellwether, not just for Vermont, but for America. It’s time to revive the maxim, “As Maine goes, so goes the nation.” Above all, it’s time to take seriously the alarm sounded by these five disparate political leaders.

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* East Quoddy is across the bay in Nova Scotia.

# Reflecting Maine’s electorate, Collins, King, and Mills are also generally pro-gun.

The “I” Word

“I may do it. I may not do it. Nobody knows what I’m going to do.”

Donald Trump, when asked about bombing Iran, June 18, 2025.

While Bobby Kennedy’s people at Health and Human Services were making a series of confusing and contradictory decisions about vaccine research, I got Covid. I didn’t take it personally; I’m sure the timing was coincidental. Covid ain’t what it used to be, but it’s not much fun. Apart from an endless cough, my main symptoms were fatigue and depression, both of which are still hanging around long after the virus itself has gone.

Depressed is not what I want to feel in these times as I watch Donald Trump dismantling the institutions of this country, not one by one, but all at once. As someone who came of age in the turbulent 1960s, I have not always been sympathetic to the role institutions play in the life and health of the nation. Not all institutions are good, and none is perfect. Slavery, for example, was America’s “peculiar institution,” one that threatened both the existence and the soul of the nation. And I spent three years in the army at a time when National Guard troops fired into student protesters at Kent State, killing four and wounding nine.

But institutions, I have learned, are the glue that holds the country together. The most basic are the three branches of government as set forth in the Constitution, three separate branches that are meant to check each other even as they work together as single whole. This secular trinity is a difficult concept to wrap your brain around, and yet, except for the Civil War, it has held us together through some very tough times.

Our constitutional form of government grew out of the Enlightenment, which had taken firm hold in Europe and America by the mid-18th century. The Enlightenment elevated reason over passion, which is the other great foundation stone of our republic. From those two pillars – the separation of powers and the primacy of reason – grew a state marked by representative government and based on the rule of law, in which both individual rights and religious liberty were protected.

These ideas stood in contrast to the absolute monarchies and religious intolerance that had previously dominated much of the world; and from them have flowed the institutions on which this country has relied for the last two-and-a-half centuries – including a free press, academic freedom, an independent judiciary, and a non-politicized military. Their purpose has been to serve as a check on demagoguery and to protect the rights of those in the minority and others who are out of favor.

The alternative, as our founding fathers warned, is a kind of mob rule in which tyrants recast the institutions that brought them to power into instruments of their own will. They seek to replace “we” with “I”.  See, for example, January 6, 2021.

That is what is dismaying about this weekend’s bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities. I have no more idea than anyone else what the ultimate outcome will be; and it is fine to say, as some have, that this is Donald Trump’s war. But it isn’t. It’s being waged in the name of our country, which is why the Constitution unequivocally gives to Congress the power to declare war.

“L’etat c’est moi” (“I am the state”), Louis XIV, king of France, is alleged to have said in the 17th century. One hundred years later, the Constitution of the United States began with the words, “We the People.”

That epic change is simple to describe: There is no I in We the People.

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Note: I plan to be on a reduced schedule this summer, as our house will be filled with the laughter and tears of children. They are the reason I still write these posts.

Happiness

“Whoever is happy will make others happy.”

- Anne Frank

The 2025 World Happiness Report is out, in case you missed it – which wouldn’t be surprising, given all the unhappiness, anger, and meanness filling the headlines and social media posts – and nowhere more so than in our own country, where the current spirit of vindictiveness would seem so petty if the stakes weren’t so high. The very idea of happiness seems a luxury reserved for the comfortable, even a frivolity in a society where success is measured in terms of power and wealth, and the corresponding ability to humiliate those beneath you. The way to happiness is to get rich and amass power. And pay no attention to the warnings – from the ancient Greeks to Shakespeare to David Brooks – that such hubris leads to calamity.

In this year’s rankings, Finland once again finished first, with Denmark, Iceland, and Sweden close behind, and Norway, the remaining Scandinavian country, in 7th place. While Europe is overrepresented in the top 20, with 14 countries, Costa Rica (6), Israel (8) and Mexico (10) all cracked the top ten.

By contrast, the United States dropped again to #24, continuing its steady slide that began in 2016. It is the country’s lowest ranking ever. The report cited declining social trust and growing inequality as the key contributors.

At the bottom of the list is Afghanistan. Beset by violence, poverty, and the subjugation of half its population (women), that nation is not only last of the 147 reporting countries (a few were deemed too dangerous to canvas) but is on a steep downward spiral with faint hope of recovery.

This year’s report focused on the impact on human happiness of “caring and sharing.” It turns out that most of us are more pessimistic about the kindness and generosity of others than is the case. That is, we expect people to be meaner and more selfish than they actually are. But it turns out that trust in others is a better indicator of our own happiness than either our income or our employment.

This has far-reaching implications, not only for our personal lives, but for the nation, and even the world. “The happiest countries are also among the most generous,” the report notes. “A positive correlation exists between international aid and happiness, suggesting that countries spreading happiness beyond their borders are not only happier but also more benevolent.” Foreign aid, it turns out, does as much for the giver as the recipient. These subjective experiences, in turn, shape a society’s values and voting behavior more than ideological or political beliefs.

All of which suggests, at least to me, that we are moving catastrophically in the wrong direction. Admittedly, it didn’t take a report from Oxford University’s Wellbeing Research Centre to make me realize that, but it did remind me that virtues like kindness, generosity, and happiness are more than minor considerations on the political stage. They are the glue that holds a society together, and in this country “the decline in happiness and social trust explains a large share in the rise of political polarization.”

One reason for this, I think, is that happiness, unlike power and domination, is not a zero-sum game. You cannot increase your happiness by taking away the happiness of someone else. In fact, you can only increase your happiness by contributing to the well-being of others. That is why communal happiness is essential to democracies and why autocrats hate it.

Start small: Greet your neighbor with a morning smile. Say “hi” to the stranger on the sidewalk. Volunteer for something. Join a local board or committee. When you go out, carry a few bucks of “give-away” money in your pocket. Laugh from deep in your belly. Let’s start a movement. Pass it on.

The simple methodology of the report: “Our global happiness ranking is based on a single question from the Gallup World Poll, derived from the Cantril Self-Anchoring Striving Scale (Cantril Ladder):

“Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time.”

A Case for Teaching the Liberal Arts

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

- George Santayana

“I think it’s a great gesture from Qatar. Appreciate it very much. I would never be one to turn down that kind of an offer. I mean, I could be a stupid person and say, 'No, we don't want a free, very expensive airplane.' But it was . . .  I thought it was a great gesture." President Donald J. Trump.

Sharon Hahn Darlin

“Trojans, don't trust this horse.
Whatever it is, I'm afraid of Greeks even those bearing gifts."

Laocoon in Virgil’s Aeneid