Kids, killers and the Catholic Church

I’m waiting for a Catholic bishop somewhere in America to deny communion to a Republican member of Congress of Catholic faith, for their role in the killing of nineteen children in Uvalde Texas. There are sixty-two Catholic legislators to choose from, ten in the Senate, fifty-two in the House of Representives.

This unlikely thought occurs to me only because this is how the Archbishop of San Francisco, the Most Reverend Salvatore Cordeolene, has chosen to punish Nancy Pelosi for opposing the criminalizing of abortion. I have no idea if Pelosi actually fears losing her place in Heaven, but the archbishop must intend to deny her the means of salvation. This is a lot worse than being blackballed at the club.

Of course none of those sixty-two Republican politicians have shot any children. They have merely failed to take action to reduce the supply of assault weapons to psychopaths. But Pelosi is not being excommunicated for having had an abortion herself or for performing one, merely for championing the rights of women in America, eighty percent of whom are not Catholics, to decide to have one without anyone calling the police.

Naively, I continue to be shocked whenever a Catholic spokesman claims the moral high ground on any issue relating to the care of children, born or unborn. Given the role played by so many princes of the Church, for longer than anyone can remember, in overseeing and enabling the abuse of children, I feel they should all take a vow of silence on questions of motherhood and the nurturing of infants. But of course the moral high ground is their natural habitat. For the Catholic Church, privileged access to eternal truths is the unique selling point. No one ever said it was a democracy.

To this extent, in preaching to America the archbishop is on more solid ground than Justice Clarence Thomas.

Speaking at a Judicial Conference in Atlanta, Thomas said that the Supreme Court ‘can't be an institution that can be bullied into giving you just the outcomes you want.’ Commenting on the angry response to the overturning of Roe v Wade, he warned that ‘We are becoming addicted to wanting particular outcomes, not living with the outcomes we don't like.’ 

Strangely, he sees the desire for popular freedoms as a form of 'addiction' and, in spite of his own enormous power, experiences democratic pressure as 'bullying'. One of six practising Catholics among the nine Justices, Thomas seems to have deluded himself into thinking that he is a member of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to pass down to the ignorant laity the divinely inspired word.  

10 reasons why I voted for Kavanaugh

Because Dr Blasey Ford was way too credible to convince me. A little bit truthy, a little bit sleuthy and a whole lot too mouthy. Indelible in the hippocampus? What the hell was that?

Because how can such an obviously traumatized woman be sure what happened to her?

Because if the PC Nazis and their friends in the Democrat Party are going to start holding us responsible for what we did to girls in our fratboy days, no one’s safe. 

Because who wouldn’t be moved by Judge Kavanaugh’s sniffling, red-faced rage? We’ve all been there.

Because so what if a devil's triangle isn't really a drinking game? Are we going to hang a guy for bragging in his high school yearbook? 

Because, sure, I’m undermining the integrity of the Supreme Court, but I’m doing it for a higher good – to undermine reproductive rights, voting rights, employee rights, LGBT rights, environmental protection, and the possibility that you’ll ever be able to get healthcare without going bankrupt.

Because the Clintons.

Because, as a US Senator, it’s my duty to respond to the concerns of my Trump-voting constituents.

Because women have had their say. 

Because the Republican Party’s got all the dirt they need to bury me. 

The exploiting of Charlie Gard

In a double-page banner headline, the Daily Mail calls Charlie Gard “the baby boy who moved the world”. I find myself drawn back 20 years to the summer of 1997 when I was thrown out of a tea shop in Monmouth for speaking of the late Princess Diana with insufficient reverence. My mild-mannered head of department and I were sitting, apparently alone, enjoying a cup of tea after a day of pre-term preparation. Tony Blair had spoken of waking up to a kinder, gentler Britain. But on my way through town I had seen people queuing in the square to sign the book of remembrance and the notice in the Oxfam shop opposite that read, ‘Closed for lack of volunteers’. I mentioned this to my colleague as an illustration of the self-indulgent sentimentality of the national response to Diana’s death. He murmured his agreement. A moment later, the proprietor appeared from the kitchen. “If you two are going to talk like that,” she said, “you can finish your tea and get out.”

I thought the country had gone slightly mad and perhaps I was slightly mad too, to mind so much. I was offended by what I experienced as a disproportionate outpouring of grief. But Diana was at least a public figure of constitutional significance. And there were legitimate targets of public anger – the Royal Family that had exploited, neglected and finally closed ranks against her, and the paid stalkers we had learned to call the paparazzi.

In the case of Charlie Gard, the grief expressed by those outside the family circle is more disturbing, and the anger is wildly misdirected. Great Ormond Street Hospital is not the enemy. It hasn’t imprisoned Charlie nor imposed a death sentence on him. Stories about experimental treatments not funded or approved by the NHS but available in America come round regularly. The right wing tabloids present them as heroic battles – the little guy against the system – but they serve the larger purpose of chipping away at our confidence in public healthcare.

Prominent US politicians have made this project explicit. For Vice-President Mike Pence, Charlie Gard’s desperate condition illustrates the dangers of the “single-payer” system favoured by progressives : “the American people oughta reflect on the fact that,” Pence said. “This is where it takes us.” Trump’s message of sympathy and support for Charlie’s parents rises from the same well of ignorance. Meanwhile the ongoing Republican attempts to repeal the moderate Affordable Care Act would put even the most basic health cover beyond the reach of tens of millions of US citizens.

Dr Hirano, who was heralded by the tabloids as a saviour – a lone ranger in a white coat – eagerly accepted his role in the narrative that socialized medicine is a dire fate from which British patients are occasionally fortunate enough to be rescued. Until this week, he was offering a 10% chance of improvement. It was never clear what this meant. If he had treated 100 patients in Charlie’s state and with Charlie’s condition and helped 10 of them he would have had a 10% success rate. But what if he had only treated 18 with a related but different condition and helped half of them but none of were as bad to begin with? Where did he get his 10% from? Let’s just say that with no clinical knowledge of Charlie Gard’s case and no experience with his particular condition he was willing to gamble that he had a slim chance of doing more good than harm.

The fact that Dr Hirano has a financial interest in the drug he’s offering is the kind of abuse that a joined up health service helps to guard against. But the entrepreneurial motive to recruit patients is equally dangerous. (I've written about these things before.)

The doctor was Charlie’s second high-profile American visitor. The Reverend Patrick Mahoney, who flew in to pray at the bedside, came to champion the God-given right of parents to decide the fate of their children. But civilized societies have long recognised that children have rights of their own and that the courts must occasionally intervene to determine what is in the best interests of children who are unable to speak for themselves.   

More surprising was the Pope’s intervention.  The Catholic Church, which tends to go off the deep end on sexual questions, takes a sane view of death. While forbidding euthanasia and assisted suicide, the Church makes a persuasive distinction between “ordinary” and “extraordinary” treatment. Withdrawing food and water to shorten the life of a terminally ill patient is not allowed, even if sustenance must be intravenously delivered. But otherwise keeping a patient alive artificially is not required. According to one account of the official teaching, “When a person has an underlying terminal disease, or their heart, or some other organ, cannot work without mechanical assistance, or a therapy being proposed is dangerous, or has little chance of success, then not using that machine or that therapy results in the person dying from the disease or organ failure they already have. The omission allows nature to takes its course” (The Global Catholic Network).

Even for Catholics, who believe in the sanctity of human life, turning off the machine is sometimes the right thing to do. 

In the summer of 1997 I chose to distance myself from the national mood, but I see now that the wave of grief for Diana was genuine, widespread and largely benign. The feelings the Mail reports and encourages are more divisive, more dependent on the manipulations of the tabloid editors and social media trolls, and considerably more sinister in their political significance.  

Trumperium

Do you believe in punishment for abortion?

The answer is… there has to be some form of punishment.

For the woman?

Yes

What punishment?

I have not determined what the punishment would be.

Why not?

Because I haven’t determined it.

I don’t think we can learn anything much about Trump’s views on abortion from his recent interview with Chris Mathews, because he has no views on abortion. It’s just one of those things he’s supposed to be against while he’s running for office. As for his attitude to women, the interview reinforces what we already know, that he doesn’t think much about them except so far as they serve or fail to serve his needs. The most revealing thing about this exchange is what it tells us about the role of President as Trump imagines it. He sees himself, like a medieval king or a Roman emperor, autonomously determining punishments.  

I happen to be re-watching the BBC/HBO series Rome. Ten years on, the parallels with the contemporary American political scene are striking. In episode 2 (written by the series creator Bruno Heller) the young Octavius is asked by a conservative centurion why things in Rome have to change. He says, ‘Because the Roman people are suffering, because slaves have taken all the work, because nobles have taken all the land and the streets are full of the homeless.’ Replace Romans with Americans, slaves with sweatshop workers and other underpaid offshore employees, and nobles with the one percent, and you have the problem that is attracting voters to both Trump and Sanders in unexpected numbers.

Sanders offers an analysis of the issues and an approach towards a solution. Trump, an armchair Caesar, offers only himself. Having crucified or put to the sword many aspiring executives in Reality-TV land and conquered vast swathes of real estate, and being now rich with the spoils of business, he crosses the Rubicon into presidential politics.

The priests who preside over the sacred rites are bribed or dazzled into overlooking his past blasphemies. The senators and nobles, a self-serving crew who pay lip-service to the ideals of the Republic, see Trump for what he is – a would-be tyrant who is stirring up the populace against them. Of course the tyranny he offers is not significantly different from their own, but, expressed more nakedly and in cruder terms, it threatens the stability on which their power depends. 

They look around for a Pompey, a veteran of old campaigns, to defeat the upstart. Romney is on hand to call Trump a fraud and a conman. McCain lends his weight to the attack. But these are yesterday’s men, has-beens. Their legions are demoralised and disloyal. In desperation, the senators plot to assassinate the dictator on the Convention floor.

Anticipating civil disturbance, the Cleveland police are already equipping themselves with additional riot gear. Let’s hope it’s only the Republican Party that is plunged into civil war and that they limit their weapons to tweets, blogs and hostile briefings. Meanwhile we can expect Trump to continue issuing decrees from the imperial throne of his imagination.

What about the guy that gets her pregnant – is he responsible under the law? 

I would say… no.

The othering of Obama

The Boston Tea Party of 1773 was a protest against taxation without representation, which sparked the Revolutionary War and led to American independence. The seeds of the modern tea party movement were sown in January 2009. During his inaugural speech President Obama proposed offering aid to homeowners threatened with foreclosure. Ric Santelli, a hedge-fund manager turned financial news editor, didn’t like the thought of paying taxes to support ‘losers’ and called for a new tea party. The idea caught fire.

Americans had paid federal taxes before, and previous administrations had overseen the distribution of funds to fellow citizens in times of hardship or disaster, and there had always been wealthy individuals who objected to handing over their cash. What was so different this time? How come the belly-aching of one rich guy inspired such a groundswell of support?

Meanwhile in Congress, the Republicans were launching an unprecedented campaign of obstruction that would spawn a series of near shut-downs and debt defaults, dozens of unfilled vacancies, and a historically low record of legislation. The latest manifestation of this campaign was the announcement in February by the Majority Leader that, in direct defiance of the Constitution, the Senate would not cooperate during the remaining eleven months of Obama’s presidency in the appointment of a Supreme Court justice to replace Antonin Scalia.

This top to bottom rejection of Obama’s legitimacy by Republican legislators and a vocal minority of their supporters doesn’t make sense without reference to race. The party has conspired to treat Obama as an interloper.

It is in this climate that Donald Trump has found his political calling. In April 2011, with his eye on a possible presidential run, he began questioning the President’s citizenship and quickly made himself the noisiest exponent of the ‘birther’ conspiracy theory. In May of that year, almost a quarter of responding, self-identified Republicans said that Obama was definitely or probably not a US citizen. In one survey after another, the proportions of Republicans who doubt Obama’s right to be President are alarmingly high.

It’s impossible to know whether all these people genuinely believe that Obama’s Hawaiian birth certificate is a fake. But I have to assume that, for most of them, saying yes to the implausible story of a hushed-up Kenyan birth or to the related rumour that Obama is secretly Muslim are just ways of signalling allegiance to a vaguer notion that an African American has no place in the White House except as a member of the household staff.

Since soon after Obama took office the tea party has been demanding to ‘take our country back’ and they don’t just mean back from the Democrats. Now Trump, whose presidential campaign has been explicitly racist from day one, is exposing the party’s worst impulses to the world and, more important from the party’s point of view, to decent, moderate Republicans and uncommitted voters. The establishment is reacting to the Trump explosion as though it’s an act of God, but it’s a disaster of their own making.  

How the GOP's karma ran over its dogma

Apparently the Republican establishment is panicking about the irresistible rise of Donald Trump. I’m not sure who qualifies to be a member of the Republican establishment, but I imagine they’re mainly the kind of rich people who use politics to fix things so they can get even richer.

For decades, popular support for their party has been waning. The Democrats haven’t been great at looking out for the interests of ordinary people, but the Republicans have made it their business to be considerably worse. Their approach to solving the popularity gap has included spreading misinformation through fake news stations and advertising agencies masquerading as think tanks, and using the Supreme Court to remove restrictions on campaign spending. As local and state legislators, they’ve gerrymandered voting districts and passed laws to make it harder for poor people to vote.

The party’s identity crisis goes back a long way. During the Nixon years they courted disaffected southern Democrats unhappy about Civil Rights legislation. Reagan stirred up evangelical groups with anxieties about the traditional family, harnessing their hostility to gays and abortion providers. The party was meanwhile hitching a ride on concerns that the constitutional right to buy lethal weapons was being restricted. More recently, to appease donors from the fossil fuel industry, they added climate-change denial to their list of irrational prejudices. And since 9/11 they’ve stoked fears of Islamist terrorism. It was beginning to look as if only a pro-life, anti-gay, bible-believing, gun-toting, minority-vote-suppressing, war-mongering science-sceptic could survive a Republican primary.

There’s no reason to think, by the way, that the party’s movers and shakers have ever believed in any of this. Beliefs, like taxes, are for little people.

Naturally, all this ideology, accumulated over half a century, brought some ugly baggage with it, baggage that was generally tucked out of sight when TV cameras were rolling. Candidates needed to develop a repertoire of dog-whistles to signal to their base, while remaining acceptable to more squeamish voters, the kind who don’t object to a bit of upward redistribution of wealth but don’t think of themselves as bigots.

Now Donald Trump has set about emptying that baggage all over the stage. Dog-whistling is suddenly a redundant art.

The reason Trump makes the others look like stiffs is because they’ve spent years schooling themselves in the received ideologies, which turn out not to matter half as much as the party establishment thought they did. It’s obvious that Trump himself is only casually attached to any of them. Perhaps he carries a concealed weapon in Manhattan, as he says he does – who knows? His knowledge of the Constitution is so shaky that he refers without embarrassment to George W Bush’s
‘reign’. He’s profoundly unconvincing as a champion of family values and, when it comes to Bible-talk, is laughably inept.

And it seems that his supporters don’t mind, because for them, it turns out, it isn’t the ideologies that matter, it’s the feelings that fuel the ideologies – fear, resentment, humiliation, the experience of being left behind by an economy that works for some but leaves too many struggling, the sense that life hurts and someone must be to blame.

How dangerous is Trump?

I'm useless at reading the mood of the American public. Wherever the pulse of the US voter is, my finger is nowhere near it. But it turns out I’m not alone – no one saw Trump coming.

Who are these potential Republican voters who are keeping him at the top of the opinion polls? Why would Christians like him, or tea-party types? Rick Santorum has a 25-year marriage, 7 children by the same wife, and solid conservative positions on all the issues that have apparently been stirring up the Republican base since Reagan first mobilized the ‘moral majority’. The libertarian Rand Paul plans to curtail the power of the government, promising to reduce America’s military commitments abroad and its prison population at home, while cutting taxes and welfare. But in the polls they’re both nowhere, along with a dozen others.

The fact that I personally don’t like Trump is, of course, entirely beside the point. I didn’t like George W Bush either, but I can see why he got conservative voters excited with his cowboy boots and cheeky Texan grin and his recovered-alcoholic born-again credentials. Why don’t those same voters see Trump as a sleazy rootless urbanite who shouts Big Government every time he opens his big mouth promising to fix something?

Of course, what Trump would actually do, if by some weird mischance he found himself elected President, is anybody’s guess. Most candidates trade in vague aspirations and make promises they would never be able to fulfil. But they generally attach themselves to some value system – theological or economic – or at least stitch together some unlikely rags-to-riches story to affirm their belief in the American Dream. Trump doesn’t seem to do any of this.

It makes you suspect that for a lot of Republican voters the traditional ideological issues have just been flags of convenience all along. Trump’s rivals earnestly flourish their Bibles and their copies of the American Constitution and the public isn’t buying because Trump is giving them permission to let their ids off the leash. Meanwhile, the serious money men, who think of themselves as the Republican establishment and don't care a jot about constitutional or ethical issues, just want a president who can be relied on to cut taxes, reduce regulations and keep America and the world open for business. Trump can’t be relied on to do anything except promote Trump.

Of course poll numbers are not delegates. Trump knows how to draw a crowd, offering a potent mixture of jokes and outrage with the occasional opportunity to rough up a heckler – all these delights without being required to think. And when asked, in the casual way of opinion polls, which of this long list of candidates they’d most like see in the White House, a lot of people probably just opt for the name they recognize. Winning caucuses and primaries is a different matter. And even if Trump pulls it off and gets to be the nominee, current polling suggests that he's alienated too many voters to beat either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders.

Hillary accuses him of being a recruiting tool for jihadis, but it’s hard to believe that Trump's bombast does more damage to relations with the Islamic world than bombing raids and drone strikes. Even so, he shouldn't be dismissed as a joke. To American Muslims he’s doing actual harm, having appointed himself cheerleader-in chief for hate crime. He’s also lowered the level of public discourse to the point where discriminatory policies are being given serious airtime.

And if his campaign implodes before the Republican convention, there’s a seemingly more plausible candidate poised to gather up his supporters. Ted Cruz as President – now that's a really scary thought. I can't imagine why anyone would vote for him. But what do I know?