All fall down

Twenty-five years ago this weekend, the Berlin Wall began to fall. I remember relief — this formidable but tangible symbol of the dark threat to the world, joyously destroyed. It's what I tried to convey in this cartoon from that time.

I drew more cartoons than I had clients to publish them, and looking back I wish the top one could have been published instead of the one (left) that ran in The Stockton Record.

Taken together, they reflect that I operate, then as now, on a volatile mix of unreasonable hope and earthbound cynicism.

Geographic neophytes (read also: Ugly Americans) like me didn't really understand at the time that divided Berlin was deep inside Soviet-allied East Germany.

The wall dividing the city had separated friends and family overnight in 1961, and kept them apart for three decades. East Germany said the ever-reinforced fence-turned-menacing-wall was meant to keep Western fascists out — of course!

East Germans yearned, upon threat of death, to clear the Berlin Wall and gain their freedom — within a totalitarian territory. Nearly 200 people died in the attempt; some 5,000 East Germans, including 600 border guards, escaped, tunneling under, hot-air ballooning over, jumping across, running through.

It seems almost quaint now, as stolidly distant as the films starring Joel McRea and Robert Young of arrogant but ultimately bumbling Nazis trying to sniff out the Resistance. It was the stuff of stories, not real.

When President Reagan in 1987 told Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, "Tear down this wall!" I thought, "Yeah, right! Never gonna happen."

Then it did. First, East German officials allowed Germans to pass through the wall's gates unfettered, 25 years ago. Immediately, people began tearing down sections of the wall on their own. East Germany became no more. Glasnost pried loose the reach of the Soviet Union.

I began to think all would be right with the world.

Pause for effect.

Of course, all is not right. Perhaps more is wrong since. Perhaps that's because technology literally has broadened our view of the world and what goes on — even as news vigilance, of sussing out truths on our behalf, seems to wane. Perhaps it's these scales that have fallen from my eyes as I age.

Germany is unified, the traces of totalitarianism fading with time. Other barriers remain around the world, though, even more menacing despite their invisibility.

Worse regimes remain. Baser regimes have arisen elsewhere in the world. Our own freedoms have diminished at the cost of two airplanes, two buildings and more than 3,000 lives.

I used to think the world was moving toward that depicted in V for Vendetta, the movie based on the Alan Moore/David Lloyd graphic novel which is commentary on Margaret Thatcher-led Great Britain. I used to think the world would descend beneath a regime that manufactures fear and salvation over it.

Now I see that the world is not a graphic novel, would not be so tidy, would not fit between the pages of a novel. It's too complex in its simplicity, too glacial for a sentence to sustain.

I see instead that money moves the world. Ideology exists to the extent it can move and concentrate money. Money, I'm seeing, trumps Democracy, trumps Communism, trumps caliphates. Money concentrates the power in the United States, power that games the system, that begets groups like Citizens United (no Orwellian irony there!) which gives concentrated money more power to control elections, that lets our bankers bungle our money scot-free and profitably. Concentrated power allows stupidity to be legislated into school curricula and science policy.

I'm just starting to learn about the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, an agreement the European Union and the United States are negotiating, ostensibly to streamline policy and break down walls blocking trade.

Critics — mostly from Europe; I have not heard anything about this agreement despite news dripping into my ears through the day — are raising outcry over whether the TTIP is a Trojan horse, giving corporations greater power to sue against government safeguards and policies.

I'm no expert, of course, but it would not surprise me that money motivated this agreement — concentrated money — and that what is touted as beneficial for working people really isn't.

Canadian Broadcasting has an interesting story about a 1988 Bruce Springsteen concert in East Berlin — sponsored by the East German government — that drew thousands of young East Germans and heralded the fall of the wall, perhaps by a show of how many longed to knock it down.

Maybe so. Despite what you may think of Springsteen and whether his persona is pure freedom, the story highlighted East Germans who lament the fire for young people to protest for their freedoms anymore, to fan their fire with protest music.

their lament resonates with me. Protest against what? The target is shadowy and complex and nimble and patient. It's not a wall anymore. It's not a symbol.

What we need is a new kind of sledgehammer and the patience to build a long, slow, sustainable burn. And maybe a nice song to set the rhythm as we swing.

Straw constituents

red white and blue …

That was it?! One humongous, bloody, pustular, rancid, scabrous, infectious, horrid WTF?

One titanic time-wasting, money-wasting, attention-wasting exercise in venal, vain futility?

One mass demonstration to the world that we're a joke, and to ourselves that perhaps we are no longer equipped to handle this experiment in government.

Sixteen days of the federal government shutdown …

• … millions and millions of dollars squandered (check your portfolio if you have one. That oughta be fun!)
•  … have-not families wasting precious energy to find costly alternatives to Head Start (good for Laura and John Arnold, the billionaire couple who gave $10 million to keep the program going for 7,000 children! Shame on us they felt need to do so!) …
• … medical research potentially set back for years … some of it gone for good …
• … federally funded earth and climate science, like those shuttered in Antarctica, similarly damaged …
• … startup small businesses on hold, awaiting federal OK …
• … national parks and monuments closed, foods going uninspected, businesses in a teetering economy delaying hiring, all uncertain for the future …
• … and much more besides, not to mention thousands of federal employees laid off, crippling their neighborhood economies.

What for? All because tea party-led Republicans maneuvered to drain funding from the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare!) and bleed it dead, holding the entire government hostage over this one demand.

Which they didn't get! That's right, the congressional agreement, on the eve of sending the country into unprecedented default, essentially leaves alone the Affordable Care Act! After 16 days of stalemate, the issue was all piss and piffle. All over us!

Now it's over. We're back to where we started, poorer in almost every way possible. Except poor in spirit. We're dispirited.
 
Others lead, and we follow, on words anymore, not on deeds. And those words are an awful variation of the already awful Big Lie, attributed to Nazi propaganda that if you tell a lie often enough it becomes the truth.

Instead, our leaders tell themselves the Big Lies early and often, then govern based on reactions to their own lies. And we put up with it.

Sen. Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, a chief engineer of the shutdown — and I'm not the first to say he looks, sounds and behaves unctuously like good ol' Sen. Joseph McCarthy — said yesterday: "It appears the Washington establishment is refusing to listen to the American people. The deal that has been cut provides no relief to the millions of Americans who are hurting because of Obamacare."

Which American people? The ones who said the tea party should stand its ground, work its whiles and grind the country into the staggering irreparable effects of default? Those people? I'm confident those people are, as they say, few and far between. Too few and far between to merit closing the government and threatening default.

All of this — all of this — pivots on the assumption that the Affordable Care Act is a terrible law. Is it really? A major plank in the Obama presidency, aimed at making health care affordable overall and extending health insurance to people who had no access — is this law really so bad?

Rep. Todd Rokita, Republican of Indianapolis, called the Affordable Care Act/Obamacare "one of the most insidious laws ever created by man." Secret boards that will condemn old people to early death! Forcibly implanted tracking microchips! Fabrications manufactured before the act was even presented. Rokita's characterization is just the latest in an unbroken chain of hyperbolic condemnations of the law.

Ben Carson, a celebrated neurosurgeon who is rising in right wing Republican circles as a possible political candidate, said, "Obamacare is really I think the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery."

Since slavery.

Hyperbole damns their own argument. Or should anyway, but we elect these people to office, and will likely send Dr. Carson into office somewhere, where he can enact his off-kilter ideas.

President Obama yesterday said: "There are things we know will help strengthen our economy that we could get done before this year is out. We still need to pass a law to fix our broken immigration system. We still need to pass a farm bill, and with the shutdown behind us and budget committees forming, we now have an opportunity to focus on a sensible budget that is responsible, that is fair, and that helps hard working people all across this country."

Do you really believe that? Do you have any hope that will really happen — or that words and lies will continue to lead us? Is President Obama by definition lying?

Just a political generation ago — in what I thought were the dark days of the Reagan administration, now suddenly gleaming — foes negotiated, crafted, compromised, hammered out laws that worked.
 
The Affordable Care Act staggers under immense ineptitude and failures, the most recent being the glitchy online health care insurance exchanges. Some is the result of political sabotage and neglect. But it is hardly "one of the most insidious laws ever created by man." President Reagan and his clobbering foe, House Speaker Tip O'Neill, would have forged that law into something both sides of the aisle, and their constituents, could have lived and thrived with.

Not these folks. In a time when technology accelerates and we get the opportunity to know more and more about ourselves and the world, we seem to be getting stupider, retreating to the dark condemned ideas of the past. Maybe it's more comforting in the past. Maybe we want our mommies.

This reminds me of driving home from the grocery store a couple of nights back. I couldn't catch the playoff game on the car radio (yes, I'm paying attention, even though I said I wouldn't) for all the football going on, so I set the radio to scan. Soon I snagged a religious station.

The host of the show was explaining why "creation science" makes sense, and creating straw arguments for its enemies, the "evolutionists." The host spoke from the view that the Bible is literally true, the world is 4,500 years old, and Noah really did have an ark large enough to preserve the world's species from a great flood God unleashed upon the earth to destroy the wicked.

Straw argument example, "What about the dinosaurs?" The host explained that most of the dinosaurs were small, the size of goats, and that we are misled into believing that dinosaurs were gigantic because no one would pay to see a goat-sized dinosaur skeleton in a museum.

I had to drive around my block to listen more, stunned by incredulity.

Further, the host said, logic follows that Noah knew better than to risk havoc on the ark, so he made sure that the Tyrannosaurus Rexes that he ushered aboard were babies, easier to handle, and that they'd leave the boat as the floodwaters receded, before they got too big to handle.

The last of the dinosaurs, he said, died out about 700 years ago. No basis in fact, except that the Bible tells him so, or he infers it from the biblical timetable of so much begetting.

I respect people to follow their beliefs, no matter the intensity or variety — as long as interpretation of those beliefs don't harm or deprive others — but …

Is he serious? Are we serious?! Are we ready, now, to get serious?

"I say to the grownups, if you want to deny evolution and live in your world, in your world that's completely inconsistent with everything we observe in the universe, that's fine, but don't make your kids do it because we need them," said Bill Nye, science educator and TV personality, responding to the argument for creationism. "We need scientifically literate voters and taxpayers for the future."

Will we get them, or will we continue to allow stupid people, lying in their mirrors, to lead us?