#WhateverTrump

So okay all you Republican floozies, if Trump is going to be the man with the plan then we need to get a few principles clarified upfront from the get-go.

#1. The man needs to be humbled and kept in his place, if he is going to be a truly effective leader. His ego is too big. This should be our strategy in dealing with the strong leader that he is.

#2. Other Republican leaders like Paul Ryan, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Mitch McConnell, John McCain, Mitt Romney and both former Presidents Bush will need to ride him hard to keep the buckaroo in line with Republican principles.

#3. A very important principle of the GOP is the one spoken by our founder, Abraham Lincoln; he exhorted the folks at Gettysburg . . . "government of the people, for the people, and by the people shall not perish from the earth."

And government by the people means teamwork, not one guy calling all the shots.

#4. Evangelical leaders who are smitten with Trump's authoritative leadership style need a reality check. Remember the words of our Lord, the One who is faithful and true, who said,

"You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men exercise authority over them. It is not this way among you, but whoever wishes to become great among you shall be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you shall be your slave"

#5. #WhateverTrump does not mean that whatever Trump wants should be done. It means whatever Trump wants must be harnessed by the Republican party, the party that put him where he is today, the party that will keep his initiatives in line with Republican principles, the party that will diligently and compulsively advise him in matters critical to the preservation and extension of this great American Republic and also the free world at large.

#6. #WhateverTrump does not mean that whatever Trump decides to do should be done. It means whatever Trump decides should be done must be legislatively advised and consented to by the Congress of the United States; and limited, if necessary, but the Supreme Court of the United States, so that we will remain a representative Republic, a government of the people, by the people and for the people.

#7. For my fellow-Christians, the most important principle of all: In God We Trust, not in the power of any one man, nor any .gov to fix everything. For those who do not choose to trust God, #good luck, and may the farce be with you.



Glass half-Full

Why I am a Republocrat

The other night Pat and I were enjoying a meal in our home with a couple of dear friends. Our after-dinner conversation turned to heartfelt expressions about past, present and future. In the midst of some shared recollections about previous phases of our life, I wondered aloud about how this idealistic young McGovernite college kid could now find myself, at age sixty, running with a bunch of Republicans.
Then last night, Pat asked me why I am uncomfortable being a Republican. I found myself unable to offer an answer. But today, after some mulling the question over, I collected a few thoughts.

I am in fact not a Republican at heart, although I am registered to vote that way. But that’s because I’m not a dam Democrat either, and wouldn’t want to be caught dead anywhere near their gov’ment-take-all way of doing things.

Here is why:
I believe in the power, proven in our American history, of a free people to do great works. I believe in the limitless possibilities of a free people who, with their individual liberties constitutionally assured, can do what needs to be done, and prosper while performing it, both individually and collectively.
I believe in free enterprise, free markets, free trade, the invisible hand, Main Street, and God.
I believe human life, from its earliest inception , is worthy to receive the protection of the law.

These days, although I empathize with the opportunity-challenged. underemployed Occupy wall street 99% crowd, I also have no complaint with the so-called 1% gathering as much wealth as they can accumulate. The rich cats can only squander so much of the gravy before spreading some of that prosperity around as expenditures and investments, whereby the rest of us 99% can catch a little of the action.
Philosophically, I do not favor the practice of governmental income redistribution, and I surely do not want to see government take over everything-- not health care, not business, not philanthropy, not any of that stuff that good citizens ought to be doing from the abundance of their own hard-earned resources.

Now perhaps you can see why I am not a Democrat, and here’s why I am not really a Republican either.
Beginning about 200 years ago our pioneering American spirit began to focus on settling and developing the north American continent. Figuratively speaking, yankee industry, southern agronomy, widespread entrepreneurship and nascent capitalism took on the challenges of capitalizing and developing this exceptional experiment in democratic/republican nationhood that we call the United States of America.
Led by wealth-seeking industrialists and prosperity-seeking workers, we built in short order an amazing infrastructure of railroads, electricity grids, highways, airways and communication networks. Thousands, yea I say unto thee millions, of folks got in on the action and got a slice of the copious wealth. We were in high cotton for 150 years or so, in spite of a depression or recession or two.
But now we’ve gotten lazy. And I’m not just talking about couch-potato consumers. Now, American business, unwilling to take on the risks—and the sweat and the toil and the uncertainty—of capitalizing the upgraded prerequisite infrastructure for 21st-century prosperity, dithers with profit-obsessive derivatives and credit default swap schemes, instead of venturing out into the new frontiers of what really needs to be done.
The infamous, phantasmic Wall Street, whatever that is, refuses to capitalize for us a way out of the self-destructive oil addiction rut in which we find ourselves cluelessly bogged down. I can’t blame the Dems for taking a stab at these dependencies when our famous free enterprise entities won’t, or can't, take a chance on it. So the self-appointed prophets and the planners and the socialists and the gov’ment do-gooders and the democrats and the intellectual elites want to take on the burdens of what unbridled industry used to do. Maybe they’ve overregulated the captains of industry into neutralized industrial impotence, I don’t know, but now it seems that the Dems want the government to initiate everything. Meanwhile, the Repubs are still dreaming in lala land about bonuses, unfettered capitalism and tax shelters.

If I could, I would cast out both the demonDemo bureaucrats and the corporatublican devils.
What has happened to our business leadership in this country? Have they abdicated the wealth-generating mantle of industrial innovation?
President Reagan, patron saint of the Repubs, said that government IS the problem. But now, thirty years later, that’s only half the picture. We’ve got a new problem: business.
Business is the problem—not enough of it. Why has business shrunk from the profit-possibility challenges of the 21st century? Why have the capitalists conceded the venture-risking function to government? Why? Because there’s not enough money to be made, and too much risk and expense required to do the work that needs to be done. Call uncle Sam, even if he’s broke busted and his mother can’t be trusted. He''ll take the risk; he's got a pump-priming Fed to back him up.
Where are the Rockefellers, Carnegies, Edisons, Fords, Morgans and Watsons of our era? For that matter, where is the Gates, or Jobs, of the next generation?

In Congressional hearings today... Solyndra? Hey, I don’t care about the rhetorical politicized blameshifting and fault-finding. Solyndra was attempting to do the work that needs to be done, before wily Chinese competition cut them out of the emerging solar collector market. Where’s the company that will, Henry Ford-like, put a solar collector on every roof by capitalizing mass-produced affordability in that sector? Where’s the UAW that’s willing to cut a deal so that every half-prosperous American can afford to put an electric vehicle in their garage? Where's the bold corporation that will take a chance on new-tech American bullet trains?
It almost appears that American business, labor and industry has outlived its usefulness. How can that great trail-blazing entrepreneurial thrust of ages gone by be recovered, and recycled?
Don’t get me started; I’m a Republocrat, and dam proud of it.

Glass Chimera

The Great American Divide

Although I have lived in the cool Blue Ridge mountans for thirty-five years now, I was raised in a place that is hot, humid and flat--Louisiana. Perhaps I ended up living here on the eastern continental divide because of an intensely wonderful travel experience I had at the tender age of nine years. In 1960, my parents had taken me and my sister on a cross-country road trip from our Miss'sipi-River delta home all the way across the Rockies to Washington state. What a string of vivid memories that westward trip has proven to be.

At the time of that journey, my father was bound for an international convention of foresters in Seattle. We took four days to drive a light blue Ford station wagon across Texas, the prairies, the Rocky Mountains, California, and up the west coast, then four days back again. This impressionable boy from Baton Rouge emerged from the long road trip with a vivid memory file that included seeing the morning snow-capped pinkness of Mt. Rainier, and an elk-horn hut in Wyoming, as well as a ride with a cowboy on his horse through a herd of cows that had blocked our mountain road.

Funny how the mind wanders sometimes. Somewhere in Colorado or Wyoming near that cowboy memory stands a wide wooden road sign that reads: Continental Divide.
And this is what I thought about yesterday while reading Paul Krugman's "A Tale of Two Moralities," in the New York Times.

It prompted me to share some personal experience with you. Everybody has a story to tell, and I'm going to tell you part of mine, as a roundabout way to get to a point about our Great American Divide.

In the first half of the last century, my dad's folks had come out of the Mississippi woods, but had settled down in Baton Rouge in the thick of the petrochemical industry. Many of my young years were spent growing up in the shadow of a gargantuan Esso (now Exxon) refinery, which was said by locals to be the third largest oil refinery in the world at the time; it was three blocks from our house. I'll never forget that acrid smell in the air, although some said it was from the Kaiser aluminum plant further up the River. Probably both.

Maybe five or so miles away, near downtown Baton Rouge stood the state Capitol, tallest bayou-state building not located in New Orleans. Huey Long had built the 34-story monolith back in the 30s. If you ever go up to the top of it, you'll see, dominating the northward view, the huge, smoke-belching Exxon refinery, kingpin of Louisana industry.

My grandfather on mama's side had occupied an office in the Capitol; he was a math-brain, and served as assistant Secretary of State under four Louisana governors, including the infamous Huey Long. The other grandfather demonstrated a more visceral, mechanical expertise. Hard-working Scots-Irish Miss'sippi man that he was-- he had become a foreman down at the Esso refinery. My dad used to tell me that grampa had worked himself into a job where "wasn't a valve or wheel in the whole damn plant that didn't turn without Louis Rowland's order."

As far as I had been told, the unions had nothing to do with my grampa Rowland's rise to productive authority in that super-size oil refinery. And that pertains somewhat to this Great Divide thing that I'm a gettin' to. But hold your horses. Go watch a video somewhere if'n you don't have time to do some personal-type historical reading.

My daddy, you see, had tried to start a forestry-supplies business back in the 60s. But it didn't work out, and so he wound up his working life as a civil servant, in industrial development and recruitment for the State of Louisiana. (Hint about the Great Divide: Entrpreneur of State employee?) His office was in the complex of state guv'ment buildings that mushroomed 'neath the shadow of Huey's skyscraping Capitol.

At the time of my father's job there, Huey was, of course, long-since dead, having been shot at the Capitol building one September night in 1935. But Huey had been a horse of different color. Some folks down there say that if he hadn't been assasinated, he would have challenged Mr. Roosevelt for the Democratic nomination in '36. Of course, we'll never know. Huey's politics was raw and agrarian, and near as I can tell, even more "liberal" than President Roosevelt's New Deal, which would have placed him on the leftward fringe of Democratic politics then or now. One of Huey's slogans had been, "every man a king," which might seem to have landed him in the self-reliant camp about which we hear so much today from the so-called libertarian wing of the Republicans. But since Huey's other major plank was "sharing the wealth," that would throw our categorization of his politics into the income-redistribution, quasi-socialist wing of the Democrats. Like I said, he was a horse of different color; there are a few of them buckin' around in every generation.

He was, after all, you know, a Democrat. And that brings me closer to this oncoming perspective on the Great American Divide.
I was raised in a (at that time) Democratic state, in that state's politics-obsessed capital city. That heritage had cast the prevailing political machinery largely into the mold of Huey Long, the firebrand orator who had come out of the piney woods of north Louisiana. Part of Huey's share-the-wealth, every-man-a-king legacy is, these days, a state guarantee that students who prove to be diligent enough can get free tuition in state colleges and universities.

It was after I graduated from the state's flagship University, in 1973, that I left Louisiana never to return, except for visits. It's a great, proud state, but too hot and flat for me, so I ended up, after a brief Florida period, in the mountains of North Carolina. Back to the earth and all that. Ha!

Thirty-five years ago my quest for cool mountain livin'-- a la that trip to the Rockies when I was nine--found its resting point here in the Appalachians. And now, after all this time, my view from the eastern Continental Divide--only a few geographical miles from our house--reveals that I landed, unbeknownst to me at the time, in the middle of a stubborn, self-sufficiency-touting, fundamentalist mountaineer culture, decidedly libertarian and mostly Republican (except for the thriving academic, typically humanistic community at nearby Appalachian State University.) So it seems that my life's journey has taken me from one side of the Divide to the Other.

I'm just now figuring out what happened. I started out fifty-nine years ago on the left side of the Great Divide, and am now winding down on the right side.
From this perspective, I can see, as Mr. Krugman has so adroitly identified, that the two poles (polls?) of American philosophy gravitate down to this definitive question:

Am I a contributing part of a great Nation-State that is taking care of every citizen, with every citizen taking care of it?

Or,
Am a self-reliant individualist who prefers to swat the government nuisance out of my way?

Which way do you lean on the Great Divide?

Glass Chimera