Looking for America

As the election cycle winds down to a merciful close, our country seems lost in a sea of confusion. Who are we, really?

We seem to be living in parallel universes, with Democrats living on one side of space and Republicans occupying the other. Where that leaves the rest of us, I'm not sure.

Yesterday I wrote about my dream -- for peace, unity and compassion, at least in the short run. To remain balanced, today I have to write about my nightmare, given our current trajectory.

In this nightmare, the impending election is a distant memory.

It turns out that there is something much more fundamentally wrong with our society than the conflict between the two political parties. We are being severed into two classes -- a small, landed overclass and a large landless underclass.

Land barons and peasants.

This historical reversion to the conditions of the Middle Ages is temporarily masked by the  existence of a "middle class," where home ownership persists and social welfare benefits stave off homelessness and starvation for the many.

But I fear the middle class will fade away as climate change and waves of pandemics reduce the human population and render large parts of the planet uninhabitable.

Advancing such a dystopian vision does not come easily for a congenital optimist, but I cannot ignore the evidence. Among my many personal flaws, disdain for science is not one of them.

After the news summaries below, I've reprinted the now-quaint Simon & Garfinkel lyrics from their iconic song "America." It was written in a simpler age, when we could hit the road and imagine innocent things from whatever we saw along the way. 

Now, if we take a road trip, we have to imagine that what we see along the way may well not be there in the future. Our innocence is gone.

Maybe it's not too late to salvage some kind of future on the planet, though it will almost certainly be vastly more dreary than it has been in our time.

And, as the climate change worsens, I'm concerned that pandemic after pandemic will be released, decimating our grandchildren's generation and those beyond. Young people today have every right to be completely pissed off at us --we have failed to exert proper custody of our common environment.

As the super rich pull away in their Lamborghinis for their second homes, and expand them into secure mansions, the rest of us will stay behind to face disease and pestilence and to compete over dwindling resources in a world where engendered species are disappearing at a frightening rate.

The rich will employ us to build their homes, enforce law and order against the rising unrest in the streets, and to practice the finer arts, as long as those arts avoid controversial topics like class.

As so many animals and plants go extinct, so will the ecological systems that sustain us.

Thus, even the rich will ultimately be doomed, and the age of humans on earth will have passed.

That is my nightmare.

***

So much for the bad news. On to the (relatively) good...

* Voters Prefer Biden Over Trump on Almost All Major Issues, Poll Shows -- Joe Biden leads President Trump, 50 percent to 41 percent, a New York Times/Siena College poll shows, with voters favoring him by wide margins on the coronavirus and law and order. (NYT)

* Retired four-star Adm. William McRaven endorsed Biden in an editorial published on Monday by The Wall Street Journal. “This week I went to the polls in Texas,” wrote McRaven, who oversaw the raid that led to the 2011 death of terrorist leader Osama bin Laden. “I am a pro-life, pro-Second Amendment, small-government, strong-defense and a national-anthem-standing conservative ... But, I also believe that black lives matter, that the Dreamers deserve a path to citizenship, that diversity and inclusion are essential to our national success, that education is the great equalizer, that climate change is real.” [HuffPost] 

* The Justice Department filed an antitrust lawsuit Tuesday alleging that Google engaged in anticompetitive conduct to preserve monopolies in search and search advertising that form the cornerstones of its vast conglomerate. (WSJ)

* Prominent Republican pollster Frank Luntz blasted President Trump and his campaign on Tuesday for focusing on Hunter Biden in the stretch run to Election Day, calling Trump’s campaign the worst he’s ever seen and saying the president’s advisers should be “brought up on charges of political malpractice.”Speaking at a briefing for the British strategic advising company Global Counsel, Luntz said Trump’s advisers have “their heads up their asses” if they think Hunter Biden will be a winning issue for them. (The Hill)

* What Fans of ‘Herd Immunity’ Don’t Tell You -- A proposal to let people with low risk of infection live without constraint could lead to a million or more preventable deaths. (NYT)

* Melania Trump’s return to the campaign trail will have to wait. Her chief of staff, Stephanie Grisham, said Tuesday that Mrs. Trump continues to feel better every day following her recent recovery from COVID-19 but has a lingering cough. (AP)

* Kaiser Family Foundation: 68% of Americans trust Dr. Fauci but only 40% trust Trump.

* The mayor of Tucson fired off a letter to Trump pointing out that his campaign still owes her city $80,000 for his last rally four years ago — even as he headed to his next potential superspreader event there on Monday.  Regina Romero also urged Trump to adhere to Tucson’s mask mandate and follow social distance requirements. Few masks and packed crowds are the hallmarks of a Trump rally. [HuffPost]

* Trump portrays the hundreds of people arrested nationwide in protests against racial injustice as violent urban left-wing radicals. But an Associated Press review of thousands of pages of court documents tell a different story.Very few of those charged appear to be affiliated with highly organized extremist groups, and many are young suburban adults from the very neighborhoods Trump vows to protect from the violence in his reelection push to win support from the suburbs. (AP)

* A federal judge has struck down a Trump administration rule that would have cut food stamp benefits to almost 700,000 unemployed Americans amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The judge, in a court filing, said the U.S. Department of Agriculture has been “icily silent” about how many people would have been denied the benefits with the changes. [Reuters]

* Turkey farmers fear that, this year, they’ve bred too many big birds (WashPo)

* Migrant Workers Restricted to Farms Under One Grower’s Virus Lockdown (NYT)

* Trump and Biden will have their microphones cut off in Thursday’s debate while their rival delivers their opening two-minute answer to each of the debate topics. The 90-minute debate is divided into six 15-minute segments, with each candidate granted two minutes to deliver uninterrupted remarks before proceeding to an open debate. The open discussion portion of the debate will not feature a mute button, but interruptions by either candidate will count toward their time. [HuffPost]

* U.S. single-family homebuilding raced to a more than 13-year high in September, cementing the housing market's status as the star of the economic recovery amid record-low mortgage rates and a migration to the suburbs and low-density areas in search of more room for home offices and schooling. (Reuters)

* Pfizer to test coronavirus vaccine in Japan (NHK)

* Trump isn’t even trying to slow the virus’s spread (WashPo)

* Peter Wehner is warning evangelical Christians that they made a “bad bargain” with Trump, who does not respect them or their faith. “Trump clearly sees white evangelicals as a means to an end, people to be used, suckers to be played,” Wehner wrote in The Atlantic. Wehner pointed to a series of insider reports, such as Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) revealing last week that Trump “mocks evangelicals behind closed doors,” and former Trump attorney Michael Cohen writing that Trump said “can you believe people believe that bulls**t?” after evangelicals did a laying-of-hands ceremony on him. [HuffPost]

* President Donald Trump's tax records show he has pursued expansive business projects in China for years and even maintains a Chinese bank account, disclosures that deal a blow to the President's efforts to paint Democratic nominee Joe Biden as the presidential candidate who is soft on China. (NYT)

* Fed up with white people calling 911 about people of color selling water bottles, barbecuing or otherwise going about their lives, San Francisco leaders are set to approve hate crime legislation giving the targets of those calls the ability to sue the caller. (AP)

* Oil Industry Turns to Mergers and Acquisitions to Survive -- With the price of a barrel stuck around $40 and no recovery in sight, companies are combining to cut costs and ride out the pandemic. (NYT)

*  An Ohio public school has been giving students extra credit for watching videos from PragerU, a right-wing website that produces clips of talking heads such as Candace Owens and Ben Shapiro discussing conservative viewpoints. The PragerU videos — with titles such as “Build the Wall,” “Why the Right Was Right” and “The Left Ruins Everything” — were assigned to a 10th-grade history class at Maumee High School, along with a series of questions about the videos’ “most important messages.” [HuffPost]

* New homes on the range: Weary city dwellers escape to Montana, creating a property gold rush (WashPo)

* Though book sales have been strong this year, local bookstores are struggling: more than one independent bookstore has closed each week since the pandemic started. As they enter a crucial holiday season, many stores are facing a challenging mix of higher expenses, lower sales and enormous uncertainty. (NYT)

* Democrats have 75% chance of winning control of the Senate. (538)

***

[Verse 1]
"Let us be lovers, we'll marry our fortunes together"
"I've got some real estate here in my bag"
So we bought a pack of cigarettes and Mrs. Wagner pies
And walked off to look for America

[Verse 2]
"Kathy," I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh
"Michigan seems like a dream to me now"
It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw
I've gone to look for America

[Verse 3]
Laughing on the bus
Playing games with the faces
She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy
I said "Be careful his bowtie is really a camera"

[Verse 4]
"Toss me a cigarette, I think there's one in my raincoat"
"We smoked the last one an hour ago"
So I looked at the scenery, she read her magazine
And the moon rose over an open field

[Verse 5]

"Kathy, I'm lost," I said, though I knew she was sleeping
I'm empty and aching and I don't know why
Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike
They've all come to look for America
All come to look for America
All come to look for America

Simon & Garfinkel

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