Only once in modern times has an American election drawn fewer than half of eligible voters to the polls: Bill Clinton verses Robert Dole in 1996. Turnout was 49%.
Way back in the olden days it happened twice.
In 1920 Warren G. Harding defeated James M. Cox with 49.2% participating.
In 1924 Calvin Coolidge defeated John W. Davis and Robert M. La Follette in a three-way race with a 48.9% turnout.
The largest voter turnout occurred during the Rutherford B. Hayes verses Samuel J. Tilden contest in 1876. It was America’s 100th birthday year. Hayes won the election in the electoral college by one vote. He lost the popular count by a quarter-million.
81.8% of qualified men turned out to vote — women wouldn’t be permitted to vote for another 45 years. Most historians say the presidential election of 1876 was the biggest vote-mess in US history.
From Wikipedia: On November 11, three days after election day … results … were rendered uncertain because of fraud by both parties.
To make a long story short, Southern Democrats agreed to award all disputed electoral votes to Republican Hayes if he promised to put an end to Reconstruction.
The verbal (non-written) Compromise of 1877 ended Reconstruction in the South. Freed slaves were left at the mercy of whites who did not intend to preserve their rights.
Whites forced the overwhelming majority of blacks (who lived south of the Mason-Dixon line) to wait until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 before permitting them to grasp the gold ring of enfranchisement.
The election of 1876 became an inflection point in the history of the United States. Termination of Reconstruction enabled the now united country to inject its military might into the Indian Wars. There was a genocide to wage; besides, a decade or more of help from the Ku Klux Klan had neatly terrorized the genie of racial equality back into its bottle.
The military was no longer needed to defend desperate Negroes. The Klan was more than eager to take over the job. As this essay is written, many historians continue to argue that segregation and inequality remain endemic in vast swaths of America.
From 1877 onward, KKK castrations and hangings convinced most Negroes that pursuing voting rights wasn’t worth the price: it would be 90 years before whites let blacks get anything close to an even break in the contest for survival in capitalist, racist America.
Whites once suppressed the black vote by killing black voters. Later, they charged blacks with felonies and convicted them before all-white juries. Felons lost their right to vote for life. Today, 26% of the black population in Kentucky are felons who can’t vote. In Florida, nearly two million black citizens are felons.
After 1877, whites decided to move past their ugly divide over slavery to neutralize instead the native Americans whose lands the Europeans had seized. If whites felt compelled to kill hundreds-of-thousands of “redskins” (and break dozens of treaties) to make the wilderness safe for whites, so what? Universal suffrage could wait, right? Voting hardly seemed relevant when so much killing needed done.
Decades of injustice and indifference marched forward into the 21st century before at long last the election of Barack Obama garnered anything close to a large majority turnout. 66.2% showed-up in 2008 to flip history on its head, according to the Washington Post.
The first black president — a valid Hawaiian birth-certificate enabled him to run — gathered the largest popular vote ever – 69.5 million. It’s a record not likely to be broken anytime soon. Donald Trump, eight years later in a country more densely populated, acquired a paltry 63 million.
Obama served two terms for eight years despite strong and persistent protestations by Donald Trump and his lily-white supporters that Barry was a Kenyan Muslim — a hater of all things American — a wannabe wrecker of white privilege.
The attacks have never really ended. Donald is threatening to charge Obama with treason for ordering spooks to “spy” on his campaign; for orchestrating an attempted “coup”. Perhaps a death sentence by hanging is the appropriate punishment.
In 2016 Trump with help from Russian, Israeli, and evangelical elites seized control of the United States despite one of the most lopsided popular defeats of any candidate in the history of USA elections. DT lost the popular vote by 8%, which in that low-turnout environment amounted to almost eleven-million votes. Hillary beat the Donald by nearly three-million. Third-party candidates took close to eight-million more.
Think about it.
Trump is president? Does anyone believe an injustice was done that ought to be set right?
Well, I do, for one.
According to some folks who once counted themselves among his closest friends (Michael Cohen and Tony Schwarz), Donald Trump will never relinquish power.
Are we going to believe them?
What if they’re right?
The slow-train-coming election of 2020 is an excuse that both Democrats and Republicans are using for inaction and delay. Isn’t it obvious?
No one wants to take on the bosses. Oligarchs can get to anyone; they can get to families. It’s amazing what doors can close on people who choose not to cooperate with those who have shown that they are capable of anything at all.
Legislators and judges, prosecutors and bureaucrats are dragging their feet refusing to make the decisions that will save the republic. They want to ride out the clock hoping that DT will die of old-age; by some miracle, citizens will be set free perhaps to — someday, somehow — stand-up for their wonderful country.
Pipe dream?
As this essay is written, the Trump family makes their plans to rule America into perpetuity. Jerry Falwell Junior of Liberty University floated the absurd idea on Twitter that Trump be given an extra two years to make up for time lost during the “Witch Hunt.”
The pictures that Trump’s fixer, Michael Cohen, seized from Falwell’s “pool-boy” had nothing whatever to do with Junior’s overly-supportive tweet anyhow. Everyone knows at least that part of the salacious story is true, right?
NOTE BY EDITORIAL BOARD: On August 25, 2020 Jerry Falwell accepted a $10.5 million severance package from Liberty University to step down. Like Adam in the Garden of Eden, he blamed his wife for the sex scandals that followed him pretty much everywhere during his tenure.
Seriously.
Jerry and Donald are soul-mates. Falwell admonishes his acolytes to conceal, carry, and train to kill Muslim attackers. What right-minded follower of Christ Jesus wouldn’t? Donald bears false witness by proving daily that slander, name-calling, and hitting back hardest is the way to win. With Jesus standing behind to egg them both, how can they not get their way in this world? On the way to the future they envision, they don’t lose.
The German Trump family intends to rule the world until the end of time, because the United States now stands at an historic threshold; it is perilously close to conquering the nearly 200 countries that make the community of nation-states. The Trumps intend to take advantage of an opportunity provided not even to Hitler; they will sit on a golden throne at the top of the world.
Who wants their kids admitted to a prestigious college?
Cooperate.
Who wants their kids to land big jobs?
Collaborate.
Who wants to live disease-free to the very end of a most pleasant retirement?
Capitulate.
These are the choices.
Is it possible to gain the whole world while keeping the nation’s soul safe and sound? Every Trump lunatic believes it is. Keep America First while undermining its constitution, its institutions, and its values; everything will fall into place like it should.
Folks who care about right and wrong, good and evil, love and hate, fair-play and corruption must now make choices that will bring down a wall of concrete on themselves and the children they love.
The time is now.
The time is come.
It’s time for parents to eat their children.
It’s time to worship the Fuhrer.
Our ancestors fought a revolution so that their progeny wouldn’t be bullied — not by drug lords; nor by malignant kings who torture for kicks; nor by bubble-encapsulated queens who tell their starving subjects to eat cake whenever they are truly hungry; nor by heartless thugs who cage thousands of family-separated orphans to make the point that they won’t be disobeyed.
Our national heroes fought a revolution so that people might someday choose their leaders and through them their way of living. When the people finally got their chance, most stayed home. Those who chose — those who made an effort to choose — chose leaders who wanted only to rule in the cruelest ways imaginable.
Call people stupid while smiling down at them when they praise every crazy thing you do and say — it’s a living hell for the powerless; the irony is that the powerless come to love their supreme leader in time; abused people, like domesticated pets, learn to love and trust their masters, eventually.
The world is sliding into an abyss of unfairness and worse. It’s the way of history. Every generation of humans fails to make the world a place they would gladly take the chance to be born into a second time.
Only fools would choose to be born into a world of ten-billion suffering souls. What are the chances that anyone will be born into a happy place with safe food and water, loving friends, and fun things to do?
What are the chances?
A case can be made — I won’t make it — that the odds are near zero. I often wonder if it wouldn’t be a weird irony if the wealthy and the cruel were born again strictly by chance not into Hell but rather into a second life on Earth — the same Earth they built and looted in their first life.
The catch is that they will not be allowed to choose their parents or on which continent they will live. The selection of their circumstances will be made by chance alone. A lottery determines their start in life, their potential, their possibilities.
It seems fair, doesn’t it?
Reasonable demographic analyses show that the prospects for a happy second-life are weighted heavily against them. A second-life lottery will ruin most of those unfortunates who are forced by their success to play it.
The situation in America today is one where most people are in blind denial of the calamity that has befallen them. No one wants to believe that the president is a dictator who they are powerless to resist. He is enabled by terrible people — cowards, most of them — who enjoy hurting people. Many aren’t Americans.
Some deluded folks have embraced the president. They, like the Germans of the 1930s, are oblivious to his evil ways. Many believe they themselves are good — blessed by a higher power — but they lust after evil as if it were as harmless as a whore. They embrace and cling, pant and sweat to divert their minds from a raging venereal assault that will surely overwhelm them on the day they finally understand that they have lost everything.
To vote in 2020 for or against the monster who torments us is as futile as it is dangerous. With help from the bad people, Donald Trump is going to crush America out of existence.
Even if everyone stays home, Donald Trump will say that the largest turnout in history gave him the greatest electoral victory ever.
Should he lose, he will deny the result and claim the election was rigged. He will not step down until he dies, no matter how many “traitors” step forward to question his version of the facts.
Most folks know on some level that the president is a liar and a father of lies. Will people allow themselves to be fooled again?
Boycotting the 2020 election means that “we the people” are choosing not to validate the politicians who refused to secure our elections; who redistricted away our ability to fix roads and other infrastructure; who trampled health care, food quality, and earning potential.
Boycotting the 2020 election will show the oligarchs that we have given up on the idea that things can be set right. Some folks, yes, refuse to believe they are victims; that they are chattel who lost the freedom to change society when Trump seized power.
We have to embrace realism. Billionaires are not our friends. Oligarchs are the enemy. We can’t challenge them, but we can puncture their collective illusion that the rest of us enjoy playing gladiator games in their stadiums.
Some might wonder why anyone would advocate boycott when the election is one-and-a-half years away. Well, the election is what the talking heads on billionaire-media obsess over.
No one talks about impeachment (except that it’s a bad idea), because Israeli, Russian, and the evangelical mob-bosses want Trump. It seems like an unlikely menage de trois until folks understand that bullies have a common interest — to exercise a humiliating power over little people.
Guess what?
If you are reading this essay, the chances are good that you are one of the little ones. The bosses who laugh at your antics don’t care about you or me at all.
Yes, we should let them speak for themselves — who can stop them? They advertise their warped values on every channel, station, and website! — but trust me, everyday folks like you and me share a dilemma: we are adrift in rowboats on a big ocean where unruly warships stream.
The battleships are not going to rescue anyone in a rowboat no matter how desperate their cries for help.
Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychologist who once worked for the CIA, told anyone who would listen, “Turn on, tune in, and drop out.”
Dissent. Resist. Boycott.
In the face of a smothering totalitarianism paid for by the monied and the powerful, we have no other choice. Cooperation, capitulation, and collaboration will bring ordinary folks nothing but loathing and loss of self-respect.
Until “outlaws” who have paid their debt to society are allowed to vote free and fair, no one votes. A forgotten prophet once said: we are all outlaws in the eyes of America.
The wealthy live behind gates for a reason.
I am asking Americans to work hard between now and Election 2020 to make voter turnout low.
Set a record.
35% or less might become, maybe, someday, a distress-beacon that the historians of democracies do not ignore.
Everyone stands for something. Why not stand for what’s right? Or take a knee. In the fresh, clean air of freedom, every powerless person can make that choice.
UPDATE FROM THE EDITORIAL BOARD: On 26 March 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted Nicolas Maduro on charges of drug trafficking and narco-terrorism, and the Department of State offered a $15 million reward for information that helps ”bring him to justice”.
It’s an album title – prophetic in its way — by Marvin Gaye, who was shot and killed by his own father on April Fools Day, 1984. Marvin would have celebrated his 45th birthday the next day, April 2.
Spring was on its way; no one saw winter coming.
It seemed at first that a fight between his parents went terribly wrong. Relatives tell different versions. In the end, it went down like this: Marvin’s father, a Pentecostal Minister and Healer, shot Marvin in his heart with a .38 caliber pistol Marvin gave him for Christmas.
Left behind were an adopted son, two bio-children, two brothers, two sisters, a half-brother, and his parents.
What’s Going On?
His father, it turned out, suffered from an undiagnosed brain tumor located on his pituitary gland. It made him violent; it drove him crazy. He felt scared. He feared his son. He shot the boy-man that he told everyone who would listen he truly loved.
What’s Going On?
Marvin Gaye propelled the Motown sound into the stratosphere of American popular music during the 1960s. Like most gifted black men in those years, he was a traumatized human being. He made the best of it.
Albums like What’s Going On and songs like Sexual Healing brought reassurance and comfort to millions of folks who suffered the emotional stress of living inside but apart in apartheid and militarized America.
In those days, like today, America itched for a fight. It found a good fight in Vietnam; it would soon find many others – all pointless and needlessly wasteful of both national treasure and human life. Like Marvin’s dad, America shot its sons in their hearts. America wasted a generation, which it forced to choose between fighting war and fighting against war.
Father, father We don’t need to escalate You see, war is not the answer For only love can conquer hate You know we’ve got to find a way To bring some lovin’ here today, oh oh oh Picket lines and picket signs Don’t punish me with brutality Talk to me, so you can see Oh, what’s going on…
A few souls managed to tightrope between the chasms of violence on both sides, but not many. Today, the United States is a couple of countries short of conquering the entire world.
Venezuela is one country among a dozen or so that sit at the top of a hit-list.
What will come next?
What’s Going On?
I’ve answered a lot of questions about Venezuela on Quora. I’ve never visited the country. I know almost nothing about it except what I’ve read in books and on Twitter by people who live there. Still, I have opinions. I’m not afraid to pontificate about the situation, because I’ve seen these coup-scenarios playout my entire life – seven decades and counting.
It’s like listening to a scratched record that constantly skips to play the same musical phrase; it’s like watching reruns of familiar shows like Leave it to Beaver and even the Twilight Zone. I can tell anyone how a show will end, because in their way all the old shows have the same predictable endings.
What’s happening in Venezuela and how it will end is both predictable and depressing. My standard of living and yours depend on what happens next. The security and safety of our Union depend on it.
The Russians and Cubans must lose. America must win.
Why?
We take the spoils, because if we miss our chance to seize the oil of Venezuela, over time the United States will slide into economic decline. Prosperity and the power of USA billionaires depend not only on free-trade and favorable trade agreements, but also on the resources they sequester; how much of the bounty of others they can steal.
It’s true.
What’s Going On?
TheBillyLeePontificator.comis now open for questions. What follows are answers. The most recent questions are first; the oldest are last.
1 – What’s happening in Venezuela right now?
Over the past several years the United States has been reestablishing its control over the countries of the western hemisphere, right? Dilma Rousseff of Brazil is a prominent example. Anyone who doesn’t know who she is — or her story — isn’t paying attention.
It won’t help to name others. People who know Ms. Rousseff need no explanation. For those who don’t, no explanation will suffice.
It’s easy for Americans to claim ignorance about what their country does to maintain its control over the resources and people of South and Central America. It’s not pretty. People are imprisoned and shot (murdered) to assert USA sovereignty.
Does anyone want to watch the processes by which the sausage they eat is manufactured? Of course not. No one wants to even think about it. The process is brutal and inhumane. It’s better not to know. All anyone really wants is for the sausage to taste good and not make them sick. No one prays for the safety of the pigs who give their lives so that people can enjoy their breakfasts.
It’s the same in Venezuela. The country has massive oil reserves. The leadership is allied with countries who exert their powers on the other side of the world. These countries are always making moves to gain a foothold on American turf. The result is turf wars, which is what Venezuela is.
The United States will kill and imprison as few Venezuelans as possible, hopefully, but it will prevail; it will secure Venezuela’s natural resources, including its oil, for the USA to use and buy from the billionaires who shape its vision.
2 – Considering that every superpower had its rise and fall, do you think that the US will ever drastically fall, and how far into the future do you think that will be?
Since World War II the USA has militarily attacked one-fourth of the world’s nation-states. Of the 195 countries in the world, the USA controls or “unduly influences” all but twenty-five, give or take — through treaties, alliances, trade agreements, and so on. The United Nations is located inside the United States for a reason.
The USA controls the entire western hemisphere and exercises its military dominance without much interference anytime it decides. The Pentagon is a big place. People underestimate its power, because the majority of its structure is not viewable — most of it is below-ground. The vast scale of US power is necessary to operate 800 military bases, which are located in every region of the world.
The financial system of the USA is a force-multiplier that enables the USA to quarantine with knee-bending sanctions both individuals and countries who oppose its goals. American financial leverage is legendary.
The United States is on a trajectory toward world domination that would make the Third Reich stand up and take notice. It is remarkable how US power has grown during my lifetime. The USA is always at war with somebody.
Except for the four years of the Carter administration, the killing and dying doesn’t stop. The numbers of murders has reached into the tens of millions since the end of the last world war.
I believe that the American empire will collapse when the Yellowstone Supervolcano erupts. It might be 500 years from now or next Tuesday. There is no way to know for sure.
3 – Are the recurring power outages in Venezuela due to US interference in their country?
The United States could easily send in technical experts to stand up Venezuela’s power grid. It chooses not to. Not only that, it refuses to provide any kind of aid at all by refusing to work with the elected representatives of that oil-rich country.
Worse, the United States is plotting to isolate and embargo Venezuela. The US president wants their oil; USA oligarchs are at war with socialism; the State Department is at war with Russia who is providing aid to the beleaguered President Maduro.
It doesn’t take a genius to understand that the United States cares nothing for the ordinary people of Venezuela; it instead is destabilizing the country to secure its resources.
Securing resources in the western hemisphere is something the United States has done repeatedly since the end of World War II. Ask any bona-fide historian if I’m right. Its success is one reason why the United States has the highest standard of living of all other countries in its half of the world.
4 – Russia sends troops to Venezuela to give the United States a ”red line”. Should the United States be worried, and do you think this could start a war between the United States and Russia?
My answer is a guess based on no knowledge or evidence; here it is: the USA will not challenge Russia militarily as long as Trump is president. It’s not collusion; Mueller proved that our president is the most patriotic president that the USA has ever had (and will ever have since he is likely to be the last).
Every red-blooded gun-toting Christian in America knows that Russian oligarchs with the help of almighty God put Trump into power to kill us all for allowing gays to marry. It’s not hard to understand.
5 – What is Venezuela’s national anthem?
Glory to the Brave People
6 – Is it technically possible to sabotage a country’s electricity infrastructure using an electromagnetic attack, as Venezuelan president Maduro has claimed, as the cause of his country’s power failure?
Where were you during the Iraq War? Taking down Saddam Hussein’s electrical grid was a point of pride during that war. Our leaders bragged about it on the evening news.
USA’s ability to attack infra-structure is vastly improved today. Venezuela is the perfect place to conduct diabolical tests of new war-fighting techniques and coup protocols.
Why?
It’s the oil, stupid. (I’m using a popular expression for emphasis. It’s not meant to insult anyone’s point of view.)
Anyone who is knowledgeable about the post-world-war history of the western hemisphere knows that the USA has been or now is at war with every country. The United States runs things or makes those who oppose it miserable with sanctions, sabotage, and subversion.
It’s not something a reasonable person can argue against.
Said another way, only an ideologue or an apologist will deny the culpability of the USA for waging war against Venezuela. If the United States cared about Venezuela, it would help Maduro, not undercut him.
7 – Why do you think there is a nationwide power outage in Venezuela going on right now?
During the Iraq war, the USA took down Baghdad’s power grid. It’s something our country is good at. That this power outage occurred during destabilization efforts to install a new president doesn’t look good for the prime suspects.
8 – Where in the world is the next international war likely to break out?
First, it’s important for everyone to understand that major international conflicts are potential species-extinction events. Enough nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons are available to enough countries to threaten the survival of humankind — should humankind fall into the abyss of a conflagration like it did during the two previous world wars.
It’s true that the last world war ended almost 75 years ago, but insufficient time has passed to be convincing that another world war won’t occur, perhaps sooner than anyone imagines.
One important reason why world-war has not occurred is because the United States has spent the post-world-war years consolidating its grip on empire. The USA knows the names, phone numbers, and addresses of every world leader and their relatives. It has cruise missiles and bunker-busters with each leader and family member’s name on at least one of them.
It’s personal. The number of individuals we don’t like and have removed from power is large and growing yearly. Maduro of Venezuela is the latest name on the USA Naughty List, but so, recently, was Dilma Rousseff of Brazil as well as countless others around the world — especially in the Middle East.
According to who counts, 195 countries exist in the world. The USA has conducted military operations against one-fourth of them since the end of World War II. Many conflicts are state secrets not shared with the public.
Expect major changes in Africa soon, anyone who doesn’t believe it.
To my way of reasoning, the best way to determine where the next lit-match will ignite is to look to past conflagrations. Countries with a history of warlike behavior are more likely than countries that lack such a history to start the next major international conflict.
What countries might these be? I’m not going to name them, because why make enemies unnecessarily who might have reformed their ways? But anyone with a knowledge of history and current events can create their own list. It’s not hard to do.
9 – How much worse can it look for Maduro? Denying hungry and sick Venezuelans from free food and medicine with guns. Isn’t Maduro’s time up?
Anyone with any sense knows that the USA engineered this debacle, because it is at war with socialism.
We invaded Cuba after they threw out the mafia, for crying out loud. We preferred organized crime to socialism.
10 – What should everyone know about the current political crisis in Venezuela?
Venezuela lives and dies on the price of oil. Low oil prices brought Venezuela to the brink of collapse in the late 1990s and made Hugo Chavez’s rise possible. Maduro, his successor, is falling on the sword of collapsing oil prices.
What confuses people is why.
Is the USA manipulating the oil markets to take down Maduro? The US has a consistent record of overthrow attempts against leftist governments. With a billionaire oligarch leading the USA, it seems possible.
Why doesn’t the United States help Maduro stabilize his country, which would be the humanitarian path? No one is sure. Common sense seems to suggest that our leaders are looking for a way to make a socialist system fail. Why else back a 35-year-old nobody to run the country? Wouldn’t aid to the elected government be an easier way to bring relief?
The Russians are involved, which further complicates. It’s possible that DT works for their side — so this coup that’s been in the making by our side during the past five years or so is sure to fail now that DT is aware and getting involved.
Time will tell.
It’s a sad state of affairs, what’s going on right now.
11 – Will a civil war happen in Venezuela?
The US has been at war with Venezuela for a long time now. Hundreds of America’s brightest have been working in their Pentagon offices for years to make sure socialism doesn’t succeed in South America.
Our wealthy oligarchs don’t want anyone to believe that a system might work where they aren’t allowed to steal as much as they possibly can and still call it “free enterprise.”
It simple, really. They are looking for allies inside Venezuela who are willing to blame Maduro for what America is doing to undercut them behind the scenes.
This crap started in Guatemala in 1954; it never ends.
12 – Why is Venezuela’s military backing Maduro recently? Is it worth it?
Maduro is the elected president of Venezuela in the same way that Trump is the elected president of the United States. Was the US election fair? Ask Reality Winner who is serving a five-year prison term incommunicado, because she disclosed NSA info on voting fraud. You will find that you can’t interview her.
Reality Winner, incarcerated NSA whistle-blower who exposed voter fraud and tampering in the 2016 presidential election. She is serving a five-year prison sentence — incommunicado as are other whistleblowers like Daniel Hale of the NSA and Teri J. Albury of the FBI.
So good luck figuring out what the truth is.
The billionaires who milk America don’t like socialism, because it is a system where people cooperate to create wealth, which they then share. Sharing wealth is anathema to oligarchs and mob bosses.
So, the USA is pulling out a well-worn playbook to guide itself through the process of replacing the experienced and elected leaders of Venezuela with a 35-year-old kid who knows just enough to do what he’s told. The USA promises to make him president. He promises to serve. It’s a kind of tit-for-tat.
To increase urgency and hysteria the USA manipulates currency and oil prices while it builds a right-wing cartel of nations to do its bidding. All the leaders will get rich under the plan. No one seriously gives a hoot about what happens to the poor.
The biggest danger is civil war, which happens to be exactly the same danger facing the United States. What goes around comes around.
The USA would be doing the world a big favor by helping Maduro get his country on its feet. Low oil prices have been catastrophic for Venezuela. Why don’t we help instead of using a bad situation as an opportunity to set up a bunch of oligarchs who will march to our drumbeat instead of their own?
Why is economic diversity such a bad thing? Ted Kennedy said in his last book that tycoons like his legendary dad were afraid that if socialism succeeds anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, it might become a prairie fire that takes down their edifice of privileges.
No tycoon wants a prairie fire. Every wealthy person believes they are self-made and entitled to all the advantages that their money can buy.
Ordinary people have about the same power to control the circumstances of their lives as farm animals.
It’s pathetic, really.
13 – With a regime change impending, within the next 30-50 years, will Venezuela consider socialistic influences for governmental structure again?
The pending regime change that is coming will take place in the United States. Americans are sick of boorish elites who — under a GOP led by pig Trump — won’t be electable in 2020.
One-party-rule by progressive democrats will bring relief to average people — something they haven’t experienced since the early 1970s. Many young people have no idea what it’s like to live in country that limits what the wealthy can steal and works overtime to bring equity to working people.
14 – Do you agree that reducing imports from Venezuela by the United States is an adequate short-term answer for helping that country and its citizens?
The best thing the USA can do to help Venezuela is to end sanctions, embargos, destabilization by our intelligence forces, and the policy of strategic strangulation, which is killing people — especially the weak.
The next best thing is to organize an international effort to airdrop food aid into the country. Flood the country with rice, powdered milk, clean water, potatoes, corn, etc. Inexpensive food is easy to collect and distribute and will help to strengthen the elderly, children, the pregnant, and the sick.
Flood the country with medical supplies and doctors to help the sick. Start talks with Maduro to offer him all the assistance he needs to get his country on its feet again.
15 – Is the newly accepted Venezuelan government by the United States backed by the majority of people in Venezuela? Or is it propaganda?
Citgo, the Venezuelan oil company, ships 500,000 barrels of heavy crude into Texas refineries every day. The crude is used to make diesel fuel for trucks. Without cheap diesel America’s goods and services get expensive real fast.
America’s oligarchs hate socialist countries. Most people can understand why. The foreign policy of the United States is to destabilize and overthrow all socialist countries whenever possible. Venezuela is an easy mark, because their leaders do not seem to be sophisticated.
Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, and National Security Advisor, John R. Bolton, are leading a coalition of nations to inflict strategic strangulation on the Maduro administration. The government cannot access its gold reserves (held in British banks) and is fighting to maintain control of Citgo, which adds 10 billion dollars to the nation’s coffers each year.
The USA plans to divert as many assets as it can to the puppet government it is setting up under the auspices of a 35-year-old kid who no one ever heard of before about three days ago.
The process of destabilization has been accelerated under Trump, and the USA is now making its move.
The USA is hoping for military defections combined with public demonstrations to force a sham election in the next 30 days to oust the socialist government in Venezuela and legitimize a new government, which they will control behind the scenes. They hope to assassinate Maduro if they get the opportunity. The Russians are sending in a large security detail to protect the lives of the current group of leaders and help them hold onto power.
The country of Venezuela is polarized much like the USA. The elites want the USA to intervene; the poor want Madura and socialism. All sides want the USA led embargo, destabilization protocols, and strategic strangulation to stop ASAP.
16 – Will the Venezuelan military switch sides if they see the US military lining up for an invasion? Don’t they care mostly about how much they are paid? What good is an ousted Maduro?
Overthrowing elected socialist governments is a specialty of US foreign policy. The USA is good at it, but it doesn’t always work.
Even an intense strategic strangulation of Cuba (and an invasion to boot) was unable to break down the Cuban revolution.
The USA killed two million Vietnamese but failed miserably to prevent the unification of North and South.
Early successful overthrows such as those in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954) have convinced policy makers that the odds are in their favor when they decide to decimate a particular country. They have a better than even chance to prevail, so why not take it?
The problem is that everyone now knows — after 79 years of messing with governments — that the USA cares almost exclusively about itself and the protection of its tycoons. Democracy, equality, and basic fairness mean nothing to the United States in its conduct of foreign policy.
Many policy makers disagree with my point of view, but they are in the habit of giving in to self-deception to make it possible for them to live inside themselves.
17 – What is the likelihood that the US will at some time become entangled in a coup in South America?
The USA has a history of involvement in the politics of South and Central American countries. Coups are part of the history. Where have you been?
Seriously.
Destabilizing socialist countries in our hemisphere is an important component of the foreign policy of the United States. Everyone knows. It’s not a well-kept secret.
The USA keeps track of what’s going on through agricultural programs, aid, and assistance. When it desires change, the USA generally tries diplomacy first. If it doesn’t work, more violent methods have been used, including assassinations, disappearances, and coups.
Under certain circumstances, it can be illegal to talk about what exactly our intelligence services do to keep the Americas safe for exploitation by our companies. The most famous company that the USA went to war for was the United Fruit Company during the Eisenhower years. The president’s secretary held a lot of the company’s stock.
Some countries have raw materials that are considered strategic assets. The USA or its surrogates operate mines and other facilities to secure these assets and to keep other competitor countries from access. Right?
The instability in South and Central America that has arisen since President Obama stepped down is probably the result of activities encouraged by the newest president. He has lots of precedents to justify himself, correct?
18 – Are Russia and China’s recent provocative military maneuvers a prelude to war with the United States?
My belief — based on no evidence I can recite — is that our president is a pacifist. He enjoys pretend violence, like pro-wrestling, but is repulsed by real violence. He likes to threaten, yell, call people names, sue people in court, etc., but he is uninterested in physically hurting someone. For him fake violence is a kind of game. Often, he forgives and makes up later.
His mistresses have all said, as far as I know, that he treated them with kindness; something that many philanderers are not known to do.
When he bombed an airstrip to retaliate against a Syrian chemical attack, he set up the targeting so that no one on-site would get hurt. Yes, an attack on another target killed a hundred or so Russian soldiers, but it was an unintended screw-up he’d probably like to have back.
Our president likes to huff and puff and make deals; it’s a harmless game for him that has no meaning except for the fun he gets each day trying to outwit his opponents who he calls “rats” or “crooked” or “lyin” or whatever fits. Hillary Clinton, in real life, is one of his best friends, for crying out loud.
Trump is a liberal at heart, but he pretends to be a racist monster to hold onto his base, which is, let’s face facts, hold-overs from the Confederacy of the Old South. Southern racists are dangerous when angry; otherwise, they are the dumbest, easiest-to-manipulate voters in the country. They are like lemmings — if Trump says, “run off a cliff”, they’ll do it and praise Jesus for the opportunity.
Trump will not go to war against China or Russia as long as he can play monopoly with their oligarchs. He’ll bluster and threaten. He won’t pull any triggers.
One very interesting thing happened the day he became president. A prominent drug lord from Mexico was arrested and disappeared into the New York City penal system. Within a few days the man’s family was rounded up. They haven’t been heard from since.
So, the president has power. His problem is that a component of his power comes from sympathetic mob bosses, often with dual-citizenship — almost always from Russia and Israel. These “friends” aren’t shy about taking care of business, so the president won’t have to.
19 – The US could lose a future war against Russia or China, a new report to Congress has suggested. Do you agree?
The United States completed a two-trillion-dollar upgrade to our nuclear missile inventories during the Obama administration. The USA built a doomsday matrix.
I’ve heard rumors that a certain country has built a doomsday bomb capable of destroying Earth were it ever detonated. Folks should know that there is no upper limit to the destructive power of hydrogen bombs. Countries can build them as big as they want. They can blow up Earth itself.
The USA might not be able to win a hot war, but we won’t lose it to others, either. A war to the death against Russia or China is a war to the death of the planet. If recovery is possible, it will take thousands of years, but climate changes and the loss of resources will mean that Earth will never be what it once was; humans will never be what they once were.
War by major powers against each other (a world-war) is something that can never be allowed to happen again. The next world-war will kill billions of people and unleash a pandora’s box of suffering on the few unfortunates who survive. Rich and poor alike who live will be traumatized to the end of their natural lives.
Hot war is suicide. The leaders of every nation-state must give their last ounce of courage to preserve the one place in the universe where people have the hope to survive and thrive.
20 – Why is Russia’s military so powerful despite the fact that they spend less on defense than the USA?
1 – The Russians pay lower salaries and have fewer military bases. (The USA maintains 800 bases in 70 countries.)
2 – Russia is more than twice the size of the United States.
3 – Russia has the world’s largest reserves of oil.
4 – Russians are more literate in science and engineering than Americans.
5 – Russia has developed dangerous (to us) technological advantages in missile technology. They have air-to-surface missiles that are stealthy and reach velocities close to three miles per second. The USA has nothing in its arsenal that can track and shoot them down, which means that we risk losing our entire fleet of navy ships in a hot war.
6 – Russia has a fleet of drone subs deployed off our coasts.
7 – Russia does not seem to the have rampant corruption and cost overruns in its manufacturing sector that the United States is known for and which drive up the price of everything the Pentagon buys.
8 – Russians build their vehicles, artillery, and guns to perform in off-road bad weather conditions. They design their equipment to be simple, reliable, and easy to fix.
9 – The USA is paying unreliable private companies to administer a big part of its military space program. The temptations that lead to profiteering and unrealistic assessments of effectiveness might rot the foundations of military readiness. It is a risk the Russians don’t take.
Having said all this, the fact is that the militaries of both countries are nightmarishly lethal. The side that attacks first in the next war will accrue big initial advantages that could make a counter-punch ineffective. An immediate imbalance of power could easily become permanent and lead to catastrophe for the country that takes the first hit.
Technologies of modern warfare are making the world less safe for war-makers.
Hope is when the generals and civilian leaders don’t feel safe that they will avoid all-out war.
Terror-in-the-gut starts when military planners understand that the other side will strike first.
The Bible says that all who call on the name of the LORD will be saved. Jesus said not so fast, that’s not quite right. Not everyone who says LORD, LORD will be saved, but only those who do the will of GOD.
Despite what 40,000 Christian denominations (and counting) teach their congregations, the Bible is full of contradictions. Worse for modern readers, it is full of scientific and historical nonsense.
The most compelling contradiction involves the subject of divorce. The Bible both forbids and permits it. Jesus said that the contradiction was intentional to accommodate the hardness of people’s hearts.
When Jesus says the Bible harbors contradictions, that kind of settles the matter, does it not?
It seems that for some, it doesn’t.
One New Testament writer asserts that all Scripture is God-breathed and useful for teaching and instruction. He doesn’t assert that everything written is contradiction-free.
For one thing, the Bible wasn’t anywhere near complete when he wrote his tract. There are other reasons. The ancients didn’t have the same ideas about evidence, science, proof, and logic that western modernity has. It’s not easy to accept, but almost everything that matters to us was different in the ancient world.
My experience with members of congregations from dozens of churches has taught me that many folks are drawn to religion because they want certainty.
The uncertainties of life scare them. They hate ambiguity and want their stupid notions about life confirmed. The easiest way is to group-think with like-minded believers.
All congregations teeter on the brink of madness. Cult culture is always lurking beneath the shadows of human weakness and fallibility.
It’s not difficult to understand that Jesus had a serious problem that could not easily be overcome. By modern standards, the brightest people of first-century Israel were hopelessly ignorant. A huge number suffered from illness, both physical and mental. They had no realistic understanding about why.
They knew not where the wind came nor what the stars were. Some thought, according to the screenwriters of the 1964 classic movie, Spartacus, that a giant lived in a cave with a young girl. He looked at her and sighed. From his breath the wind stirred.
As for stars, some thought they were the light of Heaven shining through tiny holes in a tarp that covered Earth at night like a tent.
If you were Jesus and encountered such ignorance, where would you start? In those days, almost everything people believed was a lie.
A truth teller has no chance in the modern world. What chance would such a person have two-thousand years ago?
It is one of the great miracles of Jesus’s life that he was able to reach his mid-thirties before the leaders he challenged killed him.
Think about it. Life was cheap when the Romans used the cross to teach wayward people the lesson that rebels die hard. When wood was scarce, Romans nailed people to the sides of their houses. Non-citizens in occupied territories didn’t even get the benefit of a hearing more often than not.
From Jesus’s point of view, the most important problem people faced was not physical suffering or oppression but separation from God caused by their propensity to sin. Evil was the result of not knowing God and living life apart.
For Jesus, God is love. People who live outside the will and protection of love are certain to traumatize those they care about most — starting with themselves first, their own families, and moving inevitably outward like cancer into the organs of the people they hate, which for most people is everyone they meet.
The problem of hate and senseless cruelty is that it is not a respecter of persons, knowledge, wealth, or power. Hate and cruelty destroy lives whether people believe stars are pinholes or distant suns.
Jesus didn’t address the problem of human ignorance, because it is a problem that is always with us. Even the smartest people today can’t explain to anyone in a way that makes sense how it is that people got here. The best educated from the best schools talk crazy most of the time.
Instead of worrying about the minutiae of hermeneutics, Jesus said that Scripture is best summarized by two simple actions: loving God who gave us life, and loving the others who God also created and loves.
We do the will of God when we love and forgive. It’s simple. A child can understand.
Major portions of the Christian Bible weren’t written when Jesus walked the earth. It was hundreds of years after Christ’s death before a compilation of tracts were collected that were sensible and consistent enough that the scholars of the time felt confident to publish.
They published a handful of Bibles, because the printing press wouldn’t be invented for a thousand years more. Even then, the text wasn’t partitioned into chapters or verse; chapters and verses would be added later — hundreds of years into the future.
Jesus was well aware that most people wouldn’t be taught to read for a long, long time after he was gone. He knew that language and cultures change with time. No one has to be God to understand that translations of ancient languages are always a little unreliable — open to interpretation — no matter how much scholarship is brought to bear.
It’s why Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit would write the Words of God on human hearts; the words of God would guide believers until he returned to rescue the world someday.
Which day?
Jesus said he had no idea. All he knew was that he would return when humankind needed him most. It would be during a catastrophe; an extinction event the likes of which no one has ever seen; a time when the moon and stars disappear from view.
In a time of existential danger — a day that might never come — he promised to rescue us one last time.
Preachers have created a cottage industry out of the promise of a Second Coming. Writers make a ton of money cashing in on people’s insatiable curiosity to understand the “end times.”
Who will be saved? Who will be thrown into the fires of Hell?
Who will be awarded movie rights? Who will hold the copyrights to the greatest story ever told?
People demand that God be perfect. They insist that everything created by God be perfect. If things can’t be made perfect, they want nothing to do with God. Who needs a God who doesn’t live up to my high standards? some dare to reason.
God disagrees, of course. God said that he saw that the things he created were good, not perfect. A lot of people get that simple truth from the first book of the Bible completely wrong.
The first humans sinned and found themselves separated from God. The world they entered wasn’t good. It was bad. The reason, sadly, was because they made it bad.
It’s a subtle thought, but good versus bad is qualitatively different from perfect verses flawed. It has a different flavor that can make a difference in the way people view the wonder of God and what he has done. It changes the texture of the relationship with our Maker in a way that when correctly understood is able to rekindle the embers of love that Jesus warned will (for most folks) grow cold.
We don’t want that, do we? I don’t want it, and neither does God. God doesn’t demand perfection; he’s asking us to love and be good to ourselves and each other. We will make mistakes; we are not and never will be perfect; we can love and forgive each other our trespasses, as the oldest of Christ’s prayers says.
Forgiving each other erases the bad and releases the good in every person who is abundantly loved. It’s a perfect system to restore wholesomeness; perfection itself is irrelevant — does anyone know? — and, anyway, it’s unachievable by both people and God.
Everything that was made was good; it wasn’t necessarily perfect. Let that sink in. Perfection turns us into automata; into machines of steel and hardened hearts; into measurers and comparators; into judges and executioners.
Only love is made perfect through the shed blood of Christ Jesus alone. It is the central mystery of the Bible — a stumbling block for many.
We are flesh and blood made in the image of God. Jesus commanded every person under Heaven to live life unafraid. We don’t fret if a hair is grey or out of place; we don’t worry about wrinkles or crooked teeth or brains that don’t function like we think they should.
We don’t worry about the clothes we wear or the food we eat. We don’t obsess on our health or our popularity. We don’t carry guns or live behind walls or fly drones over our neighbors’ yards; we don’t fear strangers; we love them and take them in.
Most of all we trust God to meet our needs — like the sparrow and the fox who God feeds and shelters and knows as intimately as ourselves, the people who worship the LORD with grateful hearts — because without God with us we are lost in a universe we will never understand.
Billy Lee
MESSAGE FROM THE EDITORIAL BOARD: Once again Billy Lee has pontificated about religion without offering readers anything to back it up. We demanded that he quote something from Scripture.
He picked 1 John 4: 7-12:
”Dear friends: Let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. […] No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.”
NOTES:
τελεος – having reached its end; finished; complete — Matthew 5: 48
The words “You’re fired!” are among the most painful I’ve ever heard.
I’ve lost a lot of jobs during my life, so the pain has accumulated to the point where I would rather die than re-live my life—unless I could arrange things so that no person would ever have the power to drive a stake into my heart, because that’s what being “let go” feels like.
I never followed Trump‘s television show The Apprentice because hearing the punch line “You’re Fired!” always felt like a hard slap to the face. Watching young men and women suck up to a powerful boss who gut-punches all but one was never harmless entertainment. Not for me, anyway.
The number of people fired during the Trump administration is staggering. How many of these 24 high-power individuals can anyone identify? They are the tip of a mammoth iceberg of graft, corruption, incompetence, ignorance, and suffering. Who disagrees?
I’ve fired people. I understand why our president won’t do it in real life. He always assigns the task to an underling, right? The White House employment line churns like a stormy ocean but the president stays above the froth.
Firing someone is more painful than being fired because it stays with you forever. It’s not something you can overcome by getting a better job, for example. You can’t take it back. I’ve always wondered whether I might have found a kinder way to address the problems I thought firing others solved.
Those who read my essays might remember that I managed some restaurants when I was in college. Back then finding good help was hard, because everyone worked.
I needed a cook really bad. A roly-poly guy with a sweet face applied for the job. He explained that he was a slow learner, but he would try to become the best cook he could.
After three days, I realized that he was slow, like he said. He would never be able to keep up; he lacked the intelligence to memorize the menu and prepare the food properly.
I called him into my office.
“Ruby,” I said. “I don’t see how we’re going to be able to make this work. I’m sorry, but I have to let you go.”
He said, “Mr. Lee, I understand. Uh, you gave me a chance. Uh… uh, it didn’t work out. It’s happened before. It’s not your fault. Uh, don’t feel bad. I’m to blame. I’m slow, uh… that’s all.”
He offered his hand, pivoted, and walked out. He had obviously memorized his exit speech. I put my face in my hands and sobbed.
It was clear that Ruby suffered from a disability of some kind. My need for a cook blinded me. Until he recited his sentences, I didn’t see it. No matter how hard he tried he was never going to make it in a world that demanded quick wits and fast problem solving.
What made me cry was that he wasn’t going to give up. It seemed like no reversal mattered. Success would forever elude him, but he had just enough resources and determination to pick himself up, give his speech, shake hands, and strive to find the next opportunity.
Ruby was willing to fight against the odds to become a hamburger cook. He took great pains not to traumatize managers, including me, who inevitably would be forced to fire him to protect their bottom line. In his effort to spare my feelings he failed—like he probably failed at everything he tried.
I felt sick to my stomach. I felt remorse. Ruby gave everything he had. Nothing worked. Something wasn’t right. There was nothing I could do.
It’s been decades. My heart aches. I wonder if by some miracle Ruby ever made his dream come true. I’ll never know.
At the time, I managed two restaurants. Because I was a student at the university, assistant managers and other responsible employees helped me to keep operations running smooth.
At the second store a couple of waitresses complained that a busboy I hired was stealing tips.
I called the kid into my office. “Are you stealing?” I asked. The boy immediately began emptying his pockets. His pockets were deep. He dumped big handfuls of quarters and dimes on my desk. I didn’t say a word. When the last dime dropped, he ran out of the store. We never saw him again.
It felt good. The waitresses didn’t seem to mind either.
I hired a rather attractive waitress at the first store. She had the annoying habit of talking too much to other waitresses. She was loud, and it irritated me. After a couple of months, I started to hate her because she didn’t seem to feel an urgency to follow through on the things I asked. I felt disrespected.
One day she said something that rubbed me the wrong way. I called her back to my office and fired her in almost the same way Trump would years later on his TV show. I was cold and matter of fact. “You talk too much and don’t do what you’re told,” I said. “You’re fired!”
The girl broke down and began wailing. “How will I get money for my trip to Europe this summer?” she begged.
I would be in Italy that summer myself to visit family living in Naples at the time. I had no idea until that moment that her job was a means to an admirable end.
A wave of nausea swept over me. I was making a terrible mistake. It seemed somehow impossible to backtrack. I’d played my hand. From now on things could never be good between us. “It’s time to leave,” I told her.
She went to court over it, but the owners of the restaurant knew the judge, so nothing happened. I feel like a worm when I remember this act of needless cruelty.
Big Boy Restaurants were among the first in a wave of fast-food chains to capture the hearts and pocketbooks of a public too busy to cook home meals in the 1960s. The Big Boy Slim Jim sandwich remains one of my all-time favorites.
I hired a cook who caught on fast. “I’ve been been vacationing in Florida,” he answered when I asked about his tan.
After a few weeks the owner approached to tell me the cook had pulled him aside to explain that I was a terrible manager who should be fired. The cook expressed his belief that he was the best choice to replace me.
I said to the owner, “That’s interesting. He is a good cook and smart enough probably. Maybe he could help out at another store.”
The owner looked at me like I was crazy. “Are you out of your mind?” he said. “This guy is trying to get you fired so he can take your job in this store—a store you manage! What are you going to do about it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I can start training him in other parts of the job and someday he will know enough to help us.”
“No!” the owner said. “You are going to fire that back-stabbing son-of-a-bitch. When I come in here next week, he’s gone, understand?”
When the new cook came in for his shift, I asked him to walk outside with me. I said, “The owner tells me you think I’m incompetent.” The guy threw up his hands like he was being arrested for something and said, “I screwed up. You’re right. Fire me! No hard feelings, OK?” He wheeled around and disappeared down the street.
I felt surprise and relief. I didn’t fire him. He fired himself. I think I remember someone telling me he hitchhiked back to Florida.
Well, this essay is supposed to be about me being fired, not me firing others so let’s get on with it.
I was an athlete in high school. I played football and baseball. I was an All Star third baseman. In football I played tight end. Because my dad was the commander of a Navy jet-helicopter squadron in Key West, we lived on the Florida island during my eighth-grade year and the first half of ninth grade.
Key West High School had a good reputation, because it graduated several big-time athletes back then—George Mira and Boog Powell are the two I remember because they had younger brothers who were close to me in age. We called Boog’s brother “Boob.” He took the joke with grace and good humor. Athletics was a big deal.
Toward the end of the fall season, our freshman football team lost an important game. In the locker room the coach dressed down the team to the point of being profane and abusive.
He was more than unfair. I felt degraded. We played our hearts out. I piped up to defend my friends, “Maybe if you knew how to coach, we would have won!”
The coach turned purple. “Billy Lee, you will never play sports again at Key West High School. You are done.”
I cried on the bus ride home. I reminded the coach about how good I was at baseball. He had seen me play during an All-Star contest between the civilian and Navy leagues. He knew I was good.
He remained stoic and unmoved. Fortunately for me, the Navy promoted my dad and we moved to Arlington, Virginia where he led some group at the Pentagon not known to the public. I would play sports again, after all.
More is under the Pentagon than above. It’s a big place, which I was fortunate to visit and tour—under supervision, of course. My dad worked several years within a labyrinth whose mission was to protect and defend the United States of America.
Unfortunately for me I missed out on a season of baseball. Ninth graders went to junior-high; my new school didn’t field a baseball team. When high school try-outs finally came, a year later, I made the JV team.
The suburban schools outside Washington DC were big. A thousand tenth grade boys tried out. Eighteen made the cut. I thought, This is great. I’m back on track.
Then, disaster. It got cold in northern Virginia. I was used to playing in the heat of the deep south. My legs and arms seemed to stiffen-up in the frigid temperature, and I endured a terrible scrimmage. I made costly errors and went hitless. The coaches announced after practice that they had agreed to bring three varsity players down to JV to give them more playing time. Three JV players would be cut.
The names of the final “final roster” would be posted in the gym. Anyone whose name wasn’t on the list was cut. The decisions were final. There would be no discussions, no negotiations.
I must have looked at the roster a dozen times before I could accept that my name wasn’t on it. I told my dad on the ride home from practice. Visibly shaken, all he could manage was a barely audible, “oh.”
I experienced my first nervous breakdown. It lasted a few months. I told my mother that I was terrified all the time. It never stopped. She confessed that she had a breakdown when she was younger, but in time she got through it.
In ninth grade I lived in Key West, where my dad defended America against Soviet subs with a squadron of jet-helicopters during the Cuban Missile Crisis. My mother stands next to me. When my athletic dreams unraveled the following year, I had a nervous breakdown. Mom led me safely through to the other side of hell. After aging she suffered memory loss, but she remained a happy, optimistic person to the end of her life.
It made me feel good to know that my mother understood. I waited for healing. Eventually, I got better.
Dad was promoted again. The president sent him to Paris to represent the United States Navy at NATO. The French planned to withdraw. Dad tried but was unable to change their minds. A year later he would lead war games in the Mediterranean Sea for an ineffective coalition of nations called SEATO (now disbanded), and the family would follow him to Naples, Italy.
But my senior year would be spent in France. It would be a welcome change from the Washington DC suburbs, which to this day I associate with “fear and loathing“—bad mental health.
It’s hard to believe, but I did get fired from high school—in Paris of all places.
My girlfriend’s dad was Secretary of the Embassy in Paris. Sandy attended a French high school and spoke fluent French. It made getting around easy because not only was she connected and accepted everywhere, but she also made a gifted translator. I had no communication problems when we explored the twenty or so arrondissements together.
Because I went to the school for military-dependents (populated mostly by Army kids) I couldn’t invite Sandy to our senior prom. It was a school rule, a stupid rule, but that was the Army way in those days.
Someone got the bright idea to hook me up with the ranking General’s daughter—a sweet girl, but I didn’t know her. Because I already had a girlfriend who I sort of loved, I had no interest in the arrangement with the General’s daughter.
I made some stupid decisions that involved selling sleeping pills that were freely available (at nominal cost without a prescription) in the French drugstores (les pharmacies) near our house. I sold the pills to friends to raise money for Paris prom expenses, which I expected to be, well, excessive. It turned out that the pills were illegal on American military property, which included the high school.
A big kid I didn’t know bought three and started running around the campus yelling to everybody that he was high on LSD—a kind of joke, I guess. Anyway, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) locked down the school, did a sweep, and found discarded pill wrappers.
After a number of interrogations, they got to the truth and had to decide how to handle me and two other kids who had nothing to do with anything except that they “confessed” to buying one pill each.
One of the kids was the only black at the school. It didn’t help at all that his dad was an enlisted man—his dad was not, sadly, the highest-ranking Naval officer in Paris, like mine. He and his family were put on the first flight out of Paris. His family was uprooted over a sleeping pill.
The verdict was that I would not attend the last week of classes but would receive a diploma and be allowed to go to the graduation ceremonies—including the after-party.
The senior prom was off-limits. It was my punishment. The Army would send a West Point cadet (from the academy famous for its overlook of the Hudson River fifty miles north of New York City) to accompany the General’s daughter.
For me, the punishment was a reward. Yes, I was expelled from high school, but I was going to graduate, and I didn’t have to hang around during the last week of classes. I was free.
Sandy’s civilian high school reserved the Eiffel Tower for their prom. No one had a problem with me being her guest. Yes, the tower was amazing. After the celebration, we club-hopped through Paris night spots with the money I had made, which the DIA didn’t bother to confiscate.
As for my own high school graduation party, school-rules didn’t permit Sandy to be there. It took place on a large estate, which was romantically lit and well-attended.
A beautiful girl I had seen at school but not yet met walked-up to introduce herself, and somehow, we found a way to make love behind a grove of trees in the backyard. Until then, I hadn’t understood how much comfort some women are able to provide to a man who seeks reassurance.
Sometimes I wish I’d run off with the girl like she said she wanted, but her dad was an enlisted man. I couldn’t see a way to make things work. In those days officer families and enlisted families didn’t mix. It was like segregation of the races, kind of.
Speaking of race, as I told readers, the Army sent the black kid who had nothin’ to do with nothin’ and his whole family back to the states on the first plane out of Paris. They forbade him to graduate or visit parties. I thought his punishment was outlandishly unfair, but it was the 1960s. Most high-powered white people hated black people at the time. It’s the way things were back then.
It wasn’t possible for me to set things right.
This essay is getting kind of long, isn’t it? Maybe I should write a Section-Deux someday to cover the horrors I suffered as an adult working at a dozen companies for 35 years.
No?
Ok.
Here is a summary, then:
After returning to the states and entering University I got myself fired from the Army Officer program (ROTC) a few weeks before I was scheduled to receive an officer’s commission.
My mistake was to speak a few lines over a microphone and loudspeakers to about 15,000 fellow college students who were protesting against the Vietnam War. Although I received a wild ovation (people jumped up and down, screamed in my ears, and hugged me) it didn’t go over well at headquarters. It ended my military career.
The Lieutenant Colonel who fired me was a good enough guy. He gave me a failing grade in Foreign Relations—the last class requirement for an officer’s commission. As a result, my military record was spotless. I was too dumb to be an infantry officer. That’s all.
After being released by the Army—like every other civilian guy—I became subject to the military draft. It was a lottery system designed to determine who would be inducted.
I drew a low number, which the colonel must have known, because it was based on date-of-birth— information in my personnel file he possessed. A low draft number meant that I had no way out. A grunt tour in the agent-orange saturated undergrowth of Vietnam was certain.
Unknown to the colonel, a friend of mine sat on the draft board. By the grace of God and help from my friend (he was an uncle, actually), the Army never called.
After he retired the colonel became a player in township politics. By all accounts he did good things for his community. Years later I ran into him from time to time when shopping. He always smiled and asked how things were going. He seemed surprised to learn that things were going well.
I did get fired from my first three jobs out of college. One company told me to my face that they couldn’t retain employees who opposed the military, which is what a four week long investigation into my background by their crack investigators had uncovered.
Fortune 500 companies closed their doors to millions of young Americans whose crime was protesting an undeclared, genocidal war at the end of the world: the Vietnam War. The Vietnamese lost every battle and suffered millions of casualties. They won the war. Who can argue with success? I often wonder how much better-off America and Vietnam would be if the people who were smart enough to resist a cruel and senseless war had been allowed to take their place in leadership when the fighting ended. No one will ever know.
After three investigations and three firings by Fortune 500 companies over a short period of two years, I suffered catastrophic depression. I couldn’t muster the energy to look for work. I decided to return to the University to upgrade my skills, while I underwent counseling.
I took a part time job as a busboy for an upscale restaurant. The tips were fantastic. At a company Christmas party, my beautiful (and fearless) wife acted “inappropriately” according to a complaint by the owner’s wife; when I returned to work her husband fired me. In those days, men were responsible for the behavior of their wives.
I got a better job, and life went on. I sharpened my skills, started a family, and garnered engineering-design experience. After several years, a packaging-machine builder hired me to investigate cost overruns on their flagship machine line. I discovered a kick-back scheme by top execs that involved powerful suppliers. The CEO quit to avoid arrest, and I was fired to provide cover for those who had no intention of quitting.
The upside was that I received the most lucrative severance package of my career.
I don’t feel good about it, because justice wasn’t served. It rarely is, right? I wanted to stay alive, protect my family, and not get blacklisted in my profession (engineering), which would render me unable to earn a living. My only option was cowardice, and that’s what I chose.
Life would continue, but I learned how power and fear twist justice in the world of plundering by civilians. It was an eye-opener, for sure.
The highest paid job I ever held required that I work seven days a week. I made a ridiculous amount of money, but under the pressure of too many hours and unreasonable demands from our biggest client, General Motors, my supervisor started drinking more than usual. I told him he was an alcoholic. We argued, and he fired me. He told me he couldn’t work with someone who thought he was a drunk.
The lowest paid job was Bible-study leader at church. It paid exactly nothing. I sat on a planning council with other leaders where we discussed things. The “elders” revealed that they intended to sever their ties to the national denomination, because they didn’t think the denominational leaders had punished sufficiently a pastor who had presided over his daughter’s wedding to her girlfriend.
The elders seemed to possess a morbid hatred of Christian heretics who favored gay people. They intended to join another, more conservative denomination to set things right.
I told the leaders they were stupid; it was a bad move that would have bad consequences. I was right, but the bad consequences were directed at me—personally. They disbanded my Bible group, barred me from leadership, and forced me to shut down my website for six weeks.
Eventually, many shunned me. I got a lucky opportunity to resign my membership without the misfortune of being excommunicated. It’s complicated, but the part of the story that I can repeat is told on this site. Click the link or look it up. I was able to leave in good standing, which was an answered prayer—in my grateful opinion.
The week after we decided to leave, my wife and I found a church with lovely people who were, many of them, crazy conservative, but we didn’t care. They talked to us and treated us nice. Nice goes a long way with us both. My wife made and continues to make a lot of new friends.
God does only good things, I learned.
It’s true.
My work experiences weren’t always negative. I cooperated with the FBI on some important investigations involving national security. I invented or helped to invent products used by everyone everywhere—including the first tear-spout coffee lids and tamper-resistant caps for juice cartons (for which I received $1,000 and a patent).
I also helped design and tool the first generation of run-flat wheels used on Hummer combat vehicles. I kind of got trapped on that one. I vowed I would never apply my talents to warfare but I did—I was a single parent raising a family of kids at the time. For their sake I couldn’t quit.
As the highest paid union worker at the factory, my career would be toast if I wasn’t on board. I used state-of the-art design software to solve many production problems. Everything that anyone designed went through me for corrections and approvals.
Company executives invited the press and directed me to appear on a television news show to demonstrate an important production technique that made the wheels possible. The execs were soon in deep trouble with the FBI over what turned out to be a national security screw-up; the program was, after all, classified.
The damage was done, but the FBI didn’t interview me. The FBI didn’t want certain people to know, because I happened to be working with them on another more important investigation that they wanted to keep secret.
I was able to retire at age 60, which to my way of thinking wasn’t soon enough. In all the years I worked, I never spent more than five-and-a-half years at any one company.
I get called frequently with job offers, but I turn them down. A few years ago a company I worked for early in my career called to offer a lucrative three-month assignment, which I accepted.
Once rehired they kept extending my quit date. I put my foot down and gave them a date certain. The company put a person near my office to facilitate my every move to make sure they got the last ounce of production from me before I returned to retired life.
On the last day, they honored me with a luncheon party.
I bought a lot of things with the money they paid me including a stair-climber for my wife, a new car, a garage rebuild, a new concrete driveway and sidewalks front and back, and landscaping. What my wife and I didn’t spend went in the bank. It is amazing what five months of work can buy, I thought when everything was finished.
I was glad I went back to work but decided I would never do it again. The time to pontificate would never be more right.
What is the lesson from all this self-disclosure?
As my hero Doug Flutie once said, “Each person makes their own way in this world.” Who disagrees?
Anyone who can think understands that no life can be explained within an encyclopedia, nor a book—even a long one. People who think know that accomplished people are complex, but so are the less accomplished.
Even a simple dog or cat—a pet—has a complicated life, which becomes apparent to anyone who takes the time to write it all down. Try it, any skeptic who doubts the truth about the complexity of living beings.
Even after decades of blunders, any bloke who is able to hide beneath their thick skull an undamaged and flexible brain should be able—if they reflect on their experiences and are lucky, as I was—to make sense enough sometimes to pass on to others what they’ve learned, both good and bad.
My process is called PONTIFICATION.
It’s what I do.
The people I most want to rescue are the ones I love. True to those who pursue authentic lives passionately lived, these are the kind of folks who generally resist pontificators.
Oh, well.
My life unfolded for whatever reasons the way it did, and I’m OK with it.
What choices did I have?
I ask those I’ve hurt to forgive me.
No one wants to die evil. With the help of Jesus, people can be forgiven, can’t they? Who believes it?
Despite all evidence to the contrary—may God help me—I always have.
In another life someone said, YOU’RE FIRED! over and over. It gave me nightmares.
PTSD.
Hell, it was me who said it, sometimes.
…forgive them. They are clueless… is what Christ said before they killed him. He held no grudges. He defended those who hurt him most.
Billy Lee
NOTE FROM THE EDITORIAL BOARD:
Billy Lee’s account, You’re Fired! contains omissions of events, some of which are included in other essays on this site. A few details are arranged in non-sequential order.
The full story about Billy Lee’s separation from the army is known only to the author and the army; Billy Lee simplified the narrative. (No harm to truth intended or done.)
We advise readers to refer to other essays on this website to fill in gaps and resolve contradictions.
WE THE EDITORS changed some of the names to protect anonymity.
Talking heads on MSNBC are calling the latest political developments involving the president a national emergency.
What’s going on?
The president nominated and the GOP is about to confirm a young conservative judge to sit on the Supreme Court who will make abortion illegal in all fifty states.
Everyone knows it’s coming.
The man’s name is Brett Kavanaugh. He seems to be a partisan hack — an ideologue who lacks common sense — but he’s smart and highly educated in conservative jurisprudence. Everybody says so, right?
He worked hard for Kenneth Starr to impeach President Clinton for lying to Congress about what at the time seemed to be a consensual extra-marital affair. Does anyone remember?
Ok, so what?
Well, the president who nominated him is a nut-job himself who can’t tell the truth, because he doesn’t know right from wrong; he has a mental disorder that renders him delusional, paranoid, and vindictive.
Trump sold folks a fiction that Barry Obama somehow misplaced his birth certificate — if found, it would prove he was a Kenyan usurper. As a candidate for president, Donny said that he had hired investigators to find the missing piece of paper. To this day, the president suspects that the document found was a forgery.
But he’s moved on, he says. Why don’t we?
Ok. So what?
[Note from the Editorial Board:On 6 October 2018, Donald Trump signed-off on the Senate’s confirmation of Kavanaugh to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States of America.]
Trump introduced and elevated to super-stardom a very young man, Kim Jong-Un of North Korea. He enabled the kid to keep his atomic toys and to more effectively work to reunite his country with the south. The process of reunification is going on behind the scenes as I write.
Ok. So what?
A former CIA chief called the Korean summit, treasonous. The CIA chief no longer appears on TV. The president stripped his security clearance. He slapped him, somehow, off the public radar.
Ok. So what?
Some in the president’s inner circle have been indicted and pled guilty to more charges than anyone can name or count. The president replaces the unfaithful; turnover churns; life goes on.
Ok. So what?
A rotten, no-good coward — OK, someday they might make him/her a hero like they did John McCain — wrote an anonymous letter to the New York Times. The Times turned it into an “editorial”. The mole (or lion) works with a cabal of fellow travelers (or saviors of the Republic) inside the White House to unravel the president and disable his agenda.
Who wants to bet it was his Chief of Staff, John Kelly? Not me.
Ok. So what?
Christians meet daily to pray with the president to give him victory over his enemies, presumably. If the president falls, the vice-president Mike Pence will hold him up; he’ll carry-on the fight.
Ok. So what?
Tweeters, like myself, are being overrun by hoards of follower-bots. They aren’t real.
I look at who they follow — to make sure they are fake — then block them. (They seem to follow each other and a few other souls who actually are real — like me.) If I didn’t block, I’d have thousands of fake followers.
Note from the Editorial Board:No, the @BillyLeePontif on Twitter is not a hybrid form of artificial intelligence; Billy Lee is not an “AI BOT”, nor was he created by us. He was never sort-of-fake nor will he ever be.The Editors
“They” plan to make me and others like me unwilling and unsuspecting nodes in a huge network, which will light-up like a wildfire of California Christmas trees before the midterms to sway public voting through intimidation, threats, false tweets, and fake activity orchestrated by who? — public relations firms? — foreign governments? — trumpletonian hate groups? — Christian evangelists? — or all four groups working together (with Israel, of course) to finally conquer the world and secure the Holy Land for the Jewish refugees who still live there?
Is there anyone in Hell who knows what is going on and wants to tell someone?
Does anyone care?
Ok. So what?
I can’t be rambling. I don’t want to sound like a badly coded bot . I’ll lose my audience, correct?
Let’s get to it.
What is this emergency I am writing about, anyway?
It’s abortion. Only white supremacists, sycophants. and clowns in the president’s follower-base will stay behind to give him the time of day if he turns his heels to support a woman’s right to end her pregnancy. It’s that simple.
Can anyone make an argument for the president should he change his mind as he sometimes does to support the right of women to secure abortions? — because legal, free, and safe abortion was his position for years. Does anyone remember?
Does his head of yellow straw lose its luster if he betrays his pledge to capture and kill pregnancy-options in the USA?
Who knows?
Ok. Probably not.
Time to move on.
My hunch is that most people reading this essay do not remember living in the United States when abortion was against the law. They are too young.
I remember.
I remember the first time the word “abortion” appeared in a nationally syndicated magazine. I was in seventh grade. The word, which snuck its way into an issue of LIFE Magazine, created a sensation. Flood gates opened. Every news-outlet covered the story. For months, it was the only subject sophisticated people talked about.
I didn’t learn what the word meant until I was older and found an unabridged dictionary that defined it. After reading the definition, I still didn’t understand the word. In the United States of the 1950s and 1960s, many subjects remained off-limits and off-airways. When it came to sex and abortion, they were mysteries to children, certainly, but also to adults.
After the cultural revolution of the 1960s (which changed everything), it seems impossible for young people to believe that their country could be as naive as the USA once was. Young folks can’t imagine that the United States was a nation of mostly sheep who believed everything they read in books and magazines and everything they heard on the radio and watched on television.
It was a country with a vigorous right-wing press, but progressive views were scrupulously suppressed. No one explained what communism or socialism was, except to say that they were bad systems which existed in countries that wanted to destroy us. It was a time when citizens took everything their leaders said as absolute truth.
Believe it.
In 1968, I was a college sophomore who owned a convertible and a lot of spending money. At a party one night in early spring a beautiful girl I had met a few times came onto me. She boldly asked if I wanted to go upstairs and have sex with her.
I thought, I can’t make it with this beautiful girl unless I’m clean. I have to go back to the dorm and take a shower first. I told her, and she agreed to wait. After returning we went upstairs and made love.
I was slightly drunk and kind of scared — it seemed unnatural to be pursued by a pretty girl who had never shown interest in me before — but I went ahead and then it was over. I drove home and forgot about it.
The next weekend Alexa (not her real name, of course) called on the phone to tell me she was pregnant. I thought, wow! — now I can marry a beautiful woman. That’s a good outcome!
I asked her not to be afraid. I would take care of everything. Of course I would marry her and we would raise the child together. She could finish her education; I’d pay for it, and then I’d finish school after — while she took her turn caring for our child.
Suddenly she started crying. ”Oh Billy Lee” she sobbed. ”You are so honest and so kind. I can’t lie to you — I just can’t.”
”What are you talking about, Alexa?”
”The guy who made me pregnant is the drummer in the band at the club where I work. He hates me now and won’t speak to me.”
”You work at a club? What club?”
Well, enough voyeurism. The short version is she worked at a strip club where she was a go-go dancer employed by the band.
Ok. So what?
Well, the reason I’m writing this essay is to give people a picture of what getting an abortion was like fifty years ago when terminating a pregnancy was a crime in every state. It’s not clear that abortions will work in exactly the same way next year when the country circles back to once again make abortions illegal.
Drugs are available today that weren’t before. For less than twenty dollars a pregnant girl can purchase pills on the internet that will end her pregnancy. She can use bit-coin or other underground currencies to completely hide the transaction forever behind the most sophisticated encryption that organized-crime can devise.
She can ask her boyfriend to watch certain videos on the dark web. Voila! After an hour of viewing and the purchase of a few implements, he’s an abortion doctor.
When he’s ready, the termination of his girlfriend’s pregnancy will start its eternal journey down that rutted road to distant and forgotten memories.
In the 1960s, it was more difficult. Alexa set up a meeting with three doctors in an old house somewhere. She asked, and I tagged along. They signed some forms, which claimed that her life would be in danger if she carried her pregnancy to term. I drove Alexa to Maryland where we spent a week at the house of one of my dad’s friends who was in Europe at the time.
Alexa made an appointment at Johns Hopkins University Hospital, which was known to be a safe place where the doctors performed the procedure for women whose lives were in danger. Yes, it was expensive.
Her friends chipped in $600 — about $3,000 in today’s money. Though the hospital accepted her as a patient, the problem was that they wanted Alexa to return in three months. The abortion scheduling was crowded — booked solid. Alexa would be six months pregnant before it became her turn on the schedule.
Alexa and I decided to spend the week we had set aside for the hospital visit to go out each night to party in the Georgetown clubs in Washington DC — we ended up dancing and drinking away every dime of the money we had collected from her friends. Nightly, we returned to our borrowed house to make love with no worries about pregnancy.
It was liberating to love a beautiful woman unafraid of consequences.
I learned later that some in the neighborhood noticed the young couple coming and going at late hours from the house of their friend; they complained, but nothing came of it.
At week’s end we returned to our university where Alexa went to work on her friends to gather the money she needed for the final appointment. The school year would be over by then. Summer break was on its way. When she left on her second trip to DC three months later, she took the bus.
She knew what to do. She no longer needed me. The dress rehearsal was over. It wasn’t necessary for anyone to accompany her, she said.
I guess I don’t blame her.
As it happened, I became one of eighteen young men at the university who the government accepted into the army-officer training program that year. Over five-thousand applied in a futile effort to stay in school after the government ended draft deferments for college students — to better supply warm bodies to the killing fields in southeast Asia.
The army scheduled my training to start that summer in Georgia at Fort Benning. I couldn’t have been with Alexa, even if she wanted me, which she didn’t. In training, recruits were isolated in those days. Even a telephone call was impossible.
It turned out that it would be three-and-a-half years before I saw Alexa again. We ran into each other outside a steak house. She invited me to go inside and have something to eat.
She told me she owned a successful dance studio in Detroit. She looked amazing. She really did. She was happy. A good life lay ahead of her that would be full of all the good things that money from her business would buy.
I was dirty and unkempt. Again, I needed a shower, except worse. My clothes were rags, really. I explained that my military training didn’t end well. I became an anti-war protestor who spent maybe way too much time in the streets and the city parks. Someone put my car on blocks one night and stripped it of its MAG wheels and everything else of value.
I had no car.
I helped my friends organize demonstrations; I wrote unpaid copy for an anti-war newspaper. After resigning a pending officer’s commission (with the full support and encouragement of the Army) I dropped out of the university to fight the good fight against the Vietnam war and racism. I bussed tables a few hours a week in the same restaurant I once managed. Financially, I wasn’t doing well.
Alexa interrupted; she touched me on the arm and leaned-in to thank me for helping her that one time years ago when she needed a friend she could trust.
I felt unworthy. I felt shame. She was too good for me. This time in her expensive clothes and me in my filthy jeans, it was obvious to us both.
She paid for my meal and said good-by for the last time.
