Tag Archives: Biden

Domestic Violence or a Bleak Future?

Leave a reply

On the other side of town a woman is being beaten. It’s been going on for over a month.The whole town knows about it, in fact it’s all over the news with pictures of her injuries, videos of her assaults and tales of her heroic fight to stay alive. The townspeople send her meals, praise her resistance, and supply Raine—that’s her name—with helmets and gloves for defense. 

The man committing the assault, Russ, became fabulously wealthy through corruption. He owns a host of businesses that provide the town with essentials such as heating oil and gasoline. Plus, he has an enormous supply of TNT and plastic explosives. He says he’ll blown up anyone who intervenes, but then he and his fathers before him fine-tuned intimidation and mendacity to an art. He claims Raine is his wife and that she is bound to him by God, history and nature—not that he cares about God; he simply uses the manipulation.

Some of my neighbors claim that the woman has low morals. She is of little value to the town and perhaps, because of her manner of dress and history of doing anything for a price, she is getting what she deserves. If she had joined the Westside Enterprise and Social Team, they would feel compelled to come to her assistance as an alliance with far greater power and resources than Russ possesses. She had wanted to join, but her tarnished virtue made the board of directors resist. Raine had been married to Russ in the past and finally, years after the divorce, was courting other men in the WEST. It was only when some of the board expressed willingness to accept her that Russ decided to take her back. He cuts and shoots her, trying to force her to submit. She pleads for a knife and a gun for defense. She asks for a lock, a roof, a wall. The committee refuses, thinking these steps will provoke Russ into attacking them. Cowards.

I live in the richest part of our village. Our councilman, Joe, is an old character (whose intemperate son, by the way, had dalliances with Raine, which simply amuses me but is of no consequence in this matter.) He talks about standing up to bullies when he’s on camera, but he is more frightened by Russ than almost anyone else. He and other townsfolk have ceased doing business with Russ for the most part, but not completely. Russ has them over a barrel, so to speak, since homes would grow cold and trucks would stand idle if they stopped buying his fuel. Old Joe and many other leaders of WEST sound like they simply want Raine to surrender, allow Russ to possess her and have his way. Then they can go back to fretting about the weather a hundred years in the future over champagne and caviar.

Fear is a losing strategy, as is any emotion. For me, it’s not the heart-breaking images of destruction and woe but the knowledge that history teaches us that tyrants must be stopped with the tool they use, force. Otherwise, their appetites are never sated. They continue their rampage until they conquer all or die or are stopped. 

In my prime I was a physician. I saw that the patients sho showed up with an emergency got the doctor on duty at that moment. If they were very bad off and were lucky to get one that was excellent, they might survive. If they were unlucky and the doctor was sub-par, they didn’t. Life, as we all know, is not fair, despite our human compassion to make it so. Raine has the council in the WEST that exists: risk averse, indecisive and pusillanimous. Perhaps Russ knew this when he attacked or maybe he didn’t care. Their wishful thinking that a surgeon can fix her up afterwards and that a good attorney can enforce the divorce later, when the devastation ends will lead to her death. It’s not like we haven’t read this tale in history books over and over again.k

To be or not to be…an autocrat.

Leave a reply

A man with a reputation as an early riser can sleep until noon. That was one of Mark Twain’s observations pertaining to expectation bias.

Let that sink in for a moment.

To paraphrase Shakespeare with a current event twist, the evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones. So let it be with Trump. The noble Biden hath told you Trump was authoritarian; if it were so, it was a grievous fault and grievously hath Trump answered for it. 

Mr. Trump was fond of saying, “Sleepy Joe,” in reference to the man who now has succeeded him as our president. Mr. Biden is not sleeping, at least with respect to extending power. He signed scores of executive orders and actions in a few days and continues at a rapid pace. It took (Mr. Authoritarian) Trump, several months to sign as many. Mr. Biden ran as one who reaches across the aisle, one who achieves compromise, and a man who will reduce partisan fighting. This was the reputation he, and the media, cultivated. But, now in the light of scores of actions, will the real authoritarian please stand up?

Perhaps half the country cannot see President Biden as authoritarian. The power of expectation bias is that even compelling facts can be rendered invisible. At least, for a while.

***

Sea turtles and insects lay many eggs. This is a trick of nature to ensure that enough of them survive to propagate the species. We have witnessed a flurry of orders that overwhelm the balance-of-powers mechanisms of our constitution, smothering the legislative and judicial branches. President Biden is counting on the legislative branch to support him and likely surmises that the judicial branch is loath to challenge him. Not only has Chief Justice Roberts been remarkably reticent, each order must be challenged and a lower court must review and support the challenger’s position in order for each order to reach the Supreme court. This avalanche of executive power is a clever trick and is likely to succeed on its own. The fourth rail of political balance (and the fifth column?), the media, will do its job of promoting, not challenging, this power play as well as the bipartisan, cooperative stereotype they stamped on the current president. Newlyweds and freshly minted politicians get away with excesses during the honeymoon.

One more thing. When President Biden had an opportunity to act with bipartisanship, he continued his autocratic style by rejecting a generous $600 billion bipartisan Covid relief bill and pushing his partisan $1.9 trillion bill.