Fourth and fifth Covington novels published as one book

In case you missed it, my fourth and fifth books are out in one combined edition titled "Double Play."

In the first book, "Blue Light Night," Rob and Jenny Covington are at home on a sunny Sunday morning when a strange little girl shows up next door, asking for her mommy. While Jennie searches for the girl’s mother, Rob is drawn into the world of a serial killer whose bizarre methods leave female victims all around the greater Boston area.

In the second book, "Out of the Darkness," a well-known journalist goes missing, prompting the Covingtons to follow a cleverly-disguised set of clues to track his whereabouts. Meanwhile, a man in a coma has a shocking revelation and an unexpected danger threatens both Rob and Jennie, bringing Detective Sammie Ellsworth into the case.

"Double Play," along with my other novels, is available in eBook and paperback formats from Kindle Direct Publishing, an Amazon feature. Click any link to see a preview or order copies:

Time Capsule:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0998871834/

An Empty Seat on the Ferry:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0998871885/

The Last Case
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1735448451

Double Play
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1735448494

If you have already read "Double Play" or any of my other books and would care to write a review for Amazon (I'd love it if you do), here's the procedure to follow:

How to post an Amazon review

1. Logon to Amazon.com.

2. Search for the title of the book or find it by searching Books by Marshall Scott Shields.

3. Select the book you want to review.

4. Scroll down (pretty far) to Customer Reviews.

5. Click on the box labeled WRITE A CUSTOMER REVIEW and go from there.

Thanks in advance.

Historians recount Covid year 2021

I wish I could be around to see how historians will record the Covid year of 2021. It would read something like this:

"At the beginning of the year, a vaccine was made available free of charge to all adults, and eventually to all children over age 12. It helped the people to avoid the virus or, at least, minimized the symptoms for those who became ill, keeping them out of hospitals and the ICU.

"The vaccine was so was easy to get that eventually, all people had to do was show up at their local pharmacy. The vaccine, properly administered, could have wiped out the virus in due time or at least made it less contagious.

"At first, the vaccination program went smoothly, so that by springtime, vaccinated people believed they were protected from the virus and began returning to everyday activities.

"Unfortunately, about half the country refused to take the vaccine for a variety of reasons based on misinformation they heard from a former president or right-wing media or some crazy uncle on the internet, and that allowed the virus to mutate among the unvaccinated. Once again, Covid begin to spread throughout the country and this time, the variant was many times more contagious than before.

"By mid-summer, the number of cases of Covid had escalated back to peak numbers, and children were particularly affected, so once again, citizens were advised to wear facemasks in public places and stay six feet from other people -- called social distancing -- to limit the spread of the virus. The solution was just that simple.

"However, in some states, like Texas and Florida, where cases were skyrocketing, authoritarian governors with political aspirations refused to allow their citizens to take even those simple, basic precautions. They made it illegal to require masks in schools, for example, and even punished school districts who didn't follow their new rules.

"Instead of trying to PREVENT the spread of the disease, they opened clinics to treat people with antibodies and other drugs AFTER they got sick, and some went so far as ordering refrigerated trailer trucks to serve as mobile morgues for the people who died from the disease.

"Historians today still struggle with the logic of those decisions, especially considering that Covid-19 continues to infect and kill thousands of Americans after all these years. In what was generally thought to be the most advanced country in the world, scientists all agree that it didn't have to be this way."

Clapton arrives at the crossroads, but follows the wrong path

I was saddened last week to read that Eric Clapton, one of rock music’s most popular and enduring superstars, has announced that he will not perform in any venue that requires the audience to be vaccinated against Covid-19.

With a worldwide fan base in the tens of millions, Clapton is exactly the kind of celebrity who should be coming forth in public and the media to encourage every citizen to take the Covid vaccine so that someday, in some fashion, we can begin to defeat the deadly virus that has killed more than four million people around the globe.

Instead, at a time when infections are surging again and hospitals are being overrun with unvaccinated patients, many of whom wind up on ventilators before they die, Clapton is encouraging audiences to transform arenas and other music venues into super-spreader events by showing up unvaccinated and, I’m sure, unmasked as well.

Reading his comments, I was at first disappointed and later outraged that a celebrity of Clapton’s magnitude would not only take this position but also feel compelled to come out with a statement in the press. He would have been better served to keep his anti-vaccination sentiments to himself.   

(What’s worse, the stories I read linked Clapton with Van Morrison, another of my all-time favorite musicians who is, apparently, another science denier. How terribly disappointing is that?)    

For some perspective, the number of Covid cases in the United States alone is spiking nearly everywhere you look, due mainly to the number of unvaccinated people and the effects of the more contagious delta strain of the virus. In 46 states, the rates of new cases are at least 10% higher than in the previous week, according to data from Johns Hopkins University, and in 31 states, new cases surged by as much as 50%.

In Florida, where Republican Governor Ron DeSantis has repeatedly boasted about his Covid response, the state now leads the U.S. in the number of new Covid-19 cases, and hospitalizations are rising at the fastest rate since the start of the pandemic. According to The Wall Street Journal, “The state accounts for one in five new infections in the U.S. and logged 73,181 cases over the past week. Florida had 341 cases per 100,000 people (and) the total of new cases reached its highest point since mid-January. Deaths in Florida totaled 319 over the past week, the most among states, with a rate of 1.5 per 100,000 people, according to the CDC.”

And USA Today projects that the current surge of cases will last through the fall and peak in mid-October, accelerated in part by the rapid spread of the delta variant.

Justin Lessler, an epidemiologist from the University of North Carolina, told NPR that if only 70% of eligible U.S. residents get vaccinated and the delta variant becomes 60% more transmissible, the current surge would climax with approximately 60,000 new cases and 850 deaths each day in mid-October. Currently, only 57% of eligible Americans have received at least one dose of vaccine – far below Lessler's 70% threshold.

Meanwhile, I continue to see television ads and even local promotions for a variety of events, based on the faulty notion that the virus is behind us and we can now return to activities as normal. This is clearly not true in any way.

And finally, after months of lashing out at mandatory mask rules and so-called “vaccination passports,” even some Republican governors and politicians are realizing that the anti-vaccination message is a serious mistake, especially since a majority of those newly infected individuals are unvaccinated science deniers who tend to follow Fox News and the GOP.

The Republican governor of Arkansas, Asa Hutchinson, is emphasizing the need to get vaccinated while acknowledging the mountain of misinformation he must climb. “I go into these town hall meetings and someone said, ‘Don't call it a vaccine. Call it a bioweapon,’” he said.  “And they talk about mind control.”

And that brings me back around to Eric Clapton again. I have always admired his musical talent and the way he overcame serious drug addiction to help establish the Crossroads substance-abuse rehabilitation center on the Caribbean island of Antigua. The man is 76 years old and still plays music for millions of adoring fans. But when it comes to Covid-19 and the wisdom of getting vaccination, Clapton has seemingly arrived at another crossroads … and unfortunately has taken the wrong path.  

I’m sorry, but knowing what I know now, I can’t think about Clapton (or Van Morrison) in a good way ever again ... and that may be the biggest disappointment of all.

A shieldWALL Extra rant

I don't know about you, but I don't care what Trump thinks about Facebook and Twitter. I don't care what he thinks about Ashli Babbitt. I don't care what he thinks about critical race theory or the Manhattan district attorney. In fact, I don't care what he thinks about anything, so please stop clogging up my news feed with his daily rantings and ravings.

He is obviously an insane person who should have been locked in a rubber room several years ago. The news media helped him become president -- a job he really didn't want -- with wall-to-wall coverage in 2015 and '16 when his campaign was nothing more than a publicity stunt to bolster his brand. They thought he was a joke, but the joke was on them.

Now it looks like they're helping him again by covering every crazy thing that falls out of his mouth.

When I see his photo on Facebook, I "hide" the post, because looking at his face makes me somewhat ill. The best thing the legitimate media can do is ignore this fascistic con man liar and limit his audience to the nutbags who believe he's still the president, the earth is flat, liberals eat babies, vampires exist and Fox News is fair and balanced.

Screw your ratings, all you media moguls. Think of the country, the future and the lives of your children, because this subhuman cretin and his under-educated followers clearly don't. I've come to the conclusion that Trump doesn't need Facebook or Twitter when he has the Washington Post to write a story about him every day, and MSNBC to repeat the story every hour of every day from 1:00 until midnight.

Please ... stop giving him time and space. They are oxygen to malignant narcissists like him. Without the adulation, he surely will shrivel up and die, and the rest of us can move on with our lives.

Local news reporting: Who killed curiosity and when did it die?

My hometown newspaper ran a story today that said there are 12 reported cases of the Covid-19 Delta variant in West Virginia. The story was reprinted from another newspaper owned by the same media chain, and failed to mention that one of the cases is right here in Marion County. That would have been useful to know, so my wife—a curious sort—went to another source and found that piece of information.

Now, before you click off, this is not another essay about Covid-19 and its variant cousins. It’s an essay about local news in the year 2021 and the apparent death of curiosity.

First off, it’s bad enough that the local paper only publishes four days a week now and operates with a skeleton staff, or that it doesn’t cover a lot of important stories and has to print news from its sister publications, or that most of the stories it does publish are days old and have already been posted on Facebook … but what’s really sad is that on a story as important as the Covid pandemic, no one bothered to pick up a phone, call the local Health Department and ask if there was a Delta case in our county. It would have been so easy to add a single sentence to the story they had taken from somewhere else.

A couple of years ago, our hometown college basketball team went on a two-game road trip and the star player sat on the bench and never played in either game. There was nothing in the paper to explain what happened, so I emailed the Sports Department and asked if he was hurt or just being disciplined for some infraction, and got this reply: “I don’t know. We don’t go to away games.”

Seriously? We have a highly successful Division II basketball team in our city and you don’t go to road games? Okay, but don’t you watch the live streams like I do, and weren’t you a little bit curious as to why the star player was seated on the bench wearing a sweat suit?

Here’s another sports story: This year, the second-best player on the women’s team was injured early in the season. When she didn’t return after several games, I asked the Sports Department if she was coming back at all. The reply: “I don’t know. She’s on the bench during games but she’s not in uniform.” Again, where’s the curiosity?

(You realize that even small colleges like Fairmont State have sports information departments who exist solely to deliver sports information to the public. That’s why they call them the sports information department. I’m sure they have both telephones and email so here’s an idea: Why don’t you call them up and ask?)

And here’s one more: Back before Covid, there was a traffic accident in which a car struck a fire hydrant releasing an unknown quantity of water into the street. The quantity was unknown because no one bothered to ask the Water Department. I believe the story mentioned “a lot of water.” Also, if I recall correctly, the story also failed to identify the driver of the car, even though he was still at the scene and was just standing around when the reporter arrived. I guess the question, “What is your name” was too challenging for him to ask.

Now don’t get me wrong. I know that things are different from when I was a reporter. That struck home when our local paper ran an ad seeking a “multi-media specialist”—what they call reporters today—and I realized I wasn’t qualified for the job despite 13 years in the business. It seems that newspaper technology has passed me by, not that I care, being retired and all. Still, it saddens me to see what has become of local reporting. 

Aside from the ability to write, the key qualification for a journalist should be natural curiosity … as in the ability to know what questions to ask, how to ask them and who to ask, and not being afraid to ask them. Many years ago, when I thought I knew everything, my first editor taught me to stop writing for myself and start writing for my readers. “What does it mean to the people out there and why should they care?” he told me once, adding that a good reporter never writes a story that raises more questions than it answers.

So with that in mind, I want to know who killed curiosity and when it died. Was it the sound bite that did the deed? Or social media? Is everybody writing for the website now and the serious reader be damned? Is it so important to get the news first and fastest that accuracy and thoroughness have been thrown away? Or are staffs too small, too overworked, too poorly paid and too poorly trained to get the complete story, or even to care what the complete story ought to be?

I suspect it is all of those things, and someday, when all of the newspapers have closed their doors and local print journalism is dead, we may look back and think that as much as anything, it helped to kill itself.

I wonder about these things because, well, because I’m curious, and I wish that today's local reporters were, too. I mean, I still don't know what happened to that basketball player who got hurt or whether we'll ever see her play again. I guess I'll find out when the next season starts.

Or maybe not.

When you connect the dots, whose face do you see?

A lot of people are wondering these days why Joe Manchin, the senior senator from West Virginia and a Democrat, opposes the legislation known as the “For the People Act.” It’s a bill that would expand access to the ballot box for all Americans, establish non-partisan commissions to carry out congressional redistricting and enhance election security, among other provisions.

To pass the bill, with the Senate split 50-50 between the two parties, either 10 Republicans would have to vote in favor (which they won’t do) or a majority of senators would have to abolish the filibuster rule that currently requires 60 votes for passage. With the filibuster in place, the legislation tagged S.1 in the Senate appears to be dead.

So why would Manchin break with his own party and oppose the most important piece of legislation to come before lawmakers this year? Let’s try to connect the dots.   

Dot 1: According to The New Yorker magazine, the “For the People Act” is immensely popular with the American people, including Conservatives and Liberals alike.

Dot 2: One lesser-known provision of the bill would shine a light on the “dark money” used anonymously by big-bucks donors to buy politicians and influence the outcome of elections.

Dot 3: A major proponent of dark money spending, and hence an outspoken opponent of S.1, is the Koch Brothers organization.

Dot 4: The Koch Brothers are also major backers of ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, a self-described “nonprofit” organization of conservative state legislators and private sector representatives who draft model legislation to be introduced into governing bodies around the country. Among other things, ALEC supports the broadening of voter identification laws to restrict minority voting, making it harder for them to vote instead of easier—the exact opposite of S.1.

Dot 5: The Koch enterprise and other dark money advocates acknowledge the popularity of the legislation, and have admitted that the only way to effectively kill it is with the Senate filibuster rule.  

Dot 6:  As late as January of this year, Joe Manchin was listed as a member of ALEC, according to the Center for Media and Democracy, a national watchdog organization. (I asked his campaign if he was still a member. They have not replied to my email query, but it's really irrelevant. At the very least, he has been reported to be a member in the past.)

Dot 7: Joe Manchin says he will never vote to abolish the filibuster.

Dark Money

In 2010, in the Citizens United case, the U.S. Supreme Court opened the door for millions of untraceable dollars to flow into our elections when it ruled 5-4 that corporations and other outside groups can spend unlimited money on elections as expressions of free speech. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, “The justices who voted with the majority assumed that independent spending cannot be corrupt and that the spending would be transparent, but both assumptions have proven to be incorrect.”

Since that time, by one estimate, more than $1 billion has been paid out to candidates and campaigns, and since the donors can remain secret, voters have no way of knowing who is trying to influence their votes. Under the For the People Act, organizations would be required to disclose donors who contribute more than $10,000 to a candidate or campaign.

The Filibuster

According to The New Yorker:

“In public, Republicans have denounced Democrats’ ambitious electoral-reform bill, the For the People Act, as an unpopular partisan ploy. But behind closed doors, Republicans speak differently about the legislation. They admit the lesser-known provisions in the bill that limit secret campaign spending are overwhelmingly popular across the political spectrum. Their own polling shows that no message they can devise effectively counters the argument that billionaires should be prevented from buying elections.”

A research director for a Koch-run advocacy group warned fellow Republicans that “conservatives were actually as supportive as the general public was” when presented with a neutral description of the legislation. As a result, he conceded, the legislation’s opponents would have to rely on Republicans in the Senate to use the filibuster to stop the bill, because turning public opinion against it would be “incredibly difficult.”

Political Pressure

Therefore, without the benefit of public support, opponents of S.1 decided they needed to pressure certain members of the Senate to swing over to their side, The New Yorker said. One such event occurred on March 20 of this year, “when conservative groups including Heritage Action, Tea Party Patriots Action, Freedom Works and the local and national branches of the Family Research Council organized a rally in West Virginia to get Senator Joe Manchin, the conservative Democrat, to come out against the legislation. They also pushed Manchin to oppose any efforts by Democrats to abolish the Senate’s filibuster rule, a tactical step that the party would probably need to take in order to pass the bill.”

Manchin has since insisted that the filibuster must remain in place to “protect democracy,” and that forcing S.1 through the Senate on a partisan vote would “further divide America.”

So let’s recap:

* The “For the People Act” would make it easier for Americans to vote, secure elections, eliminate partisan gerrymandering of voting districts and shine a light on secret campaign financing. It would benefit everybody except dark money donors who attempt to buy elections for their chosen candidates and voter suppression advocates who attempt to pass legislation to steal them.

* Most Americans support this legislation and want their elected representatives to vote for it.

* The bill passed the House of Representatives in March and was sent to the Senate, where 60 votes are required for passage. No Republican senators have supported the bill, which means it will fail unless the Democratic majority votes to abolish the filibuster rule and pass the bill on a 51-50 vote, with Vice President Kamala Harris casting the deciding vote.

* The roadblock to abolishing the filibuster is Senator Joe Manchin.

So I ask again: Now that you’ve connected the dots, whose face do you see?

Here is a puppy, spaghetti and the beach

 

If democracy starts to crumble, who will stop it?

It’s been more than 75 years since the end of World War II. Most of the men and women who fought in that war against German and Italian fascists and imperial Japanese bent on world domination have since passed into history.

Today, as we watch American democracy sliding toward the edge of a cliff, the question arises: Who will be left to stop the fall?

I just finished watching a six-part documentary on the Smithsonian Channel entitled, “Apocalypse: The Second World War.” It should be required viewing for every American, especially those who are too young to remember a father or mother who served overseas in the years 1941-45.

It especially needs to be seen by members of the Republican Party, with emphasis on those who compare coronavirus mask requirements in 2021 to the murder of six million European Jews before and during the war, and any others who believe the January 6 insurrection was nothing more than a casual outing by tourists visiting the Capitol.

More on that later, but first, a condensed version of history: 

The second world war was fought between the Allied powers of mainly the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union against the Axis alliance of Germany, Italy and Japan. The Axis countries shared an obsession for world domination, were disenchanted with the Treaty of Versailles that had ended WWI and were driven to political totalitarianism, ultra-nationalism and fascism as a result, starting about the time of Adolph Hitler’s rise to power as German dictator in 1933.

The war in the Pacific started in 1937 when Japan invaded China as part of its global conquests. Germany invaded Poland two years later to launch the European war, gaining Italy as an ally in 1940. France and England declared war on Germany and united to defend Europe, and the U.S. entered the war after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941.

Both my father and my father-in-law fought in the Pacific Theater against the Japanese, and both have been dead for many years. If my father were alive today, he’d be 108 years old. I was born five years after the end of the war, which makes me 71 today. Likewise, the sons and daughters of the other brave Americans who fought to preserve democracy are living out the latter portion of their lives.

Which brings me back to the question: After we’re gone, what happens next?

The Smithsonian documentary is culled from more than six hundred hours of video taken by “front-line soldiers, top-secret operatives, resistance fighters, and private citizens” who experienced World War II first hand. Much of it is graphic in nature, but out of necessity to tell the true story of the war. Watching it, I couldn’t help but wonder what my father and the others of his generation who fought against the fascists would think about America today.

I’m not going to rehash all six episodes of the series or revisit the entirety of World War II, but how can you watch Hitler speaking to hundreds of thousands of adoring, chanting fans without remembering our former president inciting rallies of his own?  The crowds were much smaller, of course, but they were no less enthusiastic.

And how can you learn about German propaganda and its Big Lie without thinking about Trump’s Big Lie and the Republican Party’s failure to refute it? (A recent poll shows that 53% of Republican voters don’t believe Joe Biden won the last election.) And I could go on ….

You may not agree with me that fascism could ever replace democracy in America, but look around before you criticize. It’s happening all over the world … again. Did you see where the authoritarian leader of Samoa recently lost his re-election but refused to transfer power, locking the true winner out of Parliament? Have you looked at the political climate in the U.K. or parts of Europe recently? Check out the rise of far-right nationalism in Hungary, Austria, Switzerland, Italy and most other European countries. And that’s just for starters.

Back at home, the bogus vote recount underway in Arizona and the avalanche of voter suppression bills working their way through state legislatures are not really intended to overturn the 2020 election, which can’t legally be done. Instead, they are setting the stage for partisan state lawmakers in the future to throw out results of legal, fair elections if they don’t like the results and to literally appoint the next president of the United States.

Think about that for a minute, then go watch “Apocalypse: The Second World War” and tell yourself it can’t happen here. (That’s what the world thought in 1933.) Your next question should be, “But if it does, who’s going to stop it?” Let me know if you have the answer to that one.

If you think your vote counts … Volume 2

Today in Maricopa County, Arizona, there’s a bogus election “audit” under way by an unqualified organization known as Cyber Ninjas, ostensibly to review the validity of ballots cast for president in the 2020 election. The so-called audit was initiated by Republican members of the state Senate to look for evidence of massive voter fraud—a claim that has been debunked repeatedly and was proven to be false by three official recounts of the votes.

The real reason for this effort is not to validate the actual votes but to throw out the official results and declare that Donald J. Trump was the true winner of Arizona’s 11 electoral votes and is the rightful president of the United States … and that he would be president now had the election not been stolen by radical Democrats.

None of this is true, of course, but truth no longer exists in the land of Trump … and hasn’t for several years. He has already declared that Arizona will be “the first domino to fall,” while similar “audits” are already being demanded in other swing states including Michigan and Wisconsin, with Pennsylvania and Georgia soon to follow if they haven’t already by the time this is read.

When all is said and done, conspiracy theorists will no doubt find the “evidence” they seek to prove that Trump won the 2020 election “by a landslide,” and start looking for ways to evict Joe Biden from the White House. They have already shown, on January 6, 2021, that they are not afraid to use violence to attack American Democracy, so there is no reason to believe we won’t see similar demonstrations somewhere down the road.

Are you frightened yet?

You should be, because Democracy is teetering on the edge of a cliff in this country and Fascism is waiting in the weeds to take its place. (Wait! Let me correct myself. Fascism isn’t even hiding in the weeds any longer. It’s sitting out in the open in Republican governors’ offices, GOP-dominated state legislatures and the halls of the U.S. Congress.)

Following is part of a summary of voter suppression and restriction laws that have been introduced in various states since the election last November. It has been edited for length and clarity by me, but was written by the Brennan Center for Justice, an independent, nonpartisan law and policy organization that works to reform, revitalize and defend our country’s systems of democracy and justice. The unedited report can be found here:         

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voting-laws-roundup-march-2021

According to the Brennan Center, “In a backlash to 2020’s historic voter turnout, and under the pretense of responding to baseless and racist allegations of voter fraud and election irregularities, state lawmakers have introduced a startling number of bills to curb the vote. As of March 24, legislators have introduced 361 bills with restrictive provisions in 47 states.”

Five such bills have already been signed into law, at least 55 are moving through legislatures in 24 states where 29 have passed at least one chamber, and another 26 have had some sort of committee hearing, amendment or committee vote.

“Most of these restrictive bills take aim at absentee voting, while nearly a quarter seek stricter voter ID requirements. State lawmakers also aim to make voter registration harder, expand voter roll purges or adopt flawed practices that would risk improper purges, and cut back on early voting. The states that have seen the largest number of restrictive bills introduced are Texas (49), Georgia (25) and Arizona (23). Bills are actively moving in the Texas and Arizona statehouses, and Georgia (has) enacted an omnibus voter suppression bill….”

That’s all bad enough, but the most damaging legislation includes a bevy of bills aimed at undermining the power of local officials to determine and certify the results of a free and fair election. For example:

* Texas has introduced at least six bills that would penalize election officials for various infractions and impose financial penalties for refusing to purge voters.

* A Wisconsin bill would prohibit election clerks from sending absentee ballot applications and absentee ballots to voters who did not request them and create a felony offense for violation.

* A Missouri bill would threaten any local election official with loss of funding if they refuse to purge voters on their rolls that the Secretary of State has called on them to remove.

* And Iowa’s new law allows the state Commissioner of Elections to impose a fine on county election officials for any technical infraction, including failing to purge voters.

Consider this scenario: Voters in your state go to the polls in record numbers and select a Democrat to be president. That means your candidate wins your state’s Electoral College votes. But because of new laws passed this year, the legislature can decide that local election officials are not qualified to determine the winner, so they toss out those results—claiming massive voter fraud or some other reason—and declare the Republican to be the winner instead. The electoral votes go to the candidate that the legislature wants to win, regardless of the actual outcome of voting. The Republican official in charge then certifies the results.

Now apply that scenario to the five critical swing states that pushed Joe Biden to the top, and the Electoral College is transformed from a representative of the will of the people into a tool to establish one-party rule in America. And not just in the next election but in every election from now on. If you don’t think that can happen, look around. It’s happening already.

One way to prevent this nightmare scenario is for Democrats in the U.S. Senate to end the filibuster and pass legislation that reforms the way elections are conducted. Among other provisions, the “For the People Act” expands voter registration and voting access; provides for states to establish independent, nonpartisan redistricting commissions; addresses campaign spending, financing and security; revises disclaimer requirements for political advertising; establishes an alternative campaign funding system for certain federal offices; sets forth provisions related to ethics in all three branches of government; and requires candidates for president and vice president to submit 10 years of tax returns.

The bill, which passed the House as HR1 but languishes in filibuster hell in the Senate, would fix many, if not all, of the nation’s federal election issues … but there’s even a problem with that. According to the Brennan Center, bills have already been introduced in several states to oppose the For the People Act, should it ever pass, and Texas lawmakers have proposed setting up a parallel system with its own rules for state contests if the federal law is enacted. That puts Texas’s 40 electoral votes in a kind of election limbo land.

There is so much more to this story, and I encourage everyone to click the link to Brennan (above) or do your own research to learn what’s really going on in this country. As for me, I just want to make one more point, and you can take it for what it’s worth: If all of these Republican legislatures are able to manipulate the results of future elections, toss out the will of the people and decide which candidate wins, Donald J. Trump will be re-elected president in 2024 regardless of the popular vote or the true Electoral College result … and if that happens, he will stay in office as King of America or Dictator for Life until he dies or until he can hand it off to Ivanka or one of his sons.

If you don’t believe me, I sincerely hope you are right … but if what I said comes true, please remember that you heard it here first.

If you think your vote counts, think again

What did you learn way back in civics class about American Democracy? Did you learn that voting is a sacred privilege granted to all U.S. citizens? And that it’s your duty as an American to vote on Election Day? And that every voter is treated equally? And that in a representative Democracy, the voters select their leaders to represent them in Congress, and that those elected leaders vote the way their constituents want them to vote? And did they teach you that the will of the people will always prevail?

If that’s what they told you, they may have had good intentions, but they were wrong … and here are some reasons why:     

One Person One Vote

Theoretically, the American system of government is built around the principal of “one person, one vote.” In a series of cases brought during the height of the civil rights movement, the Supreme Court upheld that principal by applying the 14^th Amendment of the Constitution. In 1964, for example, the court declared that equality of voting (one person, one vote) means that “the weight and worth of the citizens' votes as nearly as is practicable must be the same,” and that states must draw federal congressional districts containing roughly equal represented populations.

If, over time, these districts became disproportionately one-sided--either racially, politically or otherwise--the court said they must be realigned after the next census. 

The problem was that some states had created an “upper house” similar to the U.S. Senate which provided for an equal number of representatives from each county, which in turn gave undue political power to rural counties. In addition, many states had neglected to redistrict for decades during the 20th century, even as population increased and became less diverse in urban, industrialized areas.

Gerrymandering

That led to the expansion of a political tool called “gerrymandering,” which is the enemy of one person, one vote. Under gerrymandering, the political party in power within a state can establish an unfair political advantage for itself by manipulating the boundaries of electoral districts. The two principal tactics used in gerrymandering are (1) “cracking,” in which the voting power of the opposing party's supporters are diluted across many different districts, and (2) “packing,” which concentrates the opposing party's voting power into one district to reduce their voting power in other districts).

The result is voting districts that look like Rorschach tests or the silhouette of a grasshopper.

In general practice, gerrymandering is used to disadvantage a particular political, ethnic or racial demographic, specifically Democrats in Republican-held states and minority groups such as Hispanics and African Americans. This would seem to violate the constitutional guarantee of “one person, one vote,” but subsequent court action on gerrymandering has not been that consistent, that specific or that clear.

For example, the Supreme Court affirmed in one case that gerrymandering based primarily on race is a violation of constitutional rights, but in another, separate decision found that extreme partisan gerrymandering, while also unconstitutional, is up to Congress and state legislatures to correct according to state constitutions and laws. Does anyone see the problem here? (Hint: The court said the same state legislatures that authorized gerrymandering are empowered to decide its constitutionality.)

As late as 2019, the Supreme Court punted the ball back to state courts and legislatures by saying that claims of unconstitutional gerrymandering are not subject to federal court review, presumably forever. That gives state legislatures wide berth to manipulate voting districts to benefit their own candidates … and they’re taking full advantage of the opportunity today.

Electoral College

If you believe in “one person, one vote,” you cannot support the Electoral College system. If you live in a deep red state like I do, for example, voting for a Democrat for president is a waste of your time. The Democrat can’t win the state, which means that all of your state’s electoral votes will go to the Republican candidate regardless of how you voted. The opposite is true in deep blue states like New York and California. The bottom line is, the candidate who wins the popular vote is not guaranteed to be elected president, as history clearly shows. In two of the last six elections, the loser of the popular vote—Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016—was elected president by the Electoral College. This has happened three other times in history.

Supporters of the Electoral College argue that it was created by the founders to “preserve the constitutional role of the states in presidential elections,” while critics argue that it gives too much power to “swing states” and allows the presidential election to be decided by a minority of voters. There are over 300 million people in the United States, but just 538 people decide who will be president, many of whom represent states with very little population. And this doesn’t explain the role that slavery played in establishing the Electoral College, which is another subject for another time.

So to recap, with regard to “one person, one vote,” I am one person and I cast one vote and it should always help my candidate who is trying to win the popular vote and become president … but on two occasions it didn’t because of gerrymandering, dubious Supreme Court decisions and the outdated and dangerous Electoral College. I don’t remember hearing about that back in civics class.

Filibuster

And that brings me to the filibuster, which is the real reason for this essay.

The filibuster, in case you forgot, is a tactic employed in the United States Senate to prevent a measure from being brought to a vote. It used to mean that Ted Cruz or some other senator opposed to legislation had to stand at the podium for hours or days and read Doctor Seuss books or War and Peace to prevent a bill from coming up for debate. In reality, it means that no legislation that’s not part of the federal budget can be brought up for debate and passage unless three-fifths of the senators (60 out of 100) vote to do so. In today’s highly partisan Senate, where the representation is split 50-50, the prospect of getting 10 members of one party to support 50 members of the other party is virtually zero, nada, zip, zilch, nil, naught, no way, never  and ain’t gonna happen.

So today, a bill that would restore voting rights to perhaps millions of disenfranchised voters and effectively preserve American Democracy sits wallowing in Senate filibuster hell. So, probably, will a bill that would authorize a commission to investigate a violent insurrection that attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election by people who broke into the Capitol, killed or maimed federal police officers and threatened to hang the vice president of the United States.

This, despite polls that show these bills and many others like them are what a majority of the American people want. They are lingering in limbo and will probably die because leaders of the Republican Party are afraid to offend a narcissistic, racist con man pathological liar with Fascist ideas and a probable mental illness who lost the last election, but refuses to accept the truth while continuing to promote the Big Lie that it was stolen from him and he actually won.

One person, one vote? Not in this lifetime. It looks to me like the fate of our Democracy is coming down to one person, one lie … and a fractured majority party that apparently can’t do anything about it.

When our ‘visionaries’ lack long-term vision

The founding fathers of the United States passed the Second Amendment to the Constitution in 1791. Mark Zuckerberg and friends founded Facebook in 2004. What do these two things have in common? In both cases, the people behind this law and this social media platform, respectively, were considered to be visionaries in their fields of endeavor.

The Second Amendment, which generally gives U.S. citizens the right to keep and bear arms, was ratified after American colonists—fighting for their independence—had used guns to ward off their English overlords. Its fundamental purpose was to give citizens the opportunity to fight back against a tyrannical federal government.

The intended purpose of "The Facebook," as it was originally known, was to allow students at Harvard University to use their email addresses and photos to connect with other students at the school. Zuckerberg, then a Harvard student, saw it as a way to bring the college social experience onto the Internet.

So here’s the problem. In 1791, when militiamen used single-shot muskets to repel the enemy, nobody could have imagined that in the distant future, a gunman with a semi-automatic weapon could fire up to 400 bullets every minute, reload in seconds and start all over again. And in 2004, nobody could have imagined that in 2016, a room full of hackers could sit in a warehouse in St. Petersburg, Russia, and flood Facebook with millions of phony comments created by non-existent individuals in order to make Donald Trump the president of the United States.

Unfortunately, both of those things came true.

I could go on all day talking about the Second Amendment, but that’s for another time. The news today is that an independent board of oversight has upheld the decision by Facebook on January 7 to ban former president Donald J. Trump. According to the New York Times:

A Facebook-appointed panel of journalists, activists and lawyers on Wednesday upheld the social network’s ban of former President Donald J. Trump, ending any immediate return by Mr. Trump to mainstream social media and renewing a debate about tech power over online speech.

 

Facebook’s Oversight Board, which acts as a quasi-court over the company’s content decisions, said the social network was right to bar Mr. Trump after the insurrection in Washington in January, saying he “created an environment where a serious risk of violence was possible.” The panel said the ongoing risk of violence “justified” the move.

 

But the board also said that an indefinite suspension was “not appropriate,” and that the company should apply a “defined penalty.” The board gave Facebook six months to make its final decision on Mr. Trump’s account status.

So here’s the point:

I agree with the board that if Facebook is going to ban users for any period of time, it must establish standards for doing so, much the same way the government establishes penalties for various crimes. Murder is obviously worse than jaywalking, for example. In the case of Facebook, inciting white supremacists, domestic terrorists and neo-Nazis to storm the U.S. Capitol and attempt to overturn a lawfully-conducted election is certainly worse than calling the current president “Sleepy Joe” or your primary opponent “Lyin’ Ted.”

But how much worse? What’s the penalty for both? The answer is currently unknown.

Facebook’s seemingly arbitrary “community standards” clearly need to be more effectively defined. For example, a good friend of mine once posted something about his wife’s Volkswagen automobile and when I jokingly replied, “damn Germans,” I was threatened with suspension for violating Facebook’s rules governing hate speech.

Are you kidding me? That was considered hate speech? I could understand Facebook’s concern if I had said, “Those damn Germans are mentally deficient, substandard people with no sense of dignity or class who are only 3/5 human and should be eliminated or, at least, segregated from the good people of the earth.” But that’s not what I said. So why was I threatened then?

In a word, “algorithm.”

Since its inception, Facebook has attracted billions of users, including the above-mentioned fake accounts commonly referred to as “bots.” To monitor and control what they post on its platform, Facebook needs a system of moderation, which I know something about. I used to be one of three moderators on a sports fan site that had a few hundred users, and it was our job to observe what members posted and sanction or ban those who broke established rules.

But Facebook couldn’t hire enough people to moderate billions of users, checking every post in the context it was used, so it created an algorithm to search for certain words and phrases that it deemed objectionable, and to issue warnings, suspensions and bans based on those violations. Because the algorithm doesn’t read context, words like “damn Germans” apparently set off an alarm.

In the wake of today’s decision by the Oversight Board, it’s my opinion that Facebook needs to do two things: (1) find a way to redesign its algorithm to be more discerning (don’t ask me how; I’m no programmer) and (2) create a schedule of community standards that assigns appropriate punishment for various levels of violation.  

For example, typing “Joe Biden is a crook” might get you a 3-day ban, “Joe Biden is a pedophile” might get you banned for six months and “Joe Biden stole the election and we need to rally at the Capitol and take the country back” might you banned for life.

Or something like that.

It’s not up to me to determine appropriate punishment, so I have to trust Facebook to do it the correct way. If they do, it won’t solve all of social media’s problems, but it will be a step in the right direction. And if they don’t, I hope the Oversight Board will be back, telling Zuckerberg and his minions to try again.

Meanwhile, I hope Trump's ban is made permanent for what he has already done to this country, a lot of which was instigated through social media accounts. In my opinion, nobody deserves it more.

If the epitome of fraud isn’t fraud, then there is no fraud

Some time tomorrow, the Oversight Board of the social media platform Facebook will announce its decision whether to reinstate the account of Donald J. Trump. Facebook suspended Trump after January 6, when a riot at the U.S. Capitol—inspired and encouraged by the former president—resulted in five deaths and injuries to at least 140 police officers, caused major damage inside the building and threatened one of the pillars of democracy on which this country was founded: the peaceful transfer of power following a Constitutionally-mandated election.

The argument against Trump is that his mountain of lies, misinformation and hateful rhetoric over the five-plus years of his campaign and term of office should disqualify him from a place on the social media forum. According to the Washington Post, Trump was allowed to make 1,440 posts containing misinformation or extremist rhetoric last year alone on such subjects as the Covid virus and unfounded claims of voter fraud.

The argument for Trump boils down to freedom of speech as promised in the First Amendment to the Constitution, and, to paraphrase the bard, thereby hangs this tale.

As a former journalist, no one is a bigger defender of the First Amendment than I am. Freedom of speech is the bedrock that allows the media to exist and to report virtually unfettered on stories it considers to be of interest to its audience. But every journalist should recognize that the First Amendment is not absolute. The overused example of exceptions is the claim that no one has the right to yell “fire” in a crowded theater, although I suspect that doing so would be entirely appropriate if the theater was, in fact, on fire. But there are more notable and more important exceptions.

As a refresher, The First Amendment reads as follows:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

It sounds pretty simple, but like most things American, these words have been considered and interpreted over the years by the Supreme Court of the United States, which has generally upheld the Constitution while allowing for limitations on certain categories of speech. Those categories that are given lesser or no protection by the First Amendment include obscenity, fraud, child pornography, speech integral to illegal conduct, speech that incites imminent lawless action, speech that violates intellectual property law, true threats and commercial speech such as advertising. Defamation that causes harm to reputation is also an exception to free speech.

Now I have no evidence (yet) to link Donald Trump to obscenity or child pornography, but as far as I’m concerned, the rest of the exceptions apply directly to him, and collectively should be reasons enough to support a permanent ban from the social media giant.

Let’s take incitement, for example.

The Supreme Court has held that “advocacy of the use of force” is unprotected when it directs people or groups to take lawless action or “is likely to incite or produce such action.” So did you watch TV on January 6? Did you witness five hours of lawless action both inside and outside the U.S. Capitol? Did you also read or hear the dozens or maybe hundreds of lies and misstatements about the 2020 election that encouraged Trump supporters to go to Washington to “stop the steal?” I did, and frankly, I think those three simple words in quotes are sufficient to invalidate Trump’s First Amendment protection as far as Facebook is concerned.

And now let’s talk about fraud.

Officially, the Supreme Court said in 1974 that there is “no Constitutional value in false statements of fact,” and developed a framework that enumerated four such areas for exclusion from First Amendment protection, including false statements that can be subject to civil or criminal liability or are punishable under libel and slander laws. While not all false statements constitute fraud, I looked up the definition of fraud in the dictionary and Donald Trump’s photo was there.

Before he was elected in 2016—when he thought he was going to lose—Trump began a phony narrative that the election would be “rigged” by Democrats to make sure he had no chance to win. That claim failed miserably when he was elected, but that didn’t stop him from rolling it out again in 2020 with unfounded and debunked claims of widespread voter fraud which he said was occurring, remarkably, only in those toss-up states that Trump needed to win re-election.

When state after state investigated the claims and found them to be false, Trump filed a wheelbarrow full of lawsuits in state and federal courts, making the same claims of fraud that no one could find. All of them were dismissed, so when he couldn’t prove voter fraud in court, Trump attempted to overturn the certified election results with a series of speeches and social media posts that culminated in the January 6 rally.

Even today, after everything else has failed, he is still trying to overturn the election of Joe Biden by supporting a secret campaign to recount ballots in Arizona’s largest precinct, which, when it declares him to be the true winner, will no doubt find its way into Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan—the other states Trump needs to claim victory. “Arizona will be the first domino to fall,” Trump has said.

So here’s the point. Donald Trump has built his entire career as a businessman, TV celebrity, real estate developer and politician on some type of fraud. That was proven in the case of Trump University, which admitted to defrauding students expecting to become millionaires; Trump charities, which are now banned in the state of New York; and even Trump’s tax returns, which show how he inflated the value of his properties to secure loans but deflated the value when tax time rolled around.

Now it’s “stop the steal” and the Big Lie that the 2020 election was taken from him by illegal voting.

I could go on, but how many examples of fraud does Facebook need to determine that Trump has forfeited his place on the social media’s daily news feed? I mean, seriously, Donald Trump is the epitome of fraud. If the epitome of fraud isn’t fraud, then there is no fraud, and for my money, if Facebook has no desire to filter out fraud, then maybe there should be no Facebook, either.

The decision has been made, we’re told. Let’s hope it was the right one. Tomorrow will tell.

During a pandemic, how much is really worth the risk?

I have some questions:

* During a pandemic, is it really important to eat inside a restaurant when curbside service and delivery options are available?

* During a pandemic, is it really necessary to go to a movie theater when there are so many other options for staying home, including HBO, Showtime, Cinemax and other pay channels; Netflix, Hulu, AppleTV, Acorn, Prime Video, Roku and Fire Stick, Chromecast and I don’t know how many other devices and streaming services?

* During a pandemic, is it really important to attend a sporting event that’s being shown on TV or through a live internet stream in your house, where you can get a hot dog and beer in your own kitchen and have easy access to your own personal restroom?

* During a pandemic, is it really important to go shopping inside the supermarket, Walmart or any other store that offers online shopping and will happily carry out the items you purchase and place them in the trunk of your car?

* During a pandemic, is it really important to sit inside a church to demonstrate your faith when ministers can stream their services directly into your home? Besides, aren’t you supposed to demonstrate your religiosity all day every day from wherever you happen to be?

* During a pandemic, is it really important to hold birthday parties, wedding showers, funeral services and celebratory receptions of all kinds in packed churches, clubs, bars, restaurants and banquet halls, instead of taking a year or two off for the sake of public health?

Which of these things are really important, I wonder, and which could be postponed or canceled altogether? I’m asking for 650,000 dead Americans and 3 million dead people worldwide who have succumbed already to this pandemic, which – far from being over – is predicted to get even worse before it gets better.

I ask these questions as someone who has been called “snowflake,” “weakling,” “sheep,” “lemming” and other names that are a lot worse because for the past 13 months, I have chosen to isolate myself at home from the activities I mentioned above, venturing out for necessary doctor appointments and little else. I take advantage of the drive-up windows at the pharmacy and bank, the pickup option at the supermarkets and the mailbox outside the Post Office, and I buy other needed products from online suppliers.

I have been criticized by those who claim their rights are being violated by mask mandates and limited services and others who believe the virus is a hoax. Yesterday, on CNN, I watched an interview with an evangelical minister that went like this:

Minister: “I believe this virus is a hoax. I don’t know a single person, white, black or brown, Honduran or Mexican or whatever who has ever caught this virus.”

Interviewer: “But sir, both of your parents have had it.”

Was the man a liar or just stupid? You decide.

Covid-19 and its many variants is not a hoax and it is far from under control, despite a wave of pandemic fatigue that is overtaking Americans. We’ve opened restaurants, bars, theaters and businesses to full capacity and that can’t be good. We have states that have never to this day instituted mask mandates (I’m looking at you, South Dakota) and others that have signs on their doors but rules that are not enforced.

I have chosen to obey the scientists and avoid the pandemic risks not because I am weak but for the opposite reason. I believe that people who are staying home and trying to do the right thing are the strong ones with the discipline and restraint required to live their lives as fully as they can while avoiding unnecessary risks that could lead to serious illness or even death.

Anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers like to cling to statistics that show the survival rate from Covid-19 as being 90-some percent (the number varies), but that’s little consolation to the millions of people who have died from the virus or will die from it in the future, as well as their families who have lost or will soon lose their loved ones ... not to mention the survivors left with long-term health effects.

So call me whatever name you want, I don’t care. I’ve had my two vaccinations but I’m still not going into the supermarket or the Post Office or the movie theater or Walmart or any place that will come out to me in my car, and I won’t be attending any baseball games or concerts in the park or birthday parties and the like. To do so now would make the last 13 months of self-isolation a complete waste of effort, and put me at risk of becoming the next Covid death … and I’m not willing to take that risk.

Besides, there are already too many people out there ignoring the scientists, spreading the virus and “exercising their rights” while risking their own lives and the lives of people around them. There’s no way I can stop them from doing that, sadly, but I’m sure as hell not going to help.

The year of living Covidly

One year ago today, I walked into a Food Lion supermarket at 10:30 p.m. to buy a couple of items. I went late at night to avoid other people, because two days earlier, West Virginia had recorded its first confirmed case of Covid-19.

In the days following that first positive case, we were advised to wear masks and gloves in public, use hand sanitizer frequently, wash our hands regularly, touch elbows instead of shaking hands and stay six feet away from other people. I wouldn’t have gone to the store at all except that the items were necessities, so I took a chance on sneaking in just before they closed. It worked out, because there was only one clerk working at the time and only one other customer who was several aisles ahead of me. I bought what I needed and left.

Since that day, other than to keep necessary doctor appointments, I basically haven’t gone anywhere that required me to get out of my car. I’m talkin’ nowhere, no how, at no time and thank you very much.

Instead of going places like I used to, I now use the drive-up windows at the pharmacy and the bank, the pickup service at the supermarket and the big blue mailboxes on the sidewalk outside the Post Office. I buy things from Amazon that I used to get at Big Lots and I haven’t seen the inside of a restaurant or a store since March 19, 2020.

I also haven’t seen my children or my grandchildren or most of my friends. I did go outside to walk our dog every day until she died, but I wore a bandana around my neck that I could pull up into a mask if I encountered another person, which I rarely did. We skipped trick-or-treat and Thanksgiving dinner with the family, and we don’t answer the door to solicitors. My wife and I spent Christmas together … alone.

I haven’t seen a live sporting event, a movie, a concert or a festival of any kind. When people come to mow my lawn or shovel my snow, I pin their money to the mailbox and stay inside. I did have to allow a man from AAA into my garage once to jump-start my wife’s car, but I stayed away from him as much as possible and lived to tell the tale. 

The past year has been the closest thing to isolation I can think of. It has been, to borrow from a famous movie title, My Year of Living Covidly.

I did what I did for one simple reason: A year ago at this time, I was convinced that I was going to die. Listening to the medical experts who weren’t either silenced or ridiculed by that former president, it was clear that my wife and I fell into several high-risk categories that made us prime candidates for hospitalization, the ICU, a ventilator and eventual death. We were both over the magic age, either smokers or former smokers with high blood pressure and other pre-existing conditions.

I said at the time that I was afraid of this virus, and that anybody who wasn’t afraid of it should have been. I’m not ashamed to say those words now any more than I was back then. So we did what we thought we needed to do to keep ourselves alive, even when Trumpaloons, anti-maskers and other far-right nutbags mocked us as being “snowflakes” or made fun of our fears.  

But we survived … and now it’s time to begin Year 2.

A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I received our second doses of the Pfizer vaccine. We were grateful to be given appointments as early as we were and we both came through the procedure relatively unscathed. While I know that this particular vaccine is not 100% effective, and that the Covid virus is mutating into at least four new variants, at least I can say that having been fully vaccinated, I no longer fear that death is imminent.

That said, you’d think that by now we’d be on the road to normalcy with vaccinations running at the pace they are and more effective treatments being found for those people who do contract the virus, and we would be if everybody was playing by the same set of rules. Sadly, though, we are not.

According to the news, about a quarter of the country is refusing to take the vaccine because they don’t trust the government or they didn’t vote for Joe Biden or they think it causes Covid or because they’re just too stupid to think up a reason other than “because I just ain’t gonna take it.”

In addition, thousands of people are still refusing to wear a mask or follow safety precautions, including all of those college students celebrating spring break and St. Patrick’s Day and any other reason they can conjure up to have a mass gathering somewhere, plus mega-church attendees and obstinate under-educated “patriots” who think that god gave them rights to do as they damn well please. On top of that, you’ve got Republican governors who have decided to open up businesses and restaurants to 100% capacity and to overrule health officials who have pressed for universal mask mandates.

So what’s it all mean?

It means that after a full year of trying to do the right thing, my wife and I and others like us now face a second spring and a second summer of semi-isolation waiting for herd immunity to kick in because up to half of the country doesn’t care about anybody but themselves. It means we’ll still be wearing masks and avoiding crowds and washing our hands a lot after getting packages or mail, using drive-up windows and supermarket pickups and, god forbid, Amazon.com.

It means that it’s way too early to pretend that the virus is going away when, in fact, it may be mutating into something far worse than we’ve already seen. And it means that another surge is just around the corner as Memorial Day approaches, followed by the Fourth of July, Labor Day, the start of school, football season and 27 other reasons why protecting our collective selves against the ‘Rona takes a back seat to having fun, celebrating our “freedoms” and making sure that the virus hangs around for another year … or two.

The good news, if there is any, is that more than 100 million people have received the vaccine already, placing the Biden team well ahead of what he promised they would do. Our greatest hope right now is that the administration keeps working to vaccinate everybody by the end of summer, and that somebody can convince a lot of anti-vaxxers that taking it is a good idea.

At least, that’s my greatest hope, but just between you and me, I’ll be waiting and watching here at home—where I’ve been since March 19, 2020—and I won’t be holding my breath. 

Excerpt #6: ‘The Last Case’

I drove to the newspaper office around 7 o’clock and met Lucy in the lobby. She was sitting on a sofa placed there for visitors, reading text messages on her phone and holding a thick file folder full of papers. She was wearing a short brown corduroy skirt the color of a Hershey Bar, a tan turtleneck sweater with the sleeves pushed up on her arms and a pair of dark brown shoes with a three-inch heel that made her taller, but still short. Her long black hair was parted in the middle and swirled perfectly around her head and shoulders, and she was once again wearing a whole bunch of necklaces of varying lengths.

I was dressed in casual gray slacks, a bright red t-shirt with a white Aerosmith logo on the front and my badly worn leather bomber jacket. The gray slacks had been hiding in the back of my closet for months, and I liberated them so Lucy wouldn’t think I was living on the street. As for the shirt and jacket—well, I’ll only go so far as a slave to fashion.

We went for Chinese this time and Lucy told me about her geek friend Simpkins, who thought she was Chinese and not Korean. “You know us slants,” she said, mockingly referring to her Asian eyes. “We all look alike.”

“You look perfect to me,” I said. “Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Outer Mongolian, who cares. You could be from Jupiter as far as I’m concerned.”

“Well, thanks for saying Jupiter and not Uranus,” Lucy said.

“The thought did cross my mind,” I confessed. “I love yours.”

“My anus?”

“Your rings.”

“That’s Saturn.”

“Them, too.”

Before we preserve our culture and heritage, let’s acknowledge what they are

Let’s talk for a while about “culture and heritage.”

Those two words have become quite popular these days among white supremacists, neo-Confederates, young Nazi wannabes, the Republican Party and Fox News hosts, all of whom have taken up the cause to preserve our culture and heritage by bringing back the “good old days.” But I contend that before we think about preserving our heritage, we should first try to understand what that means, because in my world, if people actually did understand it, we’d find it’s not really worth restoring after all.

First off, I do believe that we should study our culture and heritage, or, as most normal people call it, our history. We should make an honest effort to educate the under-educated adults who get their news from right-wing opinion and blog sites and Facebook group chats with their crazy cousins and friends. And we should teach it in schools so our children understand it as well. But a little knowledge can go a long way, which is a nice way of saying the more we learn about our “culture and heritage” the less we should want any part of it.

To make my point, please allow me to recount the condensed version of early American history in a few short paragraphs:

It started in the 1400s or thereabouts when shiploads of white European emigrants crossed the Atlantic Ocean to establish settlements in “the new world.” They landed on soil that would become the United States, claiming the territory for England or Spain or whatever European flag they flew under, and set about building homes and churches and forts and what have you on land they believed was theirs.

The problem is, the “new world” they thought they had discovered was actually a pretty old world that was already inhabited by various tribes of native people who settled the territory 15,000 years ago (or more) and believed that the land was theirs to use, but not to own. So Job #1 for the white men who landed here was to eliminate the natives by killing them or enslaving them or otherwise chasing them off the land they had occupied peacefully for several centuries.

Once they had taken over the land, these white people started farms where they planted crops and tended animals, but it didn’t take long to discover that planting and harvesting crops was pretty hard work, so the white people went off looking for some help. A few of them sailed over to Africa, where they kidnapped boatloads of black people who they enslaved, brought back here and forced to work for free.

Skip ahead a few years to a time when the white people started running out of land in the eastern part of the country, so they started expanding their territory westward, which they called their “manifest destiny.” This westward movement required them to kill or displace even more native people along the way and to claim any property they came across. When they arrived in the west, they needed to possess even greater chunks of land, so they fought a war with Mexico, stole some land that became Texas (they called it “annexation”) and settled the war by paying Mexico a pittance for the vast territory that we know today as California, Nevada, Utah and Arizona and parts of New Mexico and Colorado. An estimated 5,000 Mexican soldiers and 4,000 civilians were killed and thousands more were wounded.  

So now the white people had land in the east and land in the west but no easy way to connect the two, so they decided to build a railroad linking the two halves of their new home. Railroad work was even harder than farming, so the white people didn’t want to do that either. Instead, they enlisted their black slaves and hundreds of Chinese workers to do the work for them … again for little or no pay.

Finally, in the late 19^th century, things had come together and the white settlers had themselves a big, fine country where they could live – a country that had been built on the backs of the black, brown, yellow and red people they killed, enslaved or otherwise coerced to do their work for them while they themselves rose to the top of the food chain. To celebrate this accomplishment, the white people put themselves in charge of everything, including the government they had founded with a Constitution that still permitted slavery, treated minority people as 3/5 of a human, and told women they couldn’t vote, work, sit on juries, have an opinion, go to school or enjoy any of the other benefits the white men granted to themselves.

Women were allowed to cook, clean house, make babies and care for their husbands but were not considered equal in any way. This, sadly, was the beginning of those “good old days” that the white men still long for today.

In the years since, the United States of America has had 46 presidents and all but one of them was a white man. All of our vice presidents were white men until last year, when a woman of color was elected, and Congress, for the most part, has traditionally been old and mostly white, but is now becoming much more diverse with women and minorities capturing seats.

All of this diversification has become very threatening to the white men who wish to remain in charge, and they got really scared when someone told them that in a few years, America would no longer be a white majority country, such was the rate of immigration by people of color. So what did the white men do? They elected a racist president whose first official acts were to ban Muslims from entering the country, start building a wall on the southern border to keep out brown people and lock immigrants and children who did get through inside cages indefinitely.  

This anti-immigrant, anti-minority posture continued for four years and emboldened the aforementioned white supremacists, neo-Confederates, Nazi wannabes and Republicans who began to come out from under their rocks and openly support discrimination against minorities, suppression of minority votes and even an attempt to overthrow the government on the day that the results of the presidential election were certified.

I could go on all day about that, but here’s a brief recap: White people came to America in the 1400s and took over the territory by killing, raping, robbing, stealing, coercing, enslaving, strong-arming and going to war against anybody who got in their way. They even fought a war among themselves over the issue of slavery, then assassinated the president who put an end to it.

Now we’re faced with a reinvigorated movement of very dangerous people who want to “preserve our culture and heritage,” to the extent that they would bring back all of the dark days of the past just to retain their place as the nation’s white ruling class. To that, I can only say one more thing: If “preserving” it means storing it away in the history books and libraries where it belongs, then I guess I can go along with that. Meanwhile, the rest of us can learn from our mistakes and move ahead to the reality of life in the 21st century ... and accept the cultural advancements that accompany that growth.

Excerpt #5: ‘The Last Case’

One Tuesday afternoon, a woman named Wanda Watkins hired me to kill her husband.

She said she had seen a flyer with my name and number posted on the bulletin board at her book club. That was puzzling, because I never made a flyer of any kind and I had no idea where Wanda Watkins went to read books. It seemed that someone was going around town marketing my services for me and I didn’t know who it was. I knew I wasn’t paying anyone to do that, so this was another mystery I needed to solve. I filed it away for future reference and turned my attention to the case. 

Now I’m not entirely sure what Wanda believed private detectives do, but she somehow got the idea that spousal assassination was in our job descriptions. Maybe she watched a lot of late-night TV movies, I don’t know. Not only was she wrong about my portfolio of services, she was way off on my price, assuming that I did kill people for money, which I don’t. She only offered me $500.

“I want it to look like a robbery,” Wanda said. (That’s the oldest trick in the book.) “I’ll leave the back door unlocked. You come in before 6, mess the place up a bit, take some jewelry out of the master bedroom—I’ll leave it out for you—and steal the money Stan hides inside a pair of argyle socks in his chest of drawers. There should be a couple of hundred in there. When he gets home, I don’t care how you kill him as long as you’re sure he’s dead before you leave. Shoot him, stab him, hang him from the shower rod, for all I care. What weapon do you guys normally use?”

I had to look away to keep myself from laughing out loud.

Excerpt #4: ‘The Last Case’

I went to the newspaper office to collect some information and was referred to the City Hall reporter, a very attractive Asian-American woman named Lucy Lee. Lucy was 24 years old, about five-foot-two in good shoes and appropriately proportioned in a small person kind of way. She had dark eyes, flawless Asian skin the color of an early summer tan, a pouty lower lip and slightly imperfect teeth that were white enough and bright enough but weren’t all perfectly straight. The lips and teeth combined with her smooth tan cheekbones to give her a very happy, playful and seductive smile.

The day I met her she had come to the office early to work on a story for the Sunday edition. She was dressed casually in a pair of low-rise distressed blue jeans; a slightly pink scoop neck t-shirt that exposed two inches of her midriff; and a long, camel and brown shirt-jacket, unbuttoned, with sleeves that were pulled up and held in place by straps that were sewed on as part of the shirt and buttoned at the elbow. I think it had epaulets, too. Or maybe not. The shirt wasn’t the focus of my attention.

Her jet black hair was pulled up high in a long ponytail that made her look like another Lucy, the actress Lucy Liu. She wore long dangling earrings with a turquoise butterfly at the top and a tiny gold ball at the bottom, a locket on a short gold chain around her neck and three or four longer chains of varying lengths…. She wore several bracelets on her left wrist and a garnet-studded ring on the middle finger of her left hand which told me she wasn’t married. When I sat down at her desk and she leaned forward to shake my hand, her hair smelled like apricot shampoo. That was when I started liking apricots.

Excerpt #3: 'The Last Case'

 So anyhow, on this particular night in question—I think it was in June or July or some other hot month—I was parked on my regular stool in my normal state of religious flux, wearing a pair of blue jeans that could easily stand by themselves, a Steely Dan tour shirt and a light blue work shirt that had been ironed—once, I think, a long time ago—with a “rocks” glass full of Jack in front of me and the Blue Toons playing behind me when I was approached by a tall, brown woman in a short red dress and matching heels so high you’d hurt yourself if you fell off of them. Tall body, short dress—my favorite combination in a woman.

“Buy me a drink?” she asked as she walked over and stood beside my stool.

I looked her over from top to bottom and front to back. I spent some extra time in the back. That’s my favorite part. I didn’t see any evidence that she was carrying a weapon, a summons or a subpoena, and if she was trying to hide anything on that body—in that dress—she was doing it all wrong, so I pointed her to the stool adjacent to mine.

“What would you like, Miss…?”

“Farrow. Catalina Farrow,” she said. “Most people call me Cat.” (I swear to god her voice was so sultry she actually purred.) “I’ll have a vodka tonic with an extra lime. I like to suck on something when I drink.”