Thursday, April 9, 2020

DEMOCRATS SURVIVING IN THE REDDEST STATES

By Dominique Paul Noth

I didn’t write that headline.

It was provided me partly in jest by a high school mate in Oklahoma  I have not seen for 61 years, who went on to become a distinguished Oklahoma City lawyer and school board member and is now in the last month of his life because of cancer.

[Editor's Note: The subject  succumbed in June to cancer but his life story remains important. Ironically Trump has announced his first rally in a long time for Tulsa, Oklahoma,  June 20 even as covid deaths are on the rise.]


Horning circa 2015 on Oklahoma City school board
His name is Phil Horning and this is his story through my memory and some of his words.  He was the star  of my high school basketball team nobly labeled in sports pages of the time as “The Cubs of University High” though we were in fact the smallest high school in Norman, Oklahoma,  operating out of old barracks and a naval airport hanger built by the Seabees for  a World War II base, kept alive in case the need arose in the Korean War.

(It brings to mind an old George Gobel joke on the “Tonight Show” when the audience laughed because Gobel was a naval military flight instructor stationed in Oklahoma during WWII.  “You may laugh,” he told the audience, “but remember not a single Japanese plane made it past Tulsa.”)

We were actually the University of Oklahoma Laboratory School, which had great teachers and promising student teachers back in the days when this was uncommon.  As was our small class sizes. I recall a graduating class of  about 30, but I did get to take university level math and literature courses, no small feat back then.  Our school was a smattering of  kids associated with the university and from the town of Norman and the surrounding farms and ranches, so deliberately not designed as an elite academic program. There was a gigantic Norman High School for most of the town, but thanks mainly to Horning we were also a state basketball star – he had a wicked turn-around jump shot, and with a tall center and some good passers that was enough.

I was the manager of the team (meaning glorified ball boy) and we traveled by bus from town to town, sometimes to gyms so cramped that there was a mattress hung on the wall to cushion players doing layups.  Sometimes the rowdy opposing crowd for night games  gathered around our bus a bit threateningly, but we were undeterred.  It was a happy school environment despite the antiquated facilities – with marshes where we could conduct science experiments, real carpentry shops  and frogs we could catch for dissection.  We stood out in basketball and chess but lacked the numbers to do much else.  Phil’s exploits were such that his son, Clay, now a sportswriter, wrote them up in March 2020 in a column for the Norman Transcript, a paper I think I delivered as a kid in the 1950s. 



Horning circa 1958 in Norman Transcript
news story
In a warm email catching up on our past, Phil recalled how I would leap on a teacher’s table to enact a scene from Cyrano.  His memory is flattering.  I was the school nerd, I guess, popular because I performed as a folk singer and wrote for the school dittoed newsletter.  I loved to claim that if I hadn’t stopped growing at 5 feet 6 (I did shoot up to 5 feet 11 in senior year) I could have been a jock, but of course that’s nonsense. Phil was the BMOC, a great student and athlete who I recall deserving every bit of popularity he got. 

I never knew his politics then, and while I enjoyed my school, I was a transplanted liberal New Yorker deeply troubled by the political tones I heard around me.  Oklahoma was then and now a red state.   I remember the high school once held a debate for juniors and seniors on segregation vs. integration and I cheerfully took what to me as was the obvious winning side of integration. The school’s classes voted for segregation and it took me decades to get over that.

Phil is also a giant fan of my son-in-law, comedian Jim Gaffigan whose wife, my daughter, is his co-writer and they’re parents of five of our grandchildren.  I tried to arrange tickets for the Hornings years ago when Jim came through Oklahoma City, but the date didn’t work.  That was our only email contact until a mutual friend from long ago told me last month of his battle with stage four cancer.  In my email of reconnection, he was most flattering: “I remember so many details of our interactions in our youth," he wrote, "particularly I remember what a good brother you were to Jean.” Jean’s prime care giver today is our sister Malou.

I can write about this because Phil said I could and he is deeply humorous and philosophical about it all.  Look at this paragraph: “Given the fact that my expiration date is rolling closer, that I retired 17 years ago, I'm not really devastated about dying earlier than I planned (hoped.) If it comes to pass as predicted (three months), I will be very sad to leave my family when the world is in such a mess and the worst president of my lifetime is in office.”

Let’s think about that for a moment. First, you hear the disappointment with Trump everywhere and it has  become harder than ever to stick behind him, even in Oklahoma. Phil is theoretically surrounded by deep waves of red Trump supporters, but his viewpoints are no longer unique. 

He is placing a letter to the editor with a local newspaper – and since they have not yet replied I am cheerfully offering this space.  The main reason is not the attack on Trump.  It is to remind readers that a lot of the noble examples of the 20th century American man are being underappreciated by our 21st century sensibilities.  Sometimes the quiet, steady positive life of the Phil Hornings of our world should not pass unappreciated:

Letter to the editor:

First, a personal note:   I am a patriot. I have lived in central Oklahoma all my life and have lived under 14 presidents. If you have lived under more, you are at least 88.  Three times I have drawn checks from the federal government.  When I was a soldier, when I got my law degree on the G.I. Bill, and when I began to draw Social Security.  I have twice taken an oath to defend the Constitution, and I believe in the rule of law. I tell you these things hoping you will think about my thesis before piling on.

My thesis:  We are victims of the most incompetent president of my lifetime.  He is profoundly ignorant.   As conservative columnist George Will wrote, “What is most alarming is not that Trump has entered his eighth decade unscathed by even elementary knowledge about the nation’s history… Rather, the dangerous thing is that he does not know what it is to know something.”

This flaw and others have led to the bungling and botching that is the federal response to the pandemic.   He turned down testing kits from the World Health Organization.  He spewed false statements.  On 1/22/20: “We have it totally under control.”  On 2/28/20 referring to Democrats, “This is their new hoax.”  Valuable time was lost.

Now, our health professionals are short on testing, masks, ventilators, and protective gear.
  
Our governors are trying to save lives while Trump is trying to save face.
--Phil Horning


About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his DomsDomain dual culture and politics outlets.  A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee. 


Tuesday, April 7, 2020

TRUMP’S ONLY CHANCE FOR SALVATION IS STOPPING THE VOTE

By Dominique Paul Noth

For the last weeks, every day, America has suffered through the most maddening yet strangely essential White House briefings where some important facts and warnings about COVID-19 are dispensed directly from eminent health scientist but also prattled endlessly about in somnolence inducement by Vice President Mike Pence and anchored in constant misdirection by the portly ringmaster of this flea circus, who contradicts or calls into question the advice from his own gathered experts.

Trunp tries to stifle reporters at White House briefing.
Donald Trump, perhaps jealous about how personal, emotional and fascinating have been New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo briefings, determined not to let voters forget for a moment that whatever they think of Cuomo or the other governors he is the one in charge of the vital levers of government,  and confident in his ability to spin his own version of events,  has wandered this  White House meeting stage like a prowling gorilla ready to pounce, saving some important summaries for his own lips and using a parade of military men, CEO stooges and once capable bureaucrats, plus Jared Kushner, to fill in the gaps or in reality  take the blame for the mounting sense of failure and loss he doesn’t want to be associated with.

He also plays doctor, urging Americans to take an unproven chemical he has “good feelings about,” and contradicting the ventilator concerns of the nation’s governors, inadvertently revealing that, while most Americans know ventilators are the almost inevitable tool to keep them from death, Trump envisions going on ventilators as a sign you are beyond saving – so why encourage their use?

The next few days, he insists, will bring the peak of the infection wave and America can start getting back to normal while scientists see rolling peaks going on for months.  Sunday he actually called such a White House conference, though there was no news to speak of, simply to keep his rally-less presence going on TV, and jumping in to prevent Dr. Fauci from telling us what he really thinks about Trump’s drug of choice – hydroxychloroquine, which works for malaria and lupus but is unproven for COVID-19 and has as much chance to harm as to help.

By Monday and election Tuesday in Wisconsin, Trump’s hostility and arrogance at those briefings went beyond all reason, attacking any member of the press who questioned his statistics or past statements, defending his miracle cure even though it is unclear if it helps or hurts, sideswiping  any questioning of his experts on medical supply chains or desperate physicians. He then tried to turn the blame to Congress for not giving him more money without supervising strings.

This has dumfounded the so-called Trump supporters, who live in the regions or occupy the age levels most endangered by Trump’s behavior.

Even a sober research fellow at Marquette University couldn't help noticing that Trump's slight bump in poll ratings came nowhere  near the rise in popularity of other “wartime” presidents, though Trump uses that bump to further justify his behavior.

But what it all does demonstrate is his slow change in re-election strategy.  His “trump card,” of a stable economy will be long gone by November, so he is shifting to the “irreplaceable dictator” philosophy, that only he has enough control and authority of the system so the US has to keep him in office for another four years.  Every noise he makes these days is trying to bully the public into that viewpoint, including – have you noticed? – his attacks on voting by mail.

Of all the states, it is our Wisconsin that may be quietly showing him the way forward as long as conservative courts are in charge. Wisconsin’s Democratic Gov. Tony Evers was too slow to pull the obvious trigger – delay the spring election -- perhaps because Trump was still holding out hope of an all clear by Easter. But when he did try to pull the election until June, the GOP legislature took him to conservative state high court, which insisted the election proceed.

Almost simultaneously, the US Supreme Court shot down an effort by a federal judge to allow ballots to count until April 13. SCOTUS ignored rampant evidence that the absentee ballot system was overloaded. As Justice Ginsburg said in a stern dissent: “Tens of thousands of absentee voters, unlikely to receive their ballots in time to cast them, will be left quite literally without a vote. This Court’s intervention is thus ill advised, especially so at this late hour.”

It seems to me the change in political reality runs far deeper this time than previous outrages from Trump’s lips.  This time everybody has family and friends in the danger zone for COVID while every day brings fresh stories of people outside the danger zone (except medical personnel regardless of age who are constantly in danger on the front lines) who are also dying – by the hundreds and thousands.  In Wisconsin, each day brings a story of a progressive voter who risked death to cast a ballot.

It is no accident that the country that prides itself on democracy is leading the death parade.

For him to view any of this as a personal victory, or to suggest that despite the evidence before our eyes none of this is his doing – well, everyone knows neither will fly. We can’t blame Trump for COVID-19 – any leader would have been challenged -- but we know clearly at this point that his prevarication, his destruction of previous pandemic response mechanisms, his inability to provide meaningful statistics despite the experts around him, his general incompetence all  suggest there are plenty of thing to blame him for at the polls. So his chances of winning an open election have disappeared despite the twitter harping of his diminishing fan base. They may still find him amusing but not to vote for.

His only hopes of survival are now not in the hands of voters – it depends on whether he can stop voting by mail or somehow get rid of the November election.  Wisconsin has just proved he can lean on the courts to do the undemocratic.  That’s the only way he can win.

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his DomsDomain dual culture and politics outlets.  A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.