Trump – South of Town: Notes and Scenes from Texas' Upper Gulf Coast

Reflections on Democracy: Lessons from the White House, 1964 and 2025

I had decided to let this thing go, this WordPress subscription. I stopped it but I was informed by the WordPress powers (that’s their spelling with the capital P in the miDDle) that I had recently paid for a year and I could post until my renewal date but no longer if I didn’t renew. So I left it to fallow and let the old posts rot in the field thinking that I would never post again.

I’m not sure what pushed me over the edge and led me to reach out again last night but maybe it was the criminal destruction of the East Wing of the White House. I have always felt myself to be a part owner of the White House with a bit of personal interest in its preservation as a public historical asset.

I went there once in 1964 as a college student invited by President Lyndon Johnson who, working from a mailing list, asked Dr. Phillip Hoffman of the University of Houston to identify and sponsor a student leader to come to a special White House student leaders meeting.

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Once more: From Hell

Well, good morning from Hell again.

I know you are wondering how I can call this Hell if I can’t even talk about our duly elected president, Congress, and his appointed and confirmed courts. I have dismissed him and his Space-Cadet-in-Chief from our discussion because it would be altogether too easy to assign them all the blame, remove them from office someday, and we would still have — Hell. Even if we rid ourselves of the governing powers in Texas. Yes, still Hell.

Obviously I’m not talking about an eternity in that fiery underground furnace we heard about as children or the one considered credible by many Christians, but the one we live in every day. Even if we include Texas politics, we wouldn’t quite drop to that level. And it does promise to be another hot summer in Texas here south of town.

The hell I’m talking about and the one we live in today and every day is the one:

— Where people’s rights are extinguished by the power of the state. That’s one aspect of the hell of everyday life in this world. If you don’t feel that this applies to you, good for you. But it is still hell for most of the people inhabiting our planet, including many who live in this country. Yes — our citizens, too.

— Where weapons are easily accessible and where teenagers use them to settle arguments and to express their frustrations with the institutions they encounter on a daily basis, or even their parents. Where they use them, not for sport, but to kill. That’s another aspect of Hell. If your child has not been shot at school or shot someone, it’s still Hell that you live in every day even if it comes your way only as fear or maybe the guilt you feel for being a part of a civic culture that has allowed it.

— Where there is starvation on a prosperous and resource-rich planet. Where low-cost, starchy, fat-laden, salty and sugar-loaded fast foods fill the diets of children instead of balanced meals around family tables. Where many children in other parts of our planet simply starve to death. Not even a McDonald’s to fill their stomachs.

— Where people suffer and die needlessly in a nation, indeed a world, of seemingly limitless medical knowledge and ability. It’s what happens in Hell.

— Where we encourage some to profit from our burning fuel that exhausts a suffocating gas into the air — air that is no less than the essence of God’s breath.

— Where religions persist in holding onto conflicting beliefs that are no longer of service to either man or God, then dedicate themselves to wiping out those who disagree with them. People are left searching for the moral and unifying leadership that could help them find a better life for themselves and all the other people on the planet. And while they search, the princes of Hell have their way.

This was a hell that existed long before we allowed any particular political leadership to come to power. All of it was building for all the millennia of our existence. We might even have found a name for it — call it original sin. And no, there are no exceptions. We all own it. We either enjoy its supposed benefits or we enjoy profits from the production and distribution of Hell’s products.

And all political parties and all countries own it. It was not invented by the Republicans or the Democrats. Nor was it invented by our duly elected president. He has just openly enjoyed its perfection for his own benefit more than any other president. A $400,000,000 luxury airliner from a foreign power he does business with through his family? Only a loser would say, “No, thank you” and walk away.

Many of us were taught to think of sin in individual and sexual terms. But that is so limiting. And it leaves us free to benefit from all the pleasures Hell can produce for a few at the expense of the many — the least, the last and the lost.

Think about the House version of the Big Beautiful Budget and tax bill. Huge tax breaks for billionaires and more modest ones for middle class people, paid for in part by cuts to Medicaid, SNAP (food stamps) and other vital services for low income families and individuals. If you are one of the middle class Christian voters whose silence is bought by those minuscule tax cuts, square that with your Holy Communion prayer:

Merciful God, we confess that we have not loved you with our whole heart. We have failed to be an obedient church. We have not done your will, we have broken your law, we have rebelled against your love, we have not loved our neighbors, and we have not heard the cry of the needy. Forgive us, we pray. Free us for joyful obedience, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

This Hell has many aspects that this little essay does not even touch. Privatization of almost anything for profit. Prisons. Schools. Monetary systems. Wanna buy a $trump memecoin? Now, there’s a Ponzi scheme that operates at an international level right out of our Oval Office.

Yes, it dawned here in Hell this morning, already sunny to partly cloudy and hot. And it’s promising to get even even hotter over the years and centuries.

Some in this hell have worked every day to perfect automata that can survive our physically frail humanity with an artificial intelligence unweighted by thoughts of beauty, justice, love and altruism — each one of them a winner designed and encased to thrive in whatever climate and temperature Hell might serve up.

Humanity, as we know it, is but a distant memory in the circuits of whatever it is that may survive us. Maybe the robots of the future will think of the humanity of the past as God. More likely, they will have been programmed to see us as a bunch of losers.

But there was a man in our history who tried to help us understand what people do when motivated solely by self-interest. He taught that there was a better way to live — we could make this into heaven, here and now. We could all learn much from his teaching. Think about that and find a place to attend a service this coming Sunday.

There were leaders who founded other religions and denominations teaching similar concepts. But Jesus is the one I have studied more fully as a United Methodist Christian.

If worship doesn’t appeal to you, think of it as study. See if you can identify that church’s vision of heaven from the songs, sermons, prayers and the welcoming behavior of the people you meet. If the vision you see does not seem consistent with the vision of the gospels, maybe you should find another church, denomination, or even religion. There are other religions whose practices are more consistent with the teachings of Jesus than those of a good many nominally Christian churches and denominations. And, in any case, God’s grace reaches out to all mankind.

And if you can’t quite bring yourself to get up and go to church somewhere, come back here on Monday and I’ll do the preaching.

Good Morning from Hell

Hell?

This doesn’t seem like Hell. There’s this long and beautiful marriage, two wonderful children and five grandchildren — all of them perfect. A church and a center for arts and sciences with friendships of many years. The pantry is full. The AC keeps me comfortable day and night. I have more doctors than I once had school teachers in high school. My church is involved in mission projects, a food pantry, assisting in a local elementary school, and help for people in need of financial assistance. And if I need, more likely just want, a new electronic toy, Amazon can have it on my doorstep tomorrow. Some of us are getting along quite well.

But something is amiss in our politics.

The president’s authoritarian character is not news anymore. I refer you to well documented reporting in established national media. The president, of course, denies anything that doesn’t glorify him and he decries “mainstream journalism” as creators and bearers of “fake news.”

But that’s just another tool in the authoritarian’s toolkit.

I will also spare you the well-worn comparisons with Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin. Those can be found anywhere except maybe in Fox media, controlled by the Rupert Murdock family, or the many informational hellholes you can read into on social media.

However, if you discard these comparisons as illogical name-calling, I refer you to The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a report on events in Germany in the 1930s by a CBS and UPI reporter, William L. Shirer. Adolph Hitler was Shirer’s subject with a tip of the journalist’s hat to Benito Mussolini and our ally in the European war against fascism, Joseph Stalin.

But I suspect Hitler did not consider either CBS or UPI to be a credible news source.

Shirer’s book is one of those thick ones. You may not choose it for bedtime reading. But if you do, follow it up with On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snider. That’s a short one and easy to read. Invest a few dollars and put it down beside your evening devotional guide. Read a chapter every night before you say your prayers. You will pray more fervently.

So forget about Trump for awhile if you can. Forget all about what many see as readily apparent indicators of an authoritarian future for the United States of America. Think, instead, about where we live now and where we have lived throughout the lives of most of us — Hell.

Really? How could one possibly call this Hell?

More tomorrow about the hell we live in and how it looks from the south of town.

Voices of a New Silent Majority: Defending Democracy

On Monday, April 7, The Facts ran a guest opinion piece by Janel McCann of West Columbia. (Should you look it up, it was The Facts weekend edition for Saturday/Sunday, April 5-6 that I receive on Monday.) She gave a well-written and comprehensive discussion of some of the bad things and good things the Trump administration has done. The good things, as it turns out, are all corrections to badly planned and executed decisions by the president and his cast of people with little experience in government, and in many cases, with little leadership experience at all. I was so excited to see someone in our crimson-red county speaking out for the value that government brings to our lives. She is a public school educator. Surprise . I responded to her article with a letter to the editor which The Facts ran yesterday in its April 10 edition. It follows:

Janel McCann’s guest column on Saturday provided an important service. Too many of us have sat silently while the administration has set about destroying the government that has been assembled over many years. Yes, government often muddles through on the way to getting things done, but the job of governing is complicated and unprofitable yet gets done when it really matters. After all, the products of government (like social security, defense, public education, health care for elderly, public health services, civil rights for all, pure science research, emergency response, weather prediction, etc.) are essential to the civilized, modern existence we have come to expect. And don’t wait for the private sector to do all these things for us.

Too many have been silent while our eyes and ears were telling us that something we hold dear is being taken from us.

No more. It is time for the new “silent majority” to roar and let America and the world know that the super-negotiator-in-chief has poked a sleeping bear. We are still America. We are still a democracy. We still believe in the rule of law. We still believe in peace, love, understanding, sharing and hope. These are the values that have been and always must be our message to our politicians and to the world.

Thank you, Ms. McCann. Just before Easter, your writing could not have come at a better time. On that day, we celebrate the resurrection of love. It cannot be forever suppressed.

Angry, Depressed and Getting Older while Trump Wrecks Our Democracy? Try This . . . .

Today is my birthday. I have been fortunate to accompany aging with a way of staying in touch with young people. It has been a nice way to temper my anger and disappointment about the current state of American politics with a little hope for the future. I would prefer to be able to do this with regular discussions with grandchildren the way it was done when the generations were less geographically mobile.

My grandchildren, all of them, now live over a thousand — some of them two thousand — miles from us. Their periodic visits offer only limited opportunity to have the kind of conversations that would allow me to explore the world from their vantage point.

If I were to sit here in the evenings getting only the news from Washington and other parts of the deteriorating world, I would be constantly moving between depression and anger. How did our generation let this happen?

We allowed the democratic process to be manipulated in such a way that a person with no knowledge or appreciation of how our government works wound up in its most powerful position. He is objectively racist in his core, selfish and self-centered to a nauseating degree, unlearned in the basic literature of democratic enlightenment, and incompetent in the skills of governing. All that has been well covered in the news for anyone who is willing to dig a little and read beyond the superficialities of cable TV, social media, and the National Enquirer.