It’s not our fault, Trump declares. It never is, adds Spicer.

As the GOP-controlled House retreated from voting on an Obamacare replacement bill for the second day in a row Friday, Donald J. Trump, who had said today was do-or-die for the legislation, called the New York Times to blame the Democrats.

“If they had stood up and voted to replace the disaster that is the ACA, we wouldn’t have needed unity among our ranks” to do it, Trump said. “Nancy Pelosi is a bad, or sick, woman for opposing our offer of health care coverage to many younger, healthier and higher-earning Americans. Such a nasty woman – a terrible, low-energy leader.”

    

“Why, when God’s world is so big, did you fall asleep in a prison of all places?”

~Rumi

The day after attending Pacific School of Religion’s “Borders and Identity” 2017 Earl and Boswell lectures on March 17th in Berkeley, I swam from Alcatraz Island to San Francisco. The island and its infamous prison looked desolate and lonely surrounded by an iron sea and a gray sky. I shivered in my bathing suit on the deck of the boat that was approaching the island and stared wide-eyed at the 58-degree water I would have to dive into soon. Doubt crept into me like the cold – I was not sure I would make it across.

When it comes to immigration, America has confined itself in a prison. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and undocumented immigrant Jose Antonio Vargas gave the keynote lecture the evening of March 17^th. He is the founder and CEO of Define American, a nonprofit organization dedicated to sharing the stories of immigrants in order to elevate the conversation around immigration.

    

Illustrated by Will Elder. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2017. 216pp, $29.99.

The Will Elder story is legendary in the history of comic art, but with the passage of generations, the legend is in danger of receding into a distant past of less-than-iconic popular art. Elder, like most of the brilliant artists who emerged within a temporarily booming comic book industry of the later 1940s, did not script his own work, or find himself a late life celebrity in graphic novels. Worse in some ways, in collaboration with his near-lifelong workmate Harvey Kurtzman, he turned from wildly creative satire to drawing “Little Annie Fanny” for Playboy, over several decades, with blue pencil editor Hugh Hefner further limiting a limited protagonist-titillator. It was a living, with health benefits.

But Elder (born Wolf Elder Eisenberg, 1921) had genius days, or rather genius decades, and the millions of readers who have delved Mad Comics reprints in paperbacks endlessly reprinted since later 1950s have encountered the consistent, voluminous best of his work. As Mad founder and savant Kurtzman put it, Elder would get a free hand with the schmaltz method of strip completion: he could smear around as many details as came to mind while he was working furiously from scripts, very often Kurtzman’s scripts and sometimes outlined figures. Intermittently, these included Yiddish phrases, Lower East Side scenes and most poignantly, Elder’s own mother, caricatured for humor.

    

As April 24, the anniversary of the Armenian Genocide is nearing, many countries are going to take the opportunity, again, and prove their moral superiority by judging Turkey. The morally superior even include countries such as Germany that was involved in more than one genocide in the beginning of the last century. As perpetrators of the first genocide of the 20^th century against the Herero in Namibia, Germany may have also had a role, the extent of which is still unclear, in the deportation of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. Often praised for her dealings with the Holocaust, it took Germany over 100 years to finally acknowledge the genocide against the Herero in 2015. Countries such as France, Switzerland, Slovakia, Cyprus, and Greece have so far shown their moral superiority by suppressing speech and making it a crime not to acknowledge the [Armenian] genocide while very comfortably judging Turkey for her shortcomings on freedom and democracy.

A case for calling it genocide

While inconsistently and selectively admitting that (mass) killings and “relocations” did occur, Turkish officials to-date claim that the events don’t meet the definition of genocide, Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide from 1948. They argue that there was no intent to destroy Armenians as an entire group. They refer to the fact that many Armenians survived and there was no history of singling out and targeting of Armenians as an ethnic group prior to the events, as it was the case with the Jews in Germany. They claim that the actions taken by the Ottomans were in response to threats and subsequently were of defensive nature.

    

Trump Motivates Congressional GOP on Health Bill

Donald J. Trump issued a warning to Republican House members in a closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill as dissension within GOP ranks over the proposed Obamacare replacement bill has been heating up.

According to widespread reports, Trump told lawmakers he would help ensure they lose their seats in 2018 if they don’t back the GOP health-care bill.

    

Gilbert Caldwell of Asbury Park, New Jersey – a longtime Methodist pastor and activist in many progressive causes – offers a thoughtful and personal response to Rabbi Michael Lerner’s recent article on Tikkun.org, found at this link:

Overcoming Trump-ism

and to Rebecca Solnit’s article “Grounds for Hope” in the Winter 2017 issue of Tikkun Quarterly.

My re-reading of “Grounds For Hope” by Rebecca Solnit in the Winter 2017 issue of Tikkun has caused me to respond from a personal standpoint, as a clergyman in the United Methodist Church, and with reference to what Rabbi Lerner has written in his article “Overcoming Trump-ism.”

Solnit begins her article: “Your opponents would love to believe that it’s hopeless, that you have no power, that there’s no reason to act, that you can’t win.” But, she writes; “Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away … hope is about the future, grounds for hope lie in the records and recollections of the past.”

    

Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish will be in Jerusalem March 12 – April 3 to testify at the Israeli court concerning the loss of his beloved daughters and niece. The hearing will start March 15;  he is expected to testify March 15, 19, 29 and April 2.

All who can come and witness the civil trial at the court in Beersheba are encouraged to attend.

Information below comes from several press releases about this issue. The releases seek to increase awareness and promote the cause among politicians, human rights advocates, and people who care about justice and women and women’s education.

    

Homelessness itself, let alone homeless deaths, is an unnecessary tragedy and demonstrates how uncivilized of a nation we live in. We don’t need a technological fix because it’s not a technological problem. We already have everything we need to solve homelessness, and indeed even the bigger problem poverty, except the political will to do so. We tragically have a political economy that creates homelessness, while blaming the victims, and then punishes the poor for being homeless. It doesn’t have to be this way.

    

Dear Speaker and Congressman Paul Ryan,

As a priest who commemorates his 50th year in the priesthood this year (28 as a Roman Catholic and 22 as an Episcopalian), and as your elder, I am writing you this letter because I am worried about your soul.

We all know you take good care of your body, working out frequently in the congressional gym we taxpayers provide for those in Congress, and that is a good thing. But I am concerned that you are neglecting your soul. It too requires work-outs and practice to stay healthy.

You claim to be a good and a practicing Catholic Christian but I have serious doubts that you are. Our Christian beliefs include these words of Jesus after all: “What does it profit a person if he gains the whole world but loses his own soul?” These powerful words are surely important for anyone serving in public office or any other places of responsibility, whether in government or business or church or wherever. Yes, they even apply to your close buddies the Koch brothers, upon whom you depend so fully for your income and ideas and campaigns and job.

You see, another passage that grounds Catholicism and Christianity is found in Matthew 25: “Do it to the least and you do it to me.” Not to mention the Golden Rule which is found in Matthew 7:12 and is reflected in some form in every world religion since the time of Hammurabi: “Sowhatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this isthe Law and the Prophets.”

    

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.

― Hannah Arendt

People living in the United States have entered into one of the most dangerous periods of the 21st century. President Donald Trump is not only a twisted caricature of every variation of economic, political, educational, and social fundamentalism, he is the apogee of an increasingly intolerant and authoritarian culture committed to destroying free speech, civil rights, women’s reproductive freedoms, and all vestiges of economic justice and democracy.

Trump is the fascist shadow that has been lurking in the dark since Nixon’s Southern Strategy. Authoritarianism has now become viral in America, pursuing new avenues to spread its toxic ideology of bigotry, cruelty, and greed into every facet of society. Its legions of “alt-right” racists, misogynists, and xenophobic hate-mongers now expose themselves publicly, without apology, knowing full well that they no longer have to use code for their hatred of all those who do not fit into their white-supremacist and ultra-nationalist script.[i]

Trump’s victory makes clear that the economic crisis and the misery it has spurred has not been matched by an ideological crisis– a crisis of ideas, education, and values. Critical analysis and historical memory have given way to a culture of spectacles, sensationalism, and immediacy.[ii] Dangerous memories are now buried in a mass bombardment of advertisements, state sanctioned lies, and a political theater of endless spectacles. The mainstream media is now largely an adjunct of the entertainment industries and big corporations. Within the last 40 years training has taken the place of critical education, and the call for job skills has largely replaced critical thinking. Without an informed public, there is no resistance in the name of democracy and justice; nor is there a model of individual and collective agency rising to such an occasion. Of course, power is never entirely on the side of domination, and in this coming era of acute repression, we will have to redefine politics, reclaim the struggle to produce meaningful educational visions and practices, find new ways to change individual and collective consciousness, take seriously the need to engage in meaningful dialogue with people left out of the political landscape, and overcome the factionalism of single-issue movements in order to build broad based social movements.