First Lady-elect Jill Biden has earned the right to be called Dr. Biden. She received a doctor of education degree from University of Delaware in 2007, based on a dissertation that “focused on maximizing student retention in community colleges.” It is an important topic, given the difficulties students at community colleges face, difficulties I have seen first hand teaching at two New Jersey schools.

Joseph Epstein, an essayist, disagrees — and he took to The Wall Street Journal Op-Ed page to make the case. His essay “Is There a Doctor in the White House? Not if You Need an M.D.” is one of those essays that comes off as a fresh take, when it really is nothing more than flashy nonsense. Epstein engages in gamesmanship, misdirection, bad faith, and bad logic, as he pens a screed that manages to be condescending, dismissive, and amazingly shallow given the platform.

What hit me when I read this was that I would not allow my students to engage in this kind of empty rhetoric. They are required to support their arguments with more than cherry-picked anecdotes and assumptions. So, I graded the essay based on one of the freshman composition rubrics used at one of my schools.

Here is the rubric and grade — a 72, which means the essay would pass, but not by much.

The rubric:

Here is my mark up of the text:

Am I being fair? I think so, but I’d invite readers to weigh in.

This is number 80 in my ongoing diary series, which runs on my Instagram page. My hope is to compile these, along with essays and poems that reflect our moment, into a book.

#FrontLines, a #pandemicdiary 80. Nine dead. Murdered. Pentobarbital. In six months. Five more planned by Jan. 20. A killing spree of massive proportions. After 17 years of silence. // Brandon Bernard. The latest victim. Bernard, 40, killed tonight in Terre Haute. Convicted of murdering Todd and Stacie Bagley in Texas. He was 19 at the time. Just a kid. Didn’t pull the trigger. But he was there. “I’m sorry,” he said before he died. // Todd’s mother thanked the president, the attorney general, “for bringing the family some closure,” said after the execution, “I can very much say: I forgive them.” // The Bagleys are dead. Brandon Bernard is dead. Christopher Vialva, who pulled the trigger, is dead.  // “A death sentence offers the illusion of closure and vindication,” says the Catholic Church. Appearance. Semblance. Imitation. Mirage. “No act, even an execution, can bring back a loved one or heal terrible wounds. The pain and loss of one death cannot be wiped away by another death.” // This is Donald Trump’s legacy. Adding dead to the dead. Almost 300,000 killed by his neglect. Fourteen more seem a pittance. But these killings are premeditated. Active. Thought through. // “We owe it to the victims and their families to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system.” // But Batman does not kill the Joker. Because Batman would become the Joker. Justice would disintegrate before our eyes. // “When the state, in our names and with our taxes, ends a human life despite having non-lethal alternatives, it suggests that society can overcome violence with violence,” says the Catholic Church. Violence is normalized. Murder becomes a tool. “The use of the death penalty ought to be abandoned not only for what it does to those who are executed, but for what it does to all of society.” // 

“You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress them, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” — Exodus 22:20

1/ They refuse food. Seven of them. Locked up in immigrant detention in Bergen County. This is what is being reported. Why there are protests outside the facility. They want ICE to “free them so they can await the outcome of their deportation cases at home amid the current coronavirus surge,” reports Matt Katz. // In America, we warehouse immigrants. Place them in cages. Treat them as criminals. Worse. //

*

2/ American History Lesson: The Chinese Exclusion Act. American History Lesson: 1921 Emergency Quota Act. American History Lesson: Johnson-Reed Immigration Act. // Italians. Jews. Poles. Slavs. Greeks. None need apply. // “Our capacity to maintain our cherished institutions stands diluted by a stream of alien blood,” said Albert Johnson, the Republican congressman who sponsored the bill. // Limited the undesirables from the east, especially the Jews. “The usual ghetto type,” said a government report, “filthy, un-American, and often dangerous in their habits.” //

*

3/ Germany has made itself a world power, the naturalist William T. Hornaday wrote in 1918, “partly by welding together and maintaining her Germanic stock.” No mixing with Slavs. With Hungarians. With Jews. // Germans “are a unit, working like one vast machine.” America, he said, has “pursued an exactly opposite course.” Alien races flow into American cities. Into the heartland. “America has become the dumping-ground for the ashes and the cinders of all nations” (217). //

*

4/ The rhetoric repeats. “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” This was Trump in 2015. This is Trump now. A nativist. He calls refugees from the south an infestation. A disease. An invasion. As if this were war. // On cable, the right’s commentariat amplifies the libel. Tucker Carlson says immigrants crowd out Americans. They despoil and pollute. Lou Dobbs says the immigrant influx is “just going to consign tens of thousands perhaps millions of Americans to their deaths.” Sean Hannity. Dennis Prager. Ben Shapiro. Rational restrictionists. Not opposed to immigrants, but to illegal immigration. Their arguments have the veneer of logic. But like the wood coating on a cheap dresser, they disintegrate. // Peel it back. Note the words. Culture. Homogeneity. Look at Japan, Prager says. Diversity leads to crime. Japan is successful because it’s homogeneous. Immigrants must assimilate, he says, as if they don’t. As if they refuse to. As if the young activists I’ve met, undocumented but in all ways American, are a fifth column waiting for orders. // This is not about assimilation. It’s about culture. About race. About “massive demographic changes,” says Laura Ingraham. // It’s about fear. About who the refugees and immigrants are. About where they come from. //

*

5/ Still we came. The Jews. My grandparents and great uncles and aunts. // “From their long and too often unhappy history the Jews had learned the value of migration,” writes Lucy Dawidowicz. // A history of wandering. Of flight. The “fundamental Jewish strategy for survival, the escape valve of Jewish history,” she says (3). // Exiles in Egypt. Refugees escaping the Pharoah’s wrath. Spread through diaspora to the winds. To Europe and Russia. To the Pale of Settlement. To America. On Passover, we declare, “Next year in Jerusalem.” //

*

6/ Still we came. Without papers. With few restrictions. A small tax. A check for lice or disease. And then onward. // “This is the America my great-grandfather, Samuel Freedman, came to in 1911, when he walked off the deck of an English ship onto Ellis Island,” writes Aaron Freedman. No visa. No passport. Nothing to document his travel. “In other words, my great-grandfather was an undocumented immigrant.” // No need for papers. The borders were open. “Simply stating the name of the ship on which he had arrived was all that was required for a foreigner to come to America with the intention of staying,” writes Freedman. // That was the America my grandfather entered. Henry Kaletsky. No more than 15 or so. Left Poland. Fifth of six to arrive. Father and sister would stay in Poland. The Jewish Quarter in Suwalki, the Pale of Settlement. Or that’s what we believe. // Henry entered through Ellis Island. With few papers, if any. Like his sister, brothers. Like hundreds of thousands of Europeans. Like Samuel Freedman. Lived in Queens. Would join the Army as the First World War ended. Became a citizen. Married. Had a child, my father. //

*

7/ Did he attend shabbat services at Schul Gasse? Buy his radishes and kosher meats on Market and Wesola? Almost a year in Brooklyn, with a daughter. My father’s aunt Rose. Irving tells my dad this. Irving, my dad’s younger cousin. Isaac, their grandfather, made one visit to America. To see his children. Six of seven settling here, mostly in Brooklyn. Like so many Jews from Eastern Europe, fleeing persecution. Russian and Polish pogroms. The segregation of the Pale. Isaac, my great-grandfather. refuses to stay in America. People don’t say hello. Returns to Suwalki, Poland, early-1930s. Home to shtetl streets where men sold birds and fish from stalls. Talked. Yelled. Sang. In Yiddish. Polish. This is all speculation. I watch a 1937 film clip. “Jewish quarter in Suwalki; Market in Filipow.” Soon the Nazis would erase these images. Poland would be partitioned. Suwalki bombed. Isaac died shortly before the Nazis invaded. Just weeks. His daughter Feiga, my dad’s aunt, and her family fled to Slonim. Eastern Poland. Now Belarus. They were rounded up. Massacred in the woods outside town. Dumped in a mass grave. Or so we believe. Feiga’s siblings were in the United States. Norman, Feiga’s son was sent here, too. // Irving says Isaac convinced Feiga to send their oldest son to American in ‘36. Isaac thought the rest would follow. //

*

8/ They didn’t. They died. Murder in the cause of purity. In the cause of power. By law. // “We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’ and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was ‘illegal,’” wrote Martin Luther King Jr. (134). // Feiga and her husband and her daughter. Irving’s maternal grandmother. His uncles, aunts. “They never made it to the camps,” he says. His Aunt Esther was 16. // Six million Jews killed by the Nazis across Europe. Jews scattered to the winds. Turned away. By Roosevelt. // “Most notoriously,” Daniel Gross wrote, the German ship St. Louis was turned away in June 1939. Nearly a thousand passengers, “almost all Jewish.” Denied entry in Miami. The Jews were sent back to Europe to die. //

*

9/ Separated at the Mexican border. Mother. Son. Two years apart as a penalty. A threat. A deterrent. As if they’ve committed the worst of crimes. Take away your kids. // In the Times, a story about reunification. Happiness tempered as bonds broken stay severed. As food grows scarce. As work barely materializes. // Leticia Peren fled north from Guatemala, the paper says, “rather than risk what might happen next.” The gangs. The violence. Her story is familiar. Carmela fled threats and domestic violence. Coming north, she told me, was her only option.. Still waits for a hearing, a friend tells me. // These families are refugees. Not criminals. Not vermin. Or insects or an infection. // Shut the borders. Build a wall. //

*

10/ I asked her why she left Guatemala. Why flee north? Why the United States? Carmela tells me her boyfriend raped her. He was protected by the gangs. The police did nothing. Her son was threatened. Bullied. Would be drafted into the gangs. // She would have stayed. Her family is there. Her father. But there is no safety. Trekking north. Relying on the coyotes. Crossing Mexico, through deserts and mountains. Crossing the Rio Grande. Into what has become hostile territory. There was no choice. // Carmela is in limbo. Carmela waits, but is lucky. She is in New Jersey. It is the waning hours of the Trump era. Refugees are huddled in Mexico. Hundreds. Thousands. Forced to wait there. A violation of American and international law. Refugees. Asylum seekers. Families separated at the Mexican border. // Mother. Son. Two years apart as a penalty. A threat. A deterrent. As if they’ve committed the worst of crimes. Take away your kids. // In the Times, a story about reunification. Happiness tempered as bonds broken stay severed. As food grows scarce. As work barely materializes. // Leticia Peren fled north from Guatemala, the paper says, “rather than risk what might happen next.” The gangs. The violence. Her story is familiar. Like Carmela’s. // Like my grandfathers’. Like so many across the decades.

*

__________

Works Cited

Atkinson, David. “Trump’s views on immigration aren’t as bad as those in the 1920s. They’re worse.” The Washington Post, 14 Janauary 18, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2018/01/14/trumps-views-on-immigration-arent-as-bad-as-those-in-the-1920s-theyre-worse/. Date accessed 8 December 2020

Dawidowicz, Lucy S. On Equal Terms: Jews in America 1881-1981, Holt Rinehart Winston, 1982.

Dickerson, Daitlin. “Three Years After Family Separation, Her Son Is Back. But Her Life Is Not.” The New York Times, 7 December 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/07/us/family-separation-complications.html?searchResultPosition=4. Date accessed 8 December 2020

Freedman, Aaron. “Open Borders Made America Great.” The New Republic, 9 August 2019, https://newrepublic.com/article/154717/open-borders-made-america-great. Date accessed 9 October 2020

Gross, Daniel. “The U.S. Government Turned Away Thousands of Jewish Refugees, Fearing That They Were Nazi Spies.” Smithsonian Magazine, 18 November 2015, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/us-government-turned-away-thousands-jewish-refugees-fearing-they-were-nazi-spies-180957324/. Date accessed 8 October 2020

Hornaday, William T. “Awake! America.” The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un-American Subversion from the Revolution to the Present, ed. David Brion Davis, Cornell University Press, 1979, pp. 216-218.

Ingraham, Laura, qtd. by Erin Durkin. “Laura Ingraham condemned after saying immigrants destroy ‘the America we love.’” The Guardian, 9 August 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/aug/09/laura-ingraham-fox-news-attacks-immigrants?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other. Date accessed 8 October 2020

“Jewish quarter in Suwalki; Market in Filipow.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Bland Family Collection, 1937, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn1005051. Date accessed 8 December 2020

Johnson, Albert, qtd by Tom Diegnan. “Progressives Have an Immigration Problem.” Commonweal, 7 December 2020, https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/progressives-have-immigration-problem. Date accessed 8 December 2020

Kalet, Hank. “Border Song: A Story of Violence and Flight.” The Medium, 17 June 2019, https://link.medium.com/PVEq24r63bb. Date accessed 8 December 2020

Katz, Matt. Matt Katz (https://gothamist.com/news/ice-detainees-go-hunger-strike-second-time-month-bergen-county-jail)

King Jr., Martin Luther. “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” The Radical King, 2105, Beacon Press, pp. 127-145.

Prager, Dennis. https://www.investors.com/politics/columnists/dennis-prager-a-nation-of-immigrants-only-if-they-assimilate/

Trump, Donald, qtd. by Katie Reilly. “Here Are All the Times Donald Trump Insulted Mexico.” Time, 31 August 2016, https://time.com/4473972/donald-trump-mexico-meeting-insult/. Date accessed 8 October 2020

I wrote this in August. The numbers have grown much worse, and we are now in another, possibly more brutal wave.

Fall and All

One out of every 55 people living in the United States has tested positive for COVID-19. More than 6 million in all. 183,000 dead. At least. Experts think it’s higher. // Aug. 31. I imagine William Carlos Williams in his car. On a rural road in North Jersey. The “contagious hospital” in the distance as the flora awakens among the dry and dead remains of the previous year. // I think of the roads here. Fifty miles south. Lined now with houses and stores and empty storefronts. An economy battered by COVID. // On a podcast, the panel discusses Williams’ poem. The imagery. The opening line seems disconnected, they say. Is disconnected from the poem in most readings. // “By the road to the contagious hospital,” Williams writes, before detailing a “scene of life’s rebirth.” This road “the speaker refers to casually as if he’s traveled it often” leads to “a hospital that only a few years earlier would have been filled with victims of the 1918 flu pandemic that killed 675,000 Americans.” // Williams. A doctor. Pediatrician. General practitioner. Was on the front lines then. “We doctors were making up to sixty calls a day. Several of us were knocked out, one of the younger of us died, others caught the thing, and we hadn’t a thing that was effective in checking that potent poison that was sweeping the world.” // I’ve read this poem hundreds of times. Read that opening line over and over. Not fully getting it. Now, I can’t help but reread this poem with a COVID eye. Infections spreading. Death counts rising. // Photo on the Times’ website: “Medics with the Houston Fire Department prepared to transport a patient with coronavirus symptoms to a hospital in Houston earlier this month.” // I want so bad to see the “stark dignity of / entrance” as a “profound change,” as an awakening. But summer ends as it began. With distance and masks. // The sunflowers in our yard droop from the weight of existence. Do they know? Evictions loom for many. Millions out of work. Tempers run hot. It is a grim world. // Yesterday, we drove home from a friend’s in the dark. Past the police station. Past dormant construction sites. // Across from us at a light, diners sat outside under striped umbrellas. “We haven’t gone to dinner yet for our anniversary,” I say to my wife. She nods. We don’t make plans. // “They enter the new world naked,” Williams writes of the new growth pushing up from under the “dead, brown leaves” and “leafless vines.” This is the world today. Even at summer’s end. The shoots rising, “uncertain of all / save that they enter.” And “All about them / the cold, familiar wind.”

A Facebook friend ends a post with “Heil Biden,” apparently as a joke. It came at the end of a rant about voter fraud and the latest conspiracy about a van in Georgia. I’ve tried to be open-minded about the extremes of political rhetoric — well, mostly — and I understand that I have used the word pro to-fascist to refer to Trump and the word coup to describe his efforts to overturn a legitimate electoral result. I’ve even written a political speech that is a mashup of Trump and Hitler speeches that is terrifying to me in its seamlessness. I think I’m on solid ground with these criticisms, but I am willing to acknowledge that I may have engaged in some hyperbole.

I think “Heil Biden” crosses a line, especially when there is no evidence of the kind of cult of personality that surrounds Trump surrounding Biden, or that Biden would manifest the kind of strongman tendencies Trump has exhibited over the last four years.

I find myself growing increasingly tired of all of this. I am tired of baseless conspiracies and the marshaling of fiction and falsehood as supposed factual data in support of the insupportable. I am tired of people who define freedom as not wearing masks, and who accuse those of us who do of being sheeple or unthinking drones. I am tired of personality cults and the not-so-subtle equating of Trump with nation and the attacks on those who voted against him as being illegal voters, illegitimate voters, somehow less American or not American.

This is not about policy differences. I am willing to debate those and have friends who call themselves conservative with whom I do so. Our discussions are based on an agreed reality, even if our interpretations and personal philosophies take us in different directions.

This is not about civility, either. I find that word distasteful in a political context because it implies forced bipartisanship and compromise without taking into account what is being compromised.

This is about a darkness that has settled upon us, a willed ignorance and superstition. We’ve replaced logic and debate with name calling and conspiracy, nuance with hardened lines. This descent started in the late-1950s, with John Bircherism and the growth of Goldwater and then Reagan conservatism, accelerated with the conspiracies pushed by the right during the Clinton years and just kept growing worse and more dangerous.

The presidency of George W. Bush, with its claims that it no longer had to abide by a verifiable reality and that it could create its own through pure might, brought this thinking into full flower. During the Obama years, the right became fully unhinged, making the conspiracies of the Clinton years seem trifling, and helping create the conditions that catapulted Trump into the presidency.

Jason Stanley, author of How Fascism Works, told Vox in 2018 that “Fascist politics” is “about identifying enemies, appealing to the in-group (usually the majority group), and smashing truth and replacing it with power.” The goal of this politics is to

get people to disassociate from reality. You get them to sign on to this fantasy version of reality, usually a nationalist narrative about the decline of the country and the need for a strong leader to return it to greatness, and from then on their anchor isn’t the world around them — it’s the leader.

This has been the Trump modus operandi. The Trump years have been marked by attacks on the press, on academia, on science — those institutions responsible for understanding reality and giving each of us the tools for its interpretation. These attacks were levied alongside a claim similar to the Bush team’s: Reality is what Trump decides. If he claims voter fraud, then there must be voter fraud. If he calls COVID a hoax or Chinese plot, then that is what it is and the wearing of masks, the restrictions put in place, the guidelines designed to mitigate risk and limit the number of people who get infected and die are meaningless.

This fracturing of reality has left us unable to respond to a virus that infected more than 14 million Americans with a death toll fast approaching 300,000. Simple preventative measures like wearing masks, keep out distance, and staying home have been transformed into cultural symbols that indicate weakness and fear. The strong do not wear masks. The strong eat indoors. The strong go to church and participate in mass rallies for a man who lost election but continues to raise money and continues to command a kind of personal loyalty unlike anything we’ve seen in American history.

This explains the persistence of claims like one made by several friends on Facebook — and reported on by the conservative propaganda site Newsmax (https://www.newsmax.com/politics/brian-kemp-signature-audit-verification/2020/12/04/id/1000018/) — that a video shows votes being counted after the deadline without monitors present. It explains the statistical acrobatics being performed, the sheer volume of lies and distortions being pushed not just by those close to Trump but by his legions of supporters. And it bodes ill for democracy going forward.

The reality community knows that Biden won fairly convincingly, garnering more than 80 million votes and winning by nearly 7 million. He won more than 300 electoral votes and has since had several recounts and lawsuits go his way. And yet, phrases like “illegal votes” and “Stop the Steal” continue to a clarion call among Trumpists.

Here is Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the House of Representatives, last week, tweeting

Newt Gingrich @newtgingrich

The more data comes out on vote anomalies that clearly are not legitimate the more it looks like 2020 may be the biggest Presidential theft since Adams and Clay robbed Andrew Jackson in 1824. State legislatures should demand recounts

November 27th 2020

24,538 Retweets82,168 Likes

that the 2020 vote “may be the biggest Presidential theft since Adams and Clay robbed Andrew Jackson I. 1824.”

South Carolina Sen. Lindsay Graham has attempted to get Georgia to toss out votes, while Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has refused to acknowledge Trump’s defeat. The easy response is to portray this as a desperate, Hail Mary pass by politicians hoping to keep their party in power. Perhaps it is.

But it also plays to the crowd and fans the flames of distrust on the right. About 70% of Republicans polled the week after the election “do not believe the presidential election was ‘free and fair’”; among those who questioned the vote’s fairness, “78% thought mail-in ballots spurred extensive voter fraud, while 72% believed ballot tampering occurred.”

Two weeks later, the Morning Consult reported a similar result: Just three in 10 Republicans “say the results in Michigan, Georgia, and Pennsylvania — each of which has now certified the election — are reliable. A similarly low share of GOP voters say the overall election was free and fair.” The Morning Consult surveyed 1,996 registered voters nationwide between Nov. 20 and Nov. 23, and released the results on Nov. 24.

This is not a fringe belief. If we extrapolate the numbers, we are looking at 50 million voters who do not believe Biden won fairly, most of whom also believe he didn’t win and remain loyal to the wannabe strongman who currently holds office. These fraud claims have a racial — let’s be blunt, racist — component. They focus almost solely upon urban areas, making the claim that cities with large Black populations are rife with fraud. The racism plays to a belief among Trump’s most loyal base that Black and brown voters are not legitimately American, which makes their votes illegitimate, as well. Hence, the phrase “illegal votes.”

And if Biden won these votes, he therefore cannot be a legitimate president. This belief is, itself, illegitimate. It’s a lie. But it’s rooted in the soil like a weed, and it will spread and crowd out the truth. So while Trump’s coup did not succeed in keeping him in office, it is succeeding in keeping the poison of Trumpism alive. We can expect more “Heil Biden” nonsense, more conspiracies, more attacks on truth and the press, more effort at distorting reality, and more attempts to nakedly grab for power.

In six and a half weeks, Joe Biden will become president. Kamala Harris will become vice president. The tenure of Trump and Vice President Mike Pence will be over. But the damage caused by their four years of lies and verbal attacks on opponents will continue. You can be on it.