Trumpziism cult is a terrible and dangerous throw back to the Middle Ages!

Echo opinion published by Scott Lehigh, in the Boston Globe:

Yes, indeed, Trump’s Cabinet nominees are pretty far out there.🚀⋆｡ﾟ🪐｡⋆｡ ﾟ☾ ﾟ｡⋆💥

From MAGA to medieval🏰 : How Trump’s team echoes the past

As Lord Acton said, we can’t expect great men to be good men.

MAGA supporters seem inclined to support felons (i.e. "Felonx34"), sexual predators, philandering politicians, right wing fake news reporters, wanna-be TrumpBFFs without any FBI vetting ❗.....what is wrong with these insane cult followers❓ 

I’ve heard from a number of triumphant 😒MAGA correspondents and commenters. Their message? That I am completely out of touch with America, clinging desperately to obsolete notions.

Upon reflection, they may well be right. MAGA America has moved on. Not back to the future, but forward to the past. So I’m trying to look at things through wider and wiser eyes as Trump goes about staffing his new (extremist) government.

Our once and future leader frequently boasts of surrounding himself with “the best people,” and it’s certainly true that the team he’s building is unexampled. So much so that they’ve got me pondering Lord Acton’s observation that “Great men are almost always bad men” — and looking to history for greater understanding.

Some modern sticklers, after all, objected to the way Trump’s MAGA men are treating women. And to those who, like me, apparently cleave to outmoded standards of conduct, that seems like serious stuff.

For example, a lawsuit by former SpaceX employees alleges that Trump alter ego Elon Musk ran “his company in the dark ages — treating women as sexual objects to be evaluated on their bra size, bombarding the workplace with lewd sexual banter, and offering the reprise to those who challenge the ‘Animal House’ environment that if they don’t like it they can seek employment elsewhere.”

Which is to say, Musk enabled pretty much the same atmosphere that Defense Secretary designate Pete Hegseth created at one of the veterans’ advocacy organizations he ran, according to a detailed, devastating article in The New Yorker.

That sounds disturbing. Unless, that is, “Animal House” is your lifestyle guide and you believe the Dark Ages are highly underappreciated. It was, after all, an era of traditional gender roles, a time before vexing vaccination regimes, an epoch when everyday life proceeded happily apace, save for those occasional periods when the bubonic plague would swoop in and carry off large segments of the population.

And as anyone familiar with the Dark Ages or adjacent historical spans will tell you, Henry VIII certainly didn’t treat his wives, consorts, or courtiers particularly well, as several lopped-off heads would surely attest. Yet today Henry is considered one of England’s most remarkable kings❗ (born 1491- died 1547 IOW, GMAB😡) (Ahhhh❓ Maybe🤔 Henry was remarkable because he was the father of Queen Elizabeth I - ya'think❓)

Meanwhile, don’t forget France’s Francis I. According to historian William Manchester, he traveled his kingdom exercising the royal “right of the first night” — that is, the kingly prerogative to have wedding-day sexual relations with the nation’s newly married brides.

Sullen brides and grooms may have objected, but today, no one doubts Francis’s greatness. He, after all, is the king who invited Leonardo da Vinci to France. Leonardo brought the Mona Lisa along for the ride, and just think how many grateful Americans now have a prized selfie taken in front of that timeless painting, all due to Francis’s gracious instincts as a host!

History has a trickier time explaining Health and Human Services nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who in addition to being a reported groper, also frequently says things that make it seem he’s stayed out too long in the brain-baking sun or has otherwise been touched in the head, and by something much worse than a worm. But don’t forget that George III of England is said to have buried a steak outside Windsor Castle in the hope it would grow into a beef tree and mistook an oak for the king of Prussia. At least RFK Jr. hasn’t done anything like that (Frankly❓ I would not make that assumpion).

And though public health professionals are unhappy to see him heading to HHS, this is hardly the first time self-satisfied subjects have disliked a new ruler. History reports that the people of Bohemia chafed under King John when he took the throne in 1311, considering their Paris-raised ruler an alien sovereign. 

But, in a way, that’s an apt metaphor for aging Prince Robert, when duty called, John answered. Although completely blind by the time of the Hundred Years’ War, he nevertheless joined the fray at the Battle of Crecy.

Meanwhile, don’t forget France’s Francis I.  According to historian William Manchester, he traveled his kingdom exercising the royal “right of the first night” — that is, the kingly prerogative to have wedding-day sexual relations with the nation’s newly married brides.

Sullen brides and grooms may have objected, but today, no one doubts Francis’s greatness. He, after all, is the king who invited Leonardo da Vinci to France. Leonardo brought the Mona Lisa along for the ride, and just think how many grateful Americans now have a prized selfie taken in front of that timeless painting, all due to Francis’s gracious instincts as a host!

“Take me to the place where the noise of the battle is the loudest!” commanded the sight-deprived sovereign. And so, just as RFK Jr. charged into the vaccine battle, Blind King John and his knights rode valiantly forth into the arrow-filled air, John swinging his sword so wildly as to endanger his own entourage.

Yes, the king and his knights perished during that foray. But history has no truck with minutia. Today they are remembered as romantic heroes in paintings and busts in Prague museums and cathedrals — and what, really, can be better than that!

This, then, is what I’ve learned so far in my struggle to understand modern medieval MAGA America. History doesn’t care about character or competence. Tragically, as evidenced in this essay, power is all that counts.

Until the public declares otherwise, that is.

Sinclair Lewis:  

A book discussion with Governor Janet Mills and Senator Angus King in Maine

An echo report published in The Boston Globe, an article by Scott Lehigh. 

Letters in a time of pandemic: An engaging new book opens a window on Maine Governor Janet Mills’s leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

PORTLAND, Maine:  Would you like to relive the COVID-19 pandemic?  I suspect the unanimous answer starts with “Are you” and ends with “nuts?”

But I mean vicariously, in an unmasked, month-by-month way, through the story of the governor of an older, sprawling, less affluent state?

Governor Janet T. Mills of Maine

This observational opportunity comes in the form of a new book that focuses on the first year of the pandemic, framing it partly through the engaging letters Ashirah Knapp, an off-the-grid constituent and mother, penned to Maine Governor Janet Mills, as Mills struggled to control the spread of a virus that struck, spread, and then surged repeatedly.
“In Other Words, Leadership: How a Young Mother’s Weekly Letters to Her Governor Helped Both Women Brave the First Pandemic Year”,  was written by longtime public-radio journalist and podcaster Shannon A. Mullen. 

Homesteaders in their early 40s, Knapp and her husband are raising two children in the central Maine town of Temple, population 530, where they run an outdoor-leadership school. Mullen also had access to relevant sections of Mills’s daily journal.

On Saturday, June 10, Maine Senator Angus King moderated a discussion between Mills, Knapp, and Mullen about the book, whose month-by-month narrative brings to life the challenges and choices Maine and Mills faced at any given time.

Although the subject is serious, much of the discussion was laugh-out-loud funny, thanks to the wry raillery of the two Pine Tree State politicians.

On the day she declared a state of civil emergency closing down much of the state, Mills called the former governors to ask if they had ever done anything similar. The word she received back from erstwhile governor Joe Brennan was "no". But Angus King noted that he had, during the winter storm that brought frozen chaos to northern New England 25 years ago. 

“Yes, I did. In the great ice storm of 1998,” Mills recounted him telling her.

“Holy cow. Three whole days!” Mills joked at the event.

“At least a week,” deadpanned King.

King’s advice, Mills said, had been to get out and be with the people and always to tell the truth, whether the news was good or bad.

“Two pieces of advice, one was OK, so a 50 percent average,” quipped King. “In the major leagues, that would be a big deal.”

Senator Angus King the former Governor of Maine

On a serious note, King had high praise for Mills, saying she made well-considered but tough decisions whose negative economic and personal impacts were felt immediately but whose benefits — the prevention of illness and death — were much harder to quantify or even to realize, and so carried little political reward.

“I’ve never seen a person make so many hard decisions over such a long period of time,” said the independent US senator.

Which is the same quality that led Knapp to begin her regular handwritten letters to the governor.

“I was completely amazed at the level and intensity of the rancor that was being aimed at this woman,” Knapp said. Feeling that Mills was providing smart, humane, science-based leadership, “I wanted to support her in the face of everything that was coming at her.” For her part, Mills said she drew solace from the expressions of support and details of daily life she received from Knapp.

Mullen’s well-researched book shows the difficulties that faced a governor trying to do the right thing, even as then-president Donald Trump was mocking mask-wearing and pressuring governors to reopen their states. At one point, a frustrated Mills vented to her journal that then-first lady Melania Trump should file for divorce.

“In Other Words, Leadership” also offers a look at some of the Brueghelian boors and buffoons Mills encountered as she worked to protect the state.

There was, for example, the Sanford-based fundamentalist pastor who flouted COVID travel, social distancing, and mask-wearing regulations as a way of drawing attention to himself. A wedding he presided over in Millinocket, some 70 miles north of Bangor, became a super-spreader event.

Meanwhile, the owner of a popular ski-area microbrewery took to Fox News to blast Mills for her COVID regulations. He divulged her personal cellphone number, leading to a barrage of nasty voice and text messages. The governor wasn’t flustered, but later she was blunt. The stunt, she told Mullen, was a “dirtball thing to do.”

In the end, despite having the most elderly population in the nation and vast rural reaches, Maine consistently rated among the top states on vaccination rates and among the lowest on COVID deaths.

Last fall, voters rewarded Mills with an easy victory over polarizing former Republican governor Paul LePage. 

Now, Mullen’s enjoyable book is shining some well-deserved light on the low-key governor whose level-headed leadership helped guide Maine out of the woods.