Time To Make This Land A Land For All Of Us

"This land is your land, and this land is my land
From California, to the New York Island
From the Redwood Forest, to the Gulf stream waters
This land was made for you and me."

- Woody Guthrie

Those lyrics from Woody Guthrie's song, "This Land is your land," ran through my head as I awoke yesterday morning.

Great song. A great reminder that this land, this country, under the great Democratic experiment of America, is supposed to be the home of equal rights and justice for all. 

But it's a idyllic notion, that's never been realized -- for all of us.

This land has never really been black Americans' land. African Americans never have been made to feel welcome, dating back more than 400 years ago, to 1619 in Jamestown, VA, when Africans were first introduced to American soil as slaves.

And before this land was claimed by the white man as their own, the land, for all intents and purposes, belonged to native Americans until so many of them were slaughtered at the white man's hand.

So whose land is it, really?

Like many of us, I've been pondering the vast injustices of "our land."

The intense hatred and engrained racism is borne of fear. And that fear is covered up by the pathetic political posturing of ruthless, alarmist, greedy, elitist, controlling miscreants, posing as heroic defenders of righteousness, so they can satisfy their obsessions with self, and have their way.

So much has been written about the horrible killing of George Floyd for the past three and half weeks. What is there left to say? Plenty. Hundreds of years of oppression, discrimination demands it.

How does a cop crush the life out of a man for more than eight minutes, seemingly without a care in the world, while being video-tapped doing it?

What makes Floyd's killing so unfathomable was that it wasn't the result of an impulsive, adrenalin-fueled, act of fear, where a cop fires his gun at an unarmed black man.

Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, charged with Floyd's murder, acted like a wild animal, a jungle cat which, after it initially takes down a vulnerable Gazelle, firmly clamps it's jaws down on its prey's throat, patiently squeezing out its last breath. 

Chauvin's act, coupled with the look on his face, was evil.  Period. It was cold-blooded murder, which is how I described it when I first saw it on Twitter, shortly after Memorial Day.

When I watched it again, incredulous, like many of us, I cried.

On Tuesday, Minneapolis state police filed court documents, indicating it too is reviewing former cop Chauvin's actions.

Now, amidst the inspiring  peaceful protests, demanding police accountability and serious reform, all across this land and the world, it feels like real change, real justice is finally possible.

Jesus Christ, who preached love, truth and forgiveness was crucified on a crude cross, to save man, according to God's plan. God's righteousness demanded such a price.

George Floyd, who once told a friend "I want to touch the world" and who mostly spread love and joy during his 46 years on earth, was also killed by hate, it seems, to save the rest of us.

(I wrote the piece below for Counter Punch a year and a half ago, amidst racial tensions surrounding a Mississippi senate race. It relates my experience with southern racism when I lived in the Magnolia State in the late 1990's.)

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/11/27/mississippi-memories-youre-not-black-are-you/

Trump's Twitter Tizzy Isn't About Free Speech At All

Free speech is one matter. But intentional, self-obsessed, alarmist lies, plainly designed to cause serious, irreparable harm to the U.S. citizenry, is another.

After President Donald Trump's Twitter tizzy on Tuesday, the President signed an executive order just two days later, on Thursday, that threatens U.S. government oversight of political speech on social media. 

Trump, at his press conference Thursday, proposterously feigned: "We're here today to defend free speech from one of the greatest dangers." 

The President's executive order comes after Twitter, on Tuesday, added clarifications at the bottom of a pair of Trump's tweets, which baselessly fear-mongered that voting by mail invited rampant voter fraud. 

But Trump is the only true fraud. Twitter simply clarified the truth and the prerequisites of voting by mail, setting the record straight in the public's interest.

By the way, election fraud, not voter fraud, is the real looming threat to the integrity of the 2020 presidential elections. But Trump and his abetting Republican loyalists, for obvious reasons, don't want to go there.

Trump's childish lashing out at Twitter, unsettlingly, has become the typical, vengeful behavior we have come to expect from the tempestuous "commander in chief." 

Conveniently, such blowhard displays distract from Trump's criminal complicity in a deadly pandemic that has now claimed more than 100,000 American lives.

Of course, what Trump actually is proposing to do with his new executive order, is squeeze the life out of the First Amendment rights of free speech in America.

He's convolutedly, wrongly suggesting that free speech gives one, namely him, the right to purposefully mislead the public to their detriment.

It's illegal to scream "fire" in a crowded movie theater, risking panic and serious injury, if there is no fire. But, that's what Trump has been doing these past nearly five, mind-numbing years with mounting malevolence.

Trump's been screaming "fire" through: his discriminatory policy that deprives the needy to feed the greedy; in his accusatory pressers that provoke chaos; and his exhaustively inciting tweets that gratingly disparage the righteous to offer cover and comfort for the criminal.

The "Fairness Doctrine," requiring TV and radio broadcasts to provide equal time for advocates from both sides of a public issue, was disbanded under President Ronald Reagan in 1987. That gave us the caustic, misinformation-generating, Trump-propagandist news outlet, Fox News.

Now, Trump is attempting to twist our inherent sense of fairness, under the guise of "free speech," into something much more grotesque and un-American.

'Each Man's Death Diminishes Me'

Reading through the list of names of deceased Covid-19 victims on the front page of the New York Times Sunday, I was sorry to see famed, immensely talented jazz guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli's name.

Bucky Pizzarelli, 94, Saddleback, NJ, master of jazz guitar, jumped out from the list of names on the Times' front page, just 1 percent of the nearly 100,000 dead from the Coronavirus pandemic.

Bucky Pizzarelli

Bucky Pizzarelli. It was a musically punchy name my brother and I heard a lot growing up. It's a name that's fun to say. Bucky Pizzarelli. It was a name my mother, Doris Kavanaugh McKinney, mentioned often.

"He could really play that guitar," my Mom would rave, pretending to fast strum a guitar as she relived exciting days of her youth and her brush with fame as the lead female vocalist with The Vaughn Monroe Orchestra in the late 1940's.

Bucky was the young, versatile rhythm guitarman, in his early 20's, for Monroe's big band when my mother joined Monroe's orchestra for a year right after graduating from Notre Dame High School for girls in Radnor, PA. in 1948.

My Mother Doris Kavanaugh

My mother, then, simply Doris Kavanaugh, aged 18, was often featured with Monroe's orchestra, accompanied by the "Moon Maids" quartet, on the Camel Caravan, a musical variety radio program. They broadcast out of New York City. My father, who had yet to marry my mother, would be listening in Philadelphia.

After a year, my mother lovestruck and homesick, would return to Philadelphia and marry my father, Jack McKinney who shared my mother's love for music.

While my father landed a gig as music/opera critic at the Philadelphia Daily News, my mother would continue to sing professionally the rest of her life, but closer to home.

As I reflect on the unfathomable number of lives lost from the pandemic, I can't help reminisce, conscious not so much of our transient lives, but the intransigent gifts of music, song, laughter, love and artistry in many forms that live on long after we've gone.

My mother would be a featured performer at the South Jersey Shore summertimes through the late '50s into the early '90s -- singing at Cozy Morley's in North Wildwood, The Whitebrier in Avalon and the Two Mile Inn just outside Wildwood Crest.

In the late '70s and early '80s, Doris Kavanaugh headlined summers at the Red Garter in North Wildwood, NJ, belting out Roaring Twenties favorites like "Hard Hearted Hannah" and "Second Hand Rose" to jubilant, crowds of Styrofoam "straw" hat-wearing, pitcher-of-beer drinking crowds. 

My father, Jack, gained notoriety as a fine music critic and then would become known as "Fearless Jack" in the Daily News' sports pages, sparring with Heavyweight Boxing Champ Sonny Liston and braving a cage of Clyde Beatty's lions, armed with just a whip and a chair. Later, he helped pioneer talk radio with his four-hour program "Night Talk."
.

My father Jack McKinney

Jack and Doris would have five children. Their artistry lives on.

Bucky Pizzarelli would go on to greatness, often behind the scenes, nailing down the rhythmic bottom on hundreds of records for scores of music legends.

He performed and recorded with a who's who of big names, including Benny Goodman, Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles and Ben E. King to name a few.

Pizzarelli was a member of Johnny Carson's Tonight Show band when the show broadcast from New York. He widely recorded and performed up to his final years in his 90's.

I met Bucky about 15 years ago or so, when he performed at the Cape May Jazz Festival. He was awesome; a controlled explosion of jazzy chordal rhythms and exquisite runs.

Bucky was welcoming to me after his performance. "I remember her," he said fondly of my mother, the petite blonde with a bombshell voice, who had passed a few years earlier. I handed him a compact disc of my mom singing with tracks from the Nelson Riddle Orchestra.

He gladly took it and told me an acquaintance had just discovered some old recordings from the period my mom sang and Bucky played with Monroe's orchestra. I hoped to get a hold of them, particularly if they included my mother's singing. Bucky and I communicated through his manager, but apparently no recordings of my mother on the Camel Caravan or other gigs were discovered.

Seeing Bucky's name on the front page of the Times today, brought the toll of the Coronavirus pandemic a little closer to home. These just aren't simply names any more than they are mere statistics. They had families, hobbies, unique talents, dreams and loves as we all do.

They were teachers, singers, musicians, poets, cooks, artists, dancers, bus drivers and maintenance men. They strived, sweated, laughed, prayed and cried. And they loved -- a wife, a husband, their children, a pet bird or a cat. They were, and are, us.

Some reached for the stars and got a hold of one, like Bucky. I couldn't help thinking how much history, how much instructive wisdom and knowledge these mostly older Americans took with them. What gems could they have shared with us?

Many fought for their country on faraway battlefields and survived with the scars, only to be let down by their own government's failure to timely alert its citizens to a lethal virus that has claimed more lives in America in just two months than war has taken the past half century. 

A particularly inauspicious and sobering fact on this Memorial Day weekend, as we honor our fallen heroes.

Each life is so precious, worth so much more than jewels. And we lost a whole treasure chest full in just a matter of months. They are all part of a singular family now. They will be missed and thought of often and fondly.

I'm reminded of a quote from John Donne's poem, "For Whom the Bell Tolls":

Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

What of Maskless Masses?

The barrell-shaped, bearded guy with a Budweiser beer in his hand, approaches me as I belt sand smooth a deck handrail at a marina in Wildwood, NJ, last Friday. He's not wearing a facial covering, as he boldly insists that "this pandemic thing is overblown." 

The guy stood five or six feet away, but I slipped the bandana that was around my neck, up over my mouth and nose. I remind the guy that nearly 90,000 people have died from Covid-19 in the United States in a couple months.

"Yeah, more people die from pneumonia every year” he parroted what sounded like a Fox News soundbite.

What do you say to this?  

Then, the guy went on the tiresome lament, that Conservatives, in particular, like to muddy the water with -- "Really, you just don’t know who to believe."

Of course, he went on about how all politicians are crooked and all news stations can't be trusted.

 I suggested that for starters, he cross off Donald Trump and Fox News from the list of even remotely believable sources. "Okay, so you don't like Trump," he retorted, and went on a rant about "those Democrats."

Yadda, yadda, yadda.

It's as if we've lost our common sense, our ability to listen to our gut or think for ourselves. We need a talking head to tell us what to believe or how to feel.

So, amidst the confusion, what the heck? Why not, just party, man?

I thought of that Mark Twain line:

"Never argue with stupid people, they will only drag you down to their level, and then beat you with experience."

A few minutes later, the same guy was gathered with about 5 or 6 other people around a small deck in front of a house overlooking the harbor. They were yukin' it up as if they were in a local bar and the Coronavirus had never happened. Only one person that I could see was wearing a facial mask covering.

On Saturday, hundreds of people swarmed the Wildwood Boardwalk. The Cape May Standard, published on Twitter a picture of the boardwalk crowds; the overwhelming majority were maskless. I could indentify maybe five people, out of about a hundred in the picture, wearing masks.

In the meantime, Governor Phil Murphy is still working out phased reopening plans for New Jersey. It seems to me, we need to more urgently insist that folks mask up and don't get lax about wearing a face covering in public, particularly amidst crowds.

How many individuals could be unknowingly carrying the virus and pass it on?

How many might catch the virus and spread it to wherever they came from after happy time on the boardwalk is over?

In the same way, the Trump administration criminally failed Americans by declaring a national emergency around the Covid-19 pandemic several weeks too late, hence ensuring the deaths of tens of thousands of people, President Trump prematurely, irresponsibly is chomping at the bit, egging on the impatient, to reopen the country.

This precarious moment in time demands wisdom, compassion and finesse -- three qualities in which the President is miserably lacking. Just a couple weeks could mean the difference between life or death for many.

I hope and pray the virus numbers drop steadily. But if New Jersey or surrounding states, like Pennsylvania, New York or Delaware experience any type of jump in Coronavirus cases in the coming weeks, we'll have a pretty good idea why.

So, yeah, if the maskless multitudes observed in Wildwood this past Saturday, is any indication of the senseless citizen behavior that we can expect this Memorial Day weekend re-opening -- we unwittingly could be ringing the dinner bell (to borrow from Jaws) for the "invisible enemy."

Trump: Virus "Numbers" Are "Really, Very, Very Strong"

President Donald Trump is downplaying the Coronavirus all over again. 

As parts of the United States get ready for a phased-in reopening at the President's urging, Trump is tapping out the same disingenuous dance number that led to the nearly 64,000 lives snuffed out in America.

This time, Trump is downplaying the virus's ravages, namely the deaths, fluffing off our lost souls as mere statistics and acting as if the epidemic is already over.

"Our deaths, our numbers, per million people, are really very, very strong," Trump upchucked today. "We're very proud of the job we've done."

Proud? 

It's as if the President's talking about the stock market performance of a corporate Trump sycophant like Walmart -- "Our numbers.. are really, very, very strong." 

Trump's meandering public addresses are increasingly the detached blatherings of a sociopath. And reminder: he's our President.

Those, 64,000 people happened to die because Trump was too focused, for more than two months, on stock market numbers, golfing, holding "Keep America Great" rallies and seeking vengeance against impeachment witnesses.

The President should be charged with manslaughter.

Yet, the imbecilic con man hasn't learned his lesson. He never learns his lesson. He's not interested in learning any lessons. Of course, he feigns concern. But not very well.

"This plague should never have happened," Trump said at last evening's business round table with industry execs who were present to dutifully lick the President's boots and convince America it was time to go back to work. "It could’ve been stopped, but people chose not to stop it."

That was the closest we'll get to an admission of guilt from the President. He's admitting "it could have been stopped, but people chose not to stop it." 

Trump just isn't saying he happens to be the guy who knew death was incubating in the homeland and simply blew it off as little consequence..

But, we knew that already.

The President ignored repeated warnings of the Coronavirus virus threat, detailed in his presidential daily briefings from early January through February.

Trump belatedly declared a national emergency on March 13. It was way too late. Some 1,700 cases of Covid-19 had been confirmed and 40 deaths reported.

The virus was already uncontrollably spreading across the homeland, compromising lives.

Now, the master illusionist President is promising once again the virus "is going to go away" as if this will happen at the snap of Trump's fingers.

In the meantime, the divider-in-chief continues to cast blame everywhere -- President Barack Obama, state governors, the World Health Organization and China. There will be others. 

I'm afraid that the death toll will climb much higher, particularly if citizens don't continue to take social distancing seriously. 

There still aren't enough virus test kits and components or reliable anti-body tests out there to track the contagion and help instruct who can safely return to the work place and when.

And I'm concerned that really deep down, the President -- who no doubt would happily turn a resurgent national emergency into a means of autocratic control come election day this November -- just doesn't give a damn either way.

The "Invisible Enemy" Has A Face: Trump's

The "invisible enemy" now has a foreboding face; it's the one President Donald Trump sees glaring back when he looks in the mirror.

Since the President first dismissed the Coronavirus threat more than three months ago, claiming "it's totally under control," Trump has served more like a facilitating, destructive agent of the Coronavirus, than anything remotely resembling a commander-in-chief. 

Peddling preposterous theory, incessantly inciting and brazenly boasting, the autocrat President has insufferably sown uncertainty across the homeland while the deadly virus morphed into a pandemic that has claimed more than 58,000 lives.

When the American people desperately needed a capable, compassionate leader committed to upholding his oath of office and look out for the common good, Trump consistently has proven himself not only incapable, but uninterested.

"I don’t take responsibility at all,” Trump said way back at his landmark March 13, press conference, when asked to explain his administration’s failure to ensure that Americans had  enough Coronavirus test kits, which are key to tracking and ultimately minimizing the disease’s death toll.

Not only does the President deny any culpability for failing to ensure testing for a beleagued nation,, Trump still is shirkinking responsibility for blowing off the pandemic threat even after it was clearly incubating death in the homeland in February and the first half of March.

President Trump incessantly comes off like the panicked kid who breaks the treasured heirloom antique vase while carelessly tossing the football in the house, and then repeatedly, exhaustively – hence guiltily – denying culpability to his mother.

His younger brother did it. Or, it could have been that tremor that shook the house violently, but nobody else in the neighborhood felt. Maybe it was the wind blowing through the closed window.

As far as Trump is concerned, it seems, what’s broken or lost for good, mind as well just be an inanimate nick-knack with a price tag. Something he can buy off with bluster that bamboozles a strained and fearful citizenry on the brink.

But, Trump is stiff and unconvincing when he occasionally feigns to care about the mounting number of lives lost, largely due to his atrocious failures. He seems to relish the talk of death, mentioning body bags and bodies.

Despite what the President and his cheerleading sycophant Vice President Mike Pence claimed at this evening's Rose Garden press conference, there still aren't enough test kits and test components to go around for the country to safely open back up come Friday, or soon thereafter.

And Trump should have stuck to his crybaby threat to cool off on the virus pressers after taking heat for last Thursday's disastrous display of, what Common Dream's Robert Reich today appropriately described as "quackery."

Anymore, when the President isn't insulting a reporter or stroking his ego about the "great job" his administration has done to keep the death toll down, he sounds like one of Big Pharma's TV ads, pushing a drug that might make you feel better -- if it doesn't kill you, first.

First, it was Hydroxychloroquine, a malaria drug unproven to fight Covid-19. Of late, it's household disinfectant and ultraviolet rays he's floating as a Coronavirus cure. If the virus doesn't get you, Trump will.

When asked tonight about why he thinks poison control hotlines lit up from people inquiring whether it's safe to ingest or inject disinfectant, Trump predictably played dumb.

"I can't imagine why," he said. Asked if he took responsibility for the public's confusion, Trump answered "No, I don't," and quickly moved on to another reporter.

Trump may be thinking he can bamboozle his way forward with sleight-of-hand doublespeak to magically make last week's "disinfectant" advice "disappear" like a "miracle" -- as he promised the Coronavirus would two months ago.

But, just as the virus isn't dispelled by distracting bluster or disparaging tweets, Trump's latest snake oil remedy will stick in memories for sometime. 

Unfortunately, as if we all didn't have more urgent matters to address, you just have to wonder what poisonous "elixir" Dr. Don will be recommending next?

Trump Has Joined Forces With The "Invisible Enemy"

President Donald J. Trump has become one with the Covid-19 pandemic.

Even before Trump won the Republican presidential nomination in July of 2016, more than three chaotic, painful years ago, I've warned that Trump was "America's most dangerous home-bred terrorist."

"Trump whose number one goal has always been self-enrichment, is America's most dangerous home-bred terrorist," I wrote in The Hill shortly before the 2016 presidential elections. 

"His weapons are fear and divisiveness planted not-so-subtly in the hearts and minds of the disenchanted subject to explode anytime."

President Trump has done nothing but prove that out every bullying, bamboozling, bungled step of the way since occupying the Oval Office in January 2017.

Under Trump, hate crimes have skyrocketed. The citizenry has split into opposing hardened factions. And Congress, in our lifetimes, has never been more partisan.

Now, amidst the Covid-19 pandemic that has killed more than 40,000 in America and left 22 million unemployed, it's never been more clear that Trump from the get-go was not only the wrong guy for the job -- but the worst.

When the American people have most needed a capable, compassionate leader committed to upholding his oath of office and looking out for the common good, Trump consistently has proven himself incapable.

"I don’t take responsibility at all,” Trump said at one of his dysfunctional press conferences March 13, when asked about the administration’s failure to ensure that Americans had prompt widespread access to Coronavirus test kits – a key to identifying and ultimately minimizing the disease’s death toll.

After two months of criminally downplaying the Coronavirus threat – claiming the virus was “totally under control,” labeling it a “hoax” and saying it will magically “be gone by April"– the master illusionist President has spent more time casting blame on others, picking political fights and promoting what a “perfect” job he is doing – than protecting American lives.

While the Coronavirus reached American shores and incubated in the citizenry during January and February, Trump's focus was on his re-election prospects that hinged on a strong stock market and a bustling economy.

The President who claims he wants to "Keep America Great," while the virus spread in the homeland, was holding campaign rallies, golfing at his properties and seeking vengeance against officials who exposed his malfeasance that led to the President's impeachment.

Now, Trump’s daily, disingenuous, chaotic reality TV press conferences are sickening, bumbling displays of accusation, deflection, braggadocio and most unsettling of all – misinformation.

Trump repeatedly lies about testing availability and still claims he inherited faulty Covid-19 testing from President Barack Obama. Of course, that’s impossible. The Center for Disease Control, under Trump, produced those initial faulty tests this year when the virus hit.

"No one saw this coming," Trump repeatedly says. But, just about everyone saw the epidemic encroaching -- except Trump.

Health and intelligence officials have been sounding the alarm bells about the Coronavirus for months. And many of the same national health officials have been warning for years, during Trump’s presidency, that the United States was woefully unprepared to contend with a global pandemic and that it was just a matter of time before one emerged.

The same day, March 13, Trump declared the Coronavirus pandemic a national emergency, releasing $500 billion in federal funding, he played dumbed when asked why his administration in 2018 eliminated the National Security Council’s global health unit.

"I don’t know anything about it,” Trump said about his administration’s dismantling of the pandemic unit that President Obama formed during the 2014 Ebolpa outbreak to help ensure the United States was prepared for pandemics such as the Coronavirus.

Trump's politicizing of the pandemic, applauding red state governors and criticizing blue state governors, as all of America scrambles to survive and confront this scourge, only abets the disease. His conflicting messages that cheer on unmasked protesters at government buildings pushing to end social distancing prematurely, is insane.

The President's latest target in his blame game is the World Health Organization WHO, which the U.S. gives hundreds of millions of dollars each year to coordinate global responses to epidemics like Covid-19.

In another pathetic case of deflection and projection to obscure his atrocious handling of the Coronavirus, Trump wants to riskily defund WHO, claiming it failed to timely alert world leaders, namely the U.S., about the pandemic.

But if WHO was sluggish in assessing the pandemic threat, Trump was inexplicably dismissive and flat-out mocked the unfolding global crisis for weeks after he was fairly warned of the virus’ lethality for which there was no vaccine.

On Jan. 23, the WHO updated its assessment of the virus threat, confirming “human to human transmission” of the Coronavirus and that the “global risk was high.”

Then, on Jan. 30, the WHO declared the Coronavirus to be a “Public health Emergency of International Concern” and warned countries “to be prepared for containment, including active surveillance, early detection, isolation, and case management, contact tracing and prevention of onward spread.”

Yet, all President Trump did was ban flights from Chinese nationals on Jan 31. Thousands of Americans who had traveled to China, still were allowed to return home, unscreened and untested for the virus. The President wouldn't acknowledge the virus' serious threat publicly or take any other significant action for another lost six weeks.

By halting WHO funding, Trump, again is making critical decisions designed to obfuscate his guilt and boost his phony stance as a “war time President” – which, at the same time, weakens the global effort to get the disease under control.

It should be clear by now, that Trump, wittingly or not, has been a facilitating arm of the Coronavirus. His multitude of missteps, incites, lies and boasts have done nothing to hinder the deadly disease’s spread.

Quite to the contrary. The President's dark-minded, contrived chaos has only exacerbated Covid-19's destructive path of death and financial dire straights for Americans. 

The pandemic not only has uncovered the engrained economic disparities of America's poor and uninsured, but it's undeniably exposed Trump as America's greatest enemy.