Trump And The Briar Patch Of Impeachment

Br'er Donald in his briar patch.  Art © Jim Moore

As impolitic as the stories are today, the Uncle Remus books, written in the late 1800s by Joel Chandler Harris, provided many generations of kids like me—who grew up not knowing what was or was not politically correct—a Reconstruction era brand of Aesop’s Fables that featured a trickster we rooted for. He was Br’er Rabbit, and he managed, story by story, to get the best of his antagonists—Br’er Fox and Br’er Bear. Br’er Rabbit was not always the winner in those battles (see The Tar Baby), but he won more than he lost.

Today, there is a new Br’er Rabbit, still a trickster, but hardly one we should ever be rooting for. He is Br’er Donald, and he is dangerous. His antagonists are not folksy woodland creatures like Br’er Fox or Br’er Bear; they are, instead, Democrats in the House of Representatives and in the Senate, and members of the mainstream media—for the most part—who are bent on catching and dispatching the trickster. They face enormous odds in their quest to banish the rabid rabbit.

Br’er Donald’s champions have erected a defensive bulwark around themselves and their delusionally-created country. It is a fortress constructed of stones of ignorance loosely bound with a thin mortar of supremely white nationalistic rhetoric. Surrounding this bastion of braggadocio and false bravado is a tangled and nearly impenetrable briar patch of lies and denial, planted and nurtured by the likes of Mitch McConnell and his lock-step acolytes in the House. Atop the ramparts of this ignoble redoubt, Br’er Donald’s supporters stand, megaphones in hand, praising and mimicking his divisive, hateful, and bullying rants. Their messaging is clear and frightening: Br’er Donald, an evil doppelganger of Br’er Rabbit of old, is a new trickster who is still winning (“hugely”) more than he is losing. And for that we should be concerned.

The ongoing drama that is the impeachment of a president, along with the bitter divisiveness that has overtaken political and social discourse in every quarter of the country, have as their common root cause one man bent on personal gain above all else; a mean and venal trickster who will stop at nothing to win, in part, because he believes—perhaps he knows—nothing will stop him.

I cannot adequately explain this through the clarity of logic or the recitation of facts, nor, despite their best efforts, can many of the country’s most astute chroniclers of the political scene. We all have our theories, which run the gamut from ascribing Br’er Donald’s behavior to a mental illness, to dredging up his twisted tutor, Br’er Roy Cohn, to his inability to read anything with understanding, to his total lack of interest in the flow and lessons of history. Perhaps there are elements of all those theories at work here, or perhaps Br’er Donald is just an insatiable devourer of other people’s treasure and humanity. Perhaps he just gets off on greed, gold, boorishness, cruelty, and power, in no particular order.

Whatever he is, Br’er Donald is most certainly a danger to the nation—a clear and present danger that so far has evaded accountability in great part due to the bizarre machinations of his devout adherents and enablers in Congress and among his voting base, both forces abetted and energized by certain media’s criminally irresponsible streaming forums.

What can Democrats and the bulk of concerned Americans do to put a halt to the destructive machinations of this hoodlum trickster? Impeachment? No, I think not.

In the Uncle Remus story of Br’er Fox and Br’er Rabbit and the briar patch, Br’er Rabbit has been trapped on a sticky tar baby built by Br’er Fox, who is ready to barbeque the rabbit. Ever the trickster, Br’er Rabbit plays counter-argument:

So Br’er Fox had caught Br’er Rabbit and this time Br’er Fox said he was going to cook Br’er Rabbit and eat him up for good! Br’er Rabbit was mighty scared. He begged, “Oh, Br’er Fox, I don’t care what you do with me, so long as you just don’t throw me in that briar patch over there. Go on and barbecue me up, Br’er Fox, but please don’t throw me in that briar patch.”

Br’er Fox said he was going to roast him anyhow, but when he went to hang Br’er Rabbit up over the fire, he found he didn’t have any string to tie him up with. “Well, I guess I can’t roast you,” Br’er Fox said. “I guess I’ll have to drown you instead.” Br’er Rabbit pleaded, “Oh, Br’er Fox, go ahead and drown me then, just so long as you don’t throw me into that briar patch!”

“Well,” said Br’er Fox, “it looks like there’s no water around here to drown you in. I guess I’ll skin you instead.” “Okay, Br’er Fox, no problem,” chattered Br’er Rabbit, “Go ahead and skin me, cut out my eyes, cut off my legs, just don’t throw me into that briar patch!”

By this time, Br’er Fox had gotten the idea that Br’er Rabbit really, really didn’t want to get anywhere near that briar patch. Br’er Fox wanted to hurt Br’er Rabbit as bad as he could, so he took Br’er Rabbit by the legs and threw him right smack into the middle of that briar patch. He heard a lot of rustling and crackling when Br’er Rabbit landed, and he waited around to see what terrible thing was going to happen.

But a few minutes later, he hears somebody calling, “Oh, yoo-hoo, Br’er Fox! Over here!” and he looks – and he sees Br’er Rabbit, sitting on a rock, combing the tar out of his fur with a stick. “Didn’t you know, Br’er Fox,” called Br’er Rabbit. “I was bred and born in the briar patch! Bred and born!” And he hopped away.

Now, let’s retell the story, but this time, substitute Br’er Democrat for Br’er Fox, Br’er Donald for Br’er Rabbit, and the impeachment for the briar patch. The role of the tar baby is played by the Constitution.

There is no doubt in my mind that president Trump and his Congressional flock want nothing more than for the Democrats to fling Trump into the briar patch of impeachment. As in the Uncle Remus tale, Trump will emerge from the thorns of a Senate trial completely unscathed and happy to once again having outwitted his pursuers. Trump and McConnell see clearly what the Democrats seem not to see at all: the president thrives amidst the stickers and brambles of his lies and treachery—he has debauched the Constitution and the Department of Justice, and his followers love him all the more for his misdeeds. 

There is a good chance that once Br’er Donald is proclaimed innocent by the cowards of the Senate, he will redouble his trickster ways to help the Republican Party destroy an enfeebled Democratic majority in the House, and add Republicans to the Senate (“so much winning!”).

As for Br’er Trump after he is reelected in 2020, he will stand atop his briar-surrounded rock and say, “Didn’t you know, Br’er Democrats. I was bred and born in the briar patch! Bred and born!”

It's Time To Apply The Sesame Street Solution

Let the record reflect that I have been 36-year fan of “Sesame Street,” which turns 50 this year, and was recently feted at the Kennedy Center Honors. My affection and high regard for “Sesame Street” goes back to 1983, the birth year of our first child, and continued on through the births and growings up of two more children. The program, and I say this with no shame at all, lingers on in our house even today—years after our kids moved out—when I catch “Sesame Street” as a guilty pleasure. It is a bright and thought-provoking pool of light in the otherwise dreary shadows of today’s news cycles and political Strum und Drang.

In Sunday morning’s “Washington Post’s” “Pop Culture” column, “A Friend to Everyone,” Hank Stuever offered a masterful and touching review of “Sesame Street’s” half-century of education and personal revelation. I recommend the column to anyone who has had even a tangential connection to what is far more than just a children’s puppet show. It is must reading for everyone who watched the program, because Stuever reminds us of just what it was that connected all of us—young and old—to that unique neighborhood where learning numbers and letters was fun, and where humans, characters, and emotions of every description were welcome.

Stuever interviewed Sesame Workshop President and CEO Jeffrey D. Dunn, who said:

“[We] have stayed relentlessly true to the mission of helping kids grow stronger, smarter and kinder,” Dunn says. “I’m a huge believer in the idea that society is the result of kids growing up. We’re playing a very long game here, looking 30 years ahead at any point in time. . . . Your kids are going to grow up and be the adults of tomorrow.”

“Sesame Street” can feel deeply personal to just about anyone under the age of 55. It taught us to read and count, but it also taught us about kindness and acceptance. It was jazzy and groovy; it had a loose and wild feeling, even with all that PhD scrutiny on every frame.

Today the show is brighter, faster and somehow zippier, set on a cleaner, spiffier Sesame Street (shot on a set in Astoria, Queens) with a community garden and a recycling bin next to Oscar the Grouch’s trash can. Hooper’s Store serves birdseed smoothies and has bistro seating.

Yet the sense of belonging remains. “Sesame Street” was inclusive before anyone really knew what that meant, the first safe space. It is a friend to everyone

“When people talk to us [about ‘Sesame Street’], frequently it is about the literacy. They’ll say, ‘I learned to read because of it,’ ” Dunn says.

“But the second thing is that everyone sees themselves as somewhat unique, and what they saw was some friend that spoke to them, that let them know, ‘I’m a good person, I’m okay,’ and that there are people who are different, and that’s okay, too. The idea that everybody is deserving of respect.”

You can sense where this is going.

Look around, America. Have you forgotten how to get to “Sesame Street?”

“We’ve never been needed more,” Dunn says.”

I, for one, am in complete agreement. When Dunn says, “I’m a huge believer in the idea that society is the result of kids growing up. We’re playing a very long game here, looking 30 years ahead at any point in time. . . . Your kids are going to grow up and be the adults of tomorrow,” he is echoing my own sense of compounding revelation.

That compounding revelation began with the realization each time I watched “Sesame Street” with (or without) my children that as an adult I should, and could, try to practice being a better person, a more in-touch and in-tune person, a more cognizant person, a person open to the possibility that embracing our differences will make us a better neighborhood of human beings. After all, isn’t that what parents in “Sesame Street” households were trying to instill in our own children?

Why wouldn’t we, as adults, want to be more empathetic, sympathetic, kind, loving, caring, sharing, understanding, tolerant, patient, gracious, supportive, and selfless? We don’t have to dig very deep into our hearts to know that the short-term pleasures, the surface appearances, the superficial achievements…the money, the fleeting acclaim, the momentary highs that come from our daily efforts to “win” or to climb the ladder to a corner office with walls covered in ego photos…are not all they are cracked up to be. We know that. We. Know. That. 

And yet, too often we persist along the arc of “getting” because we have lost the thread of “Sesame Street’s” fundamental fabric of life-lessons taught for a half-century by a cadre of puppeteers and their human partners.

At a time when “gotcha” normalization is the notion du jour—a warped social and political model that licenses crude public behavior, the assassination of comity, selfish ends justifying immoral and unethical means, weaponized intransigence, duplicity, outright lying, and that most popular meme, “throwing someone under the bus”—“Sesame Street” celebrates a more child- and adult-friendly normalization: inclusiveness that is openhearted, open-handed, and non-judgmental.

“Sesame Street” is all about growth—the growth of young minds and the growth of adult understanding. As Jeffrey Dunn noted, the program is a very long-game program, like planting a tree not for shade today, but for shade tomorrow; not for fruit today, but for fruit tomorrow (as corny as that may be, it’s nonetheless apt). It is also, if approached correctly, a truly interactive program, one that encourages children and parents or other caregivers to share “Sesame Street’s” lessons, images, and situations.

For many children, “Sesame Street” was and still is, a gateway to what will later be complex adult experiences like insecurity, loneliness, feeling sad or “different,” pent-up anger, even death (notably, Mr. Hooper’s death—following the death of actor Will Lee in 1982). As “Sesame Street” actress Sonia Manzano (Maria) explains, once the decision was made to use Hooper’s/Lee’s death as a teachable moment, the show’s producers reached out to numerous specialists to develop a child-suitable script in which Big Bird, played by the late Carroll Spinney, wants to know why Mr. Hooper died. 

Big Bird’s questions are a child’s questions: Will he come back? If not, who will take care of me? Why can’t he come back? But then, who among us has not voiced versions, maybe more nuanced, of those same questions as adults facing the loss of someone who was important to us? 

I was 48 when my mother died; I was there, kneeling by her bed, holding her hand, feeling her life’s tide ebb beyond the mortal horizon, never to flow back. I would be lying if I did not admit that as much as I was relieved her years-long suffering had ended, I still wanted her back, still needed the child-soothing comfort of her presence, still questioned the meaning of her death. When my father died at his house in the country in 2003, separated from me by a terrible blizzard that kept me from being at his side, and all I could do was whisper “I love you” through the phone held to his ear by his nurse, I was crushed by the frustration and anger and hopelessness and sadness that enveloped me. It was my own “Sesame Street” moment inasmuch as the adult me was, for those hours that followed Pop’s death, lost and adrift like a child with more questions than answers.

The larger point to the Mr. Hooper episode, and all the episodes before and after, is that while life throws us all kinds of curve balls we never see coming, we are rarely alone in experiencing those unbidden surprises. Happiness, sadness; courage, fears; sunny days, stormy nights; kind people, grouches; strangers, friends; questions, answers; people with my skin color, people with your skin color; people who talk like me, people who talk like you; people who can run, people who need assistance; babies, the elderly; people who are hurting, people who are helping; life and death. When all of these emotions, circumstances, and differences can be discussed in terms children can understand, in a safe place, we are witnessing an anodyne to the often confusing and unsettling world our children (and we adults) inhabit.

For 50 years, “Sesame Street” has been that safe place where learning happens by example, where children can see the positive effects of giving and sharing and caring and participating in life in all its colors, sounds, and forms. Those lessons weren’t lost on me as a parent watching my children process “Sesame Street’s” tutorials on inclusivity, acceptance, tolerance, and patience. 

We should look at what “Sesame Street” stands for, what it elevates, what it illuminates, and what it celebrates. It stands for kindness. It elevates understanding. It illuminates our common bonds. And most of all, it celebrates our global humanity. The lessons children the world over learn from “Sesame Street” are replicable among the world’s adult culture, if we only allow those lessons into our chambers of government, halls of justice, media newsrooms, and corporate workplaces. That is not to condemn all those who work in those places--but we know we can do better.

We’ve seen it work. From Mahatma Ghandi to Jane Goodall, from Greta Thunberg to Jimmy Carter, from the White Helmets to Doctors Without Borders…the list of kind, giving, sharing men and women and organizations is wonderfully long, and they embrace “Sesame Street’s” model of compassion, understanding, respect, and continual wonder. 

Echoing Sesame Workshop's Jeffrey Dunn: “We’ve never been needed more.” Mr. Dunn, you will get no argument from me.

In memory of Caroll Spinney

Caroll Spinney with Big Bird and Oscar

Syzygy: Queen’s Brian May, A NASA Scientist, And Me, On The Topic Of Space

My wife and I had a wonderful dinner the other night with our neighbors, Dave and Cynthia Draper, and Dave’s sister, Juli. Dave and Cynthia recently moved here from Houston, and we like to think they are enjoying the variety of seasons we have here in Northern Virginia. Our dinner conversation did not include the usual Washington-Inside-The-Beltway recitations of whatever the hell is going on with you-know-who. That is not what friends speak of when gathered for a post-Thanksgiving meal of Dave’s marvelous New Mexico-based carne adovada enchiladas, guacamole, chips, and copious quantities of wines—red and white.

Instead, the table talk turned to a much higher plane of discourse—so high, in fact, Dave was the only one at the table really qualified to hold forth on the subject: NASA and the Artemis Moon mission (among other above-this-world topics). You see, Dave Draper is Deputy Chief Scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. His job is to help NASA plan to develop a sustainable presence on the Moon and take what is learned to send astronauts to Mars. According to NASA’s Chief Scientist, Jim Green, “[Dave’s] lunar and planetary exploration expertise will be instrumental in helping to achieve NASA’s goal of returning to the Moon to stay and bridging the gap from science to the future human exploration of the Moon and Mars.”

Dave is also the most unabashed cheerleader for NASA I’ve ever met—and I’ve met two NASA administrators, quite a few NASA employees, and a handful of astronauts whose enthusiasm for NASA and its many missions are the stuff of recruitment posters. On a passion scale of 1-10, Dave’s affection for his employer, mission, and colleagues easily tops 1,000. And here’s a really wonderful part of his pep-rally excitement: it’s genuine and it’s infectious. Most importantly, Dave excels at sharing his enthusiasm with the rest of the world, believing that the more we know about NASA—probably the most respected brand on Earth—the more we will understand about ourselves, our origins, our present conditions, and our place in the universe as the decades, centuries, and millennia spread out before us.

Readers of this blog will know that I share Dave’s vision, although I am hardly qualified to speak to the science of extraterrestrial geology or even the geology of my back yard. What he and I do have in common is the belief that no matter what earth-bound trials consume the media’s and public’s attention, we must not take our eyes off the long-term value of space exploration. Further, we must illuminate the topic of space exploration and spaceflight—human and robotic—with the bright beams of education and public information. In this mutual agreement, Dave and I share a most unlikely syzygy with Brian May, widely known as Queen’s lead guitarist, singer, and composer of “We Will Rock You,” among many other soaring hits.

Dr. Brian May

May (Dr. May, to be precise) is heralded in the science community for his PhD in astrophysics and for his many scholarly and popular astronomy-related texts and presentations as well as for his significant contributions to the fields of astronomy and astrophysics. I would need several more blog posts to list all of Dr. May’s scientific accomplishments and contributions to the public’s understanding of astronomy. 

Sir Isaac Newton doing his best Brian May impression

Over dinner, Dave recounted his meeting with May, who, while performing with Queen in Texas, stopped by the Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston for a tour of the facility. May’s doctoral thesis, “A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud,” concerns the reflected light from interplanetary dust and the velocity of dust in the plane of the Solar System. Although Dr. May earned his doctorate on the subject of “space dust,” he had never seen an actual particle about which he wrote. Dave and his colleagues at JSC were delighted to show May just such a particle, collected during a NASA stratospheric aircraft flight, and placed in a high-resolution electron imaging system, from which it could be viewed on a screen in one of the Center's analytical labs. Much to May’s delight, what he theorized, he finally realized, thanks to NASA.

Dr. David Draper and Dr. Brian May at the
Johnson Space Center
in Houston

Dave Draper and Brian May at the
Johnson Space Center
May is wearing his "clean room" booties
after a tour of the JSC labs

Dr. Brian May in his day job with Queen, wearing a NASA ballcap
after his tour of the Johnson Space Center in Houston

Suffice to say, Brian May, Dave Draper, and I are all in agreement on this point: As a nation, as a global community, we must bend the curve of our understanding of space and its myriad treasures—known and unknown—toward an ever-steeper and accelerating path.

There is a beautiful, 100’ tall, gold-colored stainless-steel spire on the Mall side of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. The spire pierces a constellation of stars. The title of the sculpture by Richard Lippold is Ad Astra, meaning “To the Stars.” While this title is most apt for the sculpture, and the sculpture itself is inspiring, I prefer the longer Latin phrase, Per aspera ad astra, or, “Through hardships to the stars,” because no journey of such significance can be begun without great effort supported by education at every level.

Ad Astra, by Richard Lippold

Like millions of kids who grew up in the 1950s and ‘60s, space exploration—from Sputnik to Apollo—was an integral part of the national narrative. Not just a science narrative, but an overall conversation about the value of setting and meeting difficult goals here on Earth and far beyond our planet.

I was a kid in Germany when Sputnik was launched in 1957, and we all listened through the static to its beeping signal as it circumnavigated the globe with its not so subtle message of Soviet space accomplishment. That same year, I took part in school activities inspired by the International Geophysical Year (IGY), 1957-58, and even as an eight-year-old, I was drinking deeply from the firehose of science that was pouring out of the IGY’s discoveries.

I remember watching Alan Shepard’s flight in Freedom 7, first of the Mercury series, boosted into a suborbital arc on my 12th birthday, May 5, 1961. My wife lived across the street from John Glenn’s family, and she saw the gaggle of television trucks parked outside the Glenn residence during Glenn’s three-orbit flight in Friendship 7, February 20, 1962. LIFE magazine secured the rights to publish nearly everything knowable about the Mercury 7 astronauts and it seemed as if every week there was something new and interesting to read about their lives and their missions.

I did all the geeky things a science nerd of that time would do: learned the Greek alphabet (crucial in understanding star charts); hand-built several reflector telescopes (even grinding my own mirrors); volunteered to help build a large public-access telescope near Shreveport, Louisiana; camped out almost every weekend under the vast dome of the University of Nebraska’s Mueller planetarium in Lincoln; and subscribed to the Edmund Scientific Catalog, spending untold hours perusing its pages and spending even more untold dollars purchasing many of its products, including a humungous chemistry set and my first “real” space-observation binoculars. 

Other than English, my best subjects in high school were chemistry, biology, algebra, trig, and introduction to physics. In college at the University of Colorado, I fell in love with anthropology and geology. Were it not for the inexorable pull of journalism—which, like the Great Attractor in interstellar space, grabbed me and held me in its thrall for the rest of my working days—I might well have become one of Dave’s older colleagues.

All of which is to illustrate the neuron-wiring power of science-made-accessible-and-understandable within the inquisitive sponge-like brain of a young person. And that brings me back to our winter-night dinner-table conversation about NASA’s 2024 Artemis mission to the Moon and then to Mars. At 70, my brain’s neurons may not be firing as fast or growing exponentially as they did 60 years ago, but they still got jazzed and lit up by Dave’s passionate telling of NASA’s near-term plans and the scope of the agency’s vision for the future of spaceflight—whether crewed or robotic. 

NASA's Woman on the Moon patch, a tribute to Artemis

Now, I can already hear the distant grumblings about precious resources, and NASA budgets that could be better spent in the darker, sadder sectors of our own country or around the world. To be frank, I’m not going there in this missive. A simple review of NASA’s budget as it compares to the outrageous spending habits of this administration, the farm-crippling tariffs, and the massive debt our country is burdened with, will reveal a relatively lean science budget dedicated in an almost miserly fashion to the pursuit of knowledge that time and time again has paid back benefits to almost every segment of our society.

What the grumblers don’t understand, or don’t bother to understand (or reject entirely), is that NASA, through the efforts of all the men and women who work hard every day to move us closer to the stars, is one of the few gateways we have left that opens upon scenes of a better tomorrow for everybody on the planet.

I often talk about the difference between tactical planning and strategic planning, between playing a short game, or playing the long game, between the pitfalls of short-sightedness versus the rewards for patience. From an historical perspective, among nations, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Koreans (both North and South), and their cultural allies around the Pacific Rim, are all strategic, patient, long-game players.

Unlike the United States with its Constitutional constraints limiting political cycles to four and six years, and budget planning that never seems to be nailed in place, many of our geopolitical competitors operate on game plans that can be played out over generations and millennia. To the casual observer and caustic skeptic, it seems Americans are not particularly patient when it comes to looking down the road. But a close examination of U.S. history reveals some evidence to the contrary.

Although there are more examples, I like to cite five long-game plays the U.S. has executed—in which almost every state had a stake and/or role.

· The building of the transcontinental railroad (at huge fiscal and tragic social costs);

· The Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862 which established our system of state universities;

· The Homestead Act of 1862, which opened up tens of millions of acres of the west;

· The planning and construction of the Interstate Highway System (See Earl Swift’s “The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways”);

· And, of course, America’s space program, which achieved almost impossible goals from its early beginnings in Hampton, Virginia in 1917, to Alan Shepard’s 1961 suborbital leap, to Neil Armstrong’s step on the Moon in 1969, to the Space Shuttle, to the Hubble Space Telescope, the establishment of Mars rovers and orbiting surveyors, the deep planetary missions like Huygens, Juno, and Cassini that have revealed mind-boggling images and exciting chemical and biological discoveries, and to the venerable Voyager I and Voyager II missions that are now sending data to Earth from beyond the boundaries of our solar system. (For extra credit, read or listen to, “Apollo”, by Charles Murray, Catherine Bly Cox, et al., and watch “Apollo 11” a film by Todd Douglas Miller). One only needs to go to NASA’s missions pages covering more than 250 robotic and human-crewed programs launched since 1958 to appreciate the broad sweep of the space agency’s mandate to explore, discover, and teach.

So, tonight over dinner, or maybe tomorrow during lunch, or perhaps next weekend in between games, put aside the usual topics of conversation—forego the political fisticuffs and impeachment imbroglios—and devote a few minutes to discussing the marvels of spaceflight, the beauty of planets, the swirls of distant galaxies, and how your appreciation for Queen has been realigned with the help of a guitar-wielding astrophysicist with an out-of-this-world interest in star dust.