Civil Commotion

Snopes reports that the alleged Reagan quote is — What do you know? — a fake.

Longtime readers know that I attended Michigan Tech, an engineering school in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, founded in 1885 as a mining school to support the rapidly growing copper industry. Between building a career, and family obligations, 35-years passed between graduation and making it back to the ol’ alma mater; since then, it has become among mine and Dawn’s favorite vacation destinations.

Much of the southern edge of Lake Superior has been designated a national lakeshore, which prevents shoreline development (though, of course, most prior development was grandfathered). For that reason, much of the shoreline is easily accessible to the public. That, and the brutal winters, assures that the area will never be Disneyfied, making it one of America’s least disturbed natural areas. Because the U.P. lacks traditional entertainment-type destinations, a crowd is rare even at the height of the summer, and the extraordinary beauty of the U.P. remains one of America’s best-kept secrets.

When the Tacoma Narrows bridge failed in 1940 after less than 6-months of service, an American bridge designer named David Steinman set aside his consulting work and spent the next 7-years developing a theory of suspension bridge aerodynamics. The Mackinac Bridge is the direct descendant of that work.

Yes, the world’s first professional hockey game was played right in Houghton, Michigan.

Copper Harbor, at the northern tip of the Keweenaw Peninsula, has a sort of mythic romance attached to its name; it is, literally, the end of the road. You get there by following US-41 till it ends; the other end is in Miami. There is a lighthouse there, of course, and — Who knew? — NASA used to fire-off rockets there.

Spend some time on Lake Superior’s shoreline and you’ll see a lot of ore carriers go by, carrying iron ore from the iron range to the industries — the Arsenal of Democracy — in southeastern Michigan and northern Ohio. As grade-school children in the 60s, in Detroit, we were told those wicked-wicked Russkies had atomic bombs pointed directly at … us. Modern ore carriers are on the order of 1000-feet long.

If you’re hungry, the U.P. is just about the last place on earth where you can still have lunch at a Big Boys restaurant. No mooseburgers served, so don’t worry about Bullwinkle.

Dawn and I are headed to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in a couple of days. Below are some of my favorite pictures from previous trips.

Tahquamenon Falls

Near L’Anse

West coast of the Keweenaw Peninsula

Miners Castle, near Munising
Aboriginals worshiped at this outcrop 7000-years ago

I’ll have the laptop along, but it isn’t likely that I’ll be posting. I probably will publish pictures via my Twitter feed, though, so feel free to follow along.

On the border, the administration holds hundreds of migrant children in deplorable conditions: filthy, frightened and hungry. The president ordered and then called off a massive immigration raid, and, in the middle of the chaos, the administration’s top border security official resigned Tuesday.

Overseas, the administration is stumbling toward war with Iran, ordering and then canceling an attack. Iran on Tuesday said the White House is “afflicted by mental retardation,” and Trump responded by threatening Iran with “obliteration.”

Here in Washington, Trump just appointed a new press secretary for the third time and a White House communications director for the seventh time. He refuses to say whether he has confidence in his FBI director, his third, and he’s publicly feuding with the Federal Reserve chairman he appointed over whether Trump can fire him. Meantime, Trump is defying a Trump-appointed watchdog who called for the firing of White House counselor Kellyanne Conway for illegal political activities, and he’s brushing off the latest credible accusation of sexual misconduct by saying the accuser is “not my type.”

Dana Milbank, Washington Post

That’s as neat a précis of the past week’s headlines as you’re likely to encounter, and I marvel that there is anybody, anywhere, for whom it isn’t obvious that Trump must be removed from office.

Even the Trump cult, the Deplorable One-third, must be getting tired of defending his incompetence, his lawlessness, his dishonesty — right? Nope. Jerry Falwell, Jr., in fact, is some kind of peeved that Russell Moore presumed to say that our treatment of migrant children is not what it should be.

Falwell puts Moore straight:

The upside, I suppose, is that the incandescent hypocrisy of the Evangelical Right, the most immovable of the Trump cultists, can’t possibly be fooling anybody but themselves nowadays. Too bad it’s a bunch of blameless children who are paying the price for it.

An essay in Sunday’s New York Times takes up one of the most popular writers of the 1970s, Herman Wouk, whose books The Winds of War and War and Remembrance were immensely popular, pointing toward Wouk’s portrayal of the millions of small moral failures that precede political cataclysms. Mentioned in passing, too, is James Michener; both authors are characterized as ‘middlebrow’.

That is, both writers were widely read and financially successful, but neither ever enjoyed the intelligentsia’s approval as Vladimir Nabakov or John Updike did; they were … popular! GASP!

Reconsidered decades later, though, it turns out that both Wouk and Michener were a lot smarter than they were given credit for.

Wouk was certainly correct about the importance of confronting ignorance and bigotry rather than politely ignoring it. As events in this country have shown, it doesn’t need a majority to launch an influential movement animated by malice; it needs millions of people who don’t confront crazy Aunt Grizelda when she launches a rant about immigrants, gays, godlessness. You won’t change your crazy aunt’s mind, but you can let the people around her know that their instincts against her rants are sound, and that they aren’t alone. Acting together, you can arrest the madness.

Everybody who has read the Mueller Report knows that Donald Trump, FOX News, and William Barr have lied — L-I-E-D — to the country; that the Oval Office is occupied by a criminal and, arguably, a traitor; that we are witnessing the creation of a 1984-ish State Media right in front of our eyes.

The time to speak-up is now — not when the choice is bloodshed or slavish submission.

Michener wrote 2-books of striking prescience. The first was Presidential Lottery, in 1968, which takes-up and urges the elimination of the Electoral College. James Madison’s notes of the Constitutional Convention, and the subsequent discussion of it in The Federalist, make clear that the Electoral College has two purposes: preventing the large states from overwhelming the small and, second, preventing the election of a cheap demagogue. The College clearly succeeded in its first purpose, and clearly failed at its second; indeed, on that question, the College made possible the very thing it was intended to prevent.

Michener predicted that.

The second book was a novel, Space. In that book, Michener clearly foresaw the gay rights movement; the malign influence of the Evangelical Right and its exploitation of public ignorance of science and its misguided trust of religious figures; and the eventual abandonment of space exploration.

Both writers deserved to be, and should have been, taken more seriously.