Osama bin Laden and Mao Zedong

  by William H. Benson

May 18, 2016

     In recent months, the journalist, Seymour Hersh, published his most recent book, The Killing of Osama bin Laden and the Importance of Truth in Democratic Governance. In it, he criticizes the Federal government’s official narrative of bin Laden’s death, and calls it “a fabrication, a fantasy,” worthy of “Lewis Carroll.” “The story stunk,” he says, “from day one.”

     Hersh lambasts Mark Bowden’s popular book, The Finish, because it parallels the government’s narrative, unlike Hollywood’s alternate version, Zero Dark Thirty.

     First, Hersh points out that the CIA’s barbaric torture of informants, as depicted in the movie, did not help at all in finding bin Laden. Instead, one of Pakistan’s disaffected agents, motivated by the $25 million reward, walked in and gave to CIA officials bin Laden’s location.

     Hersh contends that certain of Pakistan’s officials had nabbed bin Laden in 2006, and that they had detained him at the compound at Abbottabad, less than two miles distant from Pakistan’s version of West Point, where they could watch over him.

     Once the Americans knew of bin Laden’s location, Hersh believes, they confronted Pakistan’s officials and demanded that they release him to them. Pakistan’s officials agreed but demanded more United States taxpayers’ money. It was the White House and the United States military that decided upon a stealth operation at night that included twenty-three Navy seals.  

     Hersh wonders, how did two Black Hawk helicopters fly into Pakistan’s territory, without any response from Pakistan’s military? Where, he asks, were the guards at the compound on the night of May 1, 2011, when the attack began, and why did the local police fail to respond?

     Finally, Hersh argues that the Navy seals did not transport bin Laden’s body back to a U. S. naval vessel where they then prepared it for burial at sea in accordance with Islamic law. Hersh claims that we may never know where the Seals buried Osama bin Laden’s body that night.

     Which version of bin Laden’s killing is true? The Pentagon’s? The White House’s? Hollywood’s? Mark Bowden’s? Or Seymour Hersh’s?

     Most would agree that Hollywood’s version is the most questionable. Federal government officials have dismissed both Hollywood and Seymour Hersh’s versions. Also, Mark Bowden wonders about Seymour Hersh’s claims. If Hersh’s ideas are correct, Bowden asks, then how were so many Federal and military officials duped into believing in the ruse, in the fabrication of events, that Hersh lays out?

     We may never know the truth. Like the Bay of Pigs fiasco, many files are classified and unavailable.

     China’s Cultural Revolution began May 16, 1966, fifty years ago this month, when Mao Zedong unleashed the fury of student militias that he called the Red Guards, who, according to the New York Times, killed “a million or more people, persecuted tens of millions, and destroyed thousands of historical and cultural monuments.”  

     Most Americans have little, if any, knowledge of the terror that gripped the Chinese people for ten years, until Mao Zedong’s death in 1976. For Americans, the late sixties and early seventies was a time of growth, an expansion of freedoms, a change in music and lifestyles, and anti-war demonstrations.

     For the Chinese though, those years meant misery and terror. It was as if a giant iron block had dropped upon the Chinese people, who felt smashed and crushed.

     Mao insisted that his officials push anyone—university professors, writers, intellectuals, doctors, or even common laborers—who was suspected of capitalist or bourgeoisie thinking, out of their respective positions in society. Thousands found themselves exiled to the countryside where they were forced to slop the hogs, toil in fields, clean houses and barns, and endure endless hours of Marxist instruction.

     Accusations and finger-pointing were rampant. Employees turned on their supervisors. Students turned on their professors. One son turned on his own mother because she criticized Mao Zedong for causing so much confusion and havoc. The Red Guards seized her, lined her up, and shot her. Many took their own lives. Mao’s appetite for social upheaval was unchecked.

     The result: the economy collapsed, hunger and privation resulted, and people starved. Today, China’s government remains reluctant to admit the truth, to seek justice, and to punish the perpetrators.  

     In America, people possess a Constitutional right to state their opinion, but in dictatorships, people have no such right, and can do little, other than wait and keep their heads down.

     In his book, Seymour Hersh makes his case. “Good leadership requires vigorous and honest debates, a multiple number of disagreements, different perspectives, and a consideration of all possibilities.” It is a messy business, but, he insists, it leads to truth, to better judgments, and to wiser decisions.

     The killing of Osama bin Laden, and China’s Cultural Revolution. Hersh believes that the American people have not heard the whole truth about bin Laden’s killing, which may or not be true, but we know that the Chinese people have not heard the whole truth about the Red Guards’ deplorable actions during China Cultural Revolution. 

 The literary agent, A. O. Scott, recently wrote, “The real culture war [or revolution] is between the human intellect and its human enemies: sloth, cliché, pretension, cant.” Mental sloth is lazy thinking. Cliché is passing around stock phrases. Pretension is a claim of doubtful value, and cant, according to the dictionary, is “the repetition of conventional, trite, or unconsidered opinions or sentiments.”

Housing Costs

by William H. Benson

May 5, 2016

     In 1890, a young Danish immigrant named Jacob Riis published his book, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York. He began his introduction, “Long ago it was said that ‘One half of the world does not know how the other half lives.’ That was true then. It did not know because it did not care.” Riis went where few other investigative reporters would dare to go.

     He visited the Italian ghettoes, Chinatown, the Jewish sweat shops, the Bohemian slums, and the black neighborhoods. In each, the tenements’ owners told their agents to “’Collect the rent in advance, or, failing, eject the occupants.” The landlords showed very little sympathy for their renters.

     This year, Matthew Desmond, a Harvard sociologist, published his book, Eviction: Poverty and Profit in the American City, a similar study to Jacob Riis’s. In May of 2008, Desmond rented a mobile home in the College Mobile Home Park in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and there he witnessed the results that high rents exact upon its very low-income residents.

     “Families have watched their incomes stagnate, or even fall, while their housing costs have soared,” he writes. “Today, the majority of poor renting families in America spend over half of their income on housing,” and some pay as much as 70%. Because of that high percentage paid towards rent, he says, “Fewer and fewer families can afford a roof over their head.”

     If renters pay the rent, there is little left over to pay the other essentials: gas or electricity, groceries, shoes and shirts for their kids, or gas for a car, or needed repairs on their home. The Irish proverb says it best, “Rent for the landlord or food for the children.”
     Desmond observes that this load often falls upon young working women with kids. “If a young woman does not have a boyfriend or husband to help pay the rent, gas, and electricity, then she will work two jobs.” For example, she might work a morning shift cleaning houses, and a night shift waiting tables, just to pay the landlord.

     For them the threat of eviction lies just around the corner. Desmond writes, “Black women make up only 9% of Milwaukee’s population, but 30% of its evicted tenants.” Here Desmond makes his case. “If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods, eviction was shaping lives of women. Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women were locked out.”

     In 2008, the landlord Tobin Charney owned the mobile home park and most of its 131 trailers, and he charged an average of $550 per month. When he collected the rent, he would knock on the trailer’s door until it opened, and then he would stick out a hand and say, “Pay me the rent,” or “You got something for me?” Those tenants who fell behind, he worked with, but not for long.

     Desmond writes, “Not everyone living in a distressed neighborhood is associated with gang members, parole officers, employers, social workers, or pastors. But nearly all have a landlord.” 

     A forced move humiliates its victim. Once, when an eviction crew arrived, a woman said, “All these strangers, these sweaty men, piling your things outside.” Desmond observed her reaction. “It was the face of a mother who climbs out of a cellar to find the tornado has leveled the house.” Without the rent money for another home that night, an evicted mother knows that she and her kids are now homeless.

     If a renter receives an eviction notice, she or he will, more often than not, refuse to show up at a housing court to argue their case. “Ninety percent of landlords are represented by attorneys, but 90% of tenants are not.” Also, an eviction reduces a renter’s chances of finding another home, because landlords insist that all applicants reveal their felony convictions and evictions for the past two years.

     An eviction leads to depression. The hopelessness overwhelms even the strongest, but for a single mother with children, the consequences destroy their will power, flatten their chances to escape deep poverty, and linger for decades. Often they turn to alcohol or drugs.

     In his book’s final pages, Desmond offers a solution, a government voucher program to reduce a renter’s percentage of housing costs to no more than 30% of a renter’s income. Today, the high cost of housing in some cities, such as in Denver, have skyrocketed. College students now pay $1000 per month for a modest two-bedroom basement apartment. A voucher may help those who work, but how would it help the poor college student without income?  

     Matthew Desmond and Jacob Riis write of the age-old battle between landlords and their renters, the other half. Most people win at the battle. They pay their rent when it is due, but for others, they lose, because of poor choices or circumstances beyond their control. They fall behind and cannot catch up. Those who survive do so by their wits and ingenuity. Being poor is not for the faint of heart.

     Sunday is Mother’s Day, a day when we remember our mother who fed us and paid the landlord. 

Jane Goodall

by William H. Benson

April 21, 2016

     The adventure writer Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote some eighty novels based upon two characters: Tarzan and John Carter. Tarzan lived among the apes in Africa, and John Carter transported himself from Earth to Mars, where he fought and conquered the Martians. In my younger years, I read several of Burroughs’s books, as did thousands of other American kids of the twentieth century.

     The science fiction writer, Ray Bradbury, said this of Burroughs, “I have been astonished to discover how often a leading biochemist or archaeologist, or astronaut when asked, ‘what happened to you when you were ten years old?’ replied, ‘Tarzan,’ ‘John Carter,’ or ‘Mr. Burroughs of course.’”

     Bradbury also said, “By giving romance and adventure to a whole generation of boys, Burroughs caused them to go out and decide to become special.”

     But it was not only American boys whom Burroughs influenced. There was an English girl named Jane Goodall who also read the Tarzan stories and fell in love with Africa and its wildlife and longed to live there. Jane identified with the English girl, Jane Porter, Tarzan’s wife in Burroughs’s first Tarzan adventure novel, Tarzan of the Apes, that he published in 1912.

     Unable to afford college tuition, Jane Goodall worked as a secretary and hotel waitress long enough to save her money to buy a ticket to Mombassa, Kenya. The year was 1958, and she was twenty-three. Once there, she arranged a meeting with Dr. Louis Leakey, who invited her to join him and his wife, Mary, at an archaeological dig at the Olduvai Gorge.

     Leakey then suggested that Jane should move to the forested mountains on Lake Tanganyika’s western shore in Tanzania to study the chimpanzees in their native habitat, because he understood that there was a scarcity of information about the chimp’s social habits and behavior.

     Jane, with her mother Vanne, arrived at the Gombe National Park in the summer of 1960, and there the two English ladies camped in a tent, surrounded by African fishermen, as well as bushpigs, tsetse flys, shrews, red colobus monkeys, baboons, mongooses, leopards, buffaloes, cobras, and chimpanzees.

      Daily she climbed alone to what she called, “her Peak,” a rocky outcrop that permitted her a panoramic view above and below, and with her binoculars she watched and waited. The chimpanzees though were fearful and held their distance from this strange white hairless female ape. Six months passed, and she confessed to Dr. Leakey that she had learned very little.

     Yet, she started to recognize the chimps as individuals, and she gave them names. One day in October of 1960, she observed David Greybeard insert a long piece of grass into a termite hole in order to extract termites, that he then feasted upon. This, she claimed, was evidence that chimpanzees can fashion a rudimentary tool, a skill that anthropologists had reserved only for human beings. 

     It was bananas though that won the chimpanzees’ trust in Jane. She would leave them around her and then watch as they approached. She soon met Goliath, Flo, Mike, Fifi, and Flint. She counted about fifty in the troop: fourteen males, as many females, and also the infants and adolescents.  At night, beside her campfire, she recorded into her journal all that she had observed that day.

     She noted the chimps’ dark side, their aggression. They would snatch a monkey or baboon, kill it, and eat it. They would go to war and attack a neighboring chimpanzee troop and kill all its members except the adolescent females, whom they then adopted. Then, if given a chance the male chimps would kill their own females’ infants.

     Jane wrote to Dr. Louis Leakey, and he sent a Dutch photographer named Hugo van Lawick, to capture on film her chimpanzees. Leakey told Vanne Goodall that “he had found someone just right as a husband for Jane!” Jane and Hugo did marry in 1964, and they had a single son, also named Hugo.

     In the August 1963 edition of National Geographic, one can read Jane’s article, “My Life Among Wild Chimpanzees,” and two years later National Geographic televised a documentary on Jane’s work.

     Over the years since then, she has published many books, and numerous anthropologists have joined her to observe the chimpanzees at the Gombe Stream Research Center. In 1977, she established the Jane Goodall Institute, and dedicated one program, “Roots and Shoots,” to reforesting barren lands.    

     Jane and Hugo divorced in 1974, and her second husband died of cancer in 1975. She is still thin. Her once blond hair has now grayed, but she still pulls it back into her distinctive ponytail. She travels and speaks 300 days out of the year.

     On April 3 this year, on her 82^nd birthday, she spoke at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and she mentioned her worn copy of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s book, Africa’s animals, Tarzan, and Jane Porter. She said, “And that is how the magic of my life unfolded.”

     Friday, April 22, 2016, we mark the 46^th Earth Day. Early on Jane Goodall recognized the premier importance that both animals and plants play in our planet’s existence. So we celebrate Earth Day. We can plant a tree, or we can liberate a captive chimpanzee, if not on Earth, perhaps someday on Mars. Edgar Rice Burroughs would be pleased. 

Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing

by William H. Benson

April 7, 2016

     On August 22, 1939, Nazi Germany’s troops, tanks, and aircraft stood poised and prepared to attack Poland, its neighbor to the east, and on that day the Nazi’s dictator, Adolf Hitler, spoke.

     “Our strength,” he said, “consists in our speed and in our brutality.” Already he had instructed his generals “to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language.” And the reason for his assault upon the Polish people? “Only then,” he said, “shall we gain the living space (Lebensraum) which we need.”

     Tyrants will excuse their brutality because of their citizen’s supposed need for more territory. There is some truth in that excuse, but then there is the tyrant’s overpowering internal drive to vanquish and crush other people, those whom he considers weak and inferior, who stand in his way, who dare to oppose him, or who refuse to follow his lead. In a word, his “victims.”

     Hitler ended his Obersalzberg speech with an oft-quoted remark, actually a rhetorical question. He asked, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”

     On April 24, 1915, 101 years ago, leaders of the failing Ottoman Empire launched a vicious attack upon the Armenian people, mainly Christian people who lived within the Empire’s borders, in the eastern third of modern-day Turkey. In the National Geographic this month, the reporter Paul Salopek described the awful events.

     “Some Ottoman leaders decide to resolve this ‘Armenian problem’ through extermination and deportation. Soldiers and local Kurdish militias shoot Armenian men. There are mass rapes of women. Armenian villages and city neighborhoods are looted, appropriated. The dead clog the rivers and wells. Cities stink of rot.”

     The result: the Armenian population drops from two million to 500,000, and now, “Today just three million Armenians live in Armenia; eight to ten million are scattered in a diaspora.” Historians now call this “the modern world’s first true genocide.”

     Henry Morgenthau, Sr., the U.S. Ambassador to Constantinople at the time, said, “The great massacres and persecutions of the past seem almost insignificant when compared with the sufferings of the Armenian race in 1915.”

     The pattern was set early in the twentieth century, and the world’s tyrants since then have copied it. After the Nazi war machine crossed into Poland on September 10,1939, World War II began, and it was then that Hitler turned upon Europe’s Jewish population. The Nazis murdered six million innocent people, an incredible statistic that dwarfs even the Armenian genocide.

      Then, there was the Soviet Union’s tyrant Joseph Stalin, and also Cambodia’s Pol Pot, and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, and the genocide in Rwanda twenty-two years ago, when the Hutus decided upon “a final solution to the Tutsi problem.” Beginning on April 6, 1994, they set up road blocks and barricades and then with machetes, they began to exterminate the Tutsis.

     Many fled to neighboring countries, some hid in homes and waited for the frenzy to pass, and by July it did, but by then an estimated 800,000 people lay in their graves.

     It is a fact of human behavior that certain people, when pushed and prodded, will sign up for a campaign to rid the world of other people. William Shakespeare recognized this phenomenon in his play, Julius Caesar. His character Marc Anthony shouts, “Cry Havoc, and let slip the dogs of war.”

     Often, it is one demented person who incites the attacks, but then it is thousands of servile minions who complete his ghastly deeds, because the tyrant compels and bullies.

     On April 27, 1945, American soldiers liberated a Nazi prison camp near Dachau, and Viktor Frankl experienced sudden freedom. In his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl described the scene.

     “With tired steps we prisoners dragged ourselves to the camp gates. We looked around and glanced at each other. Then we ventured a few steps out of camp. This time no orders were shouted at us, nor was there any need to duck to avoid a blow or kick. Oh no! This time the guards offered us cigarettes! We hardly recognized them at first; they had changed into civilian clothes.”

     From oppressor to friend the guards transformed themselves in an instant. They took off their uniforms. The frenzy subsided. Peace and order and sanity returned. The dogs of war were restrained. Prisoners walked through the prison gates, free at last.

     Genocide, ethnic cleansing, or mass murder. No matter the name, it is an ugly and horrific business, a blot upon the human species. Let each of us find and swallow that pill that would restrain within us forever those snarling dogs of war.

March Madness

by William H. Benson

March 24, 2016

     The NCAA basketball games are upon us, and March Madness has arrived. The team to watch in recent years has been the University of Connecticut, where basketball is king. The men won their last national championship, their fourth, in 2014, but the women point with pride to their ten national championships, the most recent one last year, in 2015.

     In first round play this year, the Uconn women decimated the Robert Morris Colonials 101 to 49, and played Duquesne on Sunday, March 21. Uconn’s men defeated Colorado University’s Buffaloes 74-67, in first round play, a heartbreak to CU fans, but then the Kansas Jayhawks defeated Uconn’s men in the second game.

     Sports writer, Nick Kosmider, at the Denver Post, said, “For all the sheer excitement the NCAA Tournament provides, it also dishes out the hurt of cold, abrupt endings in equal measure.” Both Uconn and CU men’s teams saw their seasons end near the tournament’s beginning, not what they wanted.

     Is it ironic, or just random coincidence, that James Naismith, the father of basketball, invented the game at Springfield, Massachusetts, less than fifty miles from University of Connecticut’s campus?

     In December of 1891, the Canadian James Naismith found himself in a job where he was expected to teach physical education to a class of rowdy students at the local YMCA. The students griped about the endless calisthenics, the gymnastics, and the routine exercises in the gym, and that it was too cold to play tennis outside. Two previous instructors had tried to tame the students, and both resigned.

     Naismith said, “These boys would not play ‘Drop the handkerchief.’”

     Naismith’s supervisor suggested that he make up an indoor game that did not require much room, help the students get into shape, and “make it fair for all players, and not too rough.”

     Jim nailed a peach basket on the wall, ten feet high, at both ends of the gym, and asked the students to try to put a soccer ball into the basket. He wrote thirteen rules, and the last was, “The side making the most points in that time is declared the winner.” To say the game caught on is an understatement.

     The game’s purpose still remains the same: give the students a game to play indoors during the winter. Basketball equals winter; both begin in November and end in March. It occupies young people’s time, diverts their thoughts away from misbehavior or crime, provides them great exercise, and the spectators are thrilled to watch and cheer.

     Too many young people, with too much time on their hands, with too little freedoms, create conditions ripe for a revolution. In ages past, the more perceptive kings would round them up on occasion, and march them off to fight and die in a foreign war, or the tyrants would expect them to devote countless hours training for the next attack upon their country.

     In 1497, King James II banned golf because he considered it an unwelcome distraction to archery, a more useful military skill. I say it is far better to shoot baskets, rather than bows and arrows or guns.

     After Naismith earned a medical degree in Denver, he accepted a job at the University of Kansas as the physical education instructor, and there he coached basketball, the first coach ever for the Jayhawks, and the University’s only basketball coach with a losing record, 55 and 60.

     During World War II, Naismith served as an army chaplain, and he introduced basketball to the soldiers under his command, because, he believed, it “controls their excess energy, increases morale, and even lowers the rate of disciplinary actions among soldiers.”

     America has exported basketball to the world. Although only eight million people reside in Israel, it boasts of a professional basketball league. In the New York Times sports section, two weeks ago, there was a full article on Karam Mashour, a native of Nazareth, who now plays for the Israeli team, the Bnei Herzilya. “In a league full of Israeli Jews, top Europeans, and talented Americans, Mashour is the only player of Arab heritage.”

     This is unusual in the Middle East, where winter temperatures are mild, and there is little reason to play inside. “Everyone here plays football,” Mashour said, referring to soccer. “When my brother and I told people we wanted to play basketball, they said, ‘Why?’”

     Long ago the world decided that Western Civilization created the best opportunities for common individuals. Along with the arts and humanities, the Judeo-Christian faith, and the rule of law in a democratic society, Western Civilization has also enjoyed a long association with professional sports.

     The ancient Greeks formed city leagues and held championship games at the first Olympics, and the ancient Romans competed in coliseums. Hollywood is now remaking the movie Ben-Hur, and it promises a chariot race, as did the 1959 movie starring Charleton Heston as Prince Judah Ben-Hur.

     Tomorrow is Good Friday, Sunday is Easter. Enjoy the weekend.

     March Madness will end in April, and the champions, the last team to win, will receive trophies. 

Thoughts on Campaign 2016

by William H. Benson

March 10, 2016

     The United States has had two father-son presidencies. The first was John Adams and his son, John Quincy Adams, and the second was George Bush and his son, George W. Bush. Because Jeb Bush withdrew from the current race three weeks ago, we will not have a third, anytime soon. The Bush dynasty has ended, at least for the next four years.

     “The man responsible for Jeb’s demise” is Donald Trump. A journalist said, “From the moment he entered the race, the real estate mogul made Jeb his primary target, gleefully dismissing the youngest Bush scion as ‘low energy,’ mocking his polling numbers, and relentlessly trolling him on Twitter.” Trump, “the playground bully, viciously pummeled him and his elitist family again and again.”

     Yes, Trump crushed Jeb, but, according to The Washington Post, Jeb was “never, ever going to win in a year like this one.” He was, according to another journalist, “a lousy candidate, bland, dull. There was no juice, no fire.” He fumbled the most predictable of questions: “Do you think your brother’s Iraq War was a mistake?”

     The United States has never had a husband-wife presidency. The closest was Woodrow Wilson’s second wife, Edith Bolling Galt Wilson. After Wilson suffered a stroke in October 1919, he lay in his bed incapacitated for months while she ran interference for him. She determined who would see him, if anyone, and it is possible she may have signed his name on public documents. She ran the executive branch until he left the White House in March of 1921.

     A week ago a writer in The Economist wrote, “Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee; the man most likely to face her in November on the Republican ticket is Donald Trump. The prospect of Trump vs. Clinton is grim,” as in a fearful future.

     As for the Democrats, the voters in the United States are not ready to elect an avowed socialist, such as Bernie Sanders and his “voodoo” economics, for their president, but I would think they are ready to elect a woman president. I just wonder if it is Hillary.

     As for the Republicans, one must wonder about the voters who have voted for Donald Trump. The previous forty-four presidents brought to the office at least a modicum of governing experience, either as a Senator, a Congressman, a vice-president, a governor, or a war-time general, but Trump has never held public office. His learning curve would have to ascend sharply to the right.

     But then he acts as if no one should teach him anything or that he wants to learn anything.

     The New York Times commentator, Nicholas Kristof, said that to understand Trump, “a starting point is Trump’s remarkable ignorance about international affairs.” Kristof then asked an important question, “Why, at a moment when the country desperately needs our A-team, would we send in the clowns?” 

     Another New York Times commentator, Ross Douthat, said it best, “Trump is a reality TV demagogue leading a populist, nationalist revolt.” Douthat also said that Trump “is showing us something different, something that less fortunate countries know all too well: how authoritarianism works, how it seduces, and how it wins.”

     Juan Linz, a Yale political scientist, said the same in his remarkable 1990 essay, “The Perils of Presidentialism.” He pointed out that in certain Latin American countries who have tried to elect a president, a struggle erupts between Congress and the president. Both sides say that they alone represent the people’s will, but then both sides commit humanitarian abuses against the other.

     “A coup or civil war can ensue, with democracy giving way to Latin American authoritarianism,” in order to re-establish the peace. William Falk, The Week‘s editor, said, “We are not yet Argentina or Chile, but our democracy is headed toward a dangerous place.”

     It is important to remember that there is no limit to what people will do to seize power, and what they will do to retain it, once they possess it.

     One wonders about the Republican party’s future? Only a few party officials have stepped forward to endorse Donald Trump: one lone Senator, Jeff Sessions of Alabama; a few Congressman; New Jersey’s governor, Chris Christie; Alaska’s former governor, Sarah Palin; and Arizona’s former governor, Jan Brewer. The party’s officials are feeling frantic, as they fear their power may slip away.

     If Trump wins the nomination, it is not preposterous to imagine the Republican party splitting apart. Nebraska’s Senator, Ben Sasse, said he will not vote for Trump, but when a Political Action Committee asked Sasse to run as a third-party candidate against Clinton and Trump, he vetoed the idea.       

     Interesting times we live in. There are no easy solutions. In November, we will know the end of this year’s business.