When Objectivity Dies

                                When Objectivity Dies

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 10/6/19

Glance at the front page of this newspaper.  Compare it to the page you are now on.  On the front page you will find hard news.  The headlines indicate that factual material will follow. I believe that factual material is what you will always find there.

On the page you are now reading, a heading appears.  It reads “Editorials & Opinions.”  I have read the Marietta Daily Journal since August of 1971.  I doubt that I have missed reading a single issue over these 48 years.  I also believe this newspaper has remained true to the distinction between news and opinion.

This doesn’t mean that the MDJ’s editorials or its columnists’ opinions haven’t made anyone angry or that they haven’t been unfair.  Fair or not is a matter of perspective.  In opinion writing, “fairness” doesn’t apply as long as one doesn’t tell lies or misrepresent someone.  It’s not the opinion writer’s purpose to show both sides but to argue, support, and shed light on one side.    

Factual or not is a matter of integrity.  Even so, it’s possible to get facts wrong, in which case apologies and corrections are due.  At any rate, a principled journalist will always keep news and opinion separate.  This newspaper does.

Not so with its print counterparts around the country nor with television news.  Objectivity informs; subjectivity argues a viewpoint.  Only a cursory glance will reveal whether or not the Washington Post or the New York Times presents hard news objectively. They don’t.  The Wall Street Journal is better, though at times it could justifiably be charged with fashioning headlines that tilt a certain way.

It hasn’t always been so with the New York Times.  Its long time editor, Mississippi-born Turner Catledge, was heralded as an ethical man who sought to “do newspapering right” and to “report the facts straight and the opinions clear.”  Editor of one of the world’s most widely known newspapers from 1951 to 1968, Catledge was never a big shot nor too busy to visit his home state and little East Central Jr. College in Decatur, Mississippi to talk journalism with the college newspaper staff.  Catledge was a graduate of Mississippi State University, then known as Mississippi A&M.

Smaller newspapers excepted, modern journalism has not followed the path of Turner Catledge.  Neither has the electronic media.  That’s why President Trump’s rage during his press conference this past week was justified.  There has never been a better example of New Journalism’s excesses and subjectivity than the way the national media has covered President Trump.  Finding him entertaining during his presidential campaign, the networks and the national newspapers gave him time and space, never dreaming he would win the presidency.  The biggest Uh-oh! in political history is election night of 2016.  The media’s useful idiot turned out not to be an idiot after all, but a candidate who was saying what voters wanted to hear.  Since that eventful night, the sole mission of CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post and the New York Times has been to erase their embarrassment by destroying Donald Trump.  So far none of their efforts have worked.  It’s highly unlikely that a kerfuffle over the president’s conversation with a foreign leader will work either.

Nationally, objective journalism is dying.  ABC’s Sam Donaldson started it all by yelling out at and being disrespectful to a president, but who could ever enrage the smiling, joke-cracking Ronald Reagan?  Trump, though, ain’t taking it.  Good for him.

Georgia Congressman John Lewis deserves deep respect for his courageous stand as a civil rights hero.  How many different photographs of his bloodied head have we seen?  But that heroism cannot justify Lewis’ ludicrous claim that President Trump is a threat to our democracy.  Currently the biggest threat to our democracy is “news” organizations leading the way in refusing to accept the results of an election.  That’s what undeveloped nations do.

Churchill once commented, “A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.”  His words are an apt description of the journalists and commentators whose arrogance and disdain are aimed as much at Trump’s 63 million voters as at Trump himself.

Having thrown respectable and objective journalism to the winds, the New Journalists are mean and vengeful, but they aren’t dumb. They know that Biden is too yesterday and that the other Democratic candidates are too far left.  Their aim is to coronate Hillary Clinton who, no doubt, is waiting in the wings.

Even Napoleon remarked, “Three hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.”  But Donald Trump doesn’t fear newspapers or cable television either.  That’s why they hate him.  He has bill-boarded their total lack of objectivity.

Roger Hines

10/2/19

The Lure of Old Suitcases

                                The Lure of Old Suitcases

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal,9/1/19

“Of the making of books there is no end,” wrote the Jewish King Solomon.  For a certain Jewish child’s curiosity about the contents of his father’s long forbidden suitcase, there was seemingly no cure.  Or so says my new friend Peter Bein, author of Maxwell’s Suitcase.  No cure, that is, except to open the suitcase after his father had died. 

            Author Peter Bein teaches English at Chattahoochee Technical College.  His professional career has been winding, though purposeful and interesting.  How many college English teachers first “had a math brain” as Bein puts it, studied mathematics in college, spent 25 years in the computer field, taught math, returned to college to get a Master’s degree in Professional Writing and then taught English?

            Maxwell’s Suitcase is what the publishing world is now calling a memoir, not a full scale researched biography but a remembrance or a focusing upon a period of time, a person, or as in Bein’s book, an object.

            Bein’s object is a suitcase of his father’s, hidden for forty years in a hall closet in the family’s apartment in Brooklyn, New York.  Bein’s father made his escape from Nazi Germany in 1938 on Kristallnacht (“Crystal Night”), or the Night of Broken Glass, November 9, when Nazi forces ransacked Jewish-owned homes, stores, hospitals, schools, and synagogues, leaving streets littered with shards of broken glass.

            Suitcase in hand, Max Bein fled Germany for the United States, leaving behind his mother and fiancée, Lola.  In the suitcase, son Peter Bein would learn, were pictures and stacks of letters bound in old shoelaces, which became the inspiration for his book.  The letters were to his father from Bein’s lost grandmother who had been killed in a Polish death camp at Belzec during World War II.

            It is one thing to read a history book about the Holocaust.  It is quite another to talk to a friend who is not yet even 70 and who has such close connection to one of the greatest evils of human history.  Bein’s connection to his past, particularly his grandmother’s death, is exquisitely described in his riveting book as is his childhood puzzlement over how his father could have fled Germany leaving his mother, Malka, behind. 

            When Bein was ten, his father said to him, “Come, I’ll show you my pictures from home.”  It was one of those rare occasions when Max would open up the suitcase and “invite me to the past,” Bein writes.  But not for long.  When Bein was shown a picture of his grandmother, he asked “Where is she?” only to elicit a quiet “She disappeared” from his father.

            The letters in the suitcase were written during WWII from Bein’s grandmother in Poland to his father in New York City.   In 1996, living in Columbus, Georgia Bein opened the suitcase after his father’s death.  “That suitcase was the keyhole to my past,” he writes.  Later, living in Atlanta, Bein secured the help of a friend who met him once a week at the Aurora Café in Atlanta’s Little Five Points and translated the letters aloud in English while Bein wrote feverishly.

            This enterprise compelled Bein to “make an appointment with his past” as he travelled to Poland and Germany in 2008, 2009, and 2010 to “find his way back home” and learn about the fate of his grandmother as well as the reason why his father was so protective of the suitcase.  The visit to Poland included finding and making a picture of the apartment where his grandmother had written the letters in the suitcase seventy years earlier.

            Any moviemaker seeking an interesting twist on Thomas Wolfe’s title, “You can’t go home again,” need look no further than Bein’s memoir.  Its conciseness makes it as script-ready as a book could be. Malka’s letters to her son Max are heart-rending, her last one ending with “From your mother who loves you and wishes you the best.”

            Today the Holocaust, like history in general, is being weaponized and trivialized.  Using history as a bludgeon, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has said the detention centers on our southern border ought to be called “concentration camps.”  Little must she know about what people such as Bein’s grandmother Malka endured. 

            Cicero wrote, “Who only knows his generation remains always a child.”  Author Peter Bein was not content to know only of his own era.  Hence a suitcase was his teacher and his motivation to discover who he was.  The suitcase, he writes, was his “museum in a box.”

            Readers can find Maxwell’s Suitcase on Amazon and at PeterBein.com.  From it they can learn to respect – and heed – history as Bein himself has done.

Roger Hines

7/28/19

           

           

Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 8/28/19

                          A Brief History of a House Divided

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 8/28/19

Russia, Russia / collusion, collusion / impeachment, impeachment / racism, racism, and now recession, recession.  

            Media assault didn’t start with our current president, though it did of course start with a Republican president.  Ronald Reagan was a cowboy from California whose ignorance of geo-politics and diplomacy would surely cause him to blow up the world.  And we dare not have a president saying, “Government is not the solution; government is the problem,” or – while still California’s governor –  “The college Vietnam protestors are screaming ‘Make love not war,’ but considering their appearance I doubt they could do either.”

            Just whom does such rhetoric sound like?  While its tenor may not be as acidic as Trump’s, its aim was just as sure.  And the head cheerleaders of the Reagan opposition were, yes, the three major pre-cable television networks.  If not as malicious as today’s cable networks, they were still definitely anti-Reagan.

            In spite of his supposed instability, Reagan was re-elected.  Sam Donaldson of ABC was to Reagan as Jim Acosta of CNN is to President Trump.  Both so-called reporters made themselves the story.

            In Reagan’s day cable television was in its infancy, CNN being launched in 1980, the year Reagan was elected.  The three major television networks were foot soldiers for the Democrat Party just as they and at least two cable networks are today.  Conservatives, having never enjoyed media support, edged bravely into the winds of bias and subjective journalism wherever and however they could.  Their primary conduit was radio.  Radio “spots” funded by Texas oil man H.L. Hunt kept the conservative faithful from despair.  The journalism and compelling voice of Paul Harvey, intertwined with American lore and values, kept them from sheer depression.

            Conservatives slightly cracked the media in 1966 in the person of William F. Buckley and his television program, “Firing Line.”  It was only a crack.  Rush Limbaugh would push the door further in 1988.  Only when cable television expanded was the door pushed open by Fox News in 1996.  Even so, there were two GOP presidents, Bush I and Bush II, who bore the brunt of the old networks’ bias.  Bush I was portrayed as “a wimp,” he who flew WWII combat missions and was shot down, only to fly again.  His son, like Reagan, was presented as something of a strutting, strident cowboy.  The Bushes weren’t Texans.  They were privileged whites from Connecticut merely using Republican Texas as their new base of power.  Or so the northeast media asserted.

            Clinton and Obama, on the other hand, were media darlings.  Clinton was the bright boy.  Obama was the future for sure.  He would put conservatives in their place.

            But it came to pass that, partly because of the IRS’s treatment of the Tea Party and globalism gone wild, the peasants came with their pitchforks.  From every crook and cranny they came, mostly from heartland America and small towns, though from large industrial cities as well.  We’re all familiar with “… and a little child shall lead them,” but nowhere in the annals of history do we find “…and a billionaire shall lead them.”  But a billionaire did lead ordinary folks to victory, vindicating Buckley who had said he’d rather be governed by the first 100 people in the Boston telephone book than by the Harvard faculty.

            Yes, the billionaire talks ugly.  He hits back.  His rhetoric falls far short of Lincoln’s “mystic chords of memory” and “the better angels of our nature.”  But the billionaire is listening to his peasants and they are influencing him for good, not on his hitting back which he needs to continue, but on his increasingly apparent love for ordinary folks and their values.  Who knew (the educated media elites should have) that globalism was understood by the non-elites at both the intellectual and pocketbook levels?  Who ever dreamed that the non-elites, so many of them people of faith, would support a thrice married playboy?

            It’s fortunate that ancient Jews didn’t reject the help of King Cyrus even though he was a pagan Persian.  Not a perfect vessel, that Cyrus.

            It would be nice if those who fault people of faith for supporting the president cared more about the abhorrent practice of abortion, the loss of manufacturing to other nations, and the illegal immigration crisis. It would be wise if free-marketers stopped taking social conservatives for granted.

            Those peasants are smart.  Guided by common sense, they know a smart, authentic dude when they see one.  Given that the face of the Democrat Party is now the anti-Semitic members of The Squad, it’s possible that the Jewish community will join the peasants in giving the playboy a rousing victory in 2020.

Roger Hines

8/21/19

           

           

           

The Forsaking of Old Landmarks and Where It’s Brought Us

The Forsaking of Old Landmarks and Where It’s Brought Us

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 8/11/19

            Three   entities have played a major role in producing the culture we now live in: homes, schools, and atheism.  Our culture is one of weakened families, high out-of-wedlock birthrates, therapy-soaked education, mass shootings, drug use (including our pet drug, alcohol, the evils of which most adults refuse to acknowledge), opioid deaths, declining worship attendance, political incivility, ugly language, ubiquitous pornography, and loneliness.

            These are not the only characteristics of America today.  Neighborliness still exists, charitable giving continues, most citizens are law-abiding, and the economy is strong.  Yet, there is currently a sure slide toward pure rancor and a decline of reasoned discourse.

            Quite a few unhappy souls in the media and politics are blaming one person for this slide even though that person was their creation.  It was they who ignored the American worker, who sought to trade the role of nations for the glories of globalization.  Preaching tolerance, they practiced intolerance toward Middle America.  Perched behind television anchor desks, in Hollywood studios, or resplendent Congressional offices, they scornfully dismissed all Americans who were not as “progressive” as they.

            When their creation won the presidential race in 2016, they cried, literally.  Blind for a solid year and a half to what a presidential campaign was revealing, and accepting polls as absolute truth, they viewed their creation as a fun toy, enjoying him since he gave politics a spark which they considered novel.  Then, Uh-oh!  Half of the nation’s voters took their toy seriously. He got elected.  His warts were preferable to the snarky attitudes and squishy beliefs of his creators and their preferred candidate. 

            The losers forgot or simply didn’t know that many Americans still believe in (“cling to”) certain landmarks.  Historically and literally, a landmark was a stone or a tree marking the boundary of land.  You know, borders.  But there are non-literal landmarks as well such as traditions or beliefs, held dear because they have held together civilization itself.

            The home, which is to say marriage and family, is a landmark.  It absolutely speaks of boundaries.  Is not a man’s home his castle?  His wife his beloved?  His brood his future hope?  Yet, even “wife” is now a bad word.  Family is anything you want it to be.  A couple?  A trouple?   You decide while the unraveling of monogamous marriage, a western civilization landmark, continues.  Kids don’t need a mommy and a dad anymore.  Marriage and family are a mere social construct. What’s nature or God got to do with it?

            The words of C.S. Lewis are relevant: “We remove the organ and still demand the function.  We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise.”  But “men” and “women” have gotta go.  Call your state-supported university (even if you live in the South) and ask if it has sent out memos on the proper and expected use of pronouns.  You might obtain first-hand knowledge of how academia is attacking the foundations of traditional culture, unless the Vice-President for Diversity refuses to talk to you.

            Speaking of diversity, it is higher education’s primary goal, displacing excellence.  Diversity, as a goal, has become ruinous by the very fact that it politicizes education.  Higher education’s aim is no longer learning but having on campus a certain percentage of different people, based on factors such as race.  And don’t dare speak of “seeking the truth,” a former goal of western universities, unless you can endure being laughed to scorn.  The university is the land of no truth.

            Atheism’s role?  Its numbers are growing and their books are selling.  Atheists desire a total religious lobotomy on America.  If any nation’s birth resulted from a belief in the transcendent, it was America’s.  Wherever America’s Judeo-Christian roots have spread, schools, hospitals, and orphanages have sprouted.  Not so with our atheist friends who, as far as we know, don’t build schools, hospitals or orphanages.

  One of my three atheist friends told me he complained to his Kiwanis Club president because of the Christian prayers.  When challenged, he denied that atheism is a religious position, but a purely neutral secular stance.

            Ah, atheistic secularism!  The supposed default position of humanity.  The refuge of those who resist the very thought of anything transcendent. There’s only matter and energy.  We’re all mere dust, no matter what the Psalmist or Shakespeare’s Hamlet claimed.  Could such a view affect an 18-year-old male’s conduct?  His understanding of right and wrong?  Mom and Dad, if he ever knew his dad, are out of the picture.  To whom is he responsible?

                        Landmarks are not imaginary. They are steady markers that show us the way.  We best restore them.

Roger Hines

8/7/19

           

             

           

For Female Teachers Getting Ready for School

                  For Female Teachers Getting Ready for School

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 7/28/19

            Ladies, I know what you’re facing, and I only wish to encourage you as you get back to a task that shapes not just individuals but nations.

            First, a bit of personal history.  I knew when I was 15 that I wanted to be a teacher, thanks to about 50 splendid classmates in the class of ’62 and our incredible teachers and coaches.  My classmates were a mix of town kids and country kids.  They were full of life, and seemed to be happy.  President Eisenhower was smiling down on us until President John F. Kennedy succeeded him, affirming our youth and daring us to dream.  My classmates, all of them, made me want to teach high school or college and be around people like them for the rest of my life.

             I did enter the teaching profession. Only once did I consider leaving it.  Quite a few surveys have indicated that the chief reason teachers leave teaching is students and the chief reason they stay in teaching is students.

            In the late 70s I seriously considered leaving teaching, not because of low pay, but because of students.  Since I had been a substitute school bus driver my senior year in high school, had driven trucks during college, and even knew how to back a four-wheel trailer with a tractor (try it), I figured I could drive a Greyhound bus.  To the Marietta Square I went, got a bus driver’s application from the downtown bus station, filled it out but threw it away, hoping the next year’s students would be more teachable.  They were.  I continued to teach seniors alongside predominately female colleagues.

  If you are offended by my singling out females or if you think I am already headed toward condescension or stereotyping, you might want to stop reading now.  I for one just don’t cater to the prevailing sexual chaos that denies the obvious and wondrous differences between males and females, that denies the reality of gender and scoffs at the mention of femininity and masculinity.  You probably know what I’m trying to say since teachers are probably positioned better than anyone else to observe cultural change and to keep a solid grip on the pulse of the times.

            While male teachers, coaches, and administrators need encouragement also, my interest in talking to females in education has a historical basis.  I have 10 sisters and have worked with females all of my life, so, sorry … but I have a heart for women and deep sympathy for the struggles they face.

            Let me shoot down a myth embraced by many males, particularly a few of my fellow conservative male friends.  A few times I have heard men refer to the “feminization of education” and rue the fact that our children and youth are taught mainly by women.  “Kids need some men teachers too,” they asserted.

            And of course students do.  But not because women can’t handle smarty teenage boys. One reason I’ve admired my female colleagues is their ability to dress down a towering, high school boy whenever such action was needed.  Women teachers are tough.  They don’t feminize anything.  They effectively mix grace with strength.  Any time I’ve seen a female teacher confronting a male student in the hall, I’ve hung around (sorry, I was taught to be protective) to see if things were ok.  Not only was I never needed; I even borrowed a line from a short, first year teacher and used it countless times: “Young man, you’d better explain yourself real fast.”

            You may be married or not.  You may have children or not.  But if you do have a family, I know what you will start doing in the next few days.  You will teach (and often contend with) children or teenagers all day long, then go home and serve your family, and then sit down at 9:30 to plan or review for the next day of teaching.  You will get very tired, but you will know all the while that you are shaping individuals and nations.

 Teachers actually never know whom they are teaching.  I didn’t know I was teaching the future Chief Justice of the Georgia Supreme Court or a druggie who would become a faithful husband, father, and a successful small business owner.

            Go forth, ladies, and help us address the great unraveling that almost every nation is experiencing.  Girded with knowledge, an appreciation for beauty, a zeal for excellence, and a love for children and youths, you are needed to turn boys into men, girls into ladies, and chaos into civilization.

            Good luck!

Roger Hines

7/24/19

           

Me, Seventy-five ?

                                       Me, Seventy-five ?

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 6/16/19

            In 1984 during a presidential debate Ronald Reagan said of his opponent Walter Mondale, “If my opponent will not hold my age against me, I’ll not hold his youth and inexperience against him.”  Mondale asked for it.  He had just brought up the issue of Reagan’s age.

            Mondale took it like a man, however.  He laughed as much as the audience did.  Like his fellow Minnesotan, the Happy Warrior Hubert Humphrey, Mondale laughed much anyhow.  That was back when our politics was far less acrimonious.

            Reagan went on to begin his second term one month before turning 74.  The man gave old age a good name.  His cheerfulness put to scorn the claim of columnist George Will who, upon turning 50 wrote, “Looking forward from 50 is no bowl of blueberries.”

            50?  Old?  Sounds young to me.  Will turned 78 this past May.  Let’s hope he didn’t go into depression. 

            Looking forward from age 75 - if I live for two more weeks – shouldn’t be too difficult to do.  Nine and soon to be ten grandchildren will remind me that life goes on.  Our republic is far stronger than the constancy of cable television news leads us to think, and everywhere I go I see teenagers and twenty-somethings working their heads off.  I know there’s more to the picture than this, but I’ll still take hope wherever I see it.

            My first memory is from age three, but from the fabric of the last 72 years I have plucked three others, all of which have been sources of joy and/or learning.  These particular memories also remind me of the debt I owe to so many who have rendered me a rich man for three quarters of a century.

            I remember the dirt, the soil I mean.  Oh, the dirt, the fields, the gigantic gardens that my father and other farmers up and down Old U.S. 80 Highway cared for.  Their dirt was a precious possession, almost their second self.  I wish that children today understood that groceries don’t come from grocery stores.  School teaches them where groceries come from, but only at the intellectual level.  How I wish children and teens could experience real dirt for themselves and get outside their houses more.

  My professional life has required me to haunt libraries and bookstores, but even the printed word has not erased the memory of the smell, the feel, and the mystery of dirt.  Directly or indirectly, food comes from dirt.  “From dust to dust” is a phrase too many children and teens have never even heard. 

            Antonia (“Pupi,” we called her) was the Italian woman brought to America by one of my much older brothers after World War II.  What a memory.  What an education this tough, resilient woman brought to a poor Southern family.  Her broken English and knowledge of Europe made her not just an exciting oddity, but the interesting centerpiece of our lives for the rest of her life. Antonia left her family and a significant job for an American soldier boy.

            A more recent memory is the year 1971 when I moved to the county I now live in.  From Day 1 this county has been forward-looking and even more inviting than a bowl of blueberries, or peaches either for that matter.  While some counties around us falter educationally, economically, and socially, ours thrives.  I say it’s not because we are an educated county.  It’s because many good people have landed here, most of whom treat others well.  We fuss when necessary, but because of visionary political, community, and religious leaders, we still have something special.

            Oh, for the space to name names.  Suffice it to say that my two mayors (I live in one town but have the address of another), commissioner, state representative, state senator,  Congressman, governor, and my two U.S. Senators are good people and effective leaders. My last three former governors, the only former ones I was ever around (one Democrat and two Republicans) are all men of good will.  They are also givers.  That’s something to remember when I start thinking the nation is going to the dogs.

            Men of faith, pastors particularly, have shaped my county also.  Two pastors helped me raise my children.  Two others have helped me to look steadily forward in faith as I grow older.  Another, a retired Methodist minister, has become a great friend to this aging Baptist.  He knows I believe John Wesley was actually a Baptist.

            My county’s leaders and citizens obviously seek civil peace – order.  Just call it being a good neighbor and loving your neighbor as yourself.  Whatever it’s called it can surely produce good memories for a guy who is not getting younger.

Roger Hines

             

           

             

                 

                                

Around the World, Populism is Popping

                    Around the World, Populism is Popping

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 6/1/19

            Populist, patriot, and nationalist have become put-down words.  Making the illogical and unfair error of judging an idea by its misrepresentation, critics of populism, patriotism, and nationalism display their bigotry, not to mention their misunderstanding of words.

            Judging Christians by the KKK that attempts to shroud its evil with the Christian cross is both wrong and ignorant.  Judging churches by the actions of Westboro Baptist Church is just as wrong.  Yet such misrepresentation has gone on for decades.  Most Southerners are not bigots, most Jews are not rich, most millennials are not lazy, and most citizens north of the Mason-Dixon Line are not unfriendly.

            But reading the New Your Times or a handful of other nationally known newspapers, one would think that any American who won’t disavow the labels populist, patriot, and nationalist is illiterate and bigoted.  Why this myopic view of fellow citizens?  Why the disdain for simple love for one’s country?  We used to call this disdain prejudice, a word that is falling away, but it means pre-judging or judging others as you lump them with a group and then cast aspersions on the entire group.

            In the Marietta Daily Journal several days ago columnist Pat Buchanan wrote, “The nation is the largest entity to which one can give loyalty and love.”  Buchanan extols France’s great general Charles De Gaulle who believed in and pressed for “nation-states from the Atlantic to the Urals.”  And what does Buchanan get for his love of his nation and the belief that American civilization is in great danger of early death?  He is tagged as a “nationalist,” one who despises all other nations and views them with condescension.

            But alas, it’s not just America’s deplorables who subscribe to love of one’s nation as per President Trump’s America First theme.  European nations are also fed up with globalization, multiculturalism, and all other such efforts to pull us into what amounts to world union.  Enough of “We are the world, we are the people.”  We are nations.

            Across Europe and in India Trump-like sentiments are spreading.  28 countries recently held elections for representatives to the European Union.  751 seats in the EU parliament in Brussels were up for grabs.  At least 3 European nations come to mind where the winds that swept Trump into office are touching down in Europe as well.  As it turns out, populist/nationalist coalitions are reshaping both American and European politics.  In India the pro-America Nationalist Party just won an overwhelming victory.

            In England the Pro-Brexit Party which favors Britain’s departure from the EU and a return to national sovereignty surged to victory.  The established parties, Conservatives and Labour, faltered.  In France the National Front party led by Marine Le Pen won the national election for EU representatives, thereby moving Le Pen’s party into first place over current president Emmanuel Macron.  Le Pen claimed Macron has “displayed extreme arrogance and spite for common people and the French people in general.”  She asserted that French politics can no longer best be described by the terms “left” and “right,” but by nationalist and globalist.  How applicable to American politics is that?

            Le Pen stated, “Globalism breeds a post-national spirit which carries the notion that borders must disappear.”  In Italy the League Party of Matteo Salvini also won big.  Like Le Pen, Salvini has preached national sovereignty and independence from the EU.

            These victories don’t mean that the EU will soon be upended.  They do, however, spell trouble.  Given that Hungary and Poland also have nationalist parties that are on the rise and that Germany’s leader, Merkel, was soundly defeated in the EU vote, change is definitely happening.

            What is all of this but the desire for local rule?  How was Donald Trump able to smash both political parties, embarrass the experts, and tame a previously impenetrable news media?  Why, even in Scotland, are coalitions forming to bring about a total break from Britain?  Why, if “union” is so good, did the Soviet Union last barely 70 years?     

            Europe’s Old Guard is faltering.  So is the political party system in America.  Trump’s rallies are nothing more or less than a great revolt of the middle class.  His supporters are based in work and driven by faith.  They apparently like a billionaire who, though he cusses, doesn’t drink or smoke, and definitely connects with them.

            Populism means “of the people.”  As it turns out, people around the world are tired of having pseudo-“diversity” crammed down their throats.  The Brits want to be Brits, the French want to be French, and India wants to be Indian.  What’s wrong with that?

Roger Hines

5/28/19