James M. Redwine

President Trump

A Birthday Party

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Ben Franklin & George Washington. Photo by Peg Redwine

Ever since my mother’s three brothers and one of her three sisters returned home from serving in World War II my family has gathered for a Fourth of July reunion. While competing circumstances have caused some hiatuses over the last seventy-seven years, we have been fairly consistent in our celebration of life. We do what all families do at reunions, meet, eat and subconsciously soak in the subtle changes from childhood to absence.

Those changes are what John Denver wrote about in 1971 in his song Poems, Prayers and Promises:

♪ The days they pass so quickly now, nights are seldom long

Time around me whispers when it’s cold

The changes somehow frighten me, still I have to smile

It turns me on to think of growing old ♪

Denver, as I was, was born in 1943, therefore he was only 28 when he was contemplating aging. He died in a plane crash in 1997 so his early thoughts about growing old were prescient. When I listen to his young man’s song about encroaching old age I am impressed, and sobered, by his understanding of the physical and emotional aspects of aging. I do not recall even the vaguest concern of not being 28; I am now more aware.

Our current political debate is highlighted by President Biden’s age of 80 and former President Trump’s 77. Depending upon our partisan preferences we monitor each man’s speech and movements in a search for affirmation or condemnation of our hopes or fears for our nation. For although the United States just celebrated our 247th birthday, we Americans think of ourselves as a young, vibrant country that is always trying to perfect our union. The young John Kennedy is our ideal. We may need the wisdom sometimes brought by age but we crave the vitality often born of youth.

But age does not guarantee good judgment and youth may encourage recklessness. Each of us knows the angst of experiencing what Camelot’s Guinevere called for, and eventually obtained, “A day she would always rue”. Ben Franklin was 70 years old in 1776 and George Washington was 44. Most people would say both men had good judgment. Both showed wisdom and courage, two of the character traits we need in our leaders. Their age was not a factor. As John Denver concluded, “It’s been a good life all and all” and:

♪ How sweet it is to love someone, how right it is to care

How long it’s been since yesterday and what about tomorrow?

What about our dreams and all the memories we share? ♪

Well, back to our family’s Fourth of July Reunion. The singing was poignant, the bar-b-q was well seasoned, some members were young, some no longer were and, of course, numerous loved ones were sadly no longer with us. However, “I have to say it now, the changes do not frighten me” and next year will bring more. Some will be melancholy, some will be challenging, some will be interesting, but what it all will be is a continuing party.

What Now?

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Pericles (495 – 429 BC)

The great Greek statesman and military leader Pericles (495 – 429 BC) said, “The best guardians of a society are leaders with the wisdom to recognize their duty and the virtue (courage) to do it.” Both elements are essential characteristics for our leaders. We may elect smart people who are not wise and good people who are not brave. But what we need are wise and virtuous leaders who fear loss of honor more than fear of losing elections.

Of course, our leaders are as human as we are. We all fall short of the ideal. It is not perfection we need from our politicians but the ability to recognize it when they have taken the wrong course and the character to modify their behavior in the face of great pressure to continue on a destructive path. If we apply these standards to America’s involvement in Afghanistan, we can see the virtue in our original reactions to the attacks of September 11, 2001. We were morally obligated to our fellow citizens who lost their lives to properly respond. Osama bin Laden was the Al-Qaeda leader who planned the 9-11 attacks. America needed to punish Bin Laden, which we did by assassinating him in Abbottabad, Pakistan, May 02, 2011. Our course of action was morally just and our direct attack on Bin Laden was measured. It took us almost 10 years to bring him to justice but we should have and we did.

Once Bin Laden was eliminated our leaders from President Obama, President Trump and President Biden should have carefully and incrementally withdrawn our military presence while we protected the Afghanis and others who helped us. We can still engage in such a process. Any timeline, whether May 01, 2021 or September 11, 2021 or any anniversary of previous attacks or any other date is simply one we choose. We need to carefully and slowly withdraw our forces. Artificial drop-dead dates for our leaving encourage the Taliban to simply wait us out; which they are doing.

It will not be a popular decision of President Biden and our other leaders to reinstall enough troops to protect Americans and those allies of America who need to immigrate. However, popularity should not be our goal, virtue should be.

Locking Horns

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One day I met up with my friend Tim “Turtle” Smith in the parking lot of a golf course. “Hey, come look at what I found yesterday when I was out deer hunting.” I looked in the bed of Turtle’s pickup and saw two sets of deer antlers intertwined. Tim said, “I cut these off the heads of two dead stags. They must have starved to death after their battle for which one would gain the prize doe. I guess it is a metaphor for the old saying, ‘Don’t lose your head over.…’ ” Tim is kind of a colloquial philosopher. We do not know what other stag defaulted to winning the mythical doe, but surely a wiser one was lying in wait.

For some reason my encounter with Turtle came to mind after observing the Presidential Debacle last Tuesday evening. If the goal of a leader is to have his or her constituents adopt and follow a particular vision, when it comes to debating, the leader may want to concentrate on setting out elements of the vision and not fall into the quagmire of ad hominem. President Trump and Former Vice President Biden surely both have a vision for America but they both kept their visions well disguised Tuesday.

Usually in a debate someone is declared the winner. However, in the Presidential Debacle of 29 September 2020 there was no winner but there were three losers: President Trump, Former Vice President Biden and the electorate. We learned what we already knew; the candidates hate one another and the national news media loves only itself. Where was what Socrates called for over two thousand years ago when he cautioned, “The unexamined life is not worth living”? And Joseph Campbell’s only unforgiveable sin, that is “to be unaware”, was committed by both candidates and the moderator repeatedly.

If Americans are the prize and leadership is the goal, I suggest our presidential candidates each eschew both mudslinging and mud wrestling and spend their time and ours setting forth their plans for our future and explaining cogently how their plan is superior to their opponent’s. We can decide for ourselves if we like a candidate. What we need is knowledge about which aspiring leader is truly inspiring and not merely exasperating. Of course, if Donnie and Joey continue to act like scuffling school boys, perhaps we will see both of their denouements via the ballot box and a contested election. Then someone else may end up with the prize as declared by a handful of unelected judges.

Absolutes

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We begin 2020 with the death of Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani. President Trump ordered the drone/air strike. The President said:

“The attack was necessary because Soleimani was planning massive attacks against U.S. personnel in Iraq and throughout the Middle East.”

America has been heavily involved in the Middle East since World War II. Our role until 1990 was mainly diplomatic with some force of arms as a threat. In 1990 we invaded Iraq and re-invaded Iraq in 2003 although we have not completely disengaged since our first incursion.

After the 911 attacks of 2001 we invaded Afghanistan in the hopes of quelling further attacks by Al-Qaeda members who were using Afghanistan to plan operations in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere. In 2014 America intervened militarily and diplomatically in the Syrian Civil War.

Iranian college students stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, Iran in 1979 and held 52 American hostages until 1981. All were released. The U.S. has had a prickly relationship with Iran since but it has been almost totally a war of words and sanctions.

If we point to 1990 as the metaphorical “Firing on Fort Sumter”, we have been engaged in military actions in the Middle East for 30 years. The strike on Soleimani may expand and extend our involvement. A calculation of costs and benefits of our 30 years of war is far beyond my knowledge. How does one evaluate the lives lost when there is no accounting for them? Did we eliminate terrorists or innocents, a future dictator or someone who might find a cure for cancer? We cannot know. We surely have expended trillions of dollars of national treasure, but would we have spent it any more wisely at home?

Over the last 30 years what have we done with our lives and treasure within our own country? More particularly what have we, and I mean me too, accomplished in our system of criminal justice? If America seeks to punish foreigners for transgressions and seeks to force other countries to behave as we think best, what are we doing and how have we done on imposing justice upon and modifying the behavior of our fellow citizens whom we convict of crimes? These issues, while always at play, rise up as salient as the New Year ensues.

Instead of war with Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Iran can we think about the legal system and Chris, Danny, Jackie and Jason? Is it logical to compare the behavior of countries to the behavior of individuals? Is it relevant? Is it meaningful or just another method of hoping instead of helping?

Each of the people named were at one time considered by our legal system to be in need of rehabilitation, much as America thinks of those named Middle Eastern countries. And while I have dealt with thousands of our fellow citizens in our legal system as lawyer, prosecutor and judge, this New Year season I have been musing about these four above-named survivors of my attempts at punishment and rehabilitation. In essence these four were given the opportunity to modify their own behavior and they did. Each is now a productive citizen and of more import to me, each is now my friend. Do I deserve any credit; no. Do they; yes.

But if society had continued to demand a pound of flesh from these, and so many others who have turned their lives around, each of them might have returned our slings and arrows with ballistic behavior. Yes, society held each to account just as we must do with other countries. But giving individuals and nations an opportunity for redemption might be worth contemplating.

Of Founders and Russians

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Harvard law professor Michael Klarman was the keynote speaker at the June 2019 Indiana Graduate Judges Conference. As an attendee I received a signed copy of Klarman’s book, The Framers’Coup, The Making of the United States Constitution. Gentle Reader, to give you some perspective on the exhilarating experience of a law professor’s book, the tome’s Note and Index sections run from page 633 to 865. Of course, the substance of the book contains 632 pages of which several pages thank the law students who did the grunt work. Regardless, I do recommend the book to you as an interesting and often surprising exposition of how our Constitution survived the throes of birth. As Klarman says of our pantheon of founding heroes:

“In the book I try to tell the story of the Constitution’s origins in a way that demythifies it. The men who wrote the Constitution were extremely impressive, but they were not demigods; they had interests, prejudices, and moral blind spots. They could not foresee the future, and they made mistakes.”

This is Klarman’s raison d’etre for writing the book. His admonition is that the men, and they were all white, Anglo Saxon, Christian men, who struggled for six months in Philadelphia in 1789 to create the United States were just men, not gods. Some of them owned slaves, some did not. Some were from populous states, others were not. But they were all mere mortals with virtues and defects.

The underlying message of the book is that if those men could find a way to overcome their political and philosophical divisions, we and future Americans should also be able to. For example, in our current culture wars where President Trump alleges Ukraine helped Secretary Clinton in the 2016 election and Clinton alleges Russia helped Trump and more recently both Trump and Clinton and many others are flinging arrows in all directions alleging our leaders are “foreign assets” we should just chill. If James Madison and the Federalists and Thomas Jefferson and the anti-Federalists could reach compromises, we should be able to also.

The salient issues and the thorniest were how could our Founders apportion representation among populous and less populous states, how was slavery to be addressed (or not) and could common citizens be trusted to govern themselves.

According to Klarman, as our Framers struggled to hold the Constitutional Convention together the Federalists and the anti-Federalists, “Questioned their opponents’ motives and attacked their characters, appealed to the material interests of voters, employed dirty tricks and made backroom deals when necessary.” Sound familiar?

Okay, you probably are choosing to go sort your socks rather than to hear any more from Professor Klarman or from me. But a word of caution, Gentle Reader, if I have had to experience the joys of all the almost 900 pages of Constitutional history, you may have the same opportunity in next week’s column. We might even delve into the vicissitudes of whether the United States Supreme Court is truly independent or are its decisions as politically based as those of the other two Branches

From Olduvai To Everywhere

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The Olduvai Gorge in Africa is accepted by many as the original birthplace of all human ancestors. The gorge is found on the Serengeti Plain in northern Tanzania. Archaeologists and paleontologists have spent many years researching our greater family tree since Dr. Louis Leakey and his wife, Mary, found the fossils the Leakeys opined were evidence of our oldest known ancestor.

Competing evidence for human origins was discovered in the Afar Depression in Ethiopia on the continent of Africa by Donald Johanson, Yves Coppens and Maurice Taieb who named the humanoid bones they found “Lucy” and dated her at about three million years old. Regardless of what evidence one follows, virtually every recognized authority on human history agrees every person who has ever lived can be traced back to this area of Africa. For us to return to our roots we would have to visit our grandmother Lucy or perhaps some other related fossil nearby. I will not attempt to determine how many “greats” that is.

I do know if Lucy was anything like my mother was she probably wondered why it took a couple of million years or so before any of her fourteen billion descendants paid her any attention; why can’t those kids, grandkids, etc., ever write home?

Anyway, I got to thinking about Lucy when the media began to report on President Trump’s tweets about The Squad: Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley (Democrat, Massachusetts) born in Cincinnati, Ohio of African American heritage; Ilhan Omar (Democrat, Minnesota) born in Somali, Africa; Rashida Tlaib (Democrat, Michigan) born in Detroit, Michigan of Palestinian lineage; and, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Democrat, New York) born in the Borough of Queens in New York City and of Puerto Rican parents.

President Trump tweeted out on July 14, 2019 that each Congresswoman should go back to their country of origin … “[A]nd help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done.”

In an interview with CNN’s Kyung Lah on July 18, 2019 Kamala Harris (Senator from California) born in Oakland, California who is an announced candidate for President of the United States in 2020 and who has African American ancestors said of President Trump, “He needs to go back where he came from. And leave that office.” Donald Trump was born in the Borough of Queens, New York City, New York and is of German and Scottish heritage. Although I do understand how people from one of New York City’s five boroughs may consider someone born in one of the other boroughs to be foreign born or someone from California may consider a native New Yorker an alien and vice versa and that those folks in New York and California may see the rest of America as one giant undeveloped wilderness. Regardless, here we all are. Maybe a little wisdom from Rodney King, that eloquent and forgiving victim of mob and police violence, may be in order. As Mr. King asked in 1991, “Can’t we all just get along?”