Our 90-second culture can save lives and ruin them

October 10, 2019

A lot can happen in 90 seconds. In 2013, it took the flight attendants on Asiana Airlines Flight 214 only 90 seconds to evacuate nearly 300 people off of a plane that had crashed at San Francisco International Airport — despite their personal injuries and the flames and smoke in the cabin. In February 2016, a high school senior named Jessica Fitzgerald saved her co-worker’s life at the pizzeria where they worked when he went into cardiac arrest right after a pizza delivery. She pulled out her cellphone, dialed 911 and started performing chest compressions. From the moment she ...

Trump attempting to invade the Democratic Party

October 9, 2019

President Trump’s path to re-election goes through the Democratic Party. Goal No. 1 is to get Democrats to eliminate his greatest threat: Joe Biden. It’s not the Iowa and New Hampshire polls that freak out Trump. These contests are dominated by the white liberal gentry, not Biden’s huge base of moderates and African Americans. The general election polls are what keep him up at night. They show the former vice president beating Trump like a drum. The most recent national Fox News poll puts Biden ahead of Trump by 14 points. The ABC News/Washington Post poll gives him a 15-point ...

Democrats next stop is the Twilight Zone

October 8, 2019

A 1961 “Twilight Zone” episode starred Peter Falk as a Central American revolutionary whose paranoia leads to his destruction. The dictator he has deposed tells him about a mirror given to him by “an old woman,” a mirror that will show him who’s plotting to assassinate him. The revolutionary soon sees enemies everywhere and begins to unravel, picking off his comrades one by one, believing they are out to get him. Fantasy, sure. But President Trump and Vice President Pence could use such a mirror to reveal those partisan forces attempting to carry out political ...

Remarkable wins for democracy

October 8, 2019

Ever since Brexiters and Donald Trump won in 2016, the world’s big-picture political story has been that democracy is under siege. This summer, Jair Bolsonaro’s victory in Brazil, Narenda Modi’s Kashmir crackdown and dramatic electoral gains for the anti-immigrant Alternative fur Deutschland in eastern Germany have only amplified widespread beliefs about the inexorable advance of the authoritarian right. This general story line is dangerously true, but an intriguing counter-narrative may be starting to appear: Small-D democrats are starting to play offense. Not that you would ...

My, how the times have seriously changed

October 7, 2019

You may, if you are old enough, recall a TV actor named Foster Brooks. He was a guest star on such classics of boomer kitsch as “The Monkees,” “The Munsters” and “The Mod Squad.” But if you do remember him, it’s likely for one thing only: his imitation of inebriation. Brooks made his slurring, stammering “funny drunk act” a TV staple, back when drunks were still considered, well … funny. To recall his career is to marvel at what a difference a generation or two makes. That era produced another TV trope that, in hindsight, seems equally bizarre: The funny sexual ...

Schiff’s riff on call true, but unwise

October 7, 2019

The ratcheting up of the House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry has pushed President Trump to new extremes of craziness. Consider the president’s deranged attack Monday morning on Rep. Adam B. Schiff, unaffectionately known to Trump as “Liddle’ Adam Schiff” or “Shifty” Shiff. On Twitter, Trump suggested Schiff might have committed treason by reading aloud a “FAKE & terrible statement” that, according to Trump, purported to quote from the White House account of the president’s July 25 telephone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. The ...