"TRUMP UNFETTERED AND THE WILDCAT GROWL"

“TRUMP UNFETTERED AND THE WILDCAT GROWL”

            I had intended to write my weekly blog today on people in Black History Month, but the Senate vote of 51-49 on Friday, refusing to call witnesses in the impeachment trial of Donald Trump, has caused me to revamp, simply because the decision was so appalling.  I had expected acquittal all along, since no President has ever been convicted in the Senate, but I had also expected that some witnesses would be called, to help make it clear how much Trump has transgressed the office of the Presidency.  A Presbyterian, Senator Lamar Alexander from Tennessee, swung the vote to Trump when he announced that he would vote “no” on witnesses.  If he had said “yes,” I believe that Senator Lisa Murkowski would have said “yes,” and the witnesses would have been called. 

I’m not unaccustomed to Presbyterians acting this way.  After all, it was James Henley Thornwell who authored the “Address to All the Churches of Jesus Christ Throughout the Earth” to explain to the world why the white Southern Presbyterians had left the denomination so that they could support the Confederacy and slavery.  And, it was Woodrow Wilson, the first Southern president after the Civil War, who re-segregated the federal government after his election as President.  Presbyterians were included as the recipients of MLK’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail.”  Those were monumental Presbyterian decisions, and on one level, the decision on Friday seems mild by comparison.  Yet, this decision leaves Trump unfettered.  We don’t yet know what that means, but his actions, while being fettered by the Mueller report and then the impeachment process, make me think that he may blow the doors off now.  That is a scary thought. 

I don’t know if any of his remaining advisors have much sense or caution, and if they do, perhaps they will convince him to hold it down in order to win re-election.  The base wants raw meat, but whatever remains of the center wants sensibility.  Much of our future depends on how Trump will act now that he is unfettered.  In the meantime, the key for so many of us is promoting turnout in this year’s elections.  So, let us all pledge to recruit at least 10 people who are not registered to vote – to get them registered and to get them to vote.  Don’t be shy about this.  I am a shy person, but I ask everyone I meet if they are registered to vote.  You do it too.

Also, in the meantime, I am indebted to my longtime friend Ed Loring for pointing me back to Bob Dylan’s apocalyptic song “All Along the WatchTower” after the Friday vote.  It seems to fit the current time, the hurt and the sorrow and especially the rage:

There must be some way out of here
Said the joker to the thief
There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief
Businessmen, they drink my wine
Plowmen dig my earth
None of them along the line know what any of it is worth

No reason to get excited, the thief, he kindly spoke
There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke
But you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate
So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late

All along the watchtower, princes kept the view
While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too

Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl
Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl

If you want to listen to it, here’s the link to YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bT7Hj-ea0VE  

Jimi Hendrix has a good cover of it, and Hendrix’s powerful guitars make it seem so much more ominous, but songs like this make it easy to see why Dylan won the Nobel Prize.  I hope that on this one, my rage and mystification prove to be incorrect, but we all must consider what “Trump Unfettered” means – the wildcat’s growling as the earth heats up, the riders are approaching, and the wind begins to howl.