Recipes–Escarole Soup

This is a classic Italian recipe with many variations.  This recipe is very traditional and delicious.  Escarole if eaten raw is very bitter, but when cooked lightly it lends a unique taste.

Escarole Soup

* 1 head escarole (or half if particularly large), coarsely chopped

* 5-6 lg. cloves garlic coarsely chopped

* 4-6 Tbsp. olive oil

* 1 cup canned white, cannelloni, or navy beans (garbanzos do very well)

* 2 vegetarian low-salt bouillon cubes

* 1 egg well beaten

* 2 lg. pieces parmesan cheese

* 2 cups water

- Sautee the garlic in oil until almost brown

- Toss in the escarole and mix well until leaves are slightly wilted

- Add the water, beans, and the bouillon cubes, mix well

- When the soup is boiling add the egg and stir well

- Cook for 10 min (approx.); add cheese pieces

- Simmer for another 5 min. or so

- Taste for salt, pepper; then serve

Election Post-Mortem–Are Truth And Reconciliation Really Possible? Hardly

Much has been made in the liberal media about Donald Trump’s lies, exaggerations, and deliberate distortion of the facts, and of course they are right.  Fact-checking sites worked overtime during the campaign and one, Politifact, found that 75 percent of the ‘facts’ Trump quoted were either false, fictional, or fabricated.

The real news is that none of his supporters paid any attention whatsoever.  They understood his whoppers for exactly what they were – signifiers, memes, and iconic references to make a point.  No Trump partisan ever fact-checked his statement that Hillary Clinton’s policies would allow 650 million immigrants into the country any more than anyone really believes that Isaac was 180 when he died.  In both cases there was a point to be made.  Trump’s hyperbole was to draw attention to the issue, no more.  The remarkable age of Isaac was a symbol of his importance before God, especially resonant to short-lived Jews of the second millennium.



Only progressives seemed to get exercised over Trump’s free and easy way with the ‘truth’ and misunderstood the nature of his relationship with his supporters.  He is an oversized, bombastic, image-driven product of Hollywood, television, and Wall Street.  He made his way in the cutthroat business of high-stakes real estate where his stock-in-trade was bluff, exaggerated claims, and impossible promises; and his supporters love him for it.  They did not vote for an on-the-one-hand-on-the-other liberal academic but a flesh-and-blood victor, a man of outsized ambitions and appetites.
 
Nor did Trump supporters care about his alleged sexual indiscretions.  They come with the territory, and all the greats of American history – LBJ, JFK, MLK, and many others – were serial fornicators.  FDR had a a decades-long affair.  Jefferson had children by one of his slaves.  Bill Clinton had sex with an intern.  As Henry Kissinger noted, “Power is the greatest aphrodisiac” and boasted that even a short, ugly Jewish man could get the world’s blonde beauties.  Trump was no different in his boastful, but quite true claims.  In any case, his supporters took these statements as par for the course for a 70 year old man from an earlier generation, blessed with looks, money, and power.



This disregard for ‘the truth’ by Trump and his supporters’ dismissal of it only hardened the Left’s conviction that they were uneducated, unenlightened, boorish backwoods throwbacks – a misogynistic, homophobic, and racist lot who were beyond reach and redemption.

This is why now, after the election, that there can be no hope for reconciliation.  How could there be when one side believes in the superior value of intelligence, intellect, rationality, inclusiveness, and communalism and the other disregards truth for emotion, facts for purpose; and trades ‘reality’ for image and fantasy.

The United States is a country divided in many ways – by race, ethnicity, geography, social class, education, and wealth – but the most important division is that between logic and illogic.  For the progressive Left anyone who believes that the Bible is the unaltered word of God cannot possibly judge rationally on any subject.  Belief in the Flood, Noah’s Ark, the Resurrection, the six-day Creation, and Jesus’ miracles is but the stepping stone into a world of myth, fantasy, and unreality.


                               www.commons.wikimedia.org

The religious Right claim just the opposite.  Whether the Bible is divine fact or a compendium of mystery, miracle, parable, and metaphor it still is the primary source for their inspiration in moral, ethical, and civic affairs. 

The irony of this of course is that progressives’ reliance on ‘facts’ is just as subjective as Trumpists’  rejection of them.   There is no such thing as settled history, economics, philosophy, religion, or science; but liberals behave as if there were and act as if there were no legitimate debate on how to resolve issues of poverty, climate change, income distribution, environmental hazards, or the conflict between individual and religious rights.   There is no room in the progressive canon for Biblical views on marriage, sex, abortion, family, evolution, or justice.

Worst of all this vilification of the Trump supporters feeds on itself in a perpetual vicious circle, adding calumny and hatred with every rotation.  The intolerance of the Left for the beliefs, opinions, and convictions of the Right becomes even more hostile as conservatives gain in power and audience.  The more the Right pushes back against the Left, the more liberal antagonistic resolve is strengthened.  It becomes not enough to defeat  the Right, but to destroy a political movement which espouses the worst of human nature.

The more the conservative Right is put upon, the more hostile it becomes to what is sees as the arrogant, insular, dismissive, and sanctimonious claims of the Left; and the intrusive use of government to promote its agenda.

So, is reconciliation possible? Can we all come together? Can Trump actually do what he suggested in his victory speech and heal partisan wounds and bring the country back together again?  Hardly, and very unlikely.  In fact every new President says the very same thing because American politics have always been brawling free-for-alls.  While it seems as though this campaign has been worse than most, a cursory look at history shows that plenty of mud has been slung in the past.  The issue is not the campaigns, but the American people.  We are so profoundly divided, that it will be generations if ever that true social integration will be achieved.

James Carville, longtime political commentator had this to say on Morning Joe (11.7.2016):

"I'm not sure the country wants to be pulled together. I'm not sure the people who are voting for Trump want to be pulled together with the people who are voting for Clinton and vice versa…It is almost a country…going into different camps.”

The fact that we are a divided country is not news.  The fact that we might want to be is.  Carville has rightly understood that in an era of identity politics, self-esteem, and complexity, we cannot afford to integrate, join forces, or become part of the melting pot.  It is no surprise that women, gays, Latinos, transsexuals, and blacks are all fighting for traction in an unforgiving competitive society.



                           www.politicker.com

If Carville is right – and the pervasiveness of identity politics in our highly complex society seems to confirm his judgment – than reconciliation is even less possible.  To conciliate, compromise, accept the idea that one’s opponents may actually have a point or even be right, means abandoning principle, conviction, and self-image.

And, as in the case of hardening prejudices the more the wheel turns, the more political convictions become matters of personal identity and worth, the less likely are people are to give them up.
We are in it for the long haul.  It will be generations before the economic and social disparities among majority and minority groups are minimized, the sine qua non of civic integration.  As long as population continues to increase and resources remain finite, competition will be as much a part of life as existed millennia before.

Human nature – territorial, aggressive, self-interested, expansionist, and self-protective – hasn’t changed for a million years and is unlikely to do so.  Driven by its imperatives, competition will be the byword of civilization and culture for a long time to come.   When expressed in the increasingly complex, demanding world of limited resources, it is no surprise that it becomes violent or at least hostile.

The American judicial system provides a good illustration of how to live within an adversarial, competitive society.  It is not based on the truth – which most jurists and philosophers agree does not exist – but only on prevailing versions of it.  One hopes that ‘true’ justice will be served, but most of us are satisfied with justice alone.  Reconciliation does not exist, only acceptance.



Now that Donald Trump has been elected, Hillary Clinton supporters cannot be expected to accept, tolerate, and be quiet.  Their resolve will have certainly hardened given the election of one whom they have so demonized.  Trump is not simply the 45th President of the United States, but the incarnation of political evil.  How can one sit back and do nothing?


Hold on to your hats.  The ride has just begun.

Social Harmony Is Overrated–We Don’t Want To Be Like ‘Them’

James Carville, longtime political commentator had this to say on Morning Joe (11.7.2016):

"I'm not sure the country wants to be pulled together. I'm not sure the people who are voting for Trump want to be pulled together with the people who are voting for Clinton and vice versa…It is almost a country…going into different camps.”

The fact that we are a divided country is not news.  The fact that we want to be is.  Carville has rightly understood that in an era of identity politics, self-esteem, and complexity, we cannot afford to integrate, join forces, or become part of the melting pot.  It is no surprise that women, gays, Latinos, transsexuals, and blacks are all fighting for traction in an unforgiving competitive society. 

While joining forces into one, large, all-encompassing minority rights group might make sense in traditional political terms – large lobby groups like AARP are powerful players in the Congressional game – such a  merger among minority groups would serve to submerge individual identities, dilute the force of individual manifestos, and deny partisan enthusiasts a chance to express their anger, resentment, and specific demands.

The argument, however, must be taken one step further.  Belonging to a group, particularly one which has been put-upon, ignored, or oppressed, adds value to lives which lived individually have little meaning.

It is one thing to be an individual living a life of few rewards, trapped in a dysfunctional community, working at a low-paying, entry-level, no-future job; but another thing altogether to be part of a movement that uses race, gender, and ethnicity to legitimize minority demands,  that acknowledges the value and worth of those without equality and respect, and collectively fights for retribution and justice.


There is a heroism in such membership.  Lives can be transformed through such righteous activism.  Minor moral, ethical, and civil dereliction are nothing compared to the redemptive nature of collective rectitude.   Maintenance workers can be caporegimes.  The unemployed – victims of an exploitative, rapacious elite – can become officers in paramilitary actions against the police.  Illegal immigrants can gain the immediate social legitimacy that the system denies.  They can be on the front lines of protest and share both their ethnicity and their oppression with their brothers.

Intellectual support for these oppressed minorities also confers a certain and special legitimacy.  Professors who join in lockstep with their street comrades gain self-esteem through their support of progressive causes on campus.  They encourage identification with the marginalized and oppressed and through their purging of the intellectual and social environment on formerly racist and sexist campuses become political as well as academic leaders.

Those Americans who are neither particularly marginalized nor oppressed, can still enhance their self-worth and social importance by joining activist groups.  Saving the planet from climate change and the environmental depredation of corporate greed - those who overfish, despoil sensitive estuaries, clear-cut virgin forests, cage poultry, inject livestock, and carelessly dispose of waste – is a religious mission.

The missionary nature of such causes is another reason why joining hands with like-minded people is unattractive.  The zeal with which social activists promote their causes makes them diffident at best to joint ventures.   While environmentalists are all believers in the importance of action, most have their particular axe to grind.  Some are disgusted by the despoiling of rivers and streams by corporate indifference.  Others worry about catastrophe – the rupture of a major pipeline, an oil spill in protected waters, the incineration of timberlands because of global warming.  Still others chafe at the constant urban sprawl which co-opts wilderness and wetlands.



To merge within a larger environmental movement  because its membership, financing, and political power might do more for the planet than the individual efforts which are a part, is missing the point.  The true believer, the social missionary, the reformer has joined the struggle for personal reasons; and to deprive him of the particular and special identity that belong to a specific, special interest group would be to neuter him.

Nothing is more expressive of this need to belong than today’s national politics.  In our highly segmented, divisive, interest-oriented era of identity, it is no surprise that the lines have been drawn so dramatically between the two presidential candidates who in terms of political philosophy are poles apart.  Donald Trump represents a radical populism fueled by middle class resentment of the Washington Establishment whose incestuous cabal of politicians, lobbyists, wealthy donors, and unprincipled media are destructive and antithetical to the Founding Fathers’ vision of individualism, liberty, and rights.

Hillary Clinton represents the traditional liberal elite which believes in big government, social programs, and the championing of race, gender, and ethnicity – in other words the perpetuation of the very cabal so hated by Trump supporters.  In order to engineer the social reforms that progressives want, government will have to grow, not shrink.   University campuses – the crucibles in which intellectual leaders are formed – must be purged of all anti-social sentiments, speech and behavior.  The Supreme Court must be returned to activism and support progressive causes.

At the core of this division is a fundamental philosophical difference in the two camps.  Conservatives believe in the ineluctability of human nature, assume venality, greed, and arrogation of power; and feel that the only way to right the wrongs of the past is through a revolutionary return of power to the people.

Progressives believe that human nature can be overcome and that a better world is indeed possible.  There need by no such thing as the conservatives’ endless cycle of political birth and rebirth, wars, and defense of territory and resources.

Once again political partisanship is more than a civic choice.  It confers legitimacy, social status, and self-esteem.  Angry Trump supporters may not be able to articulate their anger, but they know that they all share it.  Trump means defiance of arrogated authority, academic elitism, and class. 
Passionate Hillary supporters care less about her policies and programs but about her sex and her commitment to the progressive causes – abortion, women’s rights, gay marriage, social justice, anti-poverty programs, international negotiation and reason, and a fight for environmental sanity.


Of course the two camps don’t want to conciliate, to find middle ground, or to compromise.  To do so would not only be giving up a political philosophy but individual, hard-fought identity.

No society has every made much of communalism; and if they have – like the Soviet Union, China, and European Socialists – they have quickly abandoned it. Political leaders, royalty, and commoners alike understand that human nature is in fact ineluctable, hard-wired, and persistent.  We can’t help ourselves when we fight for traction, turf, power, and wealth.  Belonging to identity groups – regardless of their size and relative importance – is part of the competitive, Darwinian process of evolution.   Compromise and cooperation are not in our genes, and if we have to work together, we do so only because it is the only means to achieving at least a portion of our ends. 

So James Carville has hit the nail on the head.  There is no turning back from this election or from 2016 America.  What we see today is simply a more energized, angry, public display of  individualism, identity politics, and human nature.