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From the Author of The Long View From 1964
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The Long View From 1964 is political commentary for the Americans who can’t find their checkbox. Not Democrat. Not Republican. Just honest analysis from someone who has watched the whole arc — from Superman and the American Way to gilded bunkers and Walmart rejects with guns. Where we’ve been, where we are, and where we might still go.
The Long View From 1964 The Saucepan Hat
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What I am is a moderate. A person who believes in making decisions carefully, in recognizing complexity, in not burning the house down because you’re angry at the neighbors. A person who wants others to make their own informed choices rather than be handed a script.
I did. As a little boy. Johnny wore a saucepan for a hat and spread apple seeds through the land so apples could flourish everywhere. Smart little cuss. And that’s why we have apple pie.
After a year of political cartoons, then parody, migrating into complaints and now political commentary, I realized all I am really trying to do is plant some seeds for the future. The red versus blue war is too entrenched to flip a switch and start anew with sanity. But you can plant seeds of something better. You can suggest a better way. You can draw attention to failures that cost lives and hurt people and hurt nations.
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The Long View From 1964 6 of 6 – Where is Anywhere
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What I am is a moderate. A person who believes in making decisions carefully, in recognizing complexity, in not burning the house down because you’re angry at the neighbors. A person who wants others to make their own informed choices rather than be handed a script.
Because what we have is broken. The two party system that limits our choices to two flavors of the same noise, backed by dark money from both directions that you mostly never hear about. Citizens United didn’t just open the door — it took the door off the hinges. The Federalist Society on one side, the Tides Foundation and Priorities USA on the other, and the rest of us standing in the room where the door used to be wondering why it’s so cold.
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The Long View From 1964 5 of 6 – The Road and The Ground Beneath
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What I am is a moderate. A person who believes in making decisions carefully, in recognizing complexity, in not burning the house down because you’re angry at the neighbors. A person who wants others to make their own informed choices rather than be handed a script.
You cannot navigate a broken road if you don’t understand how the road was built. Not the mythology of it. Not the sanitized version that fits a current political narrative. The actual road — the compromises, the failures, the corrections, the moments we got it wrong and the generations it took to get it less wrong. That’s not weakness. That’s the only honest map we have.
America’s history is short. Embarrassingly short by the standards of civilization. Europe measures itself in centuries stacked on centuries. Asia and the Middle East reach back to the beginning of recorded human organization. We are a snap of the fingers by comparison.
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The Fastest Gun Alive — A Case for the Second Amendment
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What I am is a moderate. A person who believes in making decisions carefully, in recognizing complexity, in not burning the house down because you’re angry at the neighbors. A person who wants others to make their own informed choices rather than be handed a script.
In six years in the Army and my time with the Sheriff’s Department I never once drew my weapon and pointed it at another person. Let alone fired it at one.
That is not a confession of weakness. That is the point.
The Second Amendment was never about Vinney the desperado riding into town looking for a fight. It was never about bravado or immunity or masks or the performance of toughness by people who have never actually been tested.
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The Long View From 1964 4 of 6 – The Land Moved While You Slept
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What I am is a moderate. A person who believes in making decisions carefully, in recognizing complexity, in not burning the house down because you’re angry at the neighbors. A person who wants others to make their own informed choices rather than be handed a script.
They left. Both of them. While I was paying attention to other things — raising a family, building a life, watching the news with a growing sense that something wasn’t adding up — the ground shifted underneath the labels and nobody announced it.
It’s like waking up and finding yourself a stranger in a strange land. Except you never went anywhere. The land moved. You just didn’t notice until you tried to take a step in the direction you always walked and found nothing there.
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1776 – The Number That Tells You Everything
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What I am is a moderate. A person who believes in making decisions carefully, in recognizing complexity, in not burning the house down because you’re angry at the neighbors. A person who wants others to make their own informed choices rather than be handed a script.
Let’s start with the number.
Not the policy. Not the legal arguments. Not the court battles that were always going to happen and were always going to produce the same result.
The number.
$1.776 billion.
I have a sinking feeling we will find ourselves watching Second String Donny screaming foul again. Not just about the midterms. About the $1.776 billion that was stolen from his patriots along with everything else.
Is this proof of intent? No.
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Second String Donny
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What I am is a moderate. A person who believes in making decisions carefully, in recognizing complexity, in not burning the house down because you’re angry at the neighbors. A person who wants others to make their own informed choices rather than be handed a script.
Competent people require a competent environment. They need their judgment respected, their expertise valued, their honest assessments welcomed rather than punished. The moment a genuinely capable person walks into a room and realizes the man at the top is threatened by competence rather than energized by it — they leave. Or they get fired for exactly that reason.
So you get what you get.
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The Long View From 1964 3 of 6 – The Checkbox Problem
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What I am is a moderate. A person who believes in making decisions carefully, in recognizing complexity, in not burning the house down because you’re angry at the neighbors. A person who wants others to make their own informed choices rather than be handed a script.
The labels don’t fit anymore. And the system was not built for the moment when the labels stop fitting.
I am 79 years old. I have been voting since 1964. And this is the first time I have felt genuinely politically homeless.
But here is the thing about being lost, recognizing it is not the end. It is actually the beginning. Before you can define where you are going, you have to be honest about where you are. That is what this is. The first step in figuring out what a political identity looks like when the old labels have stopped telling the truth.
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A War Being Run By the Second String
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What I am is a moderate. A person who believes in making decisions carefully, in recognizing complexity, in not burning the house down because you’re angry at the neighbors. A person who wants others to make their own informed choices rather than be handed a script.
But what wasn’t said — what never gets said by people like me — is that I enlisted right after my 17th birthday, still in high school, in the California National Guard. November 1963. Monthly Guard meetings until graduation, then off to basic training at Fort Ord.
For anyone who went through basic training, you know the first thing they try to do is intimidate, confuse, and disorient you. That’s a pretty hard thing to accomplish when you and your brother had the run of the base because your father had been the East Garrison Commander — but that’s another story.
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Do Not Get Into Political Arguments. It’s Not Worth It
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What I am is a moderate. A person who believes in making decisions carefully, in recognizing complexity, in not burning the house down because you’re angry at the neighbors. A person who wants others to make their own informed choices rather than be handed a script.
In the film WarGames, the computer WOPR — also known as Joshua — was asked to play tic-tac-toe after nearly launching a nuclear war. Running through every possible scenario it reached the only honest conclusion available.
WINNER: NONE.
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The Long View From 1964 2 of 6 – Maybe Just Listen
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The grandchildren watch Saving Private Ryan. But they forget that Great Grandpa was the one bleeding in Europe and the Philippines. They just see old people without opinions worth hearing.
Maybe we rant because nobody will listen.
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The Long View From 1964 1 of 6 – Superman
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When you’re ten years old watching the Mickey Mouse Club, Superman, Zorro, Father Knows Best and the rest, the American Way seems perfectly clear. We were strong. We were proud. We had clear cut enemies. At school we were told to stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance with pride, and when the air raid sirens went off we got under our desks — as if that would actually do any good. But it made us feel safe.
We had presidents who built America. Eisenhower chose highways over rail because he saw how disabling rail lines stopped troop movements. He should have prioritized both. JFK, with all his faults, still told us that our strength was to stand together and build a great nation. Not a monument.
Sometime after that I took a break. I married, I divorced, I had children — not necessarily in that order. I raised families. I now have grandchildren. I learned how to build businesses and was part of the great technological revolution — time spent at gin joints like Tektronix, Intel, my own consulting and more.
And when I stopped and took a breath, I looked around and saw an America that had become super wealthy and gone to hell at the same time.
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The President Who Won’t Leave – Part 3 of 3 The Third String
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What I am is a moderate. A person who believes in making decisions carefully, in recognizing complexity, in not burning the house down because you’re angry at the neighbors. A person who wants others to make their own informed choices rather than be handed a script.
From the Author of The Long View From 1964
These are not the first string. The first string, the Generals, the Admirals, the career military officers who built their credibility over decades of actual service, were fired. Forced to retire. Replaced with loyalists whose primary qualification was willingness to pour the coffee and butter the bagel without asking uncomfortable questions.
They aren’t the second string either (no offense intended) The second string could have been considered the National Guard, but maybe they have been asked or ordered into that grey zone, maybe ‘illegal orders’ and taking up arms against their family and friends has caused a little friction?
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The President Who Won’t Leave – Part 2 of 3 Home Sweet Home
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What I am is a moderate. A person who believes in making decisions carefully, in recognizing complexity, in not burning the house down because you’re angry at the neighbors. A person who wants others to make their own informed choices rather than be handed a script.
From the Author of The Long View From 1964
From day one, my ballroom, MY ballroom. A petulant child crying for his ballroom. Almost a month later the child coyly admits to the underground complex the shed is covering. All paid for with donations straight from somebody’s pocket, probably tucked into that additional 1.5 trillion dollar defense budget, because the underground playground is his bunker. His refuge in time of war. His hidden military complex, hospital, and I am sure gilded and lavish living quarters.
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The President Who Won’t Leave – Part 1 of 3 Has He Been Planning For This War All Along?
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What I am is a moderate. A person who believes in making decisions carefully, in recognizing complexity, in not burning the house down because you’re angry at the neighbors. A person who wants others to make their own informed choices rather than be handed a script.
From the Author of The Long View From 1964
From day one, my ballroom, MY ballroom. A petulant child crying for his ballroom. Almost a month later the child coyly admits to the underground complex the shed is covering. All paid for with donations straight from somebody’s pocket, probably tucked into that additional 1.5 trillion dollar defense budget, because the underground playground is his bunker. His refuge in time of war. His hidden military complex, hospital, and I am sure gilded and lavish living quarters.
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The Ash Didn’t Disappear
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What I am is a moderate. A person who believes in making decisions carefully, in recognizing complexity, in not burning the house down because you’re angry at the neighbors. A person who wants others to make their own informed choices rather than be handed a script.
From the Author of The Long View From 1964
I walked through Dachau at seven years old. The ash was still there.
I am still here too.
And I remember everything.
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Your Grandchildren Will Search Your Name
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