Deja Vu

I have been absorbed in my annual end-of-the-year introspection and anticipation of a new year ahead. The past 12 months mostly occurred during my 70th year on the planet. There were good things: finishing my second novel, 20/20, taking an 18-day road trip with Donna down the Pacific Coast visiting friends, a wonderful Thanksgiving with my daughter’s in-laws and then my brother-in-law’s family. The tough side of the ledger has one big entry: knee replacement surgery on Sept. 13th. While my recovery has been successful, the entire effort dominated much of the second half of the year.

I’m determined to make the next year better by remembering and reasserting some basic goals and values. New Year’s resolutions never fully encompass what I’m talking about. My 2024 goals are not new, but more an updating of old desires and goals and energizing them with a new determination to dedicate myself to those goals and to keep them front of mind throughout the year. Write more, including a third novel. Improve my guitar playing. Be a better partner. Spend time with friends I care about. Waste less time.

For better or worse, these resolutions are recurring themes in my life. Thus, the title of the blog. I’ve posted a link below to a blog I wrote in July 2022, gordonmottauthor.com. I’ve also added below a quote from our family therapist, whose words unleashed my blocked desire to write fiction and start a blog. There are always excuses for why I have not been able to stick to those desires and regularly put my thoughts down on “paper.” Procrastination. Rebellion at the thought I HAVE to write to keep interest in my blog alive. Life’s curveballs and demands; a new knee, a daughter’s wedding, the small crises of daily life, keeping us fed and the house running. Fatigue over on-line battles with anti-vaxxers, Covid deniers and MAGA Trumpers. Golf. Visitors, etc, etc, etc.

I take solace in knowing that Covid did wreck havoc in my life in 2020 and 2021. Restoring some sense of purpose and normality took time. Yes, that is partly rationalization. However, our virtual lockdown in our own home from March 2020 until March 2021, when we flew to New York for our first vaccination, presented real challenges. In that year, despite our best efforts, Donna and I battled Covid infections — mine much milder than hers. We did spend more time together, without travel or socializing or anything else. But despite the inward focus, which in many ways was healthy and rejuvenating, in the end, I simply lost momentum. Not a depression per se but a loss of hope and optimism, up to that point two dependable constants in my life. The isolation often seemed like it would never end. But also, in that long, nearly two year period, two dear friends died, each loss a searing reminder of my age.

But here we are, nearly three years after that fateful realization we were living through a global pandemic. I have regained some motivation. I’m healthy again. My network of friends, here in Mexico and around the world, is thriving. Donna and I are enjoying the life we have built here.

And, in the midst of all the angst, 20/20, my second novel is written. The story follows the travails of Duncan Mount, a disgraced journalist who gets thrown into a conspiracy that threatens the future of American democracy. What better day than January 6th to announce that book will be coming soon — a propitious day also to relaunch my blog and begin reasserting my voice and my thoughts about life and the world we live in. In the weeks ahead you’ll read about sneakers, Antarctica, and my questions about the events barreling towards us in 2024.

I hope you enjoy. Best of luck with your own resolutions.

Please comment on:

You can also find all my old blogs there.

Links:

I’m Back
https://gordonmottauthor.com/2022/07/02/july-1-2022/

Quote from A Debut, May 10th, 2019
Our wonderful family therapist, Dr. Steve Fochios Sr. had asked me the most crucial question. He had heard my ramblings for years about my desire to write fiction, and my rationalizations about why it wasn’t happening. He asked me: “Do you have anything to say?” I knew I did, and in my mind, there is a dividing line before and after his question. It broke the logjam, and I began to look for the answer.

October 25, 2022

Memory is fickle. We remember some moments, and others we can’t recall. Why is that?

If we traverse a life of 70 years, that’s 3,640 weeks, 25,550 days, 613,200 hours, 36,780,000 minutes filled with life’s events and memories. I turn 70 today, Oct. 25th — which explains my interest in that timeframe. According to the website Clinical Neurologist Specialists, citing a Scientific American study from 2010, the human brain’s memory capacity is 2.5 petabytes, the equivalent of 2,560 terabytes, or 2.6 million gigabytes. So, how many petabytes, terabytes or gigabytes of information do we process in the course of 70 years? One study says we process up to 74 gigabytes a day, or nearly 2 million gigabytes in 25,550 days. To gauge what 2 million gigabytes means, consider that this MacBook Pro I’m writing on has 1TB of built-in storage, or a mere 1,024 gigabytes. A drop in the bucket. Therefore, apparently the brain is big enough to hold everything we have ever seen, touched, felt, said, and experienced. Then why can’t we remember every passing second in that life?

Okay, okay, you say, I get it. The brain is an amazing apparatus, a wondrous machine stuck on top of our skeletons that does much more than most of us even begin to tap into. Bad on me that I can’t access everything at the drop of a hat.

My point is not to suggest that we should remember everything, because we don’t and we can’t. Nor is it necessary. I don’t need to remember what I had for breakfast on June 13th, 1970 when I was not yet 18 years old. I don’t care, nor would the knowledge add anything to my current experience. That’s reality.

But why are some memories so much more potent than others?

I’m going to tell you some of mine. I hope you will tell me some of yours, too. Here’s the rule: Try to come up with memories that don’t have a photographic backup in your life. Those hard copy artifacts distort the memory of the events they capture — events like a victorious moment in your high school athletic career, your college graduation (god, I look so stoned in those pictures), your wedding, the birth of your first child, the purchase of your first house, your child’s wedding. Those are likely candidates to have been photographed. By the photos’ very existence, your brain’s memory is altered. I’m asking you to search for moments in your memory that exist outside your photographic archives. Do you want to label them peak experiences? Maybe they are. Or maybe they just touched you in some indeterminate way that permits you to summon them without any outside cues.

— A doctor’s office in São Paulo, Brazil where the corner of my eyelid was being stitched up after I, a three year old, tripped and smashed into the pointed corner of a coffee table with the orbital bone of my eye socket.

— Making out with my 19-year-old maid in Campinas, Brazil in a TV room as an almost pubescent 13-year-old boy while my parents stayed at the hospital after my father’s surgery.

— Seeing my someday-to-be wife talking to Jim Downey in the stairwell of my freshman dorm at Harvard.

— Standing in a railroad station in Bolivia as a 20-something, at 1am, high in the altiplano, and being able to read by starlight in an otherwise dark little town.

— Seeing a veil of white light on the JFK ramp leading to the airplane that was taking me to Mexico City in 1978 as a newly-assigned foreign correspondent.

— In 1981, in the dark, standing under a hideous green and orange tarpaulin lashed to the trees on the terrace of the weekend house where I was to be married the next morning, with three of my closest male friends getting ready to help haul it down.

— In a Paris bistro in 1985, watching a waiter clip a thick piece of glass siding on our banquette, and seeing it break in half next to my dinner guest facing me, slam into her head and knock her out.

— Sitting all night in a blond wood paneled birthing room at Lenox Hill hospital in 1989 while Donna labored away without success, and then in the morning hours, hearing the doctor say, she’s in distress, let’s get this baby out.

— My boss walking into my office one morning and saying, how’d you like to work on a cigar magazine.

— In my brother’s intensive care room in Washington D.C. in 1997, with the monitors blinking, the kidney machine pumping, and my sister-in-law and mother and sister standing beside him, looking into his eyes as I was leaving and saying, ‘I’ll see you on the other side.” He died the next morning.

— The moment when Donna had returned from a solo hiking trip in the Canadian Rockies and began to excitedly describe her experience, and my reflexive vision was, me, hurtling off an exposed cliffside trail into the abyss below.

— Standing at the back door of our house in Briarcliff Manor, NY, sticking the key into the door to lock it and breaking down in tears, while Donna and Liz waited in two cars in the driveway as we were leaving to drive to Wooster, Ohio for the start of Liz’s college life.

— As the light was fading in the vacant courtyard of our newly purchased, dilapidated colonial-era house in Queretaro, Mexico, seeing the sunset colors change on the old, white adobe walls and feeling the karma, that “this is the place.”

There are dozens and dozens more “moments” like those, memories that flood my head from time to time when I am feeling nostalgic, like before a 70th birthday.

With the advent of iPhone photo montages, moments without photographic evidence have become rarer. Nonetheless, digging around in your memory is a worthwhile exercise. There is a vast trove of events inside your head, and I believe, or at least suspect, that there is some merit in identifying the ones that have stood the test of time. On momentous birthdays, like a 70th, (well, it feels momentous and a bit overwhelming), it is reassuring to take a look back at where you’ve been, the things you’ve done, and how far you’ve come.

Within those unadulterated memories, there is a life. A life to remember. A life to cherish. A life to celebrate.

Oct. 15, 2022

Lake O’Hara. My fantasies of the backcountry paradise in Yoho National Park, just over the Continental Divide from Lake Louise, had kept me sane during a non-life-threatening summer illness. My desire to be there for our Sept. 2 reservation at Lake O’Hara Lodge inspired me to regain at least a bit of physical conditioning after three surgical procedures and four weeks without any exercise. I refused to let thoughts take over that I might be too weak, or not recovered enough, to hike. The fear was real.

On Sept 2, I stood in the parking lot at the bottom of the Lake O’Hara access road rising up into the mountains in front of me. Was I ready? I was there. Our luggage — my daughter Liz and her husband James and my wife Donna were on the trip too — was lined up waiting for the Lodge bus to come rolling down the road. Like magic, it appeared right on time around 9:30. 

Why do we go? Again and again and again. It was Donna’s 12th visit. My 11th, and Liz is already on her sixth trip there. James, my new son-in-law, has been there three times.

One reason is the stunning beauty. The ring of mountain peaks around Lake O’Hara, stretching down toward the Bow Valley, has been compared to the Swiss Alps. With good reason.

Parks Canada protocols also play a role. Every person who passes the hut at the bottom of the road for anything more than a day hike must have a reservation at the Lodge or at the Campground or at a small encampment known as the Elizabeth Parker Hut operated by the Alpine Club of Canada. On any given day, there are 100 people or less who have secured a space in one of those three places, and a seat space on the Lodge or Parks Canada buses both ways. You can walk in, and many do. But it’s an eight mile hike up the road (most people say it takes three hours) to try to take in as many sights as possible and then, you have to walk back down; no unauthorized camping allowed and no free ride on the buses. 

What do the access rules create? On any given day, in the more remote areas, you may see half a dozen people. On the longest round trip hike to Cathedral Prospect from the Lodge, I saw one other couple during the nearly seven-hour round trip. The semi-wilderness rules, and is not open to suggestions that the modern world should be allowed in.

The Lodge plays its own role in keeping O’Hara a paradise. Don’t get me wrong; it is not roughing it in backcountry to stay there.There are hot showers, or in my case, the tub baths. Electricity. A gourmet chef. A wine cellar well-stocked with Canadian wines. But that’s where any accommodation for outworlders ends. No internet. No TV. No radio. No telephone; well, that’s only partly true—there is a single public telephone booth down the road that takes credit cards where you can call out if there is an absolute emergency. We have even joked (more than half seriously) that the day the Lodge gets internet is the day we stop coming.

But I know how the isolation really works, why the outside world stays far away and cannot intrude. There is a shimmering veil at the bottom of the road, a fantastical barrier that separates the outside world from Lake O’Hara. If you can’t see it, or feel the magical transition that happens as you pass through the veil, (going both ways, by the way), you aren’t really seeing or feeling the wonder of Rocky Mountain backcountry. Once you succumb to the magic, you are in another world. Five or six days without any worries about what’s happening in China or Russia or Ukraine, or Washington D.C or wherever you are from. You re-emerge through the veil rejuvenated, maybe physically exhausted by the thousands of feet of vertical climbs and descents, but knowing that every vacation should make you feel this way. You can’t help but be thrilled and deeply contented with the connection to the natural beauty of Lake O’Hara. 

All behind the veil. Waiting for my next visit.

Oct. 4, 2022

I still harbor those childhood memories of endless summer days and nights, free from homework and school, playing in the woods behind our home in the country while trying to avoid my dad’s demands to mow three acres of pristine bluegrass lawn and in the evening’s glooming chasing fireflies until Mom called me in for bedtime. The idea that summer should still be a time to enjoy yourself remains a mantra. So, on a July night, the 12th to be exact, I woke up about an hour after going to sleep with an all-over body discomfort, not really pain but a deeply unsettling feeling that something wasn’t right. My anxieties kicked into hyperdrive. Sleep never really arrived that night, nor would I have a decent night’s sleep for another 30 days. I sensed that the rest of my summer plans were out the window.

This tale is not just an unveiling, or an unwelcome revelation of something intimate and personal. It also is about getting older, about the difference between having a weird abdominal pain at 30 and at 69, within days of my 70th birthday.  And it’s about how we should never stop being aware of life’s brutal reality, never forgetting or denying that from one minute to the next, everything can change.

Thirty six hours after the initial pain, I was lying in a hospital bed, a CT scan and ultrasound pinpointing a completely blocked kidney. A day later, successful surgery had removed the blockage, but because of extreme swelling, three or four other stones were left behind. Two weeks later, those were removed in New York. The entire four weeks is a blur, a whirlwind of three anesthesias and procedures. Nothing was remotely normal until a stent was removed on Aug. 12th, 30 days after my pain began. In the end, I got a clean bill of health. Recovery was more about dealing with the dull fog induced by the anesthesias and a total lack of exercise in that long month than about any long-term worries.

Yet nothing was the same, either around me or in my head. My wife’s worries were written all over her face. Hugging my daughter felt somehow more urgent, and more necessary. Dinners with friends presented a challenge to not dwell on my illness, but also to stay focused and not let my mind wander. When I saw a picture of myself taken in the middle of the episode, I looked old and drawn, not a description I would have used before. Instead of proudly trumpeting the idea I was in the best shape of life on July 11th, every step I took felt tentative, every day’s end marked by a deep, unsettling fatigue. Every middle of the night wakeup led to long stretches of dark fantasies about, well, about everything and nothing, some important, some totally trivial. I felt trapped by my anxieties, unable to brush them off or somehow resolve them.

I am keenly aware that every day people wake up with discomfort like mine and the pain turns out to be pancreatic or liver cancer, or some other much more serious disease. My wild thoughts that first night had run through all those dire outcomes, the inevitable anxiety caused by unknown origins of pain. In the wake of the experience, however, the mirror of mortality shook my usually intact sense of invulnerability, that precious terrain that let me live without paralyzing fear of death. After two years of pandemic life and the deaths of close friends, I had to admit that I had constructed rationalizations that I was doing everything to stay safe. Inevitably, the psychological toll of denial of trauma caught up with me, and caused a different kind of paralysis; it was fueled by a loss of optimism, usually a bedrock constant in my life. I was stymied at nearly every turn; writer’s block, procrastination, a lack of focus. Yet still, I externalized the ever-present trauma, boxing it into a place where I could ignore the worst outcomes being suffered by others. My simple kidney stone blockage stripped away those illusions and, despite all my proclamations of being fine and happy, I came face to face with the reality that I had been anxious and struggling to regain my pre-pandemic drive and motivation.

Although only a few short weeks have passed since those 30 lost days, I sense the walls are coming down. On a long hike on a mountainous trail in the Canadian Rockies, a trip that I had worried I wouldn’t even be able to make, I stopped feeling like a patient in recovery. I wouldn’t describe it as a new spring in my step on that 9-mile hike, but I was suddenly less worried about being weak. Upon getting home, I have started writing, diving into tasks that had been ignored for too long, devoting time again to my guitar playing and song-writing, and as an adjunct to my writing, beginning to re-imagine the plot lines of my next novel, 20/20.

Is there a lesson here? There are all the cliches: live life to the fullest every day; don’t waste time on inconsequential things; be aware of your surroundings. So yes, there are lessons, maybe ones that don’t make life’s unpredictability any less scary but that might help us prepare for life’s inevitable curveballs. And it may be too soon to declare victory over the malaise of the past two and a half years. But it’s a start. And I now believe the wake-up call of those 30 summer days will prepare me better for what’s to come.

There will be other summers. Not as many as I had ahead of me at 30. But more than some close friends of mine who aren’t with me anymore; they woke up with a pain one day and didn’t make it through the next year or simply laid their head down and didn’t wake up. I won’t ever forget, as I had forgotten on July 12th, that things can and do change in an instant. I’ve been reminded that one of the best ways to cope is to simply move forward, with that core belief in life’s possibilities. Every day.

July 17, 2022

I grew up in an evangelical Christian home. My parents were devout Christians who attended church weekly, prayed before every meal, read the Bible regularly and expected their children to do the same. In my adolescence, I professed to be a born again Christian and I enthusiastically joined groups like Young Life and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Up until college, the church was an integral part of my social life. Without dwelling on the details, I’ll say that my childhood and adolescent beliefs evolved over time into a spiritual landscape that does not, and hasn’t for decades now, included organized religion in any shape or form or denomination.

The only memory I have of politics intruding in our family’s religious life was the 1960 presidential election when I clearly remember my father’s concern over John F. Kennedy’s Catholicism, and whether it was appropriate for a U.S. president to be beholden to the Vatican or the Catholic church. But he was also a devoted Republican at the time, so it wasn’t clear if his vote was informed by religion or political affiliation. Otherwise, my parents lived their Christian values in their personal lives. In the midst of my hometown’s racial violence in 1970, my mother insisted that I invite one of my African-American basketball teammates for dinner at our home, a ranch house in the middle of a 100 percent white, middle class neighborhood. While only one example, I knew my mother, who lived to be nearly 105 years old, treated people with fairness and acceptance regardless of skin color, religious affiliation or background.

Today, my recollections run smack into the debate in the public arena about the role Christianity should have in the public life of the United States of America. Comments like Lauren Boebert’s that the “church should direct government” and that she’s “tired of this separation of church and state junk” reflect a disturbing trend in a segment of the population that shares her beliefs; since she was speaking to a Christian congregation, you can interpret her use of the word church, to mean Christian church. Even the recent Supreme Court decision allowing a high school football coach to pray (we can assume it wasn’t with a Muslim prayer rug) after games at the 50-yard line opens the door to allowing the imposition of one’s personal religious beliefs on non-believers.

One bedrock assumption of the ongoing Christian crusade polemic is that the Founding Fathers, the authors of the Declaration of Independence and subsequently of the Constitution, actually intended the fledgling nation to be guided by the Christian faith.

Those claims about the Founding Fathers are revisionism at its worst. The danger in allowing those claims to go unchallenged is clear. The hidden goal of America’s new Christian crusaders, whether you label it Christian supremacy, or Christian nationalism, is to create a quasi-theocracy in America. It’s not hyperbole to label the movement with those words. Read the movement’s own literature about homosexuals, same sex marriage, birth control, the Ten Commandments in public venues, the primacy of Jesus Christ; the role of women in marriage. Each of these attitudes run contrary to beliefs, both religious and secular, that many Americans hold.

The record is clear. Many of the Founding Fathers were deists. They believed in a divine creator, but not one which actively intervened in earthly activity. Nor did they believe the Bible was the revealed word of God, and they rejected biblical scripture as a source of religious doctrine. In accordance with their beliefs, they rejected the notion of a national religion, or any restrictions on the practice of one’s religious faith, whatever it might be. Here are some salient quotes from the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Thomas Jefferson: “Christianity neither is nor ever was a part of common law. … In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. (Personal correspondence to Dr. Thomas Cooper, Feb. 1814; Dr. Horatio Spaffard, March, 1817)

John Adams: “The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion. (as stated in the Treaty of Tripoli, which Adams signed in 1797)

James Madison: “Religion and government will both exist in greater purity the less they are mixed together.” (Letter to Edward Livingston, July 1822.)

For sure there was debate in the Constitutional Convention about the role of religion in the new Republic. But the men there were learned individuals, who knew the history of Europe and the religious conflicts that had battered the continent throughout history. They also had seen laws and attitudes in some American colonies that led to arrest and expulsion and even execution of so-called heretics.

Cognizant of the past violence in Europe and intolerance in the United States, the men writing the Constitution did agree on the wording of the 1st Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

While some argue that amendment doesn’t explicitly call for the separation of Church and State, the intention was clear. Both Jefferson and Adams considered it one of their greatest achievements, keeping the church out of government, but also the government out of churches. Today, the Christian nationalist movement seeks to undermine the original intent of those men, who constructed a framework for a nation that has survived for 246 years.

You may identify as a Christian, either ethnically as I do or as a full practicing member of the faith. You may even believe that the teachings of Jesus Christ are superior to Yaweh, Budda, or Shiva, or Mohammed. But in this country that has not, and hopefully will never, give you the right to impose your faith’s principles on others.

In fact, in all the world’s major religions, there is a simple and wonderful premise: treat others as you would want to be treated. The golden rule: that is universal. If you call yourself a Christian, when you start vilifying others based for their sexuality, their skin color, their politics, you are violating one of the basic tenets of your own faith.

I’m back

I have been silent. For too long.

There were more than enough extenuating circumstances to rationalize my retreat from public debates. Covid infections for me and my wife, hers more serious than mine. A slow recovery with long-covid symptoms before our vaccinations, plus repeated clashes with Covid deniers. The deaths of two friends, — both peers and colleagues for more than 40 years, each one about a year apart — were depressing reminders of getting older. Fatigue from futile Facebook debates with Trump-addled brains before and up to and after the 2020 election. All combined into a seething cauldron of self-doubt, depression and latent anger about the state of the world, while trying to find meaning in being a writer. Instead of believing in the possibilities, I questioned whether I had anything to say, or whether it would matter even if I did.

I had a moment of clarity in the midst of my struggles; a friend of mine, upon seeing me for the first time since before the pandemic last October, said, “Hi. Gee, you’re really a Facebook bully.” I have just recently thanked him for the comment because it brought me to my senses, at least temporarily. I pulled the plug on 99 percent of my political commentary on FB, stopped getting upset at the absurdities about the election and Covid posted by people who I once thought were intelligent human beings and tried to devote time to things that made me feel better: Playing my guitar and writing music; Cooking at a higher level of competency and creativity; Devoting more consistent time to my always problematic golf game; Preparing for my daughter’s wedding last year; Getting in the best shape I have been in since we lived in Paris in the late 80s. In some ways, the hiatus has been restorative and beneficial.

But something has been missing. And it’s gone on too long. On top of everything else, having writer’s block or at least a fear of public exposition of my thoughts, has also interfered with my second novel, 20/20. I know it’s time to put the anxieties in the rear view mirror, smash through the writer’s block and get moving forward again. Frankly, the advent of my 70th birthday in a few months is as much a motivation as anything; times a wastin’ as they say.

This is not the relaunch of my Facebook wars. Just a return to putting my thoughts down, and publishing them in my blog, on gordonmottauthor.com — the link will take you directly to the site. Once there, I will also have a FOLLOW button where you can input your email, and get alerts when I publish the next one. If you want to read something other than the headline, or first sentence, you’ll have to visit the site; I also will always post the link. I haven’t set a schedule yet, or topics, but I can assure you I won’t be publishing more than two a month. Of course, full disclosure here, that helps me because that website is also the primary vehicle to tout my fiction: 10/10 is still available. I even can deliver signed copies, if anyone desires; just let me know in the comments section and I’ll be in touch. 20/20 is underway, slowly, with some re-imagining of the narrative to make it more personal and coincidentally more current. I keep being reminded of Thomas Wolfe’s, “You Can’t Go Home Again” as I try to find a narrative vein that speaks to me, and maybe universally, to all of us. But from the seeds of our youth, perhaps come insight into our present. From time to time, I’ll publish finished excerpts.

Here’s to building a more perfect union. Now is not the time to stay silent.

Dissecting 2000 Mules: An Editor’s Perspective

I was challenged to watch Dinesh D’Souza’s documentary, 2000 Mules. The film purports to reveal a nationwide conspiracy in which hundreds and hundreds of people were coordinated to deliver illegal ballots to election drop boxes. The documentary focuses on five battleground states — Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona. The premise is this coordinated effort of submitting illegal ballots would have shifted the election from Joe Biden to then president Donald J. Trump. The key investigative tools, per the documentary’s producers, were the purchase of 4 trillion data bytes of geo-location cellphone data in those states in the six weeks preceding the Nov. 5 election, and then publicly availability video surveillance of ballot drop boxes also in those five states.

Who is behind the film?

Dinesh D’Souza is the creator and the narrator; he is a well-known conservative writer and film maker who has promoted various conspiracy theories over the years. He is an author with several controversial books including The End of Racism (“In summary, the American slave was treated like property, which is to say, pretty well.”), and The Roots of Obama’s Rage, a psychological analysis of the former president based on his childhood and his relationship with his father and a 2006 book titled The Enemy at Home, which wove a narrative about how the American liberal left was responsible for 9/11. Since the election of Donald Trump, he has been an ardent defender of the former president.

True the Vote, which describes itself as an election integrity organization, is identified as the executive producer of the film. The founder of True the Vote is Catherine Engelbrecht, a conservative activist with a specific interest in election integrity. She is seen in the film endorsing the validity of the cellphone data. It has been noted in published reports that the data purchase amounted to $2 million (Associated Press reporting) , and was paid for by True the Vote. Greg Phillips is a self-identified election integrity expert, and his firm conducted the bulk of the cellphone data analysis for True the Vote; he is also a board member of True the Vote. I could not find any public information of how much the film cost, but the average cost of documentaries runs from $1000 up to $10,000 per minute of finished product (newbiefilmschool.com), the higher estimate based on a film with production values that could be shown in movie theaters, and not just on YouTube. The cost of the film would be range from $2.1 million to $2.6 million; both numbers include the $2 million for the geodata.

I approached watching this documentary as a civic duty, to be informed about the essence of the Stop the Steal movement, which since Nov. 5 2020, has been in search of an explanation of how Trump lost the election. 2000 Mules does explore new ground in its attempt to find voter fraud. However it’s reporting needs to be judged against standards of investigative journalism. I kept a notepad handy, as if I were listening to a reporter bringing a story to my desk and pushing for immediate publication.

Here are some of those notes, which come from my own study of the 2020 election, and the Trump phenomenon, and questions that arose during my viewing.

— Any notion of balance is absent. Charlie Kirk (Turning Point USA), Sebastian Gorka, Larry Elder and Dennis Prager sit on the far right spectrum of today’s conservative ideologues. They were the panel that, in the documentary’s timeline, were interviewed before they saw the documentary and then again after watching it. D’Souza also is nowhere near the center of the political spectrum; he has been a Trump apologist almost since the beginning, and a fierce opponent of the Democratic Party for decades.

— The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, has conducted its own analysis of voter fraud for decades, and has only found 1357 provable cases in review of nearly 40 years of elections. One of the people in the documentary is a current employee of The Heritage Foundation; this previous research is never mentioned, and he is quoted saying fraud could be a problem. But offers no proof.

— Accepts prima facie that geo-tracking data is accurate.

— Asserts ballot harvesters were paid. Who paid them? Who coordinated their efforts? Where are the interviews with some of the 2000 mules? There’s one obscured face of a woman in Arizona, and she’s not a harvester; she was asked to make the deposit of ballots already collected by someone else.

— Liberal non profits involved in the deception. Which ones? Same in each city? (Not one institution is identified)

— Ballot harvesting is an illegal activity. Is it? Cite laws and regulations. (In this case, I’ll answer my own question…it is a false assertion. Only one state totally prohibits any form of “ballot harvesting” or the collection of ballots to be delivered by 3rd parties. 27 states allow it in many specified instances; others restrict it to family members, or caregivers, the latter often defined as nursing home staff.)

— Videos are mostly from fall of 2020, and possibly explains people wearing latex gloves…height of Covid epidemic when many people were doing grocery shopping with latex gloves on. Why not make this more obvious instead of citing it only as a proof of nefarious activity to eliminate fingerprints on the ballots.

— Video of man delivering ballots on bicycle and then stopping to take a picture, cited as evidence of his need to prove his deposit so he could be paid. (Ed. Note: In Philadelphia, the election commission encouraged voters to take pics of their ballot drops and post them on social media to encourage turnout). We don’t know where this bicycle guy was filmed.

— Why doesn’t film explain that in every state, every absentee ballot and every mail in ballot has a signature that is matched to voting records…very deceptively suggests than any ballot received in a ballot box is suspect…simply not true… ballots from drop boxes are generally subjected to a rigorous verification. The signature is subject to examination and verification. Please explain the lack of clarification, and why the discrepancy.

— Simply excise the dubious assertions about someone delivering ballots at 3am…I guess no one on the film has ever worked an overnight shift, or even a night shift. There’s no proof of anything suspicious just because it took place in the wee hours.

Those would have been my first observations and questions to the reporter. But to cross the hurdle for publication, the story needs this:
— Interviews with mules, not one or two, but dozens spread across all five states to show the extent of the conspiracy and the proof it was coordinated.
— Proof of coordination and source of money to pay ballot harvesters..a conspiracy of this size didn’t just happen, and wouldn’t be cheap…their own $10 estimate (they stipulate it could be more or less) means that it would take hundreds of thousands of dollars to have shifted the election. (In Pennsylvania alone, the vote margin was more than 75,000 votes in Biden’s favor, or $750,000 in that state alone.)
—Interview with geo-data analysts to provide credibility to the 2000 mules assertions about that data. Story must have a countervailing point to the main assertion that the data is valid; there are many.
—Interview people whose phones were identified as having met the threshold of 10x visits in a 24 hour period to ballot boxes (same as Mule interviews), but find someone who maybe drove back and forth on one of those days for any other possible reason. Determine other possible causes for the geodata results.
— It is simply inconceivable in the year 2022 that with a conspiracy of this magnitude and the associated outcome affecting a presidential election, someone wouldn’t have had second thoughts and come forward. Look at Jan. 6; people involved have revealed that it wasn’t a spontaneous outpouring of good feelings on a tourist visit to Capitol Hill. Find me someone behind the whole operation, a coordinator, a leader, a mastermind.

Where are the mules?

Those are some of my questions —a few but not all — that I would have been scribbling in the margins with my red editor’s pencil. Someone might argue I was still wrong, but the questions are valid, and demonstrate some of the gaping holes in the 2000 Mules narrative. Here are links to people with more time, and possibly full time jobs to do fact-checks. The bottom line is pretty simple: it does not meet the standards of credible investigative journalism. There are serious gaps in the reporting. I strongly suggest reading these analyses too; they are much more complete than my observations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_Mules (this is a compendium of many articles about the documentary)

Finally, after I told the the person who encouraged me to watch 2000 Mules that I had fulfilled his challenge to me, I asked if he was watching the Jan. 6 hearings. His only comeback was to say that the hearings were proving Trump supporters had been duped by government agents and provocateurs into storming the Capitol. That statement, on top of his belief that 2000 Mules proves election fraud against Trump, reveals an unstinting, and uncritical point of view.

After the six hearings from the U.S. Congressional Jan. 6th committee, I can’t imagine anyone believing that the events of Jan. 6th, 2021 were just a spontaneous and peaceful political protest—the evidence and testimony confirms, if nothing else, that the day’s events were premeditated and knowledge of those plans extended into the oval office. Any attempt to rationalize those day’s events any other way simply ignores the facts.

And no documentary can provide the foundation for the attack on the Republic that took place on Jan .6th. In the end, that is what 2000 Mules is about: a justification for using any means to overturn the election. It does not meet the standards of basic journalism rules, and it fails to provide any basis for that justification. That is why it needs to be challenged.

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April 6, 2020

Days Like This

My mother told me long ago that I came out of her womb with a smile on my face. It’s an image that has followed me through my life. Friends, colleagues, new acquaintances often remark, “Why are you always smiling?” It’s just me. I wake up 99 days out of 100 with a smile, looking forward to the day ahead with a sense of joy, of happiness, of anticipation.

My smile wasn’t there today. A foreboding had wormed its way inside my psyche Sunday night. An all-body anxiety that left me on edge, even before mucking around in the fictional terrors of the Roy family in Succession. Bedtime didn’t ease the feeling. I couldn’t find my peaceful place, where with a half a dozen deep breaths, a quick day-dream equivalent of counting sheep and I’m usually fast asleep. I tossed and turned, feeling bloated, swollen, heart racing. I imagined I heard every song of our normal two-hour Spotify Bedtime 1 play list. That wasn’t true because when I drifted back into a semi-conscious mode, the room was silent. But semi-conscious quickly morphed into full panic mode.

Was I hot? Did I have one of my patented, sinus infection induced night sweats? Was I finally being hammered by the onset of the fear we are all living with: Covid-19 was in my house, invading my body. Had that guy who coughed 20 feet away while we were on an early morning walk six days ago infected me? Had I not sterilized my pants after a one block foray to the nearby market to buy an avocado four days ago? Why had we gone out last weekend for a walk without masks? The cascading torrent of paranoid questions wouldn’t let up. Finally, I swung my legs out from under the covers and found a bathrobe, quietly unlatching the bedroom door and slipping outside toward the kitchen where I had left the thermometer, a tool I’d been finding solace in at least once a day.

For 10 minutes I sat at the kitchen island, thermometer stuck under my tongue waiting for the dreaded outcome: A fever and the start of medical emergency for an at risk 67-year-old man. But it was not to be. The thermometer read 97.6. There was no night sweat. There was no headache. I finally took some deep breaths and headed back to the bedroom. (I mercifully had not awakened my wife who slept soundly throughout my panic). I found a comfortable position, curled up a little on my right side, and quickly fell asleep for another four hours.

But my smile wasn’t there this morning. I couldn’t escape the realization that there were going to be more days like this; not really a fair nod to Van Morrison’s song, which is actually more upbeat than my mood. But I can feel the panic subsiding. I can feel the hope rising up through gloom. I can feel the rose-colored hues start to seep into my thoughts.

I’m sure we’re all riding the roller coaster. Optimists like me need to accept that the anxiety is going to crush us sometimes. Embrace it. Live with it. Then let it go. Some days will be better than others. Some days, the world will seem saner. Some days, the flood of ignorance and stupidity will inexorably drag me into a funk.

So, there will be days like this when the smile isn’t there. But the smile will win out. I’m sure of that.

March 24, 2020

Imagine

            Alternate universes. Different realities. How about a quick look at a hypothetical reality of what might have been.

            Imagine a world that when the first cases surfaced in Wuhan, China in late 2019, the Chinese government felt comfortable enough to immediately bring in the World Health Organization, and maybe even a fully-funded Center for Disease Control pandemic team, to investigate what was happening. What if instead of thousands of Wuhan residents traveling by air in the first month after the first case, immediate restrictions were placed on travel and mass testing was begun, using tests that had been developed and stockpiled around the globe during the previous 10 years, since the SARS and H1N1 outbreaks.

            Imagine a global summit on Jan. 15^th, 2020 when it was already clear that a coronavirus had crossed the human/animal barrier and appeared to be highly contagious, with catastrophic outcomes in certain vulnerable populations with a pandemic profile for the spread. Imagine a consensus among the leaders of the G-7, G-8, or G-20 simultaneously speaking directly to a world audience explaining the science behind their warning. Imagine them asking everyone to start simple sanitary precautions based on the best information at the time, which by that point, would have been information that had been vetted by independent organizations – like the WHO, the CDC and pandemic teams from other nations.

            Imagine a global mobilization in January to manufacture and stockpile masks, sanitary wipes and bleach to set up repositories around the globe, maybe under the auspices of the United Nations, or a private non-profit likes Medicins San Frontieres, to distribute the supplies as needed to nations facing exponential growth of infections. Imagine a concerted global effort to find ventilators, and to order every manufacturing firm capable of producing them to go on war-footing to build as many as they could in as short a time as possible, with a global fund supported and funded by every world government to pay for the effort. Unused ones would be preserved for future outbreaks.

            Imagine instructions issued worldwide to airlines and transportation companies to institute aggressive cleaning protocols of their equipment. Imagine people getting tested in the millions on a global scale at the first sign of infection.

            Imagine all that.

What we don’t have to imagine anymore in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic is an absolute truth: the world is an interconnected network of people and commerce. It has been that way for the past three decades, at least, if not longer. The people of the world move en mass every day. The goods that they buy come from every corner of the globe, and even if a product says, Made in the U.S.A, or Made in China, or Made in India, or Made in Mexico, the parts and materials used in nearly every item comes from all over the world, often produced through “just in time” inventories. We have all benefitted from that global reality, our goods being more affordable than they would otherwise be. There is no going back. To argue that we can return to a build everything at home policy is to ignore the fundamentals of our democratic, capitalist society.

But imagine a world where we all agreed that our fate is intricately tied to every other people’s and nation’s fate. If we can’t handle a relatively simple threat like a virus, imagine what happens if we learn an asteroid is on a collision path, or that a supervolcano, like the one under Yellowstone Park, is about to blow, or we suddenly are actually visited by a hostile alien culture. The only one of those potential cataclysmic events that hasn’t happened in the history of the world is the last one.

Imagine a world where we didn’t have to guess what to do when one of those threats emerges.

Imagine.