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What Family Rifts at Funerals can Teach Us About Pardoning Presidents

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Exhibit A of Step Two Behavior

Watching the coverage of the death of Elizabeth II, two questions seem to be on a constant loop. The first is political: “How will Charles change the monarchy?” The second is personal: “Will the funeral heal the rift between Harry and William/Charles/the rest of the family?” The discussions that follow, between television anchors, reporters, and “royal watchers” have provided me with great amusement. “Oh look: Charles said something nice about Harry and Meghan in his first broadcast after the Queen’s death! Perhaps all is well again!!” The wishfulness of the discussion — “Surely the funeral of their beloved mother/grandmother will bring the family together, and they can heal from the past unpleasantness” — says much more about the hopes that these media folks have and much less about the reality of how a family torn apart acts as a family funeral approaches.

As a pastor for more than three decades, I’ve never done a royal funeral, but I’ve done plenty of regular funerals, including those of matriarchs who had presided over a divided family. Most of the time, what I’ve seen is that either (a) the family members manage to sit on their frustrations with one another for a week or so as the funeral goes forward, and then they return to their earlier fighting, or (b) the funeral intensifies the fighting, as they argue about the decisions made around the funeral itself. Occasionally, the funeral does help to begin a healing process, as folks who have not seen “those monsters” in years are now in the same room for the first time again, and they realize that these other folks aren’t the monsters they have seen them to be in the past. It doesn’t happen five minutes after the burial, but with a willingness to work on both sides, healing is possible. But it sure isn’t the magic “If only Harry and William can sit next to each other at the funeral, everything will be fixed!” that so many commentators are looking for.

Which brings me to the other crazy question I’ve seen popping up more and more often between anchors, reporters, and political pundits. This is the question posed by Chuck Todd that NBC chose to highlight as they tease the Meet The Press interview with VP Kamala Harris that airs in full tomorrow:

Let me try to go to 60,000 feet. What do you say to the argument that it would be too divisive to the country to prosecute a former president?

Earth to Chuck Todd, and anyone else who asks this question: the country *is* deeply divided already.

Giving Trump a pass to “avoid division” is like that scenario (a) at the family funeral, except you are betting that everyone can sit on their frustrations not for a week but forever. Turning the question around — “Would it be too divisive to the country to give a former president a pass for illegal behavior?” — ought to make it clear how silly both questions are.

Step One in dealing with divisions — either at a family funeral or in national politics — is admitting your family/nation is already divided.

As an interim pastor, I work with congregations whose previous pastor has left. Maybe that pastor retired, died, took a new call elsewhere, or was run out of town on a rail. One of the things I often have to help the congregation deal with is conflict, either between the old pastor and the members, or between the members themselves. Whenever I hear “Yes, we had divisions, but now that the old pastor is gone, everything is just fine now” I have to figure out how get them to pull their heads out of the sand. “What’s going to happen when you disagree with your next pastor?” I ask them, knowing that for the immediate future, I am that next pastor. “What do you have to say to the folks around here who loved that old pastor and blame you for running that pastor off?”

Within the House of Windsor, simply coming up with the right seating chart at the funeral for Elizabeth will not wash away the pain that led the Duke and Duchess of Sussex to withdraw from royal duties and decamp to the US. Similarly, pardoning Trump, either by choosing not to prosecute or by an act of President Biden, will not heal the nation either.

What *will* help both the House of Windsor and the United States is to admit that divisions already exist.

Step Two in dealing with divisions, then, is to explore that divided reality. What, specifically, does that painful divided reality look like? What are the presenting issues, that anyone can see at the surface? What are the underlying issues, that lie deeper down, at the heart of the trouble? What are the triggers, that bring all that buried pain out into the open again? How is everyone being hurt by these divisions?

Looking at all that is not easy. It requires a willingness to dig into a painful past, to admit to past bad behavior (your own as well as that of others), and to accept just how bad things have gotten for everyone involved. Until you do that, all you are doing is papering over division and pretending things aren’t that bad.

In the US, the arguments about race and the causes of the Civil War are a perfect illustration of this. So long as a non-trivial part of the country denies that the Civil War was about slavery (“it was the war of Northern Aggression, fought over state’s rights”), our country will never be able to fully deal with how race continues to divide our country today. If you don’t think racism divides our country today, please go back to step one and try again.

Only when the divided congregation or family or nation has done the hard work of examining its own ugly past are they ready to move to Step Three.

Step Three is to look at what you’d like the future to be. What would a healthy House of Windsor look like? How would members treat one another, in ways that are different than what caused the fractures in the past? What would a healthy United States of America look like? How would those with different political views treat one another, in ways that are different from what caused the fractures in the past?

Step Four, then, is to figure out how to get to that future. That’s a conversation about rules, roles, and responsibilities, with unstated assumptions put out in the open and mixed expectations clarified. It’s about crafting behavior that rebuild trust, dignity, and belonging for everyone involved.

The big lesson in all of this is that THERE IS NO SHORTCUT.

You can’t just jump to step four, without doing all the work of the other three steps. You can try, but you’re just sticking your fingers in your ears and singing “La la la – I can’t hear you.” You don’t need to take my word for this. Just look at the House of Windsor.

When the Duke and Duchess of Sussex announced they were leaving their royal roles behind, that was Step One behavior. “Our family is painfully divided.” No more smiling masks, no more pretending all is well, and no more trying to ignore the pain.

When they sat down for their interview with Oprah, that was Step Two behavior. “Here’s what happened, at least from our point of view.”

Ever since then, the royal family had various private conversations to sort things out further, including such things as whether Harry and Meghan would be part of the Platinum Jubilee celebration last summer. (The answers at that time were that they were included in small family gatherings, but not the big public ones.) Now they are having similar conversations around the Queen’s funeral and the coming coronation ceremony that will follow in a few months. This is all Step Three and Step Four behavior.

To the extent that things are getting better for the House of Windsor, it’s because they’ve been working hard at Steps One through Three, not that they simply came together magically at a funeral and jumped to Step Four.

The US political press and political actors could learn a lot from the House of Windsor. Those who worry about prosecuting a past president need to recognize that this doesn’t cause division, but is a step along the way to healing – part of the hard work of Step Two that explores the divided reality in all its painful, ugly depth. The work of the January 6 Committee in the House of Representatives is Step Two behavior, and so is the work of the DOJ to investigate possible criminal behavior of the former president and his minions.

Until we as a nation are willing to honestly look at our ugly reality, we will never heal.

 

The Lesson Marina Ovsyannikova Offers to Chuck Todd and Lester Holt

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Yesterday, an editor at Russia’s official Channel One news, Marina Ovsyannikova, came onto a live broadcast and held up a sign condemning Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Predictably, she was quickly detained; thus far, her attorneys have been unable to locate her (though one outlet has said she’ll be charged under Russia’s new crackdown law).

Shortly after her detention, a pre-recorded video was released, in which she explained her actions. She spoke of the shame she feels about her past involvement in Putin’s lies.

What is happening right now in Ukraine is a crime and Russia is the aggressor. And the responsibility for this aggression lies on the conscience of only one person. This man is Vladimir Putin. My father is Ukrainian. My mother is Russian. And they were never enemies. And this necklace on my neck is a symbol of the fact that Russia must immediately stop the fratricidal war and then our brotherly peoples will still be able to reconcile.

Unfortunately, in recent years I have been working on Channel One, working for Kremlin’s propaganda. And I am very ashamed of it. I am ashamed that I was letting them tell those lies from the screen. I’m ashamed that I allowed to “zombify” the Russian people.

We kept silent in 2014, when all this was just in the beginning. We didn’t go to rallies when the Kremlin poisoned Navalny. We just silently watched this inhumane regime.

And now the whole world has turned away from us, and even 10 generations of our descendants will not be enough to wash away the shame of this fratricidal war. We are Russian people — thoughtful and smart. It’s up to us to stop this madness. Come out to rallies. Don’t be afraid of anything. They can’t imprison all of us.

It was an incredibly brave — and because she planned her actions in advance — well-executed protest.

But make no mistake. Ovsyannikova is not, like another brave journalist who spoke up this week, Yevgenia Albats, someone who has criticized the regime in the past, someone whose witness now is a continuation of years of brave reporting.

Rather, Ovsyannikova is someone who, a profile describes, “was a cog in a big machine of Channel One’s news production.” She was part of the the production of official truth. And as she describes, hers is the lesson of regret for that complicity, someone who will forever own a part of Putin’s crimes because she took the comfortable route of contributing to and participating in Putin’s exercise of power. She will almost certainly pay a stiff price for her speech, but she is also someone who did nothing, up till now, as Putin kept raising the price of speaking freely.

While Ovsyannikova’s protest will likely resonate for some time, I would hope that complicit journalists in countries where it’s not too late to defend democracy reflect seriously on Ovsyannikova’s shame. Even as Russia rains bombs down on Ukraine, journalists like Chuck Todd and Lester Holt invited Bill Barr onto their TV to tell lies about Russia’s attack on democracy in the United States, to tell lies about Trump’s extortion of Ukraine, to tell lies about his role in an attack on democracy. Like Ovsyannikova, Todd and Holt sit, comfortable, polished, and complicit, as Barr told lies that were a direct attack on democracy and rule of law.

And like Ovsyannikova, they are doing nothing to rebut the lies of authoritarianism before it’s too late.

Update: Ovsyannikova has surfaced and is thus far facing only administrative crimes, so days, not years, in jail.

Update: Ovsyannikova was fined 30,000 rubles and released, but that apparently only covers the social media video, not the protest on TV.

What Real Voters Think about Impeachment at Grand Rapids’ Brewery Vivant

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Yesterday, Meet the Press did what it billed as a “focus group,” in one of five counties it predicts will decide the 2020 election (the full clip starts at 31:00). That county is Kent County, where I live. As a slew of outlets (including CJR) and individuals have noted, the sample of voters was irresponsibly unrepresentative of voters in this county. Yes, the county as a whole is very white, but the white Republicans included in the panel are far more affluent than the norm in the county (which has a median household income of $57,000).

Worse still, Meet the Press staged the “focus group” in my neighborhood brewpub, Brewery Vivant (though, predictably, none of the panelists were enjoying its superb beer), which is one of my local haunts.

What pissed me off the most is that Chuck Todd mispronounced the name of the brewery, “Vie-vant,” rather than “Vee-vant,” as if Todd has been stuck inside the Beltway for so long he doesn’t know what real life is like anymore.

And so I took matters into my own hands. With state political reporter Nick Manes and video from Carl Morrison, I decided to interview six totally random people at Brewery Vivant. To be sure, this panel is only somewhat more representative than NBC’s. The neighborhood is a liberal hotspot, even in the city as a whole, so all but one of the people we spoke with voted for Hillary in 2016. And while the people we interviewed weren’t as rich as the partner of the city’s largest law firm interviewed by Meet the Press, the neighborhood is still more affluent than the city or county. The neighborhood is predominantly white (though gets more diverse quickly just two blocks south). So these interviews aren’t meant to capture what swing voters think about impeachment or what a real cross-sample think, just what real people who could normally be found at Brewery Vivant think about it.

I’m going to post the six interviews without commentary, as I think all six offer thoughtful comment.

Chris

Nate

Jessica

Margaret

Kelly

Mark

Talking Heads Trash Talk

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As I, er, complained of in the Khashoggi post, a talking head came to my hood Wednesday to “engage”. That was Chuck Todd and Meet The Press. It was a sham. Most all decent seats were RSVP’d or assigned to news people. There was nothing, and I mean nothing, in it for people that actually live in this part of Phoenix. Yes, I am still bitter, and what a joke that stunt was. Oh well whatchagonnado? So have a better bit of Talking Heads.

But now we are on to the weekend and real trash talk. First off, playoff baseball is the only really great baseball and it is going on. The Sawx have polished off the Stros with a little help from a blind umpire. Probably would have anyway if they can light up Justin Verlander, but still. But they are on to the Series. Much more interesting is the Brew Crew clocking in with a huge game six win against the Dodgers. That sets up a win or go home game seven in Milwaukee tonight. October baseball does not get any better than that. Must see TV.

Not sure there has ever been a better back to back SNF and MNF games than the Chefs/Pats and then Packers/Niners. Woof! This week the Pats play the Bears, who are looking far better than expected. I’ll still take the Pats, but the game is at Soldier Field, so you never know. Denver just blew up the hapless Cards on Thursday night, and the Cards promptly fired their OC Mike McCoy. And he deserved to be fired. Byron Leftwich will apparently be the defacto OC for the rest of the season, and that should be an improvement, but hard to see any salvation for Arizona this year. Buffalo at the Colts should be terrible. Cleveland at Tampa Bay should be more interesting with Winston back in the saddle after his suspension for molesting an Uber driver here in Scottsdale. Lions at Miami is notable. Lions are underperforming, and Miami over performing, even with Brock Osweiller apparently at QB for a couple of more weeks while Tannehill mends. No idea which way to go on that. Saints at Ravens much the same, though it sure feels like Nawlins is on a roll. The Bungles have been more consistent this year, but hard to see them winning in KC against a group of pissed off Chefs. Giants at Atlanta is just embarrassing, how did that dreck get scheduled for MNF??

And in the student athlete section for today, the most interesting game appears to be Oregon at Washington State. Both teams are 5-1 and have high powered offenses, it could be really fun. Michigan is in East Lansing to face Sparty, and the game is already underway. The Bo Merlots are clear favorites, but Sparty is plucky! In a shout out to Richard Taylor, Kentucky, at a shocking 5-1 has a great shot at early bowl eligibility hosting Vanderbilt. The Commodores are not as bad as their record though, so it will not be easy. LSU should take care of Mississippi State at home in Baton Rouge. Rosalind’s Stanford Trees already beat ASU on Thursday night and Jim’s Gators are off today.

UPDATE: This is really bad of me, but I did not even originally mention that the United States Grand Prix is this week in Austin Texas at the Circuit of the Americas. Frankly, the F1 Circus has gotten so boring I have a hard time paying attention anymore. Thankfully, commenter “J” woke me up. I will say that ESPN taking over coverage and basically just streaming Sky F1 has been an improvement over NBC Sports, but it is depressing that more is not featured in the States for the USGP.

Do people who are not die hard F1 fans even know the USGP is happening this weekend? And, yes, the battle for the championship that seemed so promising earlier in the season is done. Sadly. Another boring championship looms for the loathsome Lewis Hamilton. Someday there will be a real battle again.

Okay, this ain’t no party and it sure ain’t no disco. Stop fooling around and get trash talking.

Meet the Press: 12 Years of Unchallenged Cheney Claims about Iraq and Al Qaeda

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Chuck Todd figured the best way to engage in journalism after the release of the Torture Report was not to invite one of the many interrogators who objected to torture or, having performed it, learned that it damaged them as much as the detainee (Kudos to ABC and CNN for having done so), but instead to invite Dick Cheney on to defend anal rape (which Todd did not call anal rape).

And while Todd had a Tim Russert style gotcha — Dick Cheney predicting 20 years ago that overthrowing Saddam would lead to the disintegration of Iraq and untold chaos — when Dick Cheney explained that 9/11 changed that earlier analysis, Todd offered the most impotent rebuttal, noting that the report undermines that claim, without doing any of several things:

  • Rather than engaging in “report says he says” two side false equivalency, point out that the evidence — the facts — refute that
  • Pointing out the new evidence, offered by Carl Levin this week, that Cheney had knowingly and repeatedly lied on Meet the Press about this topic
  • Reminding Cheney that CIA and DOD set off to find a way to “exploit,” not just “interrogate” detainees, and on the measure of producing false confessions to be used propaganda, the torture was a key part of starting an illegal war that led to the death of 4,000 Americans and untold Iraqis

Todd, of course, did none of those things.

I guess Meet the Press believes they’ll return to the glory of the Tim Russert era if they do the same thing Tim Russert did in his last years, offer Cheney a platform to lie and lie and lie.

For 12 years now, Meet the Press has been willing platform for unchallenged Dick Cheney lies.

Ron Wyden, Refusing to Play Prosecutor, Says We Need to Ban Dragnet Collection of Purchase Records

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Meet the Press continues to spew absolute idiocy regarding the Snowden leaks. In an attempt to get Ron Wyden to call Edward Snowden a criminal today, Chuck Todd suggested because Wyden is a Senator he has the authority to decide who gets prosecuted or not.

Todd: Where are you on Snowden? Is he whistleblower? Is he a criminal? And if he’s brought back to the United States, should charges be brought up against him?

Wyden: Chuck, I decided a long time ago if somebody was charged criminally I wasn’t going to be just doing running commentary. But the bottom line is this is a debate that shouldn’t have started that way, it should have started with the House leadership– [interrupting]

Todd: But did he commit a crime? Did he commit a crime?

Wyden: I think that’s something for lawyers–

Todd: You’re in the United States Senate! You have the–you can’t tell me whether he committed a crime?!

Wyden: I’m not a prosecutor, I’m not a prosecutor. And I can tell you years ago in the House I asked the Tobacco executives whether nicotine was addictive, they were under oath, they said no, and the prosecutors said they couldn’t prove intent. Here’s what the bottom line is for me. The American people deserve straight information from the intelligence leadership. If the American people don’t get it, you can bet there’ll be other situations like this.

It must be tedious for Todd that the Fifth and Sixth Amendments might inhibit his ability to sow controversy on a Sunday show, but they nominally exist in this country.

And the rush to force Wyden to convict Snowden led him to ignore what Wyden actually said.

When Todd asked Wyden, the Senator described some other things that needed fixed. In addition to ending the bulk collection of phone records right away, Wyden said,

  • We’ve got to fix this back door search loophole in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
  • We ought to ban all dragnet surveillance on law abiding Americans–not just phone records, but also medical records, purchases and others

Todd interrupted Wyden as he talked about back door searches to prove he didn’t know what the fuck Wyden was talking about (he believed it entailed getting records without court review in an emergency). Later, having been told that the government was reading the emails of innocent Americans without a warrant and possibly collecting bulk records of their purchases, but proven ignorant about what that means, he asked Wyden if there was anything else that would make us feel insecure about our privacy.

Ron Wyden implied today that the government is collecting bulk records of our purchases (almost certainly in search of our beauty supply and pressure cooker purchases).

But revealing critical details like this is not what Chuck Todd believes Senators are for. Their job is to determine guilt or innocence on the Sunday shows.

What If Big Media Became a Systemic Risk?

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During today’s hearing, in the context of asking why the Administration was somewhat urgently pressing its proposal for systemic wind-down authority first, John Campbell (R-CA) asked Tim Geithner whether there were other non-banks that constituted systemic risks that might fail.

TG: In context of proposals for more accountability. They need to be viewed together. We’ll work with committee on best legislative vehicle. Understand can’t do this piecemeal. 

Campbell: Why move on this separately. Are you expecting additional non-bank failures.

TG: [Again no real answer]  It would be in the interest of the country to make sure we’ve got broader rules. Less costly for the taxpayer.

Geithner pretty pointedly didn’t answer that question, which doesn’t reassure me that there’s not another AIG out there.

Which is why I find it interesting that Ed Royce (R-CA) brought up one of the other entities that–like AIG–chose to be regulated by the Office of Thrift Supervision rather than a stricter European regulator: GE.

GE held a panicked investor meeting last week to lay out the status of GE Capital, and has failed to meet a number of recent promises.

Shortly before announcing first-quarter earnings in 2008, [Jeff] Immelt—who was not at the Mar. 19 session—said the quarter’s results were "in the bag," only to miss the quarter’s number significantly.

Then last fall, Immelt said the company would not need to raise new capital—not long before it sold $3 billion in preferred stock to Warren Buffett and announced plans to offer at least $12 billion in stock to the public. More recently, GE slashed its dividend 68% for the second half of 2009, following months of stating that it would maintain its dividend for the year.

And, as happened to AIG last year, ratings agencies have been cutting GE’s credit rating.

Oh, and there’s that bit about GE’s media employees being asked to put off raises for a while.

Now, at least some observers are advising not to be too concerned about GE–so I will assume that Royce was presenting a scary hypothetical rather than predicting the demise of GE. And I will take it as Royce presented it–a big what if?

What if the world’s largest non-bank finance company attached to the arms and lightbulb manufacturer attached to one of the biggest media companies in the US were considered a risk to our finance system? What if FDIC and Treasury and the Fed grew worried that NBC’s parent company was sinking under the weight of GE Capital’s defaulting loans and started thinking about "resolving" it? Read more →

Did Chuck Todd Ask about Sacrifice because He’s Been Asked to Sacrifice?

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This might explain why Chuck Todd was so hot to call for sacrifice the other night:

NBC News has instituted an across-the-board freeze on raises for its executives and talent, even those with contracts guaranteeing them salary bumps.

A tipster tells us that NBC News—and probably all of NBC Universal, though we’re not sure—is discreetly calling around and asking its on-air and off-air employees to take one for the team and voluntarily delay any contractually obligated salary increases for six months.

Is it possible that a crack journalist like Chuck Todd doesn’t know that Main Street has been facing what amount to be pay cuts for some time? Since about 1972?

It’s all about Chuck Todd, you know.