Old-time Fiddler Found his Muse in West Virginia

The following story was written by Sandy Wells and appeared in the January 25, 2016 edition of the Charleston Gazette-Mail (links below)

In his Fort Hill home, champion fiddler Paul Epstein demonstrates the musical prowess 

that earned him a first place award in the senior division of the Glenville Folk Festival last year. 

A founder of FOOTMAD, he performs regularly with his contra dance band, the Contrarians

He hitchhiked around the country. He lived in a cabin in Maine. A quest for warmer weather lured him to West Virginia. A back-to-the-lander from Pennsylvania, he found his sweet space in Roane County.

He settled eventually in Charleston. He counseled troubled teens at Daymark. For 25 years, he taught school. For a decade or so, he worked with the West Virginia Writing Project. Now, he’s making a new label for himself as an environmental activist.

But nothing in Paul Epstein’s intriguing life defines him more than the music. Through it all, there was always the music.

In West Virginia, he discovered old-time mountain fiddlers and recognized his true calling. Something about the fiddle touched his soul. So he learned to play. Taught himself. Just like that.

With kindred old-time music fans in Roane County, he started the Booger Hole Revival, a band bent on bringing back mountain music.

In Charleston, he helped form FOOTMAD, an organization devoted to old-time music and dance. That spawned his current contra dance band, the Contrarians.

He retired from the 9-to-5 world three years ago. Now, music no longer plays second fiddle. At 63, still vibrant and involved, he finally can focus full-time on the instrument that captured his heart.

It’s paying off. He won first place last year in the state fiddling contest.

He believes his father, a violinist, would be proud.

“I grew up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, a city the size of Charleston in Lehigh Valley, about 60 miles from Philadelphia.

“My dad was a social worker, head of social services at Allentown State Hospital nearby. My mom raised four children, three boys and a girl. It was a good life. I excelled at school most of the time, though I was somewhat of a troublemaker at times, a typical boy.

“My father played violin in community orchestras. He loved classical music. I hated classical music. I grew up with popular music on the radio.

“I took piano lessons until I was a teenager and said no more. It didn’t fit my view of myself at the time. My older brother started playing a little guitar, so there was a guitar around and I learned a little of how to play. In my early 20s, I got my own guitar and started playing that.

“I dropped out of college and traveled the country hitchhiking with my girlfriend. It was 1969. The world was in turmoil. I was not excited to go to college. I went to a couple of big protest rallies. My hair was long. I guess I was a hippie for a few years.

“I had a few jobs to get money. I worked construction and drove a cab. I had a little money, like graduation gifts that my parents had saved for me, a couple thousand dollars that we lived on for a couple of years.

“My dad was pretty tolerant of all this. My mom was definitely fuming. I don’t regret it at all. Everyone grows up a different way, and I had to find my own way.

“It gave me more time to play music and learn more about music. I spent some time learning guitar and started playing in a band. I started on a stand-up bass in a band in Maine. They were playing bluegrass and some Irish music.

“I was hearing these melodies that I loved and I remembered them. I started picking out the notes on guitar.

“I got hold of a mandolin and started playing tunes on mandolin. Once I was in West Virginia and heard my first old-time fiddlers, the old guys playing at festivals, I had to start playing fiddle.

“We’d been living in Maine out in the woods. I built a little cabin there. We were looking for a warmer place. This was the early ’70s. I guess you could say we were back-to-the-landers. We landed in Roane County, a little place on a road leading to Green Creek beyond Frame.

“I settled in this empty building that had once been a church, just a wood frame 24-by-24 building. We lived there for a while. People referred to this as the Booger Hole Church. A booger hole back then was kind of a place of ill-repute. There apparently had been a moonshiner in the hollow and maybe some shootings, colorful stuff people could tell stories about.

A photo from the early 1980s shows fiddler 

Paul Epstein (left) with the Back Road
 Travelers, a successor to Booger Hole Revival, 

the band he helped organize in Roane County

“There were a lot of people there like myself there who had come from other places. We started a band called the Booger Hole Revival because we were reviving old-time music.

“I was playing fiddle. It’s the instrument to me that most defines old-time music, that and the banjo, but there was already another guy playing banjo. It was challenging. But the fiddle had all that energy.

“I never have taken a single lesson on guitar or fiddle. I just learned by ear and recording things and listening to records and tapes, just working on it.

“Booger Hole lasted six years, ’77 to ’83, when we changed our name to the Backwood Travelers. We didn’t have a lot of expenses in those days. We had been able to buy a piece of land. We raised a garden.

“We had the money that came in from playing in the band, and I would do odd jobs. I worked for a logger for a couple of years. In ’77, my daughter was born and I married the woman I traveled the country with.

“Then I started working for Daymark Inc., for Patchwork. I started taking college classes at West Virginia State and got into the teacher education program and continued with Daymark until about ’85 when I graduated.

“I had always said about social work that I wouldn’t want to do that. People said I was a natural at it. I grew up in a family of social workers, so I understood how to talk to people.

“I listened to these troubled teens and found out what their issues were and tried to help them set goals to do better. I enjoyed working with people, but you don’t get a lot back from troubled teenagers.

“I thought elementary education would be a good spot for me to get a job I could stick with. The burnout rate working with troubled teenagers is hard work. But so is teaching.

“I taught for 25 years, first in Clendenin, then I moved to Ruffner Elementary and moved into Charleston. I divorced.

“I helped start FOOTMAD (Friends of Old Time Music and Dance). I was the first president. A group of us got together and started having meetings about how we were going to put together a nonprofit organization to sponsor folk music.

“For a period, working full time and going to school full time, I didn’t do much with music. That didn’t last long. I started going to the FOOTMAD dances and joining the pickup band that gradually became a band to play for contra dances. We were called the Trusty House Band. FOOTMAD named us because we were always there for them. Then we became the Contrarians, our band now.

“In the early ’90s, I started writing a lot more songs. This was around the time I was getting divorced. I wrote a bunch of songs and did a CD of my own songs, ‘Lessons Life Taught Me,’ and I was playing as a singer-songwriter.

“The songs are folk-country, what they call Americana, a mix-up of country blues and whatever genre that would fit a song I was writing. I was also writing a lot of fiddle tunes and children’s songs.

“Before I did the CD of original songs, I did a cassette and then a CD of songs I had been writing for the kids at school. I called it ‘School Bus Comin’.’

“The Contrarians for the last 10 or 15 years have been playing once or twice a month. We started with out and backs, going out for a Saturday night dance in Columbus or Cleveland or Pittsburgh or Louisville or Lexington or Cincinnati. We are a pretty well-known band for contra dancing in the mid-Atlantic region.

“Sometimes we get hired for a dance weekend that will draw people from the region, maybe 200 people. They will hire two bands and two callers and there will be dancing all weekend.

“Last year I won first place in the senior division of the Glenville Folk Festival. I don’t consider myself much of a contest fiddler but in retirement, I decided to put a little more time into preparing for contests.

“As a teacher, I got involved with the National Writing Project. I took some workshops and classes from Fran Simone at the graduate college and eventually I ended up leading the local Central West Virginia Writing Project. I did that for about 10 years.

In 1996, Paul Epstein married Rita Ray, a name long 

associated with West Virginia Public Broadcasting. 

“I recently wrote a song called ‘Green Revolution’ about climate change. I have gotten more involved in environmental issues, especially after the chemical spill into the Elk River. I always supported environmental issues, but I never considered myself any kind of an activist. But I started writing more songs on that topic and wanted to share them with people who were activists.

“I went to many of the rallies and became involved in raising money for the West Virginia Environmental Council and actually formed a little project through CAG (Citizen Action Group) that I called AWARE (Artists Working in Alliance to Restore the Environment). I wanted to use it as a vehicle for getting other artists like myself to come together to help raise money for environmental issues in West Virginia. It hasn’t been wildly successful. We raised a few thousand dollars.

“It’s just another thing I’m interested in and will continue to do. As a retired person, I’m not looking for a full-time job or mission. I have my music, my environmental work and I continue to write songs and sometimes go out and perform them.

“It’s been a great life. I was glad to be able to retire when I turned 60. It gave me more time to focus on my music.

“I might not have had time or energy or desire to learn the music if I hadn’t had that period where I wasn’t driven to do anything else. If I had stayed in college and gone on the track that was set up for me in those days, I probably wouldn’t have had time to pursue those things.

“The things that didn’t go as well as I would have liked, I probably learned from. It made me who I am, and I like who I am. So I’m not going to waste time imagining what might have been.

“My dad died in 1996. I think he enjoyed the band and was proud of it. He was a very open-minded man. He loved music, and he loved his children. Even though I bewildered him sometimes, he allowed me to be who I chose to be.”

Reach Sandy Wells at sandyw@wvgazette.com or 304-342-5027.

- See more at: http://www.wvgazettemail.com/life/20160124/innerviews-old-time-fiddler-found-his-muse-in-west-virginia#sthash.DsfVHliP.dpuf

Lose Weight Permanently? We'll See

In November 2013, a little over 2 years ago, I embarked on a change in my eating habits, following the recommendations of a book called, The 2 Day Diet: Diet Two Days a Week, Eat Normally for Five by Dr. Michelle Harvie and Professor Tony Howell. This is where I started.

Beginning weight 11/3/13: 209

Height 5'8" Age: 61

Beginning waist size: 43 in.

By reducing carbs and increasing vegetable and protein intake severely two days a week and more moderately the rest of the week, over the course of eight months, I lost about thirty pounds and five inches in waist size. I continued eating a maintenance version of the recommendations, but over time slacked off and allowed more carbs into my diet. Gradually pounds started accumulating. A few time since then I have made feeble attempts to return my weight to 180, or 185, or 190 pounds, but each time after a losing a few pounds, weight loss eluded me, and I decided to be happy with the new weight and just hold the line. So here I am today, at 197, having gained more than half of the initial loss back, and imagining the possibility that I will soon be back where I started and no longer able to fit into the new jeans I bought when I reached my low point. 

For those of you who know me or followed my blogging back then, I was posting my progress several times a month and wrote about learning to control my hunger, getting over my carb addiction, and how much better it felt to conquer the cravings I used to feel. So why am I back where I was? 

Partly, it is the insidious addiction that carbs encourage, but, due to a new book I am reading: Always Hungry? Conquer your cravings, retrain your fat cells, and lose weight permanently by Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School endocrinologist Dr. David Ludwig, I now believe that there’s been something else at work—my own metabolism and the uncanny ability of the human body to store calories in order to preserve fat. 

Surprisingly, one of the reasons I may have had trouble keeping my weight off may be that I tried to eat not only fewer carbs, but also lower my fat intake and eat low fat foods. Dr. Ludwig recommends eating butter and other ‘healthy’ fats, like nuts, and warns that low fat substitutes often contain hidden carbs. Though I haven’t yet started implementing the recommendations in this book, I look forward to losing this weight again and keeping it off.

While I won’t post weekly “weigh ins” as I did last time, I will keep you posted on my progress. Wish me luck!

Guns Serious, Climate Emergency

Which is a greater threat to our health and safety—gun violence or climate change? President Obama suggests that everyone concerned about the stranglehold the NRA has over Congress should make the support of “common sense gun reform” a litmus test. In West Virginia, this would give us few choices on election day.

The NRA is at the heart of most politicians’ fears of supporting even the mildest restrictions, such as expanded background checks. But they have gotten a lot of help from the conspiracy theory President Obama referred to in a recent town hall meeting that the federal government has a secret plan to register, then confiscate all private firearms in preparation for implementing a totalitarian regime. 

Unfortunately, conspiracy theories and wholesale rejection of science that we used to be able to laugh off as ideas held by tiny slivers of the population are now cynically used by mainstream politicians to garner support from increasing numbers of misinformed, suspicious Americans. And the prime example of that is climate change, which I would suggest is a much more important litmus test for 2016.

Yes, guns in America kill and injure thousands, and reducing that number is an important goal, but failing to reduce the greenhouse gases (GHG) being added to the atmosphere every day has the potential of resulting in catastrophic impacts on a global scale. I should not have to list them: rising sea levels, increased droughts, disease, hyper-destructive weather events, extinctions, populations on the move, and more.

Most Republican politicians, and West Virginia politicians from both parties still either deny the planet is warming, deny that it is human caused, or claim that there is nothing we can do about it. They often say that China and India will continue building coal burning power plants that will offset any of our efforts.

The recent Paris Agreement belies this claim. Almost 200 nations, including China and India, agreed on a plan to implement measures to limit global temperature rise to under 2 degrees Celsius, considered a tipping point beyond which already serious effects become catastrophic. 

No one is calling this agreement perfect. It is non-binding. Each country must set its own goals, decide how to achieve them, report back to the world on their progress every five years, and to the extent they are able, decrease their emissions goal over time. 

As a world leader, historically the world’s largest overall emitter of GHG, and the largest emitter per capita, we have a unique responsibility to make and meet goals under the Paris Agreement. This will not be easy, but it is certainly possible.

Let’s face it—we are addicted to cheap fossil fuels: coal, oil, natural gas. They have literally fueled American prosperity. We see gas fall under $2.00/gallon and cheer. We love our low electricity bills that have been provided by cheap coal. Hydraulic fracturing has brought cheaper natural gas into our homes. But what do they really cost? What will we pay in increased flood damage and worsening storms?  

As a nation, we were addicted to tobacco, and I remember buying cigarettes for $.30 a pack. What did it really cost America in lost time at work, doctor visits, heart disease, lung cancer and emphysema? Today cigarettes cost about $6.00 a pack, and many fewer people are willing to pay that price, which is saving lives. 

If we increased the cost of fossil fuels by applying a fee for their production and importation, we would make them less desirable and set the stage for the development, growth, and acceptance of alternative energy sources. Citizens Climate Lobby (citizensclimatelobby.org) has a proposal to impose such a fee and return all the money collected to households, which would in most cases reimburse them for the increased costs of fuel during the transition to alternative sources.

Find out what the position of candidates for office is on climate change and carbon fee and dividend legislation, and support those who face the future with optimism by dealing realistically with the biggest challenge of our time.

Paul Epstein is a retired teacher, writer, and musician living in Charleston.

Have We No Sense of Decency?

The United States is schizophrenic. Okay, maybe it just has what used to be called a split personality. In recent years this condition has been reduced to the words Red and Blue. Since I identify as Blue, anything I say about the Red side is suspect. Probably, however, since most of my friends and relatives are Blue, I am just preaching to the choir. 

On one side we have those who want low taxes for all including the super rich, less government regulation, strong borders and limited immigration, free and unlimited access to guns, lower spending on all social programs: health care, education, transportation, scientific research, and greater spending on the military along with a generally more robust interventionist foreign policy.

On the other side, the opposite.

On both sides we have a culture of fear and distrust of government, except when the government is in the control of their side, and even then, there is a growing percentage who distrust government regardless of which side has control. Many Americans identify with groups whose goal seems to be to destroy or dismantle most of the functions of government such as the Tea Party, Patriot Movement, and Libertarians. I couldn’t find evidence of an organized leftist group that wants to destroy the government, but those on the Red side see programs such as the Affordable Care Act and efforts at Immigration Reform and gun control as the destruction of the “American Way of Life.” 

Increasingly, therefore, there is a feeling that the other side is “Anti-American” or at least acting in ways that are counter to established American values.

And that’s how I’ve felt since the anti-Syrian, anti Immigrant response to the Paris attacks from Red state governors and congressmen. 

I am ashamed of the news coming out of the United States regarding these issues. It boggles my mind that over half the states’ governors have requested that Syrian refugees be kept out of their states. It drives me crazy to hear supposedly serious candidates for president proclaim that no amount of vetting could be adequate to verify that a Syrian refugee is not coming here to cause us harm. 

There oughta’ be a law (I’m not serious) against that kind of fear mongering. I wonder when the harassment and discrimination, possibly worse, of Syrians and other immigrants or even long time citizens who may look less than white or vaguely Arab will begin.

I shouldn’t be surprised after the fear and panic some of these same so-called leaders encouraged in the face of the outbreak of Ebola in Africa. Remember the hysterical declarations and efforts to keep people from any of the affected countries from coming here? Where are the outbreaks they predicted?

The fact is that anyone can become radicalized and become a terrorist in this age of social media and slick recruiting videos. Putting refugees of war in camps and refusing to integrate them into any kind of society or allow them any opportunity to have a decent life is a recipe for creating terrorists. 

To paraphrase Jack Welch to Anti-Communist crusader Senator Joe McCarthy when he was using a Senate investigative committee to accuse them, costing many their jobs and reputations, “Have you, at long last, sir, no sense of decency?” Have we, as Americans, no sense of decency? Are we so afraid that our only response to tragedy is an impulse to send troops, to send bombers, to seal our borders? 

How to Enjoy a "Simply Happy" Life

How many of us asked what’s most important in life would say happiness? Most of my life I have. But of course I’m a member of the notorious, self-centered baby boomer generation born and raised in a middle class home by two college educated parents in the suburban sprawl of a small town between Philly and NY. I was raised to believe I could choose my own path. My teenage angst and anger at a country engaged in the insanity of the Vietnam War and which unfairly discriminated against African Americans was assuaged by a counter-culture which allowed me to express my anger and rejection of the “straight” world by growing my hair long and substitute the relaxing and often hilariously happy highs I got by smoking pot and the crazily mind altering excitement of psychedelics. 

Before I was twenty, having turned on and tuned in, I dropped out. Anger and political frustration as I had watched my heroes (JFK, MLK, RFK, Malcolm X) get murdered and the lying Nixon take over the Presidency led me to participate in massive marches against the war in D.C. in 1969. I believed in peace, but seeing the soldiers lined up shoulder to shoulder around the Justice Department and  tanks in the garage entrance backing them up, breathing the pepper gas and tear gas that we were barraged with, I came to an ultimate realization that they had all the weapons, all the power, and it was suicide to fight. Truly, I was ignorant of political process and also ignorant of what it really meant to make change through nonviolence. I thought the 60’s had proven nonviolence doesn’t work. Unwilling to die in Vietnam and unwilling to die fighting or going to jail to end the war here, I headed for the woods to live the life of a hippie homesteader—what we now call “off the grid.”

Call it growing up, but over the next several years the pursuit of happiness was pushed aside in favor of learning how to survive….not hunting and fishing and farming, but learning how to live on less, build a serviceable shelter, fix my own car, grow some vegetables, take advantage of free stuff this prosperous country offers, and find odd jobs to bring in enough money to “get by.” The birth of a child brought me the rest of the way back on my journey from homeless wandering to rural poverty as I sought full time employment and worked for a logger for a couple years before finding a job in a runaway shelter and going to college in the evenings, eventually becoming a teacher. 

My happiness was secondary to responsible parenthood until the marriage I was in left me so unhappy that I divorced when my daughter was fifteen, leaving her with her mother. This was the most unhappy time of my life and I sought the help of a wise therapist who helped me resolve some of the barriers to happiness within myself through a process called “inner child work.”

Now remarried and retired, I have time to pursue happiness full time. And I have done so by pursuing my interests and taking care of my health. I play music regularly at home and in public in a variety of settings, a lifelong avocation that I couldn’t make work as a career. I ride my bike or go to the gym almost every day and do some Yoga. I cook meals regularly and struggle to keep my weight down. I read a lot of news and a few books, and I occasionally write essays I fire off to the newspaper about issues that bother me. I give volunteer time to environmental groups and to organize contra dances sponsored by my local folk music organization, FOOTMAD. I read, watch Netflix, and listen to the radio, especially NPR and NPR podcasts.

Which brings me to the reason I started writing this morning. Yesterday, listening to the NPR program, TED Radio Hour as a podcast while riding my bike on a gorgeous Indian Summer day, I listened to an episode called Simply Happy (you can stream or download the whole hour or any of the shorter segments here ). TED is a worldwide series of short lectures on topics related to Technology, Entertainment, Design by some of the smartest, most successful people in the world. The NPR program aggregates a few “TED Talks” by theme, uses excerpts from the lectures and interviews with the speaker to weave together a fascinating and educational hour of radio programming each week. 

This particular show featured a scientist who had researched what makes people happy, someone who created a happiness app, authors, and a monk. It was full of wonderful “a-ha” moments for me. Takeaways:

• Stuff, wealth, etc. won’t make you happy 
• Adversity such as illness, misfortune, etc., does not keep people from being happy after an average of a few months of adjustment 
• Slowing down and paying attention to what you’re doing can increase happiness, or at least letting your mind wander tends to add to unhappiness; 
• Happiness does not cause you to be grateful, gratefulness causes you to be happy.

That last was imparted by a Benedictine monk by the name of David Steindl-Rast, who has a PhD in psychology and studied Zen Bhuddism and probably every other religion and spiritual practice. Thinking back over my life, I realize that I lacked gratefulness for much of it, which means I was not as happy as I could have been. I’m grateful I ran across this, and intend to look for more of his advice on the key to happiness. I also intend to think more and more often about what I have to be grateful for (though I don’t intend to write it on FB everyday as I’ve seen some others do, which I find…annoying). In the meantime, as the great philosopher Bobby McFerrin sang, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” 

The Republican (Right) Field, Round 2

To go with the mixed metaphor of my title (baseball vs. boxing), today's blog post presents in short "chapters" some of my response to the second Republican debate, which I endured for almost two and a half hours on Wednesday. 

Debrief

I almost felt sorry for the poor guys and gal--they had to stand there for 3 hours and think about the fact that they would have to somehow distinguish themselves from the other 10 wingnuts on stage with them in little 1 or 2 minute chunks every 10-15 minutes. I'm surprised no one came out from behind the lectern and started doing cartwheels, dancing a jig, or juggling watermelons to get attention. 

Mostly they had to hope someone would mention their name, because if their name was mentioned they got automatic response time (imaginary pre-debate confession cam, with Christie: "Kasich and me gotta deal goin' you see--every time one of us gets a chance to talk we'll take a softball poke at the other one, that way we'll get to go back and forth all night and block the others out!").

And they actually got into policy, which shut Trump up, because the fact is, and he acknowledged it, he doesn't know much. I'll hire experts who know this stuff is basically what he said...that inspires confidence. Rand Paul and John Kasich tried to inject some reasonable ideas like not trying to police the whole world and working with allies instead of going it alone...but they were all alone up there. Ben Carson...what is the great attraction to him? I still think that may be about Republicans wanting to win the black vote ("Look at how many African Americans came out to vote for Obama! They'll vote for their own"). Rubio and Bush are supposed to have potential to pull in the Hispanic vote, but it seems like Trump has forced Republicans to write off that block of voters...and by the way, ship them out on Day 1!

Other things that will happen on Day 1: End Obamacare, Tear up the Iran Agreement, and, though none of them said it, probably indict President Obama for impersonating a president.....OMG--it's still over a year until the election!

On Carly Fiorna’s attack on Planned Parenthood

As if the doctored stealth videos purporting to show that Planned Parenthood was selling fetal tissue illegally weren’t false enough (a few PP clinics legally donate fetal tissue for medical research and are reimbursed for the expense of doing so), Carly Fiorina described a supposed scene from the video THAT SHE MADE UP! Here's what Politifact reports:

“Carly Fiorina spoke out against Planned Parenthood regarding the controversial videos released over the last few months. The scene she described, though, does not exist in any of the videos.

Fiorina: I dare Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama to watch these tapes. Watch a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.

We are aware of no video showing such a scene. The videos, released by the Center for Medical Progress beginning on July 14, have focused on fetal tissue being collected for research and have shown some aborted fetal tissue. As we wrote before, the use of donated fetal tissue has been important in several areas of scientific research.

Fiorina’s description matches up with one of the videos in a series the Center for Medical Progress has called “Human Capital” — but only with regard to how an interviewee describes her experience. Holly O’Donnell, an “ex-procurement technician” for StemExpress, a company that procures fetal tissue from Planned Parenthood clinics, relates a story of an intact fetus. She says that a Planned Parenthood doctor “taps the heart and it starts beating,” and then instructs her to remove its brain for collection.

The video does contain images of what appear to be intact fetuses, but they don’t fit Fiorina’s description. In one, where a fetus does appear to move, there is a caption saying that the footage is from the pro-life Grantham Collection and Center for Bio-Ethical Reform; there is no indication as to where the footage was shot. In the other, it was revealed after the video’s release that the image was of a stillborn baby, rather than an aborted fetus.

Though we cannot verify if part or all of O’Donnell’s story is true, the scene Fiorina “dares” others to watch is not present in any of the Planned Parenthood videos."

On Donald Trump boasting he would create a bigger, stronger military, so strong that nobody, not even Putin would mess with us

The fiction the Republicans have created is that talking tough, having a strong military, and using it frequently scares others into cooperating with us. They say Reagan talked tough and scared Gorbachev into disbanding the Soviet Union (false--Glasnost--freedom of speech he implemented led to the Republicans breaking away). They see Bush as tough and strong and would go it alone--going to war in Iraq with "a coalition of the willing". That meant neither NATO nor any major allies were with us and actually weakened us and our interests in the world, strengthening Iran and creating ISIS, which started as Al Qaeda in Iraq. 

They say Obama is weak because he is willing to negotiate with countries that we have serious disagreements with in order to avoid going to war. They don't see it as a strength to bring in our allies to participate in negotiations, but allies add to the threat should negotiations fail. But time after time, Obama has led the majority of the world to the table, negotiating the destruction of Syria's chemical weapons, the Iran Agreement, and to stop Russia in Ukraine by implementing sanctions against them that are devastating their economy--finally, the ceasefire seems to be holding, an indication that the policy is working.

Yet like other Republican fictions that they repeat endlessly as if repeating a lie will make it true: that cutting taxes always creates jobs, that making abortion illegal or unavailable reduces abortions, that running a deficit is always bad for the economy, an overwhelmingly strong military used irresponsibly does not make us safer, it makes us feared and hated around the world.

What Republicans see in Ben Carson (I don’t see much)

Chicago Tribune columnist Dawn M. Turner (African American—I mention that because I think it lends her credibility on the issue) wrote that Carson’s inner city Detroit rise to famed neurosurgeon story “allows Republicans to feel good about themselves. They can vote for a black guy (whose name isn’t Obama) and maintain the myth that race is no longer a hindrance in this country and the only thing black folks have to do is work hard (as if blacks don’t already) and they too can achieve the American Dream."

And the prize for dumbest statement goes to (no surprise)

Trump on why he didn't recognize the name of the head of Iran's Quds Force: “[The reporter] was giving me name after name; Arab name, Arab name, Arab name… and there are few people anywhere that would know those names… I think he was reading them off a sheet.” 

When You Dance with the Devil, You Risk Getting Trumped

“When you dance with the devil….” you get burnt; you have to pay the piper; you don’t change him, he changes you. Finish it how you like, the Republicans have been dancing with hot issues and colorful characters for years. They have enticed their base with pipe dreams of a tax free country with a tiny efficient government, an all powerful military to which all countries and terrorist groups submit, and a return to a 19th century morality that never existed in which the Preacher in Chief ushers in an era of peace, prosperity, good health, and world dominance, and there’s no need to pay for any of it….”the shining city on the hill.”

The flip side of these fantasy images assigns blame to anything they claim is preventing us from living their dream: Evil Empires, abortion as holocaust (even to save a woman’s life),  a government that should be starved and shrunk until they can “drown it in the bathtub,” a “Muslim” President “born in Africa” who “hates America”, and encourages illegal immigration and “entitlements” to pad the Democratic voting roles. Their list of imagined grievances is  endless, but it starts and ends with their political opposition who, like the rest of the world, are either evil Socialists or the Gestapo. 

Their dance with the devil, during which they have abandoned facts, reason, caution, and evidence of anything that counters their Bible thumping, demagoguing, conspiracy theorizing, tax revolting, tea partying, war mongering, immigrant hating, gay bashing platform has won a loyal following. Their constituency no longer trusts government, and the horde of Republican Congressmen, Senators, and Governors who seek the presidency are one face of the reviled government. An ever increasing number of Republican voters are not interested in facts, just claims, like those the  front runner comedian, I mean candidate, Donald Trump makes that America is losing because, “We are led by very, very stupid people,” and, "We will have so much winning when I get elected that you will get bored with winning.” 

The only other Republican candidate even reaching double digits in the polls is Ben Carson, a skilled neurosurgeon who also has no experience in government and has said Obamacare is “the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery.” Is it possible many Republicans support him because he is black and they want to prove they are not racist? At least he’s not saying life may have been better for enslaved African American families than it is today as a pledge once signed by Republican candidate Rick Santorum suggested.

I, like many liberal or progressive Democrats, are quietly waiting for the dance to end. Trump is such a wild card—a multi-billionaire who is entertaining, media savvy, and so totally disdainful of politicians, even of his own party, that voting for him is the biggest gamble voters could make. They are willing to trust our nation and the world to a carnival barker who has absolutely no discernible platform or policy—an amazingly brutal competitor who has proven himself by becoming rich, very, very rich! 

After losing the 2012 presidential election, Republican strategists saw the writing on the wall: if they didn’t abandon some of their most radical right platforms and reach out to a wider audience, they were doomed to a shrinking Party comprised mostly of angry white men. Trump represents the devil they tried to spurn. After thirty years of listening to the devil’s enticements, at least half of Republican voters will not face reality, they will not listen to reason, they want someone who tells them what they want to hear—that they, too, can be rich winners who take back their country and return it to the good old days: government of white men, by white men, and for white men.