Book Review: John Quincy Adams by Harlow Giles Unger

I went looking for a good book on John Quincy Adams after reading about various points in his history here and there. His unique position as the only US president to have continued his political career in Congress struck me as fascinating, and the fact that most of the positions he took during that career were extremely progressive, not just for his time but in ours, made him seem to me someone worth knowing more about.

Since I had absolutely no other guide, I relied on the reviews to select this particular biography. Well, that in the fact that the author based it mainly on an in-depth analysis of Mr. Adams’s own journals sounded like an excellent choice. I wasn’t disappointed. For any reader looking for an insightful and easy-to-read biography of one of our least known presidents, this is definitely the book to choose.

Perhaps the greatest irony in the career of this talented man is that despite spending his entire life from early adolescence on in politics he refused to be a politician. It was his firm belief that elected officials should become so only if they are the choice of the people they are to represent, and that therefore running for public office was dishonest. In other words, he abhorred political campaigns and refused to engage in them. If the voters wanted him, was his position, they would elect him without his having to ask.

Here is a man who was attacked by his fellow members of Congress for refusing to stay silent on the subject of slavery, and who for much of his career there cleverly managed to bypass their efforts to mute his voice using the one weapon he was willing to apply—the rules. He deserves to be brought out of the dismissive obscurity into which he’s been tossed and held up as the model to which all those seeking or planning to seek public office should aspire.

What a Trump Presidency Means, or, Why I Voted for the Other Fascist

You can’t open a newspaper or turn on the TV or even log into Facebook these days without having Donald Trump rubbed in your face. Not that what’s reported is really anything of substance. It’s mostly “Ohmigod, can you believe what he just said”?-type stuff. It’s a very effective way of keeping his opponent, whose family foundation has been the recipient of big donations from the media/communications industry, from having to publicly address the issues of relevance to the majority of voters, but that’s a rant for another time.

     However, it happens there are more than a few people, most of them those who voted for Bernie Sanders, who find Trump’s opponent so unpalatable they will go so far as to say they can live with his being elected. What this position mostly reveals is just how ignorant too many voters are of the reality of our republic, mostly because they’re painfully new to the subject and have been poorly educated in the fields of history and civics. I don’t say that to be snarky. I find the situation appalling, the clear result of forty years of federal meddling with public education; but that, too, is a rant for another time.

     So, in the interest of making clear just what a disaster a Trump victory would be, let’s ignore the rhetoric and look at the facts.

     If the GOP is given full control of all three branches of government, which is exactly what will happen if Trump is elected, how much damage can they do in the two years we would have to wait to try to take back Congress?

     Well, for starters, they’ll kill Social Security, because that’s what they’ve wanted to do from the moment it was established. They’ve hated it since FDR signed it into law. So, the trust fund will be handed over to Wall Street for “investment,” because that worked so well for all the people who lost their 401(k)s and IRAs in the Crash of ’08, or whose pensions have been cut to the bone, ditto. Instead of Medicare, those old enough will receive “vouchers” to pay for their medical care, and if the voucher runs out—well, tough, that. Paul Ryan’s had the plan on his desk for ages, so it’s a given it will be on the floor of the House the day after Trump’s in the Oval Office. Indeed, they’ve already started chewing on the edges.

     They will proceed as well with selling the USPS to FedEx and UPS and any other shipping company with the right price in mind. Since they’ve already made it impossible for the service to break even, they’ll have a “reasonable” excuse for doing that. If you pay your bills by check, keep that in mind, because there’s no telling how much FedEx will have to charge to keep those profits up.

     Oh, and if you’re thinking the USPS isn’t working, that’s another Republican lie. Indeed, it was showing a profit before Congress decided to make it pre-pay 75% of its pension funds not just for actual employees but for any future ones. Which no other company or entity does or has ever been required to do. So, if your local branch of the post office closed, or you no longer get your mail on Saturday, and your Congress critter is Republican or one of the corporate-sponsored Democrats, you be sure to send them a thank-you note.

     They’ll probably have time to also eliminate free public education by revising the most recent monstrosity of an education plan to allow vouchers, which means public funds will be made available for people to send their kids to private schools, religious-based schools, and charter schools. The schools will likely also then find it necessary to start charging some fees, since they’re mainly set up to make a profit for somebody and with states and the feds cutting education budgets to the bone there likely won’t be enough tax money to go around.

     Of course, the free public schools most kids go to won’t be able to stay open because there’s not enough money, what with what little funding remains is going to be spread out over all the redundant “educational facilities.” Granted, that will mainly effect poor kids and special ed kids and any other group that might need a little more attention, so maybe not a real problem.

     If you think I’m making that up, you’d be wrong. I didn’t realize just how bad things have gotten in the last 3-4 decades until I began re-educating myself. Plus, I live in Texas, where we’ve had a Trump-like government for the last two decades, and where our legislature is planning to establish just the kind of education system I described. They already have it in a couple of other states (cf. New Orleans post-Katrina).

     The GOP also wants to had over public lands now protected by the federal government to the states. If that sounds harmless, just ask the people of Colorado who are fighting for their right to clean air and water as their governor and legislature give the fracking industry carte blanche. There are already 300,000 fracking wells polluting our air and water with little to no oversight because that came to an end in ’05 under the last GOP regime. As a side note, it’s likely they’ll at least try to get rid of the EPA.

     Of course, you aren’t going to learn any of that from our “unbiased” media, because it’s not in the best interests of the plutocrats who currently own Congress for us to know about it. Fortunately, we live in an information age where there are still people brave enough to dig out the truth. It’s getting it in front of the people who need to know it that’s hard. And, given just how blatant the sellout is, convincing people we aren’t just making this stuff up.

     If it helps, for the last forty years, I was like the majority. I had a life to live and work to do and kids to raise and whatnot, and I grew up when the New Deal was young, and everyone mostly thought it was a great idea. I did see some cracks forming, but they didn’t really have a big impact on me personally (at least, I didn’t think so). Fortunately, I was kicked awake in time.

     I’ve reviewed several books here that are a good place to start if you want to join me in helping take back our country. Because we’re going to have to do that if we want to have not just a country but a planet left for our children and grandchildren and those who are born after them. It’s that bad, and if we behave like a bunch of sore losers and let the foxes into the henhouse, we’ll have no one to blame but ourselves when we’re starving.