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In 1939, MGM released a movie, starring one of their favorite contract players, a young, rising star named Judy Garland. It was based on a novel published in 1900 by L. Frank Baum, one of several he wrote about The Land of Oz, its Wizard and the characters who sought his favor and help. Judy Garland played Dorothy, a young girl living on a farm in Kansas and dreaming of a better and fuller world. The film has since become one of a handful of the most popular movies of all time, and Dorothy’s song about her hopes, Over The Rainbow, has became a beloved standard, as well.
To underscore the transition Dorothy will face, the film begins in black and white. A powerful tornado sweeps across the Kansas plains, tearing Dorothy’s house from its foundation and sending it spinning through an amazing journey, filled with floating cows, furniture and people. After it lands with a thud right on top of the Wicked Witch Of The East, Dorothy and her little dog, Toto, emerge from their tornado-wrecked house, finding the world outside the door is suddenly painted in full-blown, riotous color and holds a series of fantastic and varied denizens. As she begins her adventure in what she will soon learn is The Magical Land of Oz, she says, in a line that has become an iconic shorthand for sudden-change situations, “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”
In the case of our own wonderful land of many colors, it’s just the opposite. “Friends,” I would say, “I don’t think we’re in America anymore.” Not only is everything suddenly very black and white (obey and maybe you can keep what you already have), but, in addition, the color is being drained from our historical records, our academic institutions and every business that dares to use the word “diversity.” What is being lost?
Well, let’s start with the underpinnings of our entire democracy. The president is governing by fiat, without any of the protective “checks and balances” envisioned by our Constitution. This power grab is being enabled by the Speaker of the House of Representatives and his party, who are refusing to strip the white house of its ability to trample on protections against illegal search and seizure, illegal extraction and imprisonment, and the special declaration of emergency that gave the president the ability to single-handedly impose outrageous, damaging and crippling tariffs.
It’s also not America anymore if you expect protection from the thoughtless and heartless terminations carried out by Elon Musk and his youth band and their little DOGE, too. Easily gaining access to virtually any government computers, they continue to rampage through departments and agencies, chanting “Off With Their Heads”, wielding a chainsaw as their sacred implement, and, when told by the courts they couldn’t do that and our federal employees had to be allowed to return to work, pretended to try but claimed not to have any personal email addresses so that those who had been fired couldn’t be contacted. This is all made possible by the fact that computers hold vast compilations of information in such a collective format that, with a stroke of one key, you can fire tens of thousands of people without interference, cause or thought.
It’s not America anymore as we watch virtually every protection provided by the government brought to a halt, protections we take for granted every time we buy food, drink water, take a deep breath outside. All of our food safety inspections, water quality rules, environmental protections, healthcare services, meals on wheels for seniors, weather analyses for future planning, national park accommodations and services, nuclear protection teams, national cybersafety oversight, educational support, fairness doctrines, natural resource stewardship, and any semblance of rationality or empathy are, in less than 80 days of the Trump administration, a thing of the past. How can they take such cruel actions? Well, that’s the point. Empathy toward individuals is a weakness. The Third Reich said so. And, now, so does the man with the chain saw. “The fundamental weakness of Western Civilization,” Elon Musk wrote, “is empathy.”
Everything is crashing and burning. To return to our Wizard of Oz theme, various of the destroyers have no brains, no heart and no courage.
Unfortunately, we can’t find a Wizard to just make it all go away.
However, as it turns out, that is just as well, and the film ultimately concludes with that thought. The three main characters, Scarecrow, who makes the dangerous trip with Dorothy down the yellow brick road to ask the Wizard to give him a brain, Tin Man, who is seeking to be granted a heart to fill his empty barrel of a chest, and the Cowardly Lion, who wants to be filled with the courage he lacks, are all eventually disappointed, but in a good way.
As they confront the terrifying image of the magnificent and intimidating Wizard, having completed the tests set for them by him, Toto notices a curtain, off to the side. Unfazed by the huge, scary image of the all-powerful Oz, little Toto trots over and pulls it back. Behind it is a perfectly regular man, shouting into a microphone and pulling levers to manipulate the huge image of the Wizard that has held all the travelers, excepting Toto, in thrall. “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain,” he shouts, but, of course, by then, it is all revealed to be a sham.
Honestly, had the film ended there, it would have been an amazing bummer. However, once exposed, the “Wizard” goes on to make what I have always considered the real point of the story, one that can instruct and help us in our current dilemma.
Taking time with each character, the “Wizard” reminds the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Lion of the ways in which they have demonstrated, all along, that they already possess the brain, the heart and the courage they believe they lack. They had simply failed to recognize and appreciate their own abilities. He awards to each the symbols used by the world to recognize these accomplishments: a diploma, a commemorative watch, and a medal. What does this have to do with us?
Like them, we needed to wake up to the fact that we have more power than we thought. And we’re certainly not alone. Five million of us showed up on April 5th, at more than 1600 demonstrations, across the country and across the world. It is up to us and in our hands. We can turn this country back into America, again. We simply have to click our heels and say, “there’s no place here for heartless dictators”. Take heart! (and brains and courage)!
The Origin of the Lie that Tariffs Will Make America Wealthy
If you’ve already heard this story, please feel free to skip it. I was fascinated to learn the ways in which the poison of the fake tariff benefit theory got poured into Trump’s ear and into our crumbling economy.
In 2016, when Trump was running for his first term, he turned to his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, asking him to find an economic advisor who could help with messaging for the campaign. Kushner, in true Trumpian style, scrolled through book titles on Amazon, and, upon reading the summary (not the book) of one called “Death By China” by Peter Navarro, recommended Navarro for the job. The book had been widely panned for its xenophobic and hysterical tone, as well as its unproven theories, but, since Trump hadn’t even opened a book since the second grade, if then, he hired the inexperienced blowhard as a trusted economic trade and commerce advisor to the campaign.
Navarro pushed a strong America First agenda, setting out a tough-guy isolationist and protectionist foreign policy. Admiring this approach, in his first term, the president chose him to serve as director of the National Trade Council and then as director of a new office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy.
Beginning in 2001, in each of his successive books, and in all discussions with Trump, Navarro repeatedly cited the theories and research of an “expert” named Ron Avar to support his proposals for the imposition of large tariffs on the grounds that they would protect American manufacturing and products.
But, just as there was no Wizard of Oz (tying our themes together here), there was not, and never had been, a real expert named Ron Avar. Navarro had invented him out of whole cloth in order to buttress the theories he was proposing and make them appear to be supported by research, study, or any kind of reality. Though he had been quoting Ron Avar in all of his books back to 2001, Navarro did not admit, until he was found out in 2019, that the “expert” was a fictional avatar for himself. The name Ron Avar is simply an anagram of Navarro.
Of course, this didn’t ruffle a hair on the president’s well-plastered head, since he, himself, had invented a fictional spokesperson, John Barron, in the 1980s, to sing his praises and burnish a non-existent reputation. Instead, proving yet again that he does not care to distinguish between fiction and non-fiction, between truth and invention, he doubled down on Avar’s theories and even seems to have convinced himself that greatly increasing tariffs would save America economically. Of course, the story that America needed saving was also made up, since the economy was doing well all the way up to the day of Trump’s second inauguration. That day was the beginning of the steep slide toward an economic depression, a trade war, and catastrophe for the American people.
Apparently, it was too much even for Elon Musk. Suddenly waking up to the fact that the imposition of Trump’s tariffs had drilled a trillion dollar hole in the stock market and shaved 11 billion dollars off of his own net worth, Musk posted that the tariffs were a vast screw-up and Navarro was “Truly a moron.”
Welcome to the world, Elon. You might want to choose your friends more carefully.
You know what they say, “If you lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas.” Not Toto, of course.
Sheila
