Rick Scott was supposed to keep his mouth shut. But then he unleashed the "bigotry circus of poorly planned nonsense."
Welcome to the GOP's "11 point plan to rescue America." It's a doozy, folks.
Welcome to The Experiment, where we’re hoping for a quick resolution of the baseball owners’ lockout so I can enjoy seeing my Baltimore Orioles lose slightly fewer games this year. Jessie Daniels returns to ask some provoking questions about whether the state of the union really is strong, and Frank Spring gives us the backstory on this Katy character. As for me, I do what I really did not want to, and that’s take you through the Republican’s plan to “rescue America.”
As always, we have things to do (feed hungry people for my birthday), read (Scott Galloway on why the dollar might be Putin’s undoing), watch (Twenties on BET), and listen to (PAINLESS, a terrific new album from Nilüfer Yanya).
And by the way, I’ve got a fundraiser going for the Central Texas Food Bank on my Facebook page. Help me feed hungry people! Finally, this is the last weekend you can vote for Forget the Alamo as New Book by an Austin Writer in the Austin Chronicle.
If any of you nominate me for best non-fiction writer, I swear I will haunt you. Actually, that brings up a funny story. My youngest, a college freshman, wanted to curry favor with his Texas History professor, so he went up to her after class one day and asked if she’d read Forget the Alamo. She had and said she loved it, so my son said that he could get one of the authors to come speak to the class because, well, his dad wrote it.
“Your dad’s Bryan Burrough?!?” enthused the professor.
No, no, said my son, who I should point out shares my last name.
“Then your dad must be Chris Tomlinson,” she said, sounding every bit as excited about the prospect of speaking with the progeny of Bryan Burrough.
No, said my son, who said that his dad was the other one on the cover, Jason Stanford. The professor politely passed on the offer to have me speak to her class. Forget the Alamo might be the best book by an Austin writer that came out in 2021, but I’m far from the best writer on that book, much less in Austin. So, no, please don’t nominate me. When I die, I will literally haunt you and make all your pictures crooked.
But first, have I ever told you about this text thread I’m on?
Folks, if you’re like me, you prefer spending time in conversation with your intellectual betters, not only for the chance for dazzling self-improvement but the overwhelming abundance of opportunities on offer. (“Your dad is Bryan Burrough?!?) But in a world of being the intellectual water boy to the varsity athletes, there is no more rarified such paradigm as the text thread I’m on with Caitlin, Elie, Maggie, Frank, and Sonia. And though I am not as smart or well-educated as they, I do bring certain qualities to the text thread, notably advanced age and various infirmities that I try to keep to myself.
Last week Elie dropped a link to Rick Scott’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal into the chat, and, having a million better things to do, I of course clicked on it anyway.
An aside on Scott, a senator from Florida who has a startling visage that the eye does not rest upon but adjusts with some effort to. Scott became obscenely wealthy by defrauding Medicare so much so that he had to pay $1.7 billion in fines. Having learned to screw people over at scale, he went into politics, first as governor and now as a united states senator who chairs the GOP’s senate campaigns, which makes his opinions more relevant than, say, Mike Braun, Mike Crapo, or Mike Rounds, none of which are names I made up. What he is saying is what Republicans will be campaigning on.
The gist of his op-ed was that he, a courageous truth teller, had angered the “Beltway coward[s]” because he “committed heresy in Washington” by releasing a plan (A PLAN!). “In the real world beyond the Beltway,” he wrote, “Republicans and independents demand bold action and a plan to save our nation.” I’ve got to say, as a liberal Democrat I must have missed the rending of garments for lack of a plan from Washington, but perhaps there’s more appetite for government planning than when I grew up.
Oddly, Scott doesn’t so much go into the “11-point plan with 128 ideas” as refer to it after spending four paragraphs asserting that things have gone a bit squiffy and then changing the subject almost entirely. It appears Scott said that everyone, whether or not they made or had any money, should pay some taxes. “I said that all Americans need to have some skin in the game. Even if it is just a few bucks, everyone needs to know what it is like to pay some taxes,” wrote Scott. “It hit a nerve.” Well, sure. When you propose taxing income and respiration, people might get touchy.
Then Maggie dropped the link to Scott’s 11-point plan into the thread. “Have y’all flipped through his weirdo plan?” she texts. “It is truly all the quiet parts being screamed out loud. It is a bigotry circus of poorly planned nonsense.”
I read “An 11 Point Plan to Rescue America: What Americans Must Do To Save This Country” and suspect they eschewed hyphens in the title because they might sound too much like hymens, and fellas, that’s science. I wish I had been aware of the exact moment when we went through the looking glass. I think it was on slide 8 when Scott declared that children will be required to salute the flag. It’s stuck in there between saying the Pledge of Allegiance and teaching that America is a great country, so I almost missed it. A hand over the heart is not enough anymore, apparently. The exact manner of salute is not prescribed, whether elbow bent and fingers at the brow or arm outstretched, fingertips at hairline elevation, palm down.
The plan calls our troops “American war fighters,” proposes teaching the three r’s, and eliminates racism by forbidding ever asking anyone about race or ethnicity. “We simply do not give a damn what color anyone’s skin is,” writes Scott. “That’s the colorblind future America deserves.”
“‘We oppose cultural segregation. We believe in the melting pot.’” is an interesting argument for what amounts to an overtly fascist policy,” texts Frank.
Scott’s plan (Guys, c’mon, it’s a real plan, not just a Power Point.) says we will “enforce our laws, all of them,” finish the wall and name it after Donald Trump, and treat socialism “as a foreign combatant.”
“It is a rich text,” says Maggie.
“I am once again asking: why is everything like having a stroke?” offers Frank. “I actually think it’s point 7 when this thing really goes off the rails.”
The alliterative Point 7 — FAIR, FRAUD-FREE ELECTIONS — has a daring up-is-down flair but avoids the f-word that sallied from my mouth. “In true Orwellian fashion, Democrats refer to their election rigging plans as ‘voting rights’. We won’t allow the radical left to destroy our democracy by institutionalizing dishonesty and fraud,” writes Scott.
Point 8 — FAMILY — sees your Orwell and raises you Atwood. “The nuclear family is crucial to civilization, it is God’s design for humanity, and it must be protected and celebrated. To say otherwise is to deny science.” Blessed be the fruit, yo.
“Number 9 is an absolute banger,” warns Frank.
Men and women are biologically different, “male and female He created them.” Modern technology has confirmed that abortion takes a human life. Facts are facts, the earth is round, the sun is hot, there are two genders, and abortion stops a beating heart. To say otherwise is to deny science.
A banger indeed. I retreated into the grammarian’s shelter of questioning, once again, Scott’s punctuation choices. Why, I wondered, did he need those quotation marks? Oh yes, Genesis 1:26-28: “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” Because science.
“This is what happens when you mainline OAN and Newsmax,” texts Elie.
“Incredible stuff, truly,” texts Frank. “I can’t believe the Super Bowl halftime show didn’t merit a bullet point of its own.”
Point 10 — RELIGIOUS LIBERTY/BIG TECH — concludes with a threat lest the wall separating church and state not be completely torn down: “Remember – the Second Amendment was established in order to protect the freedoms guaranteed in the First Amendment.”
But it’s the open appeal to nationalism in Point 11 — AMERICA FIRST — that sticks in my throat.
“America will be dependent on NO other country.”
“We will not pay any dues to the United Nations.”
“Our military will not be used as a peace-keeping force, it exists to protect us by intimidating or killing our enemies.”
“We take climate change seriously, but not hysterically. We will not adopt nutty policies that harm our economy or our jobs.”
Elie asked how Rick Scott’s plan compared to Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America in 1994, the first Republican wave year in modern times. As the senior member of the thread, I pointed out that it was not Gingrich’s alone but co-authored by a Texas congressman named Dick Armey, and everyone just acted like that was normal at the time. Besides, the Contract With America only had eight planks, and Rick Scott’s went to 11.
“YEEEEEEEAAAAAAAHH,” texted Frank, omitting punctuation entirely, before observing, “What chance did the poor man have, raised as he was by people with the surname Armey yet willing to name their son Richard?”
For Maggie, the biggest takeaway was Rick Scott quoting himself “like he said those things in a speech and not writing them for his little powerpoint.” Like he’s Michael Scott,” she texts. “He didn’t say this! He wrote this for the doc!!! It’s insane!”
To laugh at fascism’s unfashionable approach comforts the one being approached, but only up to a point. It’s comforting to mock inelegant writing that seems better suited to a script for a straight-to-video Chuck Norris movie in the late ‘90s. But that reference won’t make sense to those who only know Chuck Norris as the pop culture reference who parodied himself in 2004’s Dodgeball: A true underdog story. To me he’s still the out-of-fashion action hero, and America First the discredited nationalist screed championed by Charles Lindberg.
The temptation to brush our hands, having shown that Rick Scott a mocking he won’t soon forget, and consider the matter over with is too great. We can sit back in our overstuffed chairs, swirl our snifters and parse the politics of it all. A bit early, we agree, for Republicans to be throwing the red meat out there. Surely Chuck Schumer will make sport of the idea to make housewives pay taxes just for the sake of them paying taxes, eh? Quite so, says Frank. And don’t call me Shirley, offers Elie.
There’s a voice inside my head that keeps saying, “Rick Scott can’t possibly believe this! Of course he is just saying this for effect!” And then I tell that voice to settle down. It does not matter if any of this makes sense or has any basis in fact, because this isn’t an argument to be won but an advance to be blunted. You can’t use reason to disabuse someone of an idea they didn’t use reason to take up in the first place. The answer to “America will be dependent on NO other country.” isn’t a simpering “Well, actually…” before launching into a disquisition about multilateralism in an interdependent world.
Being right about them being wrong will be meager comfort when Republicans not only win back congress this November but take office in January 2023 and actually start doing all this stuff.
Storm’s coming. You want to complain about the weather or start building a boat?
Jason Stanford is the co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. He works at the Austin Independent School District as Chief of Communications and Community Engagement, though he would want to point out that these are his personal opinions and his alone, but you already knew that. Follow him on Twitter @JasStanford.
Más
How we’re getting through this
Thanking Ryan Holiday
Coming around on AirBnB
Cheering this 5th grader on
Feeding hungry people in Austin
Getting stronger muscles in 3 seconds
Pre-ordering Forget the Alamo in paperback
Marveling at the many careers of Sarah Bird
Not being sure what to make of pawternity leave
Making accessories for a truck that doesn’t exist
What I’m reading
Gregory Carleton: “Why Russia thinks it’s exceptional” - No research issues.
Not for nothing do state-sponsored advertisements replay a joke favored by Tsar Alexander III in the late 19th century – but no longer in jest. He would ask, “How many allies does Russia have?” Two, was the punch line: its Army and its Navy.
Scott Galloway: “Yachts & War” - Definitely read this.
Vladimir Putin was 15 when those tanks rolled into Prague. One lesson he likely drew confirmed the upshot of every previous military confrontation: The side with the most armaments wins. However, things may be changing. The most powerful carrier squadron in the world today is the dollar, and it appears that the delta in traditional firepower may not be the sole determinant of the outcome.
Michele L. Norris: “What Ketanji Brown Jackson’s guidance counselor missed” - Be a good guidance counselor, people.
So, I have a slight twist on Jonathan’s query. I’d ask: “Are you now *that* guidance counselor, unable to see the potential that resides inside brown skin, or in some kid who doesn’t have the ‘right’ Zip code, name or gender?”
Cy White: “Dr. Stephanie Elizalde: Perfectly Imperfect” - The boss gets the cover of Austin Woman and about as positive and accurate a profile as anyone could ever hope for.
Even while wading through whispers and internet chatter about how she should present herself, Elizalde refused to let those who knew the least about her force her to assimilate to their notions of respectability. In her mind, there was never a question of choosing. “To be quite frank, it wasn’t until I came to Austin and was reading some social media, which I try to stay away from these days. Someone said, ‘I don’t know why she can’t just use her mom’s name. There’s no need for her to identify as a Latina. She’s just as much white as she is Latina. Why is the Latina the spotlight?’
What I’m watching
Is Twenties good? I don’t know, but I can’t stop watching it.
What I’m listening to
I can’t stop listening to Nilüfer Yanya’s sophomore album, PAINLESS, which sounds both like a ‘90s throwback to Lilith Fair guitar rock and futuristic at the same time.
Soccer96 is an experimental band from London. Something about this song, “I Was Gonna Fight Fascism,” caught my ear.
I was gonna fight fascism
I was gonna
Course I was gonna fight
But I was really angry with the other people fighting fascism
So I just went on facebook and said nasty things instead
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Buy the book Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick banned from the Bullock Texas History Museum: Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of the American Myth by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and myself is out from Penguin Random House. Out in paperback this June!