2022 February blog
Bert Bluster Enters the Race, or Our Homebred Game of Thrones
By Chuck Peek
Like so many places, Nebraska is in the throes of early election fervor. Ads run ad nauseum, and none of them address any real issues or propose any real solutions. They are not meant to. They are meant to hit the hot buttons that draw voting blocs to favor one candidate over another. In other words, they are meant to distract voters from the real issues that, if they gave them a fair hearing, would end up as the best way to term-limit our current office holders.
Someone once described an academic lecture as a process by which the ideas in one head are put into another head without either of the heads needing to do any thinking. That could very well describe campaign ads.
Several hats in the ring for the Republicans, almost a new hat every day it seems, but the two with deep pockets seem to be Charles Herbster and Jim Pillen.
The Herbster ads are about the Nebraska Spirit, a spirit shared not by all Nebraskans by any means but by the “us ranchers/bull semen sellers” crowd. Herbster was in Washington D.C. with the Trump party on the evening of January 5. In case that date doesn’t ring any bells, it was the night before the assault on our government, the night Herbster slipped out of town before being associated with the pillage he’d encouraged. Now his party has held the insurrection to be just ordinary political discourse (tell it to the families of the terrorized and injured) and Herbster is endorsed by Trump (who, sadly, still plays big in Nebraska’s 3rd District).
He’s confronted by Jim Pillen, once a decent enough fellow, who brandishes the shotgun by which he is going to keep Nebraska safe. That’s the Nebraska Way, whatever that might mean.
One of his ads extols family values, noting how his parents taught him how to treat others. His other ad shows what that must mean as he treats everyone who might disagree with him on anything with derisive scoffing and belittling. No other ideas fit into the Nebraska Way.
Both candidates go out of their way to deride and offend the underpaid working poor, the LGBTQ+ community, people of color, and (I know this is shocking) “liberals in Washington”—anyone to the left of QAnon.
Meanwhile, Pillen is precious quiet about how his inherited family farm is now part of big ag, jeopardizing the family farm. Nor does he tell us just from what onslaught of enemies he is protecting Nebraska—apparently, all those groups whom he belittles, the enemy at the gate. Pillen is currently, in his phrase “heaven help us,” a Regent of the University and uses his Regency to urge the University not to teach any truths he finds inconvenient, especially about our nation’s racial history.
So far, then, Pillen has only betrayed the Nebraska voters’ trust in him while Herbster has betrayed the very foundations of our Republic with Democratic principles. And neither seems to be even remotely challenged by other Republican candidates, one or two of which seem to still be decent people trying to work around the fact that unless they start sounding like right-wing bigots and conspiracy theorists, they don’t stand a snow ball’s chance in hell.
Believe it or not, it was not always thus in our fair state. There was a time when people of all stripes were not made stupid by ideological blinders, listened to candidates from both parties, and decided, often on the basis of personal character, who to vote for—pretty evenly candidates of both parties. Not so long ago our two Senators were considered some of the brightest on the Senate floor—one a Republican, one a Democrat. Not so long ago, Ben Nelson led a bipartisan gang of eight in actually getting legislation through the Congress.
The growing momentum from the Contract with America to the Tea Party to the Freedom Caucus to the Bannon/Trump chaos changed all that.
It is hard for some of our folks—ironically, those who most claim to be carrying on a tradition—to recall that the whole national climate has changed radically, that the ideas Democrats today champion were once championed by the Republicans.
I was driving somewhere the other day, listening to radio classics on Sirius radio, and chanced on hearing the Fred Allen show. Allen’s name has faded but in the 1930’s and 1940’s, he was as big a name as Bob Hope and Jack Benny. His program was sponsored by then big names in popular products like Ipana toothpaste and Sal Hepatica. His guests were also big names such as Frank Sinatra, Roy Rogers, Orson Welles, Bela Lugosi, and Edgar Bergen.
The program I chanced on was his old “Town Hall” and originally aired during the late 1930’s build up for World War II. Allen addressed that build up with a joke. History, he said, is filled with many generals whose names are now long forgotten, but the Venus de Milo is still standing. The moral, he concluded, is that we really are better off without arms.
And, as to our heritage, there is the little matter of how Nebraska came into the union. The first proposed constitution that anyone be a citizen in order to be a citizen, but it did require them to be white. To this day, no one is quite sure just who wrote that proposed Constitution. However, with Reconstruction in full stream, nobody wanted to grant statehood to another racist state; they were looking for states in the spirit of Lincoln (for whom our Capitol City is named); so Nebraska became part of the United States by disavowing that offensive clause and eliminating race as a qualification for citizenship. If Mr. Pillen were not so against teaching truth in our schools (his ads call that a ‘socialist’ idea!), he and our students might know what is the true Nebraska Way, Nebraska Spirit.
In the trumped-up patriotism of our times, Allen would have been run out on a rail. Or, in Mr. Pillen’s manner, scoffed at as anti-American. The right wing of her day accused Lucille Ball of being a Communist, but that right wing had not yet deluded so many Americans.
Sadly, three generations later, the people who pretend to bear our heritage, have reversed its values. As former Governor Frank Morrison told a Fred Phelps picket line…your mothers would be ashamed of you. I don’t know about their mothers, but certainly their great grandmothers would be ashamed!
In the midst of this election ballyhoo, our Governor has decided to do battle with Colorado over water rights. Not over the agricultural issues that produced an earlier water compact but over his desire to build a lake in eastern Nebraska that would rival the bigger lakes in western Nebraska and would, not coincidentally, bring in lots of tourist revenue. Even now it is apparent that this is going to get mired down in legal battles and, as one wag put it, send lots of rich lawyers’ sons and daughters to very expensive colleges.
Where will Nebraska’s portion of those fees come from? From the money Nebraska received from the Biden Administration’s programs meant to build infrastructure, support those least able to support themselves and their families with educational, medical, and social service, and rejuvenate the economy. Well, this will certainly rejuvenate the economy of Trump’s friends in the legal community. And once spent on fees for the legal battles, will no longer go to the people the Governor has declared “don’t really need any help.”
These are the same people that didn’t need help when the voters of Nebraska voted for expanding Medicaid and the Governor and his administration delayed action on it for years!
They in fact do need help, the help given them would have strengthened the Nebraska economy and especially its rural health care institutions, and improved the quality of life in our state. “They don’t need help” is a lie, and it makes you wonder why the proponents of such draconian measures don’t feel they can be honest with the public. Why don’t they just say that they don’t believe in federal programs and won’t take part in them—and see how the electorate feels about that? Or, if they don’t give a plug nickel about that, why don’t they just say they believe government exists to enhance the wealth of the wealthy, lots of whom belong to the same club they do…the club of the privileged 1%? Or they don’t want to appear to benefit from a Biden program?
Well, those were, as you could tell, just rhetorical questions…questions the answers to which we are already all too well aware of.
Meanwhile, as the Republican race looks sure to come down to Herbster and Pillen, you can just as easily see it comes down to Trump vs. Rickets, who have (respectively) endorsed them. That should bring to mind Shakespeare’s “a plague on both your houses” but it is unlikely to do so. And, if a plague falls on both camps, then just possibly the lone Democrat, Carol Blood, might squeeze through and make a showing. She’s bright and knowledgeable for sure, but those aren’t the stuff of which Nebraska victories are made these days, something made more apparent every day by those who have won and can’t or won’t govern. In any event, Democrat pockets don’t run so deep as to start round-the-clock ads just yet.
But think on this: What will it say about voters, especially those of Nebraska’s 3rd (western) district, if all you have to do to get their vote is to show up on TV toting a shotgun and touting hog slop or bull semen. When this dreadful cycle comes to an end, there will be a lot of children or grandchildren ashamed of a generation so easily duped.
Duping, however, is a forte of the politics of the far right these days. It’s in the playbook! One of our Congressional Representatives, under indictment, hopes we’ll excuse his lying as being simply his being easily confused! Now there is a real qualification for office!
Meanwhile, all the candidates bemoan the loss of our young folks to more enticing places outside of Nebraska…places where possibly gay folks are loved for who they are, immigrants are seen as the tired, the poor, the hungry that we welcome to our shores, and people don’t always have to cloak the past with platitudes. Of course, people longing for that kind of place are not the kind of people Pillen or Herbster want to keep in Nebraska.
Under Jane Kleeb’s leadership, a state Democratic Party that had been sorely weakened by the DNC’s policy of neglecting Red States, is slowly gaining strength. I think it has a promising future, but that may be too far in the future to meet the current challenge, so our most likely next Governor will be one of two sloganeers for hot button issues with no ability or intention of confronting the real political issues raised by the malfeasance of the so-called Republicans currently in office in our state and nation, indeed in the very Congress insulted and degraded by the insurrectionists the Republican party refuses to condemn, let alone punish.
Yes, Regent Pillen—Heaven help us! Meanwhile, Jim, you take heart—driving around town I’ve seen two Trump-flagged homes deserting their Messiah’s endorsement and sporting Pillen yard signs.
Next blog: March (Lent and much to be “Lent” about!)
capeek 