(Back in December, 2022, I wrote about the blizzard of Trump-like lies swirling around newly-elected Republican Congressman George Santos, who fraudulently stole the New York Congressional seat in the district where I lived for 20 years. Santos was the poster-boy for the “Next Generation of Republican Leadership,” and campaigned with House Republican Conference Chair, Rep. Elise Stefanik, from upstate New York. Stefanik even helped raise money for Santos, and used some of those funds to support other GOP Congressional candidates, giving the GOP control of the House of Representatives.
This morning those lies, fraud and alleged crimes caught up with George Santos when he was arrested by the FBI, and indicted on 13-federal charges including money laundering, fraud, and theft of public money—COVID money.
Like many law abiding Americans, I love the sound of GOP frauds, liars and cheats being handcuffed in the morning…
Here’s my original piece, entitled “Georgy Santos Has No Pantos.”
He never went to Horace Mann,
He lies and lies as fast as he can.
Baruch, a goof; Citibank, a prank.
Georgy Santos has no pantos.
Deaths in the Holocaust? 9/11? Or Pulse?
Surely such horror was meant to repulse.
No one will fact check; no one will question.
To grift on such grief,
Is to cause indigestion.
Georgy Santos, has no pantos.
Ukrainian-ISH, Jew-ISH, or just a tad gay;
The lying was pure TrumpISH,
Even Elise would say.
To them, one big con game, so ripe to play.
An overnight wonder, like Elizabeth Holmes or Crypto;
Santos source of $$$, didn’t come from calypso.
From Brazilian fascists? Putin? Stefanik, perhaps?
Just cook up a fake resume, and goddamn the facts.
Perhaps it was growing up poor, or just appreciative of every little thing, but we didn’t believe in wasting anything.
We repurposed as much as we could, giving our toys, and our creations, multiple lives and meanings.
A few years ago,, I searched for the best Pinata I could find, to celebrate Cinco de Mayo with our three granddaughters. I discovered a cornucopia of these beauties hanging from the ceiling of a bright, abundant Mexican market, in our Northern California town which is roughly one-third LatinX.
I filled it with candies and toys and we invited some of our granddaughters’ friends over to help us break the Pinata open. We had fun that day, and I rescued the battered Pinata and saved it for another time, another celebration.
Last year, our granddaughters planned an inspired, hopeful, “End of COVID” Party. All we needed was a replica of a COVID virus, prickly spikes and all.
Well, Voila! I re-dressed the Pinata in new garb, and this time, we smashed open the dastardly COVID virus to beat it out of our lives, retrieving the treats inside. We knew there were better days ahead, and that we could overcome any hardship, which is a wonderful meaning of this special holiday.
If only it were that easy to beat COVID, which, as of today, has taken 1.2 million lives in the U.S, and 6.9 million worldwide.
In our family, COVID stole the life of a beloved Matriarch, and laid me low 3 times. We are vaxxed, double vaxxed and triple vaxxed and are planning to get vaxxed again, knowing that without those life-saving vaccines, our bouts with the disease would have been much, much worse.
So, it’s kind of serendipitous, or ironic depending upon your perspective, that today, on Cinco de Mayo, the World Health Organization (WHO) is declaring that the COVID crisis is over.
Perhaps our COVID/Pinata Punching Bag had something to do with it’s demise. It would be nice to believe there was some kind of Karmic Connections, and that we were able to exorcise evil with such a simple act.
Just in case Karma does count here, it’s time to, once again, start repurposing our Punching-Bag Pinatas into the shapes of AR-15’s, Anti-Trans bigots, Racists, book censors, Clarence Thomas, Donald Trump, Nazis, Proud Boys, White Supremacists, Leonard Leo, Kevin McCarthy, Christian Nationalists and a host of other hate-mongers and fanatics infecting our lives, like communicable diseases.
As we used to say when I was head of a terrific national HIV/AIDS action and education organization: “We’ve Got A Lot of Work To Do.”
“Yes, Autism Is A Disability. And Being Disabled Is Not Bad.”
(A father-daughter conversation for the parenting website, Romper.com, between my son Matt Villano, a writer/journalist, and my oldest granddaughter, Sage Villano, an Autistic teenager.)
April is Autism Acceptance Month around the country, but every month is Autism Acceptance Month in my house. I’ve got three daughters — ages 13, 11, and 7 — and the oldest, an eighth grader named Sage, is autistic. Sage was diagnosed with autism in April 2021. Two years before that, doctors had misdiagnosed her. In all, our family searched nearly five years for a diagnosis. Something I’ve learned since then: Doctors have trouble diagnosing girls with autism. This means those recent numbers from the United States Centers for Disease Control suggesting that 1 in 36 kids are autistic probably underestimate the truth.
Sage and I talk about her autism a lot. We also talk a lot about autism in general. One of the recurring themes: How there aren’t enough autistic voices in the conversation about autism. Sage, like most autistic individuals, thinks allistic people — that is, people who don’t have autism — control the narrative. The more I read, the more I know she’s right.
When I floated the idea of sharing one of our father-daughter conversations about what it’s like to be a kid with autism with the wider world, Sage couldn’t agree fast enough. We decided on a Q&A. We did our “interview”on a Friday afternoon in my living room. She sat on her preferred side of our L-shaped couch, petting her cat, Bluebell; I sat on the other side. An app on my phone recorded everything. We focused mostly on what she wishes everyone understood about autism. Over the course of 20 minutes, my brilliant daughter taught me a ton. Below is our talk. —Matt Villano
Dad: To what extent do you consider autism a disability?
Sage: It is a disability. And being disabled is not bad. It’s just a word that people have made into this taboo word because disabled people are known to be different. Saying “disabled” is a bad word is like saying “gay” is a bad word.
[My kid, who is a lesbian, shakes her head in disgust at the notion of thinking the word “gay” could be bad.]
Dad: When in your life do you feel most misunderstood?
Sage: In schools they’ll have that talk in class about clear communication and body language, and how you’re being rude and disrespectful if you don’t make eye contact. Oh, they also don’t like it when you fidget with your hands. And I think that that way of thinking, this whole notion of having “manners,” really is not set up for autistic people. As an autistic person, I don’t make eye contact. I stare at people’s foreheads. I fidget with my hands all the time. I crack my knuckles as a stim [or, a way to manage feeling overstimulated].
[Sage takes a beat to crack her knuckles.]
When people see me doing that, they think I’m not trying. Sometimes even you do that.
[Not gonna lie, I feel pretty terrible when she says this but I let it go.]
But I am trying. I’m always trying. I’m physically incapable of acting like everyone else, of “manners.” It’s part of my disability.
When you’re a teenager, people will pick on every little thing they think you do wrong and then they will point it out to you. When you’re autistic, there’s even more stuff that society considers wrong.
Dad: What aspects of autism present the biggest challenge for you?
Sage: I struggle with reading social situations and understanding social cues, and with knowing what to say and what not to say in the moment. Sensory issues are a big part of it too. A big part of my autistic experience is the noises of certain things, and the feeling of certain textures and certain items of clothing. Also getting overheated is really uncomfortable for me.
[She stops to eat a handful of Pepperidge Farm cheddar goldfish crackers, a snack she calls her “same food” because she must have it every day. She has explained previously that she likes the crunch and the way they feel in her mouth.]
Dad, you know that’s why I hate being outside in summer so much.
Dad: Oh, I know. Aside from sweating in summer, what’s the hardest thing about being an autistic teenager?
Sage: [Laughs.] The social scene. Teenagers are ruthless, bro! They’re mean. There’s always going to be people that bully you for being different or wearing ugly, too-basic clothes, even though you might be wearing them for sensory comfort. People will always make fun of you for not knowing when to stop talking or interrupting too much or not getting the memo or whatever. Not “reading the room.” When you’re a teenager, people will pick on every little thing they think you do wrong and then they will point it out to you. When you’re autistic, there’s even more stuff that society considers wrong.
[Hearing this makes me wince; she’s been bullied for her autism multiple times. The most recent incident happened at the start of this month. I decide to move on and not dwell on the bullying right now.]
Dad: You’ve had some autistic dysregulations over the course of your life. What is that experience like for you?
Sage: It depends. Sometimes I’m so overstimulated or tired from masking, I just shut down. Other times I get really riled up and I feel like I don’t have control. The connection between my body and my brain just goes off. In both moments I can’t even think about what I’m doing. I don’t even remember half the time. People will tell me, “You threatened to throw yourself down the stairs,” or, “You punched me in the face.” And I’ll be like, “Really?” They’ll be like, “Yeah, why don’t you remember?” And I’m like, “Because the connection to my brain and my body just shut down, bro.” It’s scary. And it’s harder when allistic people don’t understand or make me feel bad about it.
[She stops and thinks for a second.]
I guess I understand why people wouldn’t understand, but it still makes me feel bad.
Dad: OK, you know I’m a grammar nerd, so I want to ask you a few questions about semantics. People sometimes describe autistic individuals or people they suspect might be autistic individuals to be “spectrumy” or “on the spectrum.” What do you think of these terms?
Sage: Spectrumy?
Dad: Yes, have you never heard that phrase?
Sage: Dude, that’s just wrong. I’ve never heard that, and I don’t ever want to hear it again.
Autism isn’t some kind of disease that needs to be cured. It’s a part of us and we shouldn’t have to change it just to fit society’s standards.
Dad: It is pretty gross. What about “on the spectrum,” Sage?
Sage: The spectrum is designed around who’s the closest to looking allistic, which implies that autism is a bad thing when it isn’t. What I mean is that the two ends of the spectrum are “low-functioning” and “high-functioning,” which is problematic because it makes us think that, as autistic people, we’re not valid unless we “function” the way allistic people think we should. When I hear someone say that phrase, I feel disrespected.
Dad: So, what is a better phrase to use?
Sage: Honestly, just say “autistic.” People are either autistic or they’re not.
Dad: If you could tell people one thing about being autistic, what would it be?
Sage: Autistic people are humans. Autism isn’t some kind of disease that needs to be cured. It’s a part of us and we shouldn’t have to change it just to fit society’s standards. There’s no cure for autism, and there shouldn’t be, because being autistic isn’t something that should be looked down upon or made fun of or used in an insulting way. Yeah, there are struggles to it — there are some benefits to it, like how we see the world — but telling us we need to find a cure, or we need to get it fixed is not true.
[Sage is starting to become visibly agitated]
Can we be done now, Dad? I want to get back to watching TV.
Dad: Yes! I promise. One last question.
Sage: [Annoyed] What?
Dad: As an autistic individual, what do you seek from people you encounter in the world?
Sage: [Stares into the distance, then chuckles to herself.] I just seek acceptance and the space to feel what I want to feel and act how I act without judgment or blame. I think everybody wants that, you know? It shouldn’t be that hard. For anyone.
(Photo by Steve Villano, at The National Memorial for Peace & Justice, Montgomery, Ala.)
Jews traveling through the States of the Old Confederacy to work for human rights and learn first-hand about the continuing struggle for Civil Rights and the centuries long Holocaust against Black people—millions of whom were kidnapped, shackled in heavy irons and died the bottom of the Atlantic ocean, enroute to being enslaved in America—is nothing new.
While many fellow Jews over the last century sacrificed much, including their livelihoods and their lives, to stand up against White Supremacy and injustice, we, as Jews—with clear exceptions like the Rabbis who marched with Dr. King, or civil rights activists like Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman– didn’t do enough to fight the brutalization of Black Americans as much as we like to tell ourselves that we did.
Many social activist Jews saw the White Supremacist terror against Black Americans as a replication of the Nazi terror vs. the Jews. Yet, others choose silence as a way of staying “safe,” particularly large numbers of Southern Jews, or the “good Jews,” as Mississippi’s racist Senator Theodore Bilbo called them, who joined the “White Citizens Councils” for self-protection, and anonymity.
Jews like me, are, after all, White-skinned. Hitler’s biggest and deadliest lie was that we were a separate, inferior race—a murderous myth which Hitler and the Nazis concocted to separate us from other Caucasians, making us more suitable for extermination, as he noted in Mein Kampf, indigenous people and Blacks were in America. Whoopi Goldberg was right, despite being wrongly attacked for her honesty. We were, and are White. To buy into the “Jews as a separate race” fiction, is to swallow Hitler’s elemental lie. We are a people, a civilization, a culture, a religion—but not a race.
In fact, as Professor James Whitman writes in “Hitler’s American Model,” and Isabelle Wilkerson reiterates in “Caste,” Hitler was furious that the Jim Crow laws of some 30 US States—upon which the Nuremberg Laws were based—didn’t go far enough, because they only applied to Blacks, not Jews. It was easier for Jews to hide in plain sight among American White Supremacists, for our own safety, because we were White, like they were. Until, of course, they discovered we were different; we were Jews, as Leo Frank found out in Georgia, in 1915.
So, in the week before the 55th Anniversary of the Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, more than two dozen Jews from Santa Rosa, California’s Congregation Shomrei Torah, including our Louisville, Kentucky-born Rabbi, George Gittleman, followed in the footsteps of the Freedom Riders, and John Lewis and marchers from Selma, Alabama to Montgomery, and walked through the hallways of the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, where Dr. King was gunned down and died.
We walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge—named for a Confederate soldier who killed Blacks and US Government soldiers—passing the very spot where John Lewis, and dozens of other men, women and children as young as 11 years old were beaten nearly to death 58 years ago, their blood running down into the dark Alabama River below.
We ran our hands over the big thick stones on the sides of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church, remembering that just a few feet behind them, in a basement level Ladies Lounge, four little Black girls, ages 14, 14, 14 & 11, were giggling and getting ready to go upstairs to pray on that Youth Sunday 60 years ago, when they were blown to bits by killer KKK bombers. The big, thick church stones that still stand, couldn’t cradle those babies, just like the massive girders of the World Trade Center that are no more, couldn’t protect nearly 3,000 other humans against mass murder.
We were left numb by the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum and Lynching Memorial in Montgomery, where huge steel slabs hung like human beings from trees, remembering the thousands of Black men, women and children lynched by lawless vigilantes and law enforcement officials in counties and states throughout the South and Midwest. I was overcome with grief, and my mind fled to Jerusalem 32 years earlier, when I first visited Yad Vashem, Israel’s Memorial to the Six Million, and walked through the darkened entryway where one-million tiny lights flashed to commemorate the one million children murdered by the Nazis. The feeling of the unimaginable slaughter of humanity was precisely the same.
I could barely speak for the remainder of the day. The rhythm of the Paul Simon song, “Hearts & Bones,” haunted me, and my own new lyrics to his masterpiece wrote themselves. With proper attribution and gratitude to singer/songwriter Paul Simon, my thoughts are below:
(Former NYS Governor Andrew Cuomo on his Podcast, stating that the prosecutor in Alec Baldwin’s case was motivated by politics and a quest for fame. Cuomo has also attacked the NYS Attorney General’s Sexual Harassment findings against him, and the Manhattan DA’s case against Donald Trump as politically motivated. He has also recently sided with BiBi Netanyahu in his attempt to cripple Israel’s Judiciary, and supports the extreme Right Wing government of Israel which has brought the country to the brink of Civil War.)
Andrew Cuomo continues to search for new ways to disgrace himself. Earlier this month, he announced he was forming a group to support the Fundamentalist government of Israel, at the very time his old friend, BiBi Netanyahu, was pushing to strip the Israeli Judiciary of it’s power (BiBi is under investigation for bribery and other crimes). Tone deaf to the legitimate voices of deep concern in Israel and the United States about Israel’s ability to stay away from becoming a complete theocratic and autocratic state—like many of its’ Arab neighbors– Cuomo has chosen to side with the bullying Bibi, whose alleged crimes of corruption make Spiro Agnew look like a harmless hub-cap thief. Cuomo has chosen to demonstrate his incredibly poor judgment toward the most extremist government in Israel’s 75 year history at the very time hundreds of thousands of Israeli Jews are demonstrating in the streets of Tel Aviv, against the suspension of human and civil rights in the country for which they have fought and bled. In fact, large numbers of members of Israel’s armed forces, are refusing to support Bibi’s anti-democratic dictates, causing the Israeli Defense minister, Yoav Gallant, to demand that Netanyahu stop moving to undermine the judicial system, since his actions are harming the pivotal Mid-East country’s national defense. Defense Minister Gallant said in a televised speech in Israel: “ The rift within our society is widening and penetrating the Israel Defense Forces. The schisms have caused a clear and immediate and tangible danger to the security of the state.” Netanyahu fired Defense Minister Gallant, and removed him from his Cabinet on Sunday, March 26th, setting off massive civil unrest throughout the country. But all thatseems to matter to Andrew Cuomo anymore is desperately clinging on to what he sees as the shards of his shattered political career. Otherwise, he’d be dismayed by Netanyahu’s dictatorial actions, and the growing Apartheid movement in Israel, where top-ranking extreme Right Wing government officials have declared that “Palestinians are non-existent.” That’s the same pre-genocidal language used by Hitler in Mein Kampf against the Jews, that threatens Jew-on-Jew violence, according to Israel’s own President, Isaac Herzog. Hundreds of thousands of Conservative and Reform Jews across the United States—and our Congregations– are reassessing our life-long support of Israel, since it has fallen from being a democratic hope in a global region of autocracy—a commitment to democracy, inclusion and human rights made to the United Nations and the United States at Israel’s founding 75 years ago—into a dark pit of fascism and totalitarianism against it’s own Israeli-born Arabs, Palestinians, women, the LGBTQ community, the rule of law, and progressive Jews in Israel and worldwide. By siding with Bibi and the theocratic extremists now in charge of Israel, Andrew Cuomo has abandoned most American Jews, and the fundamental principles of universal human rights, which Israel pledged to uphold in its founding charter. His father, Mario Cuomo, an admirer of Shimon Peres, and one of the most enlightened American political leaders of our time, would be appalled over his son’s abandonment of support for the rule of law in Israel and the United States. I had the honor of working with Mario Cuomo, and of meeting both Peres and Yitzhak Rabin in Israel in 1992, three years before Rabin was assassinated by the very same extreme Right Wing fanatics—followers of the racist and convicted terrorist Rabbi Meir Kahane—who have now seized power in Israel. Tragically, those are the kind of totalitarians Andrew Cuomo has thrown his support behind. But Andrews’s attacks on the rule of law, for purely political purposes, aren’t limited to Israel. They’ve expanded to include his own perceived political enemies in this country—prosecutors; a target of Cuomo-as-victim, since a prosecutorial investigation by NYS’ Attorney General Tish James uncovered damaging findings about Cuomo’s behavior as Governor, in the areas of sexual harassment and abuse. This week, as Trump whipped up his White Supremacist wackos in Waco, Texas, in attacks on Manhattan’s Black District Attorney, Andrew Cuomo was hustling for headlines again, maligning Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s Grand Jury investigation into Trump’s crimes as “political”–on the day after Bragg got a Trump-inspired death threat. Great timing, Andrew. Mario Cuomo’s mantra and his great integrity, which attracted many of us who worked with him to work with him, and which we respected greatly , was “The law isthe law.” It was a standard he lived by, and a legal and moral value he applied uniformly. Unfortunately, his oldest son—a lawyer, and one-time Attorney General of New York State—has twisted his father’s teachings into being: “the law is whatever the leader says it is, and everyone else should hold the leader’s coat,” consistent with the actions of Bibi Netanyahu , Donald Trump, and Andrew Cuomo himself. This cheapened version of a Cuomo just can’t let go of the fact that the NYS AG–a post he once held when he crafted strong anti-sexual harassment laws–investigated the credible sexual harassment complaints against him by 12 women, whose rights the State Attorney General is sworn to protect. The fact that there was credible evidence against Governor AndrewCuomo is why Cuomo is no longer Governor. He alone is responsible for wrecking his own public service career. Cuomo, like the other self-professed “victims” Bibi Netanyahu and Donald Trump whom he is abandoning his upright upbringing to defend, refuses to accept responsibility for any of his actions. He blames the women who filed sexual harassment complaints against him; the prosecutors & investigators; the media; and, even “wokeness”—a nonsensical fiction championed by Trump, Ron DeSantis, and other Far-Right extremists; Christian Nationalists who trample on Jewish teaching that life begins at birth; White Supremacists opposed to teaching about slavery and US racial history; and other anti-government troglodytes hell-bent against law enforcement—like the January 6th insurrectionists, and the last criminal cult from Waco, 30 years ago. Cuomo even once had the audacity to blame his sexualized, groping actions on his Italian heritage, until many of us in the Italian-American community demanded that he stop spreading ethnic slurs about us, and man-up for his own individual unacceptable behavior. Sadly, Andrew Cuomo cannot control his craven craving for public attention or to stay relevant. With $10 million of campaign contributions in the bank, and a wealth of skills, talent and media access, there are dozens of ways and urgent issues on which Andrew Cuomo can make the world better, and increase his relevancy. He can fight to protect Women’s Reproductive Freedom; lead the effort to make voting rights 100% universal; be a powerful voice on behalf of the LGBTQ community and protecting the human rights of Trans people; battle against the unconstitutional banning of books, and the fundamental right of parents to have our children and grandchildren learn a complete, uncensored history of the United States, and the responsibilities of citizenship. He can continue the good work he started nearly 40 years ago on homelessness, or focus on growing food insecurity. Instead, he wallows in playing the victim, and bellows his blubbering whines in a blustery voice, just like Bibi and Trump. It’s an enormous tragedy that a human being like Andrew Cuomo, with so many gifts and blessings, has forgotten the sound lessons his father taught him, as well as the oft-repeated advice of Mario Cuomo’s spiritual muse, Teilhard de Chardin: “All that is necessary to achieve happiness in this life is to be part of something bigger than oneself.”
