THE YEAR OF DAMNED FOOLS AND DAMN-FOOL NOTIONS

By: Paul S. Marchand

It’s been nearly 30 years since I watched Linda Hunt, Sigourney Weaver, and Mel Gibson play off each other in Peter Weir’s The Year of Living Dangerously, which takes place against the backdrop of the overthrow of Indonesia’s then-President Sukarno.

A generation and a half later, as America swings into another presidential election year, I can’t help but think of 2011 as the Year of Damn-Fool Notions, or maybe just of damned fools.  Unfortunately, it’s pretty clear that 2012 will be the year of Damn-Fool Notions redux, as we listen to the policy proposals of a bench of GOP presidential hopefuls unparalleled in its thinness since the Democratic presidential pool of 1988.

It’s hard to say which Republican candidate is more appalling.

Has it been Newt Gingrich, with his apparent nostalgia for a dispensation that used to send children into factories at six?  To say that there is something disturbing about the idea of undoing more than a century of legislation designed to keep children in school and out of unsafe working conditions is to understate the case by order of magnitude.

Has it been Willard M. Romney, who was for what he was against before he was for what he was against, or is it the other way around?  The dizzying speed with which Mr. Romney takes up and discards positions has been one of the most extraordinary and unedifying political spectacles of our time.

Has it been Ron Paul, the political munchkin whose antebellum, nay, antediluvian views on race and society seem to be biting him on the posterior of late?  It certainly seems under his libertarian façade, Dr. Paul is nothing more than old-fashioned neo-confederate racist with a generous, adulterating dose of bad Ayn Rand thrown in.

Has it been Rick Perry, who cannot seem to open his mouth without committing another faux pas, detracting as he does so from the sum total of human knowledge?  Listening to Rick Perry demonstrate the limitations of his understanding leaves one wondering whether he possesses even a basal skull set for public office.

Has it been the other Rick, whose last name, when Googled, defines a postcoital byproduct, and whose apparent obsession with what gay men do in the privacy of our bedrooms has led to more than just the occasional raised eyebrow?  To say that he comes across as a political charlatan of the extremest order is also to understate the case.

Has it been the incredible Michelle Bachmann, who would, no doubt, love to come across as an American Margaret Thatcher for our time, but who instead comes across as the crazy pro. per. lady ahead of you on the appearance calendar in court --- the one who insists on explaining in excruciating detail whatever conspiracy theory is uppermost in her mind?

At all events, none of the GOP seekers after the Presidency seem to have recalled Mark Twain’s advice that it is better to remain silent and be a thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt.

Time was that the Republican Party could put up highly competent, highly intelligent, highly articulate candidates for public office.  Indeed, by comparison with the current crop, even Richard Nixon would be preferable.

For I was not in jest when I suggested that the current bench of GOP presidential hopefuls shows even less to the American electorate than did the Democratic field of 1988 that ultimately gave us Michael Dukakis -- the best, sadly, of that year’s not very inspiring lot.

In the end, the Republicans will probably do what they have historically done; they will fall in line behind a candidate who has the best campaign machine: Mitt Romney.  And they will do so because, as Bill Clinton once famously observed, while Democrats want to fall in love, Republicans want to fall in line.

Given the thinness and the inadequacy of the GOP presidential field, it’s not surprising that comedians of every stripe should have found the endless Republican primary campaign for the presidency to be an endless source of grist for the comic mill.  Such a development should have Republican strategists deeply worried.

When a campaign season degenerates this early into farce, it ought to be a warning to candidates and their staffers that they are not being taken nearly as seriously as they need to be in order to win.  Back in 2008, a friend of mine with experience in both political campaigns and the entertainment industry, watching Tina Fey’s dead-on impression of Sarah Palin, had no hesitation in calling the race right then and there for Barack Obama.

Worse still for our friends in the party opposite has been the fact that this endless, agonizing primary affairs has also had the effect of giving the President enormous quantities of ammunition to use against whoever crawls out, broken and bleeding, from the GOP scrum to emerge as the nominee.  Another friend of mine, a longtime GOP stalwart, expressed it this way: “the Republicans have learned the Democratic trick of forming a circular firing squad aiming inward.”

So, as we enter into the final days before the much-overrated Iowa caucuses, we see a series of presidential wannabes who have not only managed to make us laugh at them but also to give us sticks to beat them with.  The President, who at the beginning of the fall had seemed to be a dead man walking, increasingly appears to be not only the only adult in the room, but also the only person with the intellect, the understanding, and the stature for the job.

This is not the narrative any GOP strategist wants to see emerging.  It might have been different, had the candidacies of Jon Huntsman, Buddy Roemer, or Gary Johnson ever developed any meaningful throw weight, but all three of them were too smart, too pragmatic, and too potentially appealing to crossover voters, to be able to survive the hard line right wing slugfest the Republican primary processes have become.

For Democrats, the 1988 presidential debacle proved to be a fortuitous turning point.  The lessons learned from that election enabled us to select in Bill Clinton a candidate with sufficient appeal to capture the White House in 1992.  This current election may very well prove to be a similar turning point for the GOP, though I'm not holding my breath.

For while I am not calling the 2012 election for President Obama just yet, I have no hesitation suggesting that the election is his to lose; the auguries suggest that he will in fact be reelected.  If the GOP is serious about fielding a presidential candidate with meaningful hopes of winning in 2016, it’s going to have to tack back toward the center, much as the Democratic Party had to do between 1988 and 1992.  For if it does not, 2016 may prove to be a very unpleasant year indeed for the Grand Old Party.

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PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City.  The views expressed herein are his own.

FOR UNTO US CHILD IS BORN

By: Paul S. Marchand

An unwed mother. 

Situationally homeless. 

Pregnant. 

Traveling with a partner who is not the father of her unborn child.

Not the sort of thing we would expect from “respectable” people.

Indeed, many, hearing such a word-picture, might well be inspired to angry, fulminating discourse on the ills of our 21st-century American society.

Of course, the word-picture in question actually comes from the narrative set forth in Luke’s Gospel of the birth of our Savior in a manger in Bethlehem more than 2000 years ago.

Across generations and centuries, the Lucan infancy narrative, encapsulating both the paradoxical power of powerlessness and the human compunction we feel in the presence of the smallest and weakest among us, has been at the heart of the Christmas story.

For at its core, the Christmas story is about more than giftgiving or liturgies or Christmas trees or official proclamations or Christmas cards (with or without First Dog, pace Sarah Palin).  It is about proclaiming a radical view of human and social justice over against a dispensation that still, after 20 centuries, organizes the world very much without reference to the teachings the infant in Bethlehem sought to impart to us, a dispensation that still reflexively takes the side of Dives over Lazarus --the one percent over the 99 percent.

Some years ago, an Episcopal priest of my acquaintance inveighed against the common cliché of “putting the Christ back in Christmas.”  Instead, he suggested we should perhaps seek to put the Mass back in Christmas.  By sharing the gifts of human companionship, human compunction, and human charity, and by breaking bread together --- both at home and in the context of the Eucharist --- this priest suggested we could do more to share the spirit of Christmas than if we had had all the tangible things in the world wrapped in paper under the tree.

For as much as the birth of a child focuses the thoughts of that child’s family toward what must be done to create a better future, so too does the infancy narrative which lies at the heart of our Christmas story call us to examine our consciences and our conduct, and to focus our thoughts on building a better future for our communities, for our country, and for the world.  The greatest gift of Christmas, therefore, may not be what lies under the Christmas tree.  The greatest gift of Christmas may be the opportunity it gives to us to renew a commitment to the kind of social justice the Infant in the manger came into this world to proclaim:

    “The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me; because the LORD hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound; to proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all that mourn.” Isa. 61:1-2

For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, Who shall be called the Prince of Peace.

Merry Christmas.

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PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, California.  He is a member of the Riverside County Workforce Investment Board.  The views expressed herein are his own.

THE LONG GOODBYE TO THOSE WHO SAVED THE WORLD

By: Paul S. Marchand

Patsy’s Bar, the Bronx.

That’s where my dad remembers being on the afternoon of December 7, 1941. Eight years old, munching on pizza, and sipping an illegal beer.

Seventy years have passed since the Japanese attack against Pearl Harbor. An anniversary that falls on some multiple of ten years always seems to call forth more discussion and reminiscence than an "off year" anniversary. So it is now, in 2011, when 70 years have passed to the day since my dad and the others at Patsy’s Bar heard the news.

The number of those who remember that day --- to say nothing of those who were of military age at the time --- ineluctably grows smaller with each passing year and each passing decade. Seven years ago, writing on the 60th anniversary of D-Day, I noted that the "Greatest Generation" which had stormed ashore on the continent of Europe on June 6, 1944, was passing rapidly into eternity, and as their numbers diminished, World War II was also passing out of living memory; the long goodbye continues.

Seven years later, the number of World War II veterans has diminished even further; those for whom Pearl Harbor is still living memory are most likely to have experienced December 7, 1941 as children, like my eight year old dad in Patsy’s Bar.

While it will probably be at least another couple of decades before the last living American World War II veteran dies, (our last living World War I veteran passed away only recently) the days when there were World War II veterans in every neighborhood and on every block are long gone. A few days ago, the Desert Sun reported that the local chapter of the Pearl Harbor Survivors organization was folding; there were no longer enough living Pearl Harbor survivors in the Coachella Valley to be able to sustain their organization. By 2015, the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, the number of living veterans of that conflict will be close to the vanishing point.

As our collective living memory essentially ceases to be that of the men and women who served and fought during World War II, it shifts to be that of those who were children during what Winston Churchill called those "stern days." I think of my eight year old dad in Patsy’s Bar at the beginning, and I think of my six year old mom, living in El Paso and witnessing the bright flash of the first atomic test up near Alamogordo just three and a half years later in the summer of 1945.

My own generation, the Baby Boomers, was the first to have no direct recall of the Second World War, but we did grow up in communities in which the presence of World War II veterans was still the rule, not the exception. Growing up at the end of the 1960s and the early 1970s in the Hollywood Hills in Los Angeles was to grow up in a place full of veterans --- some still in their vigorous late 40s and early 50s --- who had served in the armed forces not only of the United States and our allies, but even of the Axis as well.

The millennial generation --- those born in the 90s and just coming-of-age now --- and those born in this century, are even further removed from World War II than were we Boomers. For them, the memory of the Second World War can be as distant and sepia-toned as that of the Civil War. The world my millennial cousins inhabit is one in which the barriers and dispensations my generation took for granted simply do not exist.

How does one explain the postwar partition of Germany to someone who was a toddler, or not even living, when the Berlin Wall fell and Germany once again became one?

How does one explain to a young cousin jetting off to Bratislava that not too long ago the Czech Republic and Slovakia were once part of the unified country called Czechoslovakia?

How does one explain that the country known for quality automobiles, consumer electronics, Pokémon, manga, and animé was once feared and hated on account of the "sneak attack" against Pearl Harbor?

How does one explain that the totalitarian communist state which was, in turn, our World War II ally and our Cold War adversary has since turned into a capitalistic, kleptocratic, frenemy?

Seventy years on, how does one explain the sense of disquiet that comes over so many of us on this 70th anniversary of Pearl Harbor that perhaps we took more for granted than we should have done those World War II veterans in our midst ---the ones who saved the world--- even if many of them would have been embarrassed to be so lauded?

For, in the end, that is exactly what they did.

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PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City. His dad was in Patsy’s Bar on Pearl Harbor Day, and his grandfather served in World War II. The views expressed herein are his own.

FOR THE OCCUPIERS, FOR THE NINETY-NINE PERCENT, FOR THOSE WHO HAVE FOUND THEIR VOICES AND CRY FOR JUSTICE, GIVE THANKS.

By: Paul S. Marchand

Every Thanksgiving, we find ourselves called upon to think about what we are thankful for.

This year, I find myself thankful for the Occupy Wall Street Movement and for the increasing social and political awareness of the Ninety-nine Percenters who have, perhaps without even knowing it, found themselves living a kind of reality first prefigured in the late Paddy Chayefsky’s screenplay for the 1976 movie Network.

In one of the most famous scenes in that film, the protagonist, the angry newscaster Howard Beale, loses it, famously exhorting his viewers to “get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: "I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!"

In our own time, we have seen life imitate art, as countless middle and working-class Americans, tired of being ripped off in the interests of the wealthiest one percent among us, have dared to say “we’re as mad as hell, and we’re not going to take this anymore!”

I’m thankful that, after eight bitter winters of George W. Bush, when middle and working-class Americans felt there was no one to listen to their cries and lamentations against their spoliation on behalf of the “haves and the have-mores” --- the richest one percent in the land, my brothers and sisters of the Ninety-nine Percent have finally found their voice, and have dared to speak truth to those who have unjustly enriched themselves upon the blood, toil, tears, and sweat of those who seek nothing more than basic fairness for themselves and for their posterity.

I’m thankful that, paradoxically, we have an administration in office which we, the people, believe will listen when we say that it is not right that the playing field should be tilted so powerfully against the Ninety-nine Percent of Americans upon whom the prosperity of this country, and in large measure, the world, depends.  That we are frustrated with its slowness to act on our behalf is a sign that we believe it capable of better things than its predecessor.  Now it is incumbent on that administration to listen, and listen well, to our voices. 

I’m thankful that a critical mass is taking shape which dares to say that it is not right that America in the 21st century should resemble France in the 18th; a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that we are all created equal deserves better than to be governed in the interests of a narrow class which bears a distinct and unsavory resemblance to the worst of the French nobility of the ancien régime.

I’m thankful for a movement that looks like America, a movement composed of all sorts and conditions of human beings; of young and old; of tall and small; of rich and poor; of professionals, the fully employed, the underemployed, and the unemployed; of straight and queer; of PhD’s and high school dropouts, of veterans, vagabonds, and vegans; of people of every faith and no faith at all.

I’m thankful for a movement that is not afraid of civil disobedience; I am grateful for a movement that is not afraid to sit peaceably amid clouds of pepper spray; I am grateful for movement that dares to say “these are our streets; we will occupy them. These are our parks; we will occupy them.  This our tundra; we will occupy it.  This is our country; we will occupy it.”

I’m thankful that we are reclaiming our noble revolutionary heritage, that we are having once again a conversation about liberty, about fairness, and about fundamental decency.

If we are to be able to speak in good faith of America as a land of opportunity, we dare not allow ourselves the feckless luxury of an unsustainable social order in which those who have “arrived” are able to pull up behind them the ladder of social mobility and success upon which others rely to better themselves and their children. 

I think it is safe to say that we of the Ninety-nine Percent do not resent the success of those who have made it, what we resent is the efforts of far too many in America’s one percent to prevent anyone else from making it, too.

So, on this Thanksgiving day, I give thanks to God Who in every generation calls forth prophets and witnesses.  I also give thanks for those prophets and witnesses who in our own time are those voices crying in the wilderness on behalf of all who have been voiceless, abused, and ground down.

A single voice, crying in the wilderness, can change the world.  By God’s good grace, we may dare to hope that many voices crying in cities and towns and villages all over this land, may yet change our world in our time for the better, for ourselves and for all who will come after us.  Amen.

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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, California.  The views expressed herein are his own.

NOW FOR THE MERITS.... A BATTLE LOST, A WAR TO WIN

By:  Paul S. Marchand

The California Supreme Court has unanimously held that the proponents of Proposition 8 have standing to defend if the State declines to do so.  Initial reactions notwithstanding, we should welcome the opinion.

While disappointing to many, the ruling is based on upon sound application of the principle of stare decisis, which holds that similar cases should be similarly decided.  As much as it may irritate many of us in the LGBT community that our civil rights should still be accounted lesser things than those of our straight neighbors, today’s advisory ruling, intended for the education of the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, may well open the way to a substantive adjudication in favor of marriage equality.

It’s important to keep our eyes on that larger goal.  As I’ve blogged before, denial of the right of GLBT people to enter the civil contract of marriage in effect reduces us to the status of slaves.  Whether Ruth marries Naomi, Jonathan marries David, or Adam marries Eve, should not matter in a state in which people of every faith and none at all should be able to exercise equal civil rights without having those rights sacrificed to assuage the religious discomforts of this or that sect, denomination, or cult.

Thus, in keeping our eyes on the prize, we should not allow ourselves to be distracted by the temptation to vent anger at what is, to all intents and purposes, a nonsubstantive decision turning on issues of law, not of policy. 

The Court’s opinion particularly Justice Kennard’s concurrence, offer guidance as to the Court’s rationale for its decision:
 "When the voters, through the exercise of their constitutionally guaranteed initiative power, have enacted a new statute or have amended the state Constitution, and the validity of that initiative is challenged in a judicial proceeding, who may appear in court to defend the initiative?
    "California‘s state trial and appellate courts have routinely permitted initiative proponents to defend an initiative‘s validity, and to appeal from a judgment holding an initiative invalid, particularly when state officials have declined to do so." (Concurrence of Kennard, J., slip opn. at 4-5, See also Majority slip opn., at 28-31. emphases added.)

The Court’s majority opinion also goes on to make it clear in no uncertain terms that “the state law issue that has been submitted to this court is totally unrelated to the substantive question of the constitutional validity of Proposition 8.”  Maj. slip opn. at 2. (emphasis added.)

In short, while anti-equality forces may try to spin today’s ruling as a victory, they should perhaps remember the old adage about being careful what one asks for, because one might get it.  If the State had been compelled to step in and defend Proposition 8, any of a number of outcomes could have been foreseen.  There might have been large-scale resignations from the Attorney General’s office by lawyers choosing to resign on principle rather than defend an odious law.  Conversely, the A.G.’s office might have, for the sheer sake of preserving its professional integrity, appointed the best and brightest lawyers it could secure.

As it is, Proposition 8 will now probably defended by the crew of cranks and crazies that defended it in the first place, along with their lawyers.  If the poor performance of the proponents’ legal team in the District Court and the Ninth Circuit is any predictor of any subsequent performance before the Court of Appeals, we may dare entertain a certain measure of optimism.

Sometimes, the battle one loses helps position oneself for a future win.  I hope -and with justification, I think- that is the case here.

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PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, CA.  Almost 20 years ago, he litigated one of the first marriage-equality cases in California.  The views contained here are his own.

A GOOD NIGHT TO BE A 99 PERCENTER: THE END OF THE BEGINNING

By:  Paul S. Marchand

It was a good night last night to be a Ninety-nine Percenter.
It was good to see mainstream Mainers restore a 38-year practice of election-day voter registration, rebuking the GOP’s consistent efforts to narrow the franchise.

It was good to see voters reject Mississippi’s misogynistic so-called personhood amendment that would have turned women into chattels of the state.

It was good to see the people of Ohio rise in support of public sector workers and their right to collectively bargain, reaffirming what ought to be an unquestionable American truth that our teachers, firefighters, and cops are our neighbors, not our enemies.

After the beating we Ninety-nine Percenters have taken in the last year at the hands of an out-of-control right wing, it was good to see us find our voice and reclaim our power at the polls.

But, as Winston Churchill said after the second battle of El Alamein,  "Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end, but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."

The analogy to El Alamein is a compelling one.  In late October and early November, 1942, Axis forces under Field Marshal Erwin Rommel stood just 50 miles from Alexandria.  If they could break through, the way to the Nile, to Cairo, and beyond that, the Suez Canal, lay open.  The only thing standing in their way was the British 8th Army, under Lt.Gen. Bernard Montgomery.

We may be grateful that Montgomery and the 8th Army were victorious at Alamein; the history of our world might have been a much darker one had the battle gone the other way.  Together with Stalingrad and Midway, El Alamein ranks as one of the most consequential battles of modern times.  As Churchill noted after the war: "before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein, we never had a defeat."

For the last many years, it has seemed as if we Ninety-Nine percenters had never had a victory.  Again and again, we had seen the playing field tilted against us; banks were bailed out at our expense, only to punish us for having rescued them with the pittances of our pockets.  Reward was privatized while risk was socialized.

We of the 99 percent were blamed for our improvidence in wanting to hold onto the American Dream, while the wizards of Wall Street were routinely rewarded for mediocre performance with end-of-year bonuses that exceeded by orders of magnitude the total lifetime earnings of most of their employees. 

When the “too big to fail” haves and have-mores defaulted on their obligations, it was everybody’s problem; when an average middle class family came up against hard times and needed help with the mortgage, it was that family’s “moral hazard.”

For us in the 99 percent, the hits just seemed to keep on coming.  We were routinely blamed for the shortcomings of others; for Wall Street, an economic downturn was a “correction;” the challenge for Wall Street was to ensure that the burdens of such a “correction” were borne by anybody but those whose incompetence and peculation had caused the “correction” in the first place.

For us, an economic downturn was more than a “correction;” it was a nightmare of deferred dreams, foreclosure fears, credit crunches, and the always uncertain footing that is the ineluctable concomitant of a playing field that was tilted ever more against us with each passing year.  Under such circumstances, was it surprising that so many middle and working class Americans should have been close to despair?

Perhaps that is why last night’s victories, in Maine, in Mississippi, and most importantly in Ohio, feel so good.  If nothing else, they have send a message that we can fight back, that we can say “no” to the ongoing effort of the One Percenters and their right-wing allies to grab all the goodies while leaving us to pay for their profligacy.  Against a right-wing mantra of “no, you can’t,” we of the 99 Percent have once again dared say “yes, we can!”  

For last night demonstrated that as much as we of the 99 Percent can Occupy Wall Street, we can also occupy our polling places, that we do have the ability to hold out, that we need no longer passively tolerate our spoliation. 

The muted rumble of approaching events we began to hear with the Wisconsin recalls is growing louder, and its message is clear:  the once-silent, once-close-to-despair 99 Percent has found its voice.  More importantly, we have found new hope.  Last night was our Alamein.

This is our country; we will occupy it. 
These are our cities, towns, and villages; we will occupy them.

And we will use the power of our numbers and our vote to preserve, protect, and defend what is ours.

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PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, CA, a working city full of 99 Percenters, including himself, even if not everybody in Cathedral City realizes it.  The views expressed herein are his own.  All rights reserved.

FEED THE RICH, TAX THE POOR, TILL THERE ARE NO POOR NO MORE

By: PAUL S. MARCHAND

Let’s blame the poor for being poor.

After that, we’ll tax the poor.

We’ll tax the poor till they have no more.

And then we’ll blame the poor even more.

It may sound like a bad riff on a Dr. Seuss story, but it’s actually the new political strategy being pushed by the American right.

There’s a kind of curiously unhinged, frothing-at-the-mouth quality to the way in which the American right has taken out after the poor and middle class in this country.  There certainly seems to be a disposition among the American right to want to turn on its head the lyric from Ten Years After’s classic song “I’d Love to Change the World”  “Feed the rich, tax the poor, till there are no poor no more.”

Commies. Fleabaggers. Freeloaders.  Losers. Malcontents.  Mooches. Socialists.  Scum.  Traitors.  Troublemakers.

We shouldn’t be surprised, only disgusted, to see defenders of the One Percent lashing out with such vitriolic words at America’s middle and working class, and particularly at those millions of Americans who are either living in poverty, on the brink of poverty, or in daily insecurity of their own economic position and status.  America’s One Percenters and their water-carriers in the media and in Congress use, and encourage their followers to use, bullying and hateful words most of their parents would not have tolerated from them as children.

If ever we needed proof that the American right is wrong, we have it now.

Perhaps that unhinged, frothing-at-the-mouth anger betokens -- at least among the more perspicacious One Percenters-- a realization that the American middle and working classes have grown tired of being despoiled in the interests of a very few wealthy individuals and corporations.  Perhaps a few of the One Percenters have begun to realize that the days when the Ninety Nine Percent would quietly acquiesce to being treated as an ATM are over.  When a company like General Electric pays no income tax at all, the Ninety Nine Percent’s irritation (to put it mildly) becomes understandable.

Certainly, behind the anger of the American right and their water-carriers should lie a real sense of worry.  Bullies often get worried when their targets begin to hit back.  Like the too-often bullied gay kid in school who one day rounds on his attacker and breaks his nose, a majority of the American public is becoming increasingly disinclined to tolerate the misconduct of the favored few at the expense of the middle and working class many.

Every movement, it seems, has its own series of turning points.  Like the 2011 World Series, whose turning point came in the Cardinals’ miraculous bottom-of-the-ninth rally in Game VI, the Occupy a movement’s turning point may very well have come when Scott Olsen, a twice-deployed Marine veteran, suffered a fractured skull at the hands of the Oakland Police.

For in that moment, millions of Americans who might otherwise have been inclined to dismiss the Occupy Movement as nothing more than a bunch of social undesirables throwing temper tantrums were forcibly confronted with the fact that the Occupy Movement looks a lot more like America than the right wing and too many of the mainstream media would have us believe.  When a decorated Marine veteran becomes the victim of officially-sanctioned violence, Americans sit up and take notice.

Shortly after the injuries to Scott Olsen became national news, a sometime constituent of mine, himself a Marine veteran, observed to me that of all the people the Oakland police could have hit and injured, it had to be a twice-deployed, gainfully employed Marine veteran.  Strike one.  Strike two.  Strike three.  As my former constituent noted to me, the Marines are perhaps most insular and clannish of all our armed services.  “Screw with one Marine,” my former constituent said to me, “and you’ve screwed with the entire Corps, living, dead, or yet to be born.”

What millions of Americans are now confronting is a disturbing reality that at least part of our social structure seems quite prepared to appeal to violence and hatred in order to avert a real conversation about the alarming growth of economic and fiscal inequality in this country.  If we are to avert class warfare, there must be a conversation that does not take as its starting point the idea that the poor are taxed too little and the rich too much.  The conversation also cannot start from Herman Cain’s wrong premise that the poor are to blame for their condition.

Of course, there have been times in our history when blaming the poor was not merely acceptable, but fashionable.  While Herman Cain might have been perfectly happy to live in such a time, he seems to forget that under such a dispensation he himself would have been worse than poor; he would have been a slave.  A society that claims to be Judeo-Christian in its values and outlook nevertheless seems astonishingly forgetful of repeated scriptural admonitions showing God’s preferential option for the poor.

Despite the admonitions of Scripture and even of the better angels of our personal natures, blaming the poor and inciting hatred toward them have become all too common in a society which has managed to go altogether too far toward re-creating and glorifying the inequalities of France’s ancien régime, and which refuses to find any lessons in the collapse thereof .  Like Talleyrand’s Bourbons, the right-wing mockers and abusers of the middle class and the poor seem to have forgotten nothing and learned nothing.  

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PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, California.  The views expressed herein are his own.

ON THE STUBBORNNESS OF FACTS

By: Paul S. Marchand

It has not been a good last few days for serial deniers of reality, either on the front of climate change or in Libya.

Climate change deniers got a rude shock last week when UC Berkeley physics professor Richard Muller, long known as a prominent climate change skeptic, concluded, after extensive study, that existing climate science is correct, and that the Earth’s surface is indeed warming.  For his apostasy from the ideological camp of climate denialism, Prof. Muller has become the target of angry right-wing climate deniers out to attack not only the methodology of this study but also his personal integrity.

Now, nobody likes to be wrong.  When evidence disproves a cherished idea or hypothesis, our reaction can range from mild disappointment through irritation to outright concealment and spoliation of conflicting evidence.  But one of the signal hallmarks of intellectual honesty, per se, is a willingness to modify an idea or hypothesis to bring it into accord with facts.

It was John Adams --defending the British soldiers accused in the Boston Massacre case in 1770-- who observed that “facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”  Yet, far too many of us find ourselves subscribing to a philosophy that proclaims “don’t confuse me with facts; my mind is made up.”  These are the same kind of intransigent people as Oliver Cromwell addressed in his famous 1650 letter to the Scots Kirk: “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.”

So it is with climate change deniers; there is a strong current of both intellectual dishonesty and ad hominem attack in the claims and assertions climate change deniers use to try to advance what has become for them an almost religious faith.  A personal example: a couple of years back, when I was serving on the Community, Economic, and Human Development Committee of the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG), the organization was in the process of finalizing a document relating to alternative energy and the challenges of climate change.  Needless to say, conservative Republicans on the committee tried --thankfully without substantial success-- to turn the document into a climate change denying tract.

So common are phenomena like climate change denialism that behavioral scientists have coined the term “confirmation bias” to describe the process.  Reduced to its simplest terms, confirmation bias is the tendency all of us have to accept information that accords with our own views and to reject that which does not.  In that regard, we all tend to match Friedrich Nietzsche’s description of Ralph Waldo Emerson as “one who lives instinctively on ambrosia - and leaves everything indigestible on his plate.”

Of course, confirmation bias is hardly limited to climate change denialism; we can see it in the hyperventilating, backtracking, obfuscating, and climbing down in which Republican politicians have been engaging in the days since the late Muammar Qaddafi, Libya’s Sheikh of Shriek, met his overdue and unlamented end.  To hear the GOP tell it, the President either did too much, did too little, failed to include our allies, let our allies take too much of the lead, or just did or didn’t do whatever it was the GOP did or didn’t want done.  All they can seem to agree on is if the President did it, or likes it, they don’t approve.  Reflexively.

To listen to people like John McCain or Marco Rubio or Lindsey Graham complain about the fact that on Barack Obama’s watch the United States and our NATO allies were able to get rid of a perennial disturber of peace is to find oneself in an Alice in Wonderland altered reality in which one does not know whether to laugh, to cry, or to rage against the Brobdingnagian stupidity of a political party which seems to have forgotten its 2008 campaign sound bite of “country first.”

Time was, within relatively recent memory, that elected officials of both parties subscribed to an unwritten, but nonetheless powerful, understanding that domestic politics should end at the water’s edge; when Americans are in harm’s way, we may debate over means and ends, but seeking to undercut the execution of the nation’s foreign policy in order to secure domestic political points was considered out of bounds.

Unfortunately, that was then and this is now; times really have changed for the worse.  The willingness of certain Republicans and Republican-leaning Democrats/Independents to criticize and downplay the Administration’s success in Libya, especially after the individuals in question had, to use Sarah Palin’s phrase, been palling around with Col. Qaddafi, does not speak well either for their common sense or their patriotism.  Apparently, for Republican Obamanators, party now comes before country, not the other way round.

We had not thought it possible that the election of an African-American to the presidency of the United States could have undone so many, so badly, so completely, so quickly, as to bereave ostensibly intelligent and experienced people of their basic faculties of commonsense and commonweal.  Sadly, that is exactly what has happened.  The confirmation biases of the American right now appear so entrenched as to make it impossible for them to accept the overwhelming weight of evidence supporting the science of climate change, while concurrently making it equally impossible for them to accept that the Obama Administration has in Libya actually accomplished a worthwhile and long-standing foreign-policy goal of the United States.

Such invincible error may incorrigible, but we are under no obligation to tolerate its propagation in silence.  If the GOP wants to deny not merely the anthropogenicity of global climate change, but also its very existence, and if the GOP would rather be seen as carrying Col. Qaddafi’s water, or rather than that of the United States and the rest of the civilized world, that is their privilege, as it is our privilege to vote them out of office at the earliest possible opportunity.
  
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PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, California.  The views expressed herein are his own.  All rights reserved.

IF WE’RE SO POWERFUL, WHY DOES THE GOP KEEP GAY-BAITING?

By: Paul S. Marchand

Imagine how absurd it would be were a court somewhere to rule that, because the President of the United States is African-American, it would be constitutional for a city to pass an ordinance requiring African-Americans to ride at the back of its municipal buses.

More than half a century after Rosa Parks changed history by insisting upon her right to ride at the front of the bus, such a ruling would strike us as inconceivable.

Nonetheless, that is essentially the argument lawyers for Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives are making in defense of the so-called Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).  Essentially, the lawyers in question are claiming that LGBT people have so much political power that we don’t need the courts to protect our rights against anti-GLBT incursions.

The argument is specious on its face; if the queer nation were as powerful as the GOP and their lawyers make us out to be, the entire discussion about first-class citizenship for America’s queerfolk would simply not be happening; our equality as first-class members of the Commonwealth would be accepted as a matter of course, and gay-baiting would be considered as unacceptable as race-baiting.

For when race-baiting or gay-baiting become a tool of legislative policy --as gay-baiting has become part of the right-wing's legislative playbook-- it is emphatically one of the most crucial functions of the judiciary in a government composed of coordinate branches to step in and  exercise checks and balances; in a system such as ours, the judiciary serves as a vital safeguard of minority rights against the “tyranny of the majority.”

The history of most American minorities --- to say nothing of the history of American women --- has been one of ongoing efforts to secure first-class citizenship in the Commonwealth.  Obtaining first-class citizenship and obtaining political power have historically been closely intertwined in a self reinforcing feedback loop; the more a minority community can overcome structural discrimination against its own membership, the more members of that community can secure the political clout needed to ameliorate and ultimately eliminate the grosser forms of legally sanctioned discrimination.

Consider for example the parallel histories of the Irish- and African-American communities.  The success of the Irish effort to integrate into American society, and the relative success of the African-American community to do so can be gauged by the extent to which members of each community have been able to seek political office, up to and including the presidency of the United States.  John F. Kennedy established the principle that an Irish Catholic can make it to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., and Barack Obama broke the color barrier that had kept a black man from being in charge at the White House.

One of the other reliable indicators of a community’s relative degree of political power is the extent to which it becomes progressively less admissible for mainstream politicians or political parties to advocate against that community’s equality --to engage in race-baiting or gay-baiting, for example.  Thus, no sane American incumbent or seeker of political office would seriously argue in favor of restoring Jim Crow, or bundling the descendents of the millions of Irish and Italians who fled grinding poverty for a better life in a New World back to the old countries from which their ancestors came.

But if the measure of any American community’s respective or relative political power is that it is, or comes to be, regarded as inadmissible to target that community for specific and invidious discrimination, then GLBT Americans are far from having the kind of political power that the House Republicans’ lawyers claim we do.  

If we had such power, then 31 states would not have written discrimination against our families into their constitutions.

If we had such power, it would be unlawful in every single state of the union to deny LGBT people jobs or access to housing on account of sexual orientation.

If we had such power, it would not have taken almost 20 years to lift the ban on open service in the Armed Forces by queer people.  

In short, if we had such power, the GOP would presumably know better than to use us as targets whenever a Republican presidential hopeful wants to throw red meat to the extreme base.

Forasmuch as we might wish it, however, and as much as the trend of history is running in our favor, we still remain one of the few minority groups --- along with Latinos (who many on the right see as presumptively illegal aliens) and Muslims --- against whom many of our American neighbors feel it perfectly legitimate to discriminate with hateful legislation that denies us such basic rights as the freedom to marry and the liberty to be authentically ourselves as out people in the Commonwealth.

Many years ago, I observed that a government which can deny me the right to enter into a marriage -- by that name, and not some other -- with the man of my choice in some measure reduces me to the status of a slave.  It is worth recalling that in the antebellum South, slave marriages had no legal validity; the master could break up that marriage at his convenience and sell one or both of the parties down the river.

Because the lack of liberty of marital contract is so very much a badge and incident of slavery, our liberty as queerfolk is necessarily impaired and incomplete; we are barely a single degree removed from the trammels of the Peculiar Institution.

It has been said that the true test of democracy is not how well it protects the majority, but how well it protects the dissenting, outspoken, or unpopular minority.  As long as we are considered legitimate targets for exclusion from first-class citizenship in the Commonwealth, as long as a disturbingly large number of so-called socially conservative politicians and wannabes seek to compass our vanishing by any means necessary, and as long as our basic human rights are in danger of being stripped from us by the whim or caprice of a demagogued and inflamed electorate, we will still need the protection of the courts and of the Constitution.
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PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, California.  He litigated one of the first marriage equality cases in California, almost 20 years, ago, when it wasn’t fashionable or politic to do so.  The views expressed herein are his own.

IN WHOSE INTEREST? Traveling Perez Road with My Fellow Ninety-Nine Percenters.

By: Paul S. Marchand

To hear the Republican Congressional leadership -- or the current crop of GOP presidential hopefuls -- tell it, America’s “job creators” are either the uber-rich, or the business organizations they control.

In fact, the backbone of American business, and the backbone of the American economy, is to be found in America’s millions of small businesses, like those which came together on Saturday, October 15, for the Perez Road Fall Festival in Cathedral City.  (Full disclosure: I happen to be a small business owner whose offices are located on Perez Road.)

Several dozen small business owners had booths at the festival, and, since my line of work didn’t really lend itself to having a booth, I had the opportunity to mix and mingle among festival attendees and with my fellow Perez Road businesses and business owners.

One thing was clearly evident, even if unstated; all of us at the Fall Festival are members of that 99 percent majority of Americans who have not been beneficiaries of the pervasive and ongoing socialization of risk and privatization of reward that has led to an unprecedented upward transfer of wealth over the last decade. 

We are the people who have, to all intents and purposes, been bankrolling the cleanup of the vast mass created by America’s astonishingly ill managed and largely unaccountable financial services industry.

Now most of us in small business don’t have a lot of time to be engaged in the kind of activism which has led to the Occupy Wall Street movement.  Indeed, some of my fellow small-business owners find the Occupy Wall Street movement objectionable or even frightening.  But others, myself included, have a more nuanced reaction, which in some cases includes a sense of shock or surprise that the Occupy Wall Street movement -- or something like it -- should have been so long in coming.  Whatever our views of the Occupation of Wall Street, however, most of us agreed that we in the middle class small-business community are tired of having to take a haircut in order to make the uber-rich even richer.

For at a certain point, even the most long-suffering middle and working-class Americans sooner or later get fed up with a politics that, in the words of the 19th-century American commentator Lyman Abbott, “encourage[s] the spoliation of the many for the benefit of the few,” and which “protect[s] the rich and forget[s] the poor,” particularly when they see their nest eggs being used as an ATM to shore up mismanaged institutions that have been deemed “too big to fail,” while they themselves are apparently considered “too small to care about.”

This sense of economic disquiet, coupled with increasing frustration and anger that the economic well-being of the 99 percent has been consciously sacrificed in favor of that of the top one percent was reflected in a number of conversations I had with my fellow Perez Road small-business owners.  We spoke of how difficult these economic times were, and often in our conversations that sense of anger and frustration became very clear very quickly, and was shared equally irrespective of partisan affiliation.

I can also tell from some of my conversations that while many, if not most, of those with whom I spoke were themselves either skeptical of the Occupation movement, or agnostic about its chances of success, they were also equally disinclined to pour onto the Occupy Wall Street protesters the kind of scorn and vitriol that have come from the organized spinmeisters of the right-wing; it is a little difficult to buy the spin when many of the faces we see on Internet or broadcast coverage are faces very much like our own, middle and working class people, often middle aged or older, worried about their future and that of young people who are protesting with them.

I can also tell that a number of the people with whom I had spoken -- not only at the Fall Festival, but also elsewhere in recent days -- are also increasingly disinclined to buy into the spin about the so-called 53 percent who are supposedly paying all the taxes in America. 

It’s an easy soundbite, but one which conveniently ignores the fact that just about every American alive pays some form of tax, whether sales-tax or property tax or other state and local rate.

The spinmeisters of the right, particularly over at Fox News, would also have us forget that among that so-called 47 percent who ostensibly pay no tax at all are such Fortune 500 companies as General Electric, which paid not one cent in federal income tax last year.  Of course, the right-wing spin ignores General Electric while instead scapegoating those who have been too poor to have any taxable income, young children who have not yet entered the workforce, seniors who have left the workforce, and -- even more insultingly -- disabled veterans who have come home from our endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan maimed, mutilated, and altogether unable to subsist for themselves, but who must depend for their very substance and survival upon the willingness of the Republic for which they gave so much to offer some kind of compensation and recognition.

While I certainly do not presume to speak for the entire business community, I do know one thing: the small-business community with which I am in touch in Cathedral City and the Coachella Valley is a part of that 99 percent whose collective net worth has been considered a legitimate subject of spoliation in order to protect and enhance the financial well-being of the richest one percent of Americans, and we in the small-business community are wise to what’s going on and growing increasingly angry at having our till raided, our intelligence insulted, and our posterity put at risk.

As Lyman Abbott noted there is indeed something wrong with legislators who “encourage the spoliation of the many for the benefit of the few, protect the rich and forget the poor.”  There is something wrong when presidential hopefuls of either party encourage fiscal policy which, to all intents and purposes, advocates taxing the poor more so that the wealthiest among us can pay less. 

While I usually hesitate to quote Scripture, I cannot help but remember those powerful words of the Gospel according to St. Luke, which I first learned as a child in the majestic cadences of the King James Version: “For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more.” Luke 12:48.

Now certainly there will be those like Glenn Beck who believe that society owes no duty to the poor, the destitute, and the dispossessed, who believe that talk of social justice or having “a preferential option for the poor,” is just a bunch of socialist babble.  Yet even were we to ignore our historic sense of obligation, and our historic call to do social justice, there are sound pragmatic reasons why many of us in the small-business community have a preferential option for those civil disobedients who have had the courage to occupy Wall Street.

For the progressive immiseration of the middle and working classes in the United States is, from a pragmatic point of view, the most dangerous development conceivable for our Republic.  The prosperity of the United States depends far more on labor than it does on capital, a fact America’s first GOP president, Abraham Lincoln, recognized in his first State of the Union message to Congress when he declared that “Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”  Sadly, too many in the one percent and too many of their supporters seem to have forgotten Lincoln’s words.

If the American working and middle classes are reduced to penury and pauperism, who will buy the products and services American business produces?  An impoverished population, lacking the purchasing power to do much more than a subsist from hand to mouth, may be one whose lack of political and economic power appeals to the uber-rich among us who have sought to concentrate not only wealth, but also political power, in their own hands, but a country with such a population can hope for neither economic strength nor national security. 
 
Thus, if the spoliation of America’s middle and working classes succeeds in destroying the small-business driven capitalist system which has been the engine of our prosperity, the One Percenters will have only themselves to thank when their ill-gotten gains and power prove transitory and hollow, and when their children find themselves driven in armored limousines from gated communities to private schools guarded by private militias in order to learn the Mandarin language of their new Chinese masters.

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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney in Cathedral City California.  He is one of the 99 percent, and the views set forth herein are his own, but are probably shared by a whole lot of other 99 percenters.  All rights reserved.

FOR NATIONAL COMING OUT DAY: THOUGHTS ON OUR NATIONAL DEFENSE

By: Paul S. Marchand

If you’ve been out of the closet for twenty-plus years, and if you live in a community where between a third and two fifths of the population is gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered, it can be easy to get blasé about National Coming Out Day.

    So I’d like to thank House Armed Services Committee Chair Buck McKeon, the Republican -and Mormon- Congressman from California’s 25th District for reminding me why NCOD still matters.  Today’s edition of The Hill reports that McKeon “would rather go without a defense spending bill this year than compromise on allowing military chaplains to conduct gay marriages.”  (http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/186363-house-armed-services-chair-i-wont-compromise-on-gay-marriage-detainees)

    So, let me get this straight, all puns intended.

    McKeon would harm and hamstring this nation’s entire defense in order to push his personal anti-queer agenda.
 
    I must be in an alternate universe.  I thought it was the Republicans who were supposed to be the hawks, while Democrats were supposed to be dovish wusses, unable to commit to our national defense.

    But no, McKeon apparently really does believe that anti-queer bigotry is more important than making sure that our nation has a defense capability.

    Whose side is he on?
   
    Certainly not the side of America, that’s for sure.

    A Congressional back-bencher, a Mary Bono Mack or a Michelle Bachmann, for example, might be allowed a little leeway in making crazy pronouncements; Bono Mack is considered little more than a lightweight, and Bachmann’s appeal to her like-minded base has little crossover appeal to rational America.

    Howard “Buck” McKeon, on the other hand, does not -or should not- have the luxury of crazy talk.  As a committee chair, he should understand that his utterances carry weight, and that he owes the nation a higher duty than sacrificing the national security of the United States to his personal, religiously-motivated, ideology.

    I guess you could say I’m a little angry.

    I’m angry not just because I’m tired of social and religious conservatives insisting that America needs one last minority against whom it should be legal to discriminate; I’m tired of the lavender Jim Crow of Buck McKeon and his ilk.  

    I’m also angry because Buck McKeon happens to be a senior member of a religious denomination that contributed millions to Prop 8 campaign whose clear intention was to keep us uppity queers as far in the back of the bus as possible.  

    Finally, I’m angry because I believe the defense of the United States should never, repeat never, be held hostage to ideology so crudely or so cynically.  We do have enemies who wish us ill, against whom this nation must be defended.  More importantly, we have servicemembers whose livelihoods and well-being depend on passing the defense authorization bill, livelihoods and well-being that are too important a thing to be treated as a political football.

    The double standard Mr. McKeon and his fellow travelers apply to their own actions is reprehensible.  If a Democratic House committee chair had even suggested holding up the annual defense authorization, even for a compelling and justifiable reason, the Republicans would be screaming “treason,” or worse.

    Yet, by McKeon’s lights, the thought of an armed forces chaplain joining Ruth and Naomi or Jonathan and David is so awful as to justify laying this country open to its enemies and starving its defenders.  We would be right to question -and we should question- such a person’s patriotism and commitment to this country, to say nothing of questioning his fitness to serve in the Congress.

    Whose side is he on?

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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney in Cathedral City, where he lives and works.  The views expressed herein are his own, including his view that Howard McKeon is an embarrassment to the Golden State.

WHOSE SIDE ARE THEY ON? How the Religious Right’s War on Science Represents a Threat to the National Security of the United States

By: Paul S. Marchand

Steve Jobs, who died this week, was one of those people Who Change The Way We Do Things.  If today we take for granted devices and technology that barely a generation ago seemed the stuff of science fiction, it is at least in part because Steve Jobs helped make it happen.

Thus, one cannot help but notice the irony inherent in the use of Jobsian technology by reactionaries and obscurantists of every stripe whose vision of the world could not be further from that which Steve Jobs articulated, as when one receives an e-mail or a link to some science-damning, flat-earther website.
 
We seem to be caught up in a headlong retreat from scientific literacy in this country.  From the right, we see a climate of scientific denialism that rejects not only the possibility of anthropogenic climate change, but also the reality of Darwinian evolution itself; notwithstanding enormous evidence to support both theories, right-wing denialists insist, contrary to the enormous, overwhelming, weight of the evidence, that climate change is a hoax and Darwin was wrong.  Indeed, so great is the right-wing denial of reality that there are actually websites out there denying that the earth revolves around the sun:  Copernicus and Galileo were wrong.

On the other side of the political divide, we find a different kind of obscurantism, a sort of post-scientific rejection of what, by now, ought to be the basic commonsense view that vaccinating your children against common childhood diseases is a good thing.  Instead, we have so-called empowered parents placing their children and children around them at risk by refusing to agree to simple, basic, sound, prophylactic health measures.

While it might be easy to postulate a moral equivalency between right and left when it comes to America’s headlong retreat from scientific literacy and understanding, the fact remains that much of the blame must go to the religious right and their fellow travelers, who have spent generations trying to convince Americans that there is something evil and suspect in all of that scientific book-learning, in all of that knowledge that seems to be the province of so-called "elites," which has become the pejorative right wing codeword for anyone possessing some degree of advanced learning or education.

Such a rejection of science, whether it comes from the religious rightist (like far too many of the current Republican presidential hopefuls) who rejects evolution or climate change, or whether it comes from so-called empowered progressives who won’t vaccinate their kids because they have listened uncritically to long-discredited, fraudulent, gossip masquerading as good science, has dangerous ramifications for the immediate and long-term national security and interests of the United States.

We would do well to remember that our leadership in the world is very much a function of our long and honorable heritage of innovation, invention, and scientific inquiry.  The United States has long been regarded as a place to which people come to do science free from the kind of ideological blinders and fetters which so often oppress scientists in other parts of the world.

When Hitler and the Nazis declared war on so-called Jewish science, the resultant exodus of world-class scientists from Europe to the United States brought to this country many of the men and women who helped make the Manhattan Project a success.  By the same token, strong scientific education in much of the United States helped produce a generation of young scientists who also played a critical role in the success of the Manhattan Project.  The history of the world would have been much different, and much worse, had Germany been victorious in the race to build The Bomb.

In the years since World War II, particularly after the-kick-in- the-butt humiliation of Sputnik helped jump-start the effort that took us to the moon barely a dozen years after that first Soviet satellite, American innovation, inventiveness, and scientific leadership have helped preserve American preponderance in the world, to say nothing of creating the kind of climate in which Steve Jobs and the other giants of his generation could give rise to a technological revolution of unprecedented magnitude.

During the years when I was in elementary and high school, between the late 60s to the early 80s, the whole concept of scientific, Darwinian evolution was regarded as settled.  We did not view Genesis, nor was Genesis taught to us as, a scientific text, even though a part of my elementary and high school education took place in schools affiliated with the Episcopal Church, of which I continue to be a member.  We did not have to contend with reactionary preachers proclaiming that “if the science conflicts with the Scripture, the science must be wrong.”

Since then, however, the religious right has been frighteningly successful in implanting in the minds of many Americans a profoundly regressive and medieval view of the sciences.  For the religious right, and for far too many politicians who pander to it, science has become not a means for establishing and maintaining American preponderance, but a positive enemy of the faith.

Such a view is dangerous to our national security and national interests, both at home and abroad.  The syllogism is simple: America’s preponderance in the world depends upon the America’s leadership in science, technology, and innovation.  It’s no accident that people like the late Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg should have come out of a climate which fosters and cherishes innovation.  America’s leadership in science, technology, and innovation, depends in turn on ensuring that the next generation of American schoolchildren receives sound scientific education, based upon sound scientific learning and knowledge, and not upon the dogma of any particular religious denomination.

Those in the religious right who would turn us backward, and who would substitute their own denominational dogma for sound science do not --- or refuse to --- understand the clear and direct linkage between our national security and our commitment to ensuring that our children attain the same level of scientific literacy as do children in such countries as China, India, and Pakistan, to say nothing of children in Singapore, Japan, or Germany.

When American schoolchildren test anything less than first in the world when it comes to scientific literacy, the religious right, and their enablers in the political culture, ought to hang their heads in shame.  Instead, they proclaim that they are in some way doing God’s work.  In truth, they are harming the national security of the United States, they are undercutting our competitive position in the world, and they are leaving our children a damnosa hereditas composed in equal measure of medieval thinking and misplaced faith in American exceptionalism.

Such misplaced faith in our so-called exceptionalism is akin to the story the man who lived in a floodplain.  When he was warned that a great flood was on its way, he said “I am a righteous man, so surely God will save me.”  As the floodwaters rose, the local Sheriff’s Department sent out deputies in a Humvee to the man’s home.  He sent them away when they offered to give him a lift, proclaiming his faith that God would save him.  A short time later, as the waters were now two feet deep in his front yard, more Sheriff’s deputies came by, this time in a boat, yet still the man spurned their offer of rescue, proclaiming again that God would save him.  A few hours later, as the man was on the roof of his house, a Coast Guard helicopter came by, and again, the man refused their help and reiterated his faith that God would save him.  The man drowned.  As he arrived at the Pearly Gates, God Himself was there to meet the man, and he rebuked him asking, “why are you here?”  And the man replied “you said you would save me and you didn’t.”  God replied “you idiot; I sent you a Humvee; I sent you a boat; and I sent you the Coasties in a helicopter.  What were you waiting for?”

It was Benjamin Franklin who declared that “God helps those who help themselves.”  By failing or refusing to understand the importance of scientific literacy, the religious right --like the “righteous” man drowned in the flood-- has fallen into a dangerous trap into which it would lead the rest of America, the trap of believing that we don’t need to look out for ourselves, that we don’t need to cultivate a climate of scientific and intellectual inquiry, because God will save us from ourselves even when we do nothing.

Rubbish. 

Our competitors are outcompeting and outperforming us in indices and areas in which America had been, and still ought to be, the undisputed leader of the world.  If the religious right believes that somehow God will save us from the consequences of our own unwillingness to acquire scientific literacy for ourselves and inculcate it in our children, then they are as foolish and disconnected from reality as the flood victim who spurned the Humvee, the boat, and the Coasties in their helicopter.

Until the religious right gets out of the way of scientific inquiry and technological innovation in this country, they cannot in good faith claim to have national security of the United States at heart.  Until the religious right stops trying to lead this country backward; until the religious right stops carrying the water for our rivals and potential enemies, they do not deserve a place in the body politic.

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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, California.  The views expressed herein are his own, and not those of any entity, board, or organization with which he is associated.

AND SO IT ENDS: The World Hasn’t Ended, only DADT

By: Paul S. Marchand

This morning, after eighteen years of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and after a dozen years of its predecessor, the so-called 123 Words (which began with a ringing declaration that “homosexuality is incompatible with military service,”) the United States finally joined the many other nations that permit LGBT persons to serve openly in their Armed Forces.

GLBT Americans can now serve without lies or concealment, as can their counterparts in the Armed Forces of such nations as the United Kingdom, Israel, Australia, and twoscore others.

For LGBT veterans, the end of the ban on open service has been a a not unmixed vindication, a belated acknowledgment of the integrity of their service to a nation that was happy to send them into harm’s way, but only at the price of constraining them to fearful silence about the most integral aspect of their personhood.

For those of us who were deterred from pursuing a vocation to service in the Armed Forces -in my case, in the United States Navy- today marks a day of “what ifs.”  Some deterred applicants -those still young enough to serve- may well seek to pursue their callings.  For those of whose time to serve has passed, the moment is more bittersweet.  What if we had stuck it out?  What if we had been willing to accept the silence our service would have imposed upon us?  As Winston Churchill once wrote in The World Crisis, “the terrible Ifs accumulate.”

But for those on active duty, or those who feel a vocation to service, today marks the first day in which their service need no longer conflict with their integral sense of self.  In a prior post, I observed that the interpersonal culture of the American military places a premium on truth-telling; the end of DADT resolves the conflict between that all-important virtue of truth-telling and the heretofore critical necessity of remaining closeted in order to serve.

Today, the gay 17 year old pursuing service through Navy ROTC can do so knowing that he won’t be confronted with the 123 Words, as I was at 17 when I walked away from an opportunity for a full ride three-and-a-half year NROTC scholarship rather than live a lie that I had no confidence in my ability to sustain.  Today, a motivated lesbian can find a place in the Armed Forces without having to pay attention to the pronouns she uses about her girlfriend lest she fall afoul of DADT.

Of course, on this day when we celebrate the lifting of the ban on our ability to make war and be cannon fodder alongside our straight fellow citizens, I am not unmindful of the irony inherent in the fact that obtaining an equal right to participate as out people in military hostilities should be such a landmark advance for GLBT civil rights.  Nonetheless, as I observed at the time the Senate’s cloture vote opened the way to DADT repeal, the fact remains that in a society such as ours, participation in military service remains in many ways a critical index of first-class citizenship.

If there has been any silver lining in the long struggle to lift the ban, it has been that we have before us the example of more than 40 other countries’ experiences with open LGBT service in their Armed Forces.  The experiences of our allies in particular have demonstrated that the parades of horribles envisaged by supporters of the ban have simply not materialized.  If Her Majesty’s Armed Forces in the U.K., or the Israel Defense Forces can integrate, so can we.

Withal, the world hasn’t ended today, the West hasn’t gone into a sudden, headlong decline today, and America hasn’t collapsed today by allowing homosexuals to serve openly alongside their straight fellow citizens.  In due course, perhaps, the example of queerfolk serving openly and honorably in our Armed Forces will help lay the groundwork for that good day when marriage equality becomes a reality:  when Ruth and Naomi, or Jonathan and David, will be able to come home from active service to have their marriages recognized throughout the length and breadth of this great nation.

My mouth to God’s ear.

-xxx-

PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney.  He lives and works in Cathedral City, California, where he served eight years as a city councilman.  He is currently a member of the Riverside County Workforce Investment Board.  He was one of the first openly gay councilmembers in Cathedral City’s history, and was also one of the first California attorneys to litigate a same-gender marriage case, back in 1993, when it wasn’t on most people’s radar.  The views expressed herein are his own, and are not necessarily the views of the Riverside County Workforce Investment Board, or of any other entity, board, or commission with which he is associated.

A WIND AGE, A WOLF AGE, A SWORD AGE, AN AX AGE: Why 9/11 Was More Like June 8, 793 than December 7, 1941.

By:  Paul S. Marchand

Since almost before the dust had settled from the terrorist outrages of September 11, 2001, it has been fashionable to analogize 9/11 to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

Such an analogy is tempting.  After all, millions of Americans living today, my father among them, can remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news of the attack.

Yet, while tempting, the Pearl Harbor analogy is inapt.

Instead, we should reach much further into history if we are to find an historical event to which 9/11 can be meaningfully and actually compared.

Rather than thinking back to December 7, 1941, we should take ourselves back to June 8, 793 to the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, off England’s Yorkshire coast.  On that date, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tersely observes, “the harrying of the heathen miserably destroyed God’s house in Lindisfarne by rapine and slaughter.”

The “harrying of the heathen” by which the monastery at Lindisfarne was “miserably destroyed” was the first in a series of Viking raids that would cast a pall of terror over Christian Europe for the better part of the next 300 years.

The Lindisfarne raid raised the curtain upon a time that the Norse sagas themselves described as “A Wind Age, a Wolf Age, a Sword Age, an Ax Age,” in which the minsters and monasteries, the cathedrals and cloisters, of Western Christian Europe echoed with the clamant petition “a furore Normannorum libera nos, Domine,” from the fury of the Northmen deliver us, O Lord.

Writing from the court of the Emperor Charlemagne, the English monk Alcuin expressed the shock he and his contemporaries felt about the Viking descent on what had been one of the holiest and most richly endowed monasteries in all of England: “Lo, it is nearly 350 years that we and our fathers have inhabited this most lovely land, and never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race, nor was it thought possible that such an inroad from the sea could be made.”

After the events of 9/11, one can easily adapt Alcuin’s words to the events of that thrice-cursed day with little change: “'Lo, it is nearly 400 years that we and our fathers have inhabited this most lovely land, and never before has such terror appeared in America as we have now suffered ... nor was it thought possible that such an inroad from the sky could be made.”

What makes Lindisfarne so much more apt an historical analogy to 9/11 than Pearl Harbor could ever be lies in the fact that whereas the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was carried out by a state actor in pursuit of clearly defined military and diplomatic goals, both the Lindisfarne raid and the outrages of 9/11 were carried out by nonstate actors engaged in an attempt to sow fear and terror among an unarmed civilian target population --- whether that be the monks of the Holy Island, or the American public.

Thus, while Imperial Japan possessed in every respect the institutions and attributes of a modern state --- nay, even those of a Great Power, nothing similar can be said of either the Viking raiders at Lindisfarne or of Al Qaeda.  To the extent that the Lindisfarne raiders possessed any kind of political organization, it did not extend beyond some kind of rude, rudimentary system of primitive chieftainries -- little more than glorified, armed farmers.  Al Qaeda, while organized in a way not dissimilar to a Mafia crime family, possessed no meaningful political organization at all.

Herein lies the paradox.  While the Japanese attack against Pearl Harbor engendered in the American public a strong sense of outrage and desire for revenge, it did not call forth primal fear or terror; while America knew herself to be at war, she also knew that the war would be fought “over there,” and that it would be a military enterprise, with relatively clearly defined objectives and war aims.

By contrast, the raiders at Lindisfarne and the terrorists of Al Qaeda were and are practitioners of a kind of violence that depends for its very success upon instilling into the target population an ongoing back-of-the-lizard-part-of-the-brain sense of permanent fear and apprehension, in which our hands are always tight upon the hilts -- real or metaphorical -- of our swords.

For both the Viking and the terrorist understood and understand the utility of creating a climate of terror, whether that be the sort of sheer unreasoning panic embodied by the Lindisfarne monk or the Manhattan stockbroker fleeing for dear life, or the more subtle and endemic low-grade terror that keeps us gripping our sword hilts, looking over our shoulders, glancing sidelong at the dark-complexioned among us, or scanning the skies for any indication that the airplane overhead may be about to do something awful.

By creating such a climate of fear and terror, both the Viking and the Al Qaeda terrorist sought to demoralize their targets and to disrupt the ability of those targets to respond effectively.  The distinction between military and civilian targets to which a state actor is at least theoretically bound by international law and custom, means nothing to the raider storming ashore at Lindisfarne or the terrorist preparing to drive a plane full of terrified civilian passengers into the side of a building.

This, then, is why the Pearl Harbor analogy to 9/11 ultimately fails.  While the historical record of Japan’s conduct during the Second World War is by no means free of crimes and atrocities, we must acknowledge that in large measure even the Imperial Japanese Army tended for the most part to observe some degree of distinction between the front and the rear, between the zone of battle and the civilian zone behind the lines.  The Viking raider at Lindisfarne and the Al Qaeda terrorist make no such distinction; for them the battlefield is anywhere and everywhere.

Pearl Harbor precipitated the United States into a declared, conventional war; 9/11 may merely have been the opening curtain to a new wind age, a new wolf age, a new sword age, a new ax age.  If we have had difficulty figuring out in these last ten years how to respond, it is because we have not faced a challenge of this kind since the last great Viking raid was turned back by King Harald II Godwinson of England at Stamford Bridge –- barely a hundred miles from Lindisfarne itself -- in September, 1066.

Our challenge, then, on this tenth anniversary of the inroad from the sky that on September 10, 2001 we had not thought possible, is threefold.
First, we must reject the counsels of cowardice and division into which far too many in our government fell far too eagerly in the months and years that followed 9/11.  In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the goodwill of the world flowed powerfully toward a wounded nation and a shocked people.  Yet, by petulantly insisting that “you’re either with us or against us,” our government managed to squander that goodwill within weeks.  In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the American people were more at one than had been the case for a long time.  Yet, by equating questioning with dissent, and dissent with disloyalty, and by insisting that we sacrifice many of our cherished civil liberties in the interests of creating a national security state, our government managed to fragment beyond repair the unity which had for a brief, glimmering, moment brought us together.

Second, we must overcome our solipsistic insistence on regarding 9/11 as a sui generis event of which other countries have no understanding.  As much as Lindisfarne proved to be no isolated occurrence, nether was 9/11.  We therefore cannot afford the vain and frivolous luxury of discounting the terrorist outrages that occurred in Nairobi, in Dar es Salaam, in Bali, in London, in Madrid, or elsewhere.  For contrary to what some on the far reaches of the political right might urge, empathy is not necessarily a dirty word; when those who have been targets of terror can empathize together they can draw strength from one another, take good counsel together, and create long-term faculties of resistance, much as Christian Europe came together in the end not merely to resist the Vikings but to assimilate them into Western civilization.

Finally, we must decisively reject the counsels of those who would see in Al Qaeda’s outrages some kind of existential clash of civilizations.  Inductive reasoning -- drawing conclusions about the generality from particular incidents -- is always dangerous.  We know from direct observation that Al Qaeda represents neither all Arabs nor all Muslims, and that as and to the extent that our own Roman-descended civilization and Islamic civilization can engage with one another, we together can resist the bomb throwers and terrorists on the fringes of our respective communities.  We also know from direct observation, that much of Al Qaeda’s appeal has been driven by a perception that the West has had a preferential option for uncritically backing the dictators who for so many decades have throttled the democratic aspirations of so many in the Arab world in particular and the larger Islamic world in general.

It may be that the coming of the so-called Arab Spring may undo some or all of the appeal Al Qaeda has heretofore had; an organization that thrives in a political winter often cannot survive a thaw, as the terminal years of the Soviet Union so amply demonstrated.  With Osama bin Laden dead in the Arab world going through a process of revolution not unlike that of Europe in 1848, we may perhaps anticipate that as the Viking age ended at Stamford Bridge, the ability of Al Qaeda to trouble the world may be declining toward its own final Stamford Bridge-type dénouement.

We should nonetheless keep our hands tight on the hilts of our swords; a dying organism is still capable of lashing out, even as a star burns more brightly just before going nova.  But ten years after 9/11, we may dare hope that some of the progress that has been made and some of the lessons that have been learned may stand us in good stead,may come to an unlamented end. and we may dare hope that sooner, not later, this current “wind age,” this current “wolf age,” this current “sword age,” this current “ax age,”

-xxx-

Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, where he served eight years on the City Council.  The views expressed herein are his own.  All rights reserved.