BAH, HUMBUG!

Summary: Christmas is a pain in the ass.  Crises, snits, and quarrels, ridiculous culture war confrontations, fights over politics, and disappointment at the failure of unrealistic expectations for the season are often enough to cause many of us to growl “bah, humbug!” and to retreat from Christmas altogether.  Our surly moods often express themselves in such things as retreating to our places of work, to try to get some work accomplished during the silent time when nobody else is around.  Yet in the silence, we cannot avoid contemplating the subversion the Infant in the manger came to set in train.  In a time and a society that demonizes the powerless and punishes the poor, we may yet acknowledge some incremental steps toward satisfying our duty of compassion toward the neighbors Christ our Savior called us to love as we love ourselves.  The works of justice to which He called us are still incomplete; “substantial additional work” Bush v. Gore (2000) 531 U.S. 98, 110, is still needed, but on this Christmas, we may still, with full consciousness of the subversive nature thereof, dare to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.  Merry Christmas and happy holidays. The Savior is nigh.  O come let us adore Him.

By: Paul S. Marchand

It’s easy to hate Christmas.  

It’s a pain in the ass.  

Start with the canned Christmas music and the pre-Yuletide shopping season whose beginning advances ever further into the liturgical season of Pentecost, add to that all of the various other crises, snits, and quarrels that seem to erupt around this time of year, throw in a generous of the culture war bullshit that crops up right around this time (think Bill O’Reilly and his idiotic “War on Christmas” screeds, together with his whiny criticisms of the Roman Pontiff and the aggressively ignorant bigots of Duck Dynasty and their aggressively ignorant defenders), and finally layer on top of all of that the various expectations we all seem to entertain about what Christmas should be —-and our disappointment when those expectations are not met.  All these things together are a recipe for a lousy holiday season.  To riff on playwright Larry Kramer’s famous line, “I have seen the Christmas season and it shits.”

So, like a lot of people for whom late fall and winter are a time of torment, my response to the overload of saccharine inherent in this season is to growl a well considered “Bah, humbug!”, together with an off-color homage to Bette Midler’s character in The Rose: “fuck this shit.”  It does not take a lot to understand my surliness of mood as we approach yet another American Christmas.  Certainly, such a mood is hardly enhanced by nosy neighbors who want to know why I have put up no lights on my house.  Such a mood is not enhanced by neighbors giving me stink eye after noticing that, rather than put up a Christmas tree, I make do with an Advent wreath (complete with three purple candles, a pink one for Gaudete, and a white one for the Incarnate Savior).  Indeed, my mood usually gets so surly by Christmas Day that it’s become a personal shibboleth of mine to go into my office and get at least some work done.

Yet, in the lonely quiet of the office on Christmas day, far away from the importunings of co-workers, the ringing phones, the canned music, and the endless advertisements for products I neither need nor want, the silence lends itself to contemplation, and to a realization that, stripped of all the accretions of bullshit we have piled onto it, Christmas is a subversive time.  We cannot avoid contemplating the subversion our Savior came into the world to set in train.

Alan Jones, sometime Dean of San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral, once noted that "We live in an age in which everything is permitted and nothing is forgiven."  Certainly, in a time of culture wars, Duck Dynasties, and aggressive, triumphalist ignorance, it is easy to fall back upon a judgmental posture that sees little redemption in anything.  What would our culture war hardliners have said about a pregnant teenager traveling with an older man who is not the father of her unborn child?  Would they have appreciated the weary dignity —– that weary dignity which is so often the lot of the poor among us —- with which this couple sought lodging on a cold night in late fall in an occupied territory?  Or would they had seen this couple’s choice of a manger as a place to bed down in as nothing more than an example of freeloading by the undeserving poor?

What would our culture warriors think of the events described in the Lucan infancy narrative were they not possessed of the pre-knowledge that comes from that particular Gospel story having become, over 2000 years, one of the most special and precious possessions of the Western mind?  I think the answer is simple.  Mary and Joseph and their unborn child would have been described as freeloaders at best, welfare cheats at worst, and instead of being acknowledged as Our Lady the Queen of the Angels, Mary might well have been derided as nothing more than a welfare queen, living in the projects and sucking off the largess of society.

Indeed, applying such a narrative, many of the right-wing culture warriors who have made a fetish of insisting that Jesus was white might well have assumed the blackness of his unwed mother, sleeping rough in a manger and giving birth therein.  For across 2000 years, we have yet to heed Jesus’ call, prefigured in the Hebrew Scriptures, to love our neighbors as ourselves. 

And herein lies the subversion inherent in our celebration of the Incarnation of our Savior, the Word made flesh, come among us to dwell full of grace and truth and to draw us all to Himself.  For indeed, the whole infancy narrative, the whole narrative of the suffering Savior Who offered Himself upon the bitter cross for our advantage, stands at fundamental variance with the way in which our world organizes itself.

In a society that regularly demonizes the poor and powerless, the very idea that the Savior of the world should have come into it as the child of a homeless, unwed mother is both subversive and confrontational.  For the Infant Jesus did not come into the world to bring peace, but a sword.  The Infant Jesus did not come into the world to comfort the comfortable, or to afflict the afflicted, but to remind us of God’s preferential option for Lazarus over Dives, of God’s awesome compassion for those unloved with none to love them.

The radical and subversive teachings Jesus brought to the world call us across 21 centuries to an ethic of justice, inclusion, compassion, and compunction.  As we feel a sense of inchoate obligation toward the Infant in the manger, so that Infant calls us to feel that same sense of obligation toward our neighbors.

And indeed, in this year 2013 we may perhaps feel a sense of having in some incremental way done right by those to whom we have so often done wrong.  Though the federal government has left more than a million lumps of coal in the stockings of unemployed Americans, 13 states have been moved to raise their minimum wage, to provide some degree of a better life for millions of the working poor.  Though jurisdictions throughout the country have had to be chivvied, dragged, and ultimately sued, the corner appears to have been turned on marriage equality.  A year ago just six states out of 50 permitted the marriage of Ruth and Naomi or of Jonathan and David; today 18 state jurisdictions, together with the nation’s capital, embrace marriage equality.  The city of Phoenix, Arizona, mirabile dictu, has managed to house all of its chronically homeless veterans.

Yet, in the sacred silence of this time of Incarnation, we need to realize how much more remains undone, how distant we yet remain from the Kingdom of God.  To borrow from the language of the egregious Bush v. Gore opinion, “substantial additional work” is needed. 531 U.S. 98 at 110.

In this sacred time, when we recall again that we are the people of a passionate God, Whose passionate love for us is passionately expressed in the Incarnation, Passion, death, and Resurrection of the Infant in the manger, it is for us, as Abraham Lincoln reminded the nation at Gettysburg, to be "dedicated to the great task remaining before us," of furthering toward toward completion unfinished work spoken of by the prophet Isaiah:
    “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.
And to say “bah, humbug” to all the naysayers who believe on this Christmas that we can neither attain social justice nor proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.

“Substantial additional work” is still needed.  Let’s get about doing it.

Merry Christmas and happy holidays.

The Savior is nigh.  O come let us adore Him.

-xxx-

PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney who lives in practices in Cathedral City, California, where he served two terms as a member of the city Council.  The views contained herein are his own, and are not intended as, and should not be taken as, legal advice.

LIPSTICK ON A PIG: Cathedral City Spin Master Kathleen Derosa Chronicles Our Municipal Decline.

Summary: Embattled Mayor Kathleen Joan DeRosa’s State Of the City address last Wednesday represented another effort put lipstick on a pig and spin the sad decline of the city during the nine winters we have been burdened with DeRosa as mayor.  Her litany of marginal achievements reads like the prognosis reports of a terminal patient.  She has managed single-handedly to sidetrack Cathedral City’s proposed annexation of Thousand Palms, while here in Cathedral City proper, our own desolate downtown has become a municipal embarrassment.  DeRosa’s failure and incompetence have gone on long enough.  It’s time to replace her with somebody who can get the job done.

By: Paul S. Marchand

Embattled and ineffective Cathedral city Mayor Kathleen Joan DeRosa put on her hubcap earrings and tried to put lipstick on a pig last Wednesday with her most recent “State of the City” address.

Hope was a prominent thread in her remarks.  “Hopefully revenues will be coming in,” DeRosa is reported to have said, apparently in much the same tone as one who whistles past the graveyard.  DeRosa is also reported to have claimed that “there are glimmers of hope all over the city.”  Unfortunately for DeRosa, hope doesn’t pay the rent, and hope doesn’t excuse her lamentably poor performance in elective office.

Additionally, DeRosa touted a number of low-end businesses in progress in the city, as if these low-revenue-generating enterprises represented the city’s fiscal salvation.  Like a woman grasping at any straw available, DeRosa then declared, contrary to the clear weight of the evidence, that “Cathedral City is ahead of the curve and ready for business.”

Ready for what?

DeRosa’s litany of marginal achievements reads like prognosis notes for a terminal patient.  This is DeRosa’s eighth state of the city message, and in each one, despite her upbeat spin (oh hell, let’s tell the truth, shame the devil, and describe her remarks as the lies they are) each such message has, in effect, been a chronicling of municipal decline on her watch.

We shouldn’t be surprised that, during the nine winters of DeRosa’s maladministration of the city, Cathedral City has steadily lost ground compared to other Coachella Valley cities.  DeRosa’s history of being able to “queer every deal” conceivable is well-known throughout the Valley, as is her unfortunate tendency to drive potential suitors away by antagonizing just about every imaginable prospective business partner that has ever come to the city.

We are hemorrhaging businesses; just as bad, we are hemorrhaging city staff who are critical service providers for constituents and businesses alike.  Yet, DeRosa continues to fiddle while Cathedral City burns.  If, three years ago, I could in good conscience support the proposed annexation of Thousand Palms, I can no longer do so; in the long run, it may be better if Thousand Palms remains unincorporated county territory, or incorporates as an independent city.  I am not alone in this gathering momentum against annexation, even though I believe that, over time, bringing Cathedral City and Thousand Palms together could create potential synergies for growth.

How has what once looked like a good deal for both Cathedral City and Thousand Palms come to look like an incipient disaster?

I’m not certain how to fix the problem, but I do know where to fix the blame, and it must be fixed squarely on Kathleen Joan DeRosa.

After all, how can Cathedral City hope to get its act together to annex Thousand Palms if it cannot, after nearly 15 years, get its act together to develop its desolate downtown?

To drive through Cathedral City’s downtown is to feel deep embarrassment.  On a recent windy afternoon I drove through downtown and watched as the dust devils danced across vacant lots that many of us had once believed would be the heart and core of a vibrant community.  All I could see in the dancing dust devils were the remains of hopes and dreams shattered on the rock of the incumbent mayor’s absolute failure to do the job the voters continually elect her to do.

Let us hope (there’s that word again!)  that an awakened population, aware of the dismal performance of this mayor, turns her out in next year’s election.

-xxx-

Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in practices in Cathedral City, and who deplores the decline of his city during the nine winters of the incumbent mayor.  The views set forth herein are his own, and are not intended as legal advice.

WHOSE DAY? COLUMBUS DAY? DAY OF THE RACE? DAY OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES?

Summary: Every year at Columbus Day, we get our knickers in a knot.  Should we embrace a white liberal guilt posture of anguished handwringing and so-called political correctness, or should we fall back on the triumphalist Eurocentric narrative so many of learned in school?  The day long ago set aside to commemorate the first coming of Columbus to the New World has become an ongoing controversy.  Whose day is it?  Do we celebrate the exploring spirit or do we mourn for our First Peoples?  Does the celebration of the one preclude sober reflection about the fate of the other?  Columbus day is, and will always remain, a paradox.
By: Paul S. Marchand

Cathedral City, October 14, 2013– Today Columbus Day, as officially observed.  Saturday the 12th was traditional Columbus Day.

There is an ironic New Yorker Columbus Day cartoon of some notoriety depicting two American Indians standing in the underbrush by the shore of a Caribbean island.  From three high-castled ships anchored offshore, boats are rowing toward the beach.  In the lead boat, an explorer (presumably Columbus) stands, holding a flag.  The caption of the cartoon has one Indian saying to the other something like “now might be a good time to review our immigration policies.”

The cartoon strikes us as funny because we know the history of the 500-plus years since Columbus’ arrival in the New World triggered the greatest völkerwanderung -a vast migration of peoples- in the recorded history of the world.  Since then, millions of immigrants from all over the world have made their way to the Americas, and the history of their interaction with those who came before has been checkered at best.

Yet, in the last analysis, we all are descendants of immigrants from elsewhere, even Indians.  If my white ancestors came here as part of the Atlantic migrations, my Indian ancestors arrived here tens, perhaps scores, of thousands of years ago, presumably across the Bering land bridge from Asia, and are still ultimately immigrants.  The term “Native American” is thus something of a misnomer, a fact Canada recognizes by designating her Indians and Eskimos as “First Peoples.”

Still, by the time the first Europeans reached America -whenever that may have been, but certainly well before Columbus- the Indians of the Americas had established a lengthy tenure of occupation.  The Americas were not -as generations of schoolchildren were once taught- an empty wilderness, but a landmass populated by a mass of humanity more diverse by far than Europe itself.  By 1492, the social development of the Americas ranged from primitive hunter-gathering groups to complex state societies ranging from the mound-builder descendants of North America to the Aztecs of México, to the South American empire its Inca inhabitants called Tahuantinsuyu, the Four Quarters of the World. 

Within two centuries, all of this had gone.  The westward migration triggered by Columbus’ voyages had grown from trickle to flood.  Wave after wave of migration, particularly to the settlement colonies of British North America, coupled with superior weapons technology, superior agricultural and industrial technology, and the spread of European diseases -trivial childhood ailments to whites, fatal to unexposed Indians- tipped the balance decisively in favor of the pale invaders from across the water.

Thus the history, and thus the deeply conflicted emotions that swirl around any October 12 observance.  Is it Columbus Day?  Is it Dia de La Raza/Day of the Race?  Is it Indigenous Peoples Day?  Whatever one calls it, October 12 can be relied upon to pit the Sons of Italy celebrating one of their own against Native American groups calling attention to what has been called “half-a-millennium of resistance.”  As always, the truth lies somewhere in the middle, in that no-man’s-land to which moderates and truth-seekers -and indeed, most of us- are exiled.  Do we celebrate the human achievement of the explorers and the immigrants, or do we weep for our Indian ancestors?  Do we call attention to the evils the explorers so often brought in their wake, or do we celebrate the achievements of our First Forebears?

The answer is: all of the above.  We cannot reverse the pragmatic sanction of history; the völkerwanderung that brought my European forebears to the Americans is as irreversible as that which brought my Indian ancestors to this place.  The peoples have mixed too much to separate them; the rate of intermarriage among the Cherokee, for example, is close to 100 percent.  Now is no longer an opportune time for the Indians in the underbrush of the New Yorker cartoon to discuss immigration policy.  The invaders cannot be marched back onto their Naos and caravels and Mayflowers, their Susan Constants, their Godspeeds and their Discoverys and packed back whence they came; their bones and the bones of their children have also become part of this land.

The invasion has been a success.  Generations of interpenetration have produced a people that like mythic Coyote -the culture hero of many tribes- is one of shape-shifters.  Millions of Americans carry the blood of both sides in their veins; millions of us are at once both the invading European and the resistant Indian.  In a time of shape-shifting and mixing, Columbus Day, like Coyote, must be a shape-shifter.  It must be an occasion for celebrating the nobility of the exploring spirit, but also for reflection on the duties we all owe to one another as common human inhabitants of the place we all call home.

As progressives, we must particularly be attuned on Columbus Day and every day to what our communities are telling us.  We are a coalition -a movement- composed of communities and tribes and lineages of every sort and condition.  We march with labor, but also support the right of Indians to be accounted as first class citizens of the commonwealth.  We confess many faiths, and none at all.  We acknowledge the right of many Americans of faith to oppose marriage equality within the context of their own churches, but we also insist that America’s queerfolk be treated as first class citizens, too.  We embrace inclusiveness, knowing that ours is the harder choice and the nobler path, one from which the fearful of change turn away.

Columbus Day has become a paradox, laden with so many layers to deconstruct the debate will continue long after those currently engaged in it have passed out of this world.  It is part of our larger American paradox, in which, as Babylon 5 writer J. Michael Straczynski once observed, "The past tempts us, the present confuses us, [and] the future frightens us...."  Whose day is Columbus Day?  It is our day, on which, perhaps more than on any other holiday, we need to reflect on who we are, where we’ve been, and where we’re going.

-xxx-

PAUL S. MARCHAND is a pale, European-looking, attorney.  He lives and works in Cathedral City, where he served two terms on the City Council, for which he is running again.  Thanks to an Act of Congress only a lawyer could love, and the fact that he lives on Indian leased land, his government considers him an Indian living on a Res.  Go figure.  The views herein are his own, not those of any jurisdiction, agency, entity, club, or other organization, and are not intended as, and should not be construed as, legal advice.

This post is a revision of an earlier post published at this time last year.  Since knickers are still in knots, it remains timely.

NO SQUISHES NEEDED The Astonishingly Jejune Performance of Congressman Raul Ruiz

Summary: Once regarded as spineless, willing to cave, and prepared to be washed away on their own fear pee every time a Republican said “boo!”, Democrats on Capitol Hill seem to have rediscovered their backbones in the confrontation over Obamacare and the government shutdown. Yet, newly emboldened Democrats need to cherish a famously cranky and unpredictable base, working to ensure that Democrats don’t just sit out the midterm elections of 2014. Democrats at every level need to put Democratic partisanship in command and have the courage of our convictions. Fortunately, Republicans are doing a very good job of once again scaring the bejeesus out of uncommitted and Democratic-leaning voters. However, there are still too many Democratic squishes (pace Ted Cruz) who seem naïvely willing to damage their party and betray their constituents by attempting to “reach across the aisle.” Here in California 36th congressional district, our Democratic Congressman, Raul Ruiz, was one of only nine Democrats to vote in support of Republican sponsored amendment to delay the individual mandate portion of the Affordable Care Act. Right now, many of his constituents feel as betrayed by him as a wife would who finds that her husband has been whoring around with other men on the down low. Dr. Ruiz needs to come clean and get right with his base, lest he find himself facing a primary challenger from his left in 2014. We didn’t vote to send a squish to Washington.

By: Paul S Marchand

Democrats once had a reputation for spinelessness. Over the course of many years, the Democratic Party had come to be regarded as one that would shrink from confrontation with Republicans, one that would cave on major issues, leaving the Democratic base stranded out in the cold.
Those days, thankfully, appear to be over. I noted the other day the pleasantly surprised tone of an article in the Daily Kos on the fact that Congressional Democrats in both Houses were standing firm and not caving against the Republican temper tantrum and its consequent government shutdown. Indeed, it’s nice to know that the Party seems to recovering some backbone, and that Democrats are no longer willing to let themselves get washed away by their own fear pee every time Republican stamps his or her foot and yells “boo!”

Of course, the sudden recovery of spine by Congressional Democrats is no guarantee that the Democratic base, famously cranky and unpredictable, will rally to Democrats next year. To a certain extent, we Democrats may have to rely on our “friends” in the GOP to do some of the work of rallying our base for us. By sabotaging their own brand, Republicans may have the effect of scaring the bejeesus out of and driving uncommitted voters toward the Democracy and also of calling disillusioned, squishy Democrats home to their own Party.

In tandem with Republican efforts not merely to kick, but actually to dance on, the turd, Democrats must also re-proselytize their own voters, keeping before them the dismal catalog of bad GOP behavior. We Democrats dare not fall back into our fatal pattern of over-trusting our electorate. Too often, Democrats manifest a childlike, naïve belief that if we just give voters the raw data, those voters will spontaneously perform the appropriate analysis and reach the correct conclusion.

Of course, this is not the case. While I do not necessarily mean to suggest that the masses are asses, many low-information voters simply lack the intellectual infrastructure to be able to process those raw data and come to the conclusion we desire them to reach. Republicans, on the other hand, don’t feel the apparent compunction we do about spoon feeding their base the answers. In short, the institutional Party needs to cherish and handhold its voters far better that it has done. We can’t afford to make the mistake the Obama administration has made with the rollout of the Affordable Care Act, sometimes referred to as “Obamacare.”

If we don’t do a better job marketing our message prior to the midterms of 2014, many Democratic or Democratic-leaning voters will succumb to the same kind of apathy that caused Democrats to stay home in droves during the disastrous midterm elections of 2010. Hopefully, however, the astonishing and welcome unity of the Democratic caucuses on Capitol Hill will serve as a model and an inspiration for local Democratic parties around the country as we prepare to muster our troops for what may well be one of the most consequential midterm elections in recent history. At this moment, Democrats, particularly Democrats in local party organizations, must put their partisanship in command. We dare not fall into the trap William Butler Yeats described in his classic poem “The Second Coming,” in which he lamented that
 “[t]he best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”

By putting partisanship in command, I mean that Democrats must give up certain behaviors they had considered comfortable. Democrats must, for example, discard the foolish, politically heretical idea that there is no practical difference between the parties. That’s what cost Al Gore the presidency of the United States in 2000, when foolish, arrogant, solipsistic Ralph Nader voters insisted, against all evidence, that Democrats and Republicans were “all alike.”

Furthermore, Democrats must neither engage in nor tolerate the uniquely American behavior of trying to blame both sides. Pari delicto (both parties are equally at fault) is not an option, it is a recipe for self-defeating self sabotage. The next time a Democrat hears the phrase “I blame both sides,” a loyal Democrat must quickly rise to the defense of the Party, and make sure the blame is cast where properly belongs, with the GOP.

Additionally, Democrats need to stand with the President. Yes, we all know that Barack Obama has not delivered the Utopia many of us wanted him to deliver, yesterday. Utopia will never be attained in a day, or even in the quadrennium granted a president by the Constitution. Anytime a Democrat complains that the President has not done enough, remind that wayward Democrat of what this President has in fact accomplished. 

Finally, at a time when the party opposite has reduced governance to a form of grim and hateful trench warfare, in which no prisoners are taken and no quarter granted, in which a small group of willful and arrogant House members —along with Ted “Joe McCarthy’s bastard child” Cruz—  have contrived, in the words of President Woodrow Wilson, “to make the United States appear weak and contemptible in the eyes of the world,” Democrats cannot afford the naïve and frivolous luxury of trying to “reach across the aisle.”

Unfortunately, some Democratic members of Congress have made the rookie mistake of playing directly into the Tea Party’s hands with such foolish posturing. A couple of days ago, the House voted on a Republican sponsored amendment to delay the implementation of the individual mandate on Obamacare for a year. Nine Democrats crossed the aisle and voted with a united Republican caucus to support the delay. These Democrats bolted from their caucus, and let the Party down very badly. 

Tea Party bomb thrower Ted Cruz has a word for politicians who won’t stand with their caucus. That word is “squish.” It may with justice be applied to each of the nine Democratic squishes who crossed the aisle and voted with the Tea Party, impliedly supporting the GOP’s effort to sabotage Obamacare.

Sadly, one of those Democratic squishes was Congressman Raul Ruiz, of California’s 36th Congressional District. Ruiz has claimed in public that he was attempting to be conciliatory and “reach across the aisle.”

With the GOP willing to shut down the United States government in a last-ditch, desperate attempt to prevent the implementation of Obamacare, every vote on that issue becomes, in effect, a litmus test and a statement of conviction about the member’s position on the Affordable Care Act. If Congressman Ruiz secretly has reservations about the ACA, he certainly concealed them very effectively from the many thousands of Democrats who elected him to Congress last November, in part to defend the Affordable Care Act. If that is the case, then Raul Ruiz may well find himself a one term congressman; the base does not like to be played for fools.

On the other hand, if Congressman Ruiz was attempting to engage in some kind of naïvely hopeful “reaching across the aisle,” then he made a rookie mistake that verges on being unpardonable given the current political climate. To the extent that Congressman Ruiz allowed political naivety to push him into making such an elementary blunder, then it is clear that he can be played like a Stradivarius by the party opposite. We partisan Democrats can only hope that a spirited discussion between him and Minority Whip Steny Hoyer and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi will recall him from so foolish an error.

Because it may be that getting spanked by Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer will be a lot more palatable to Congressman Ruiz than facing the possibility of a primary challenge by a stronger, more committed, more partisan Democrat in 2014. 

The last thing Raul Ruiz needs right now is to gain a reputation, barely 9 months into his term, as an unreliable squish, as a DINO. Already, on comment threads and in discussions among Democrats throughout the district, a wave of anger against Congressman Ruiz has become palpable. If you are a first-term congressman, logic suggests you should try to conciliate your base. Right now, much of Congressman Ruiz’s base feels betrayed, and is nurturing the same kind of anger that a wife might feel whose husband has been whoring around with other men on the down low.

Dr. Ruiz’s base has the right to expect from him a certain level of commitment, and a certain level of loyalty to the Party of which he is a member. To borrow Ricky Ricardo’s line from I Love Lucy, “Raul, You got some 'splainin' to do!” And whatever explanation Congressman Ruiz proffers to his upset and angry base will need to be clear, convincing, credible, and repentant.

Years ago, a Democratic Congresswoman of my acquaintance compared bolting the caucus to an unpardonable sin against the Holy Spirit. I may be prepared, for the sake of my personal friendship with the Congressman, to consider the possibility of absolution, but absolution requires true repentance and the doing of appropriate penance. Whatever explanations Congressman Ruiz proffers to his base will need to be made not for pardon only, but for redemption, not for solace only, but for strength.

Right now, Dr. Ruiz is a very bad place. He has managed to alienate his friends while gaining no traction among his enemies. He should have known better, and this Democratic activist is hugely disappointed in the Congressman’s astonishingly jejune performance. I’m not sure I’m prepared to be let down the garden path again. Already, there is talk of finding a 2014 primary challenger from the left who won’t be an unreliable squish.
-xxx-

Paul S Marchand is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City, California. He currently serves as a vice chair of the Riverside County Democratic Central Committee, and is a constituent of Congressman Ruiz who voted for him in the 2012 election cycle. The views contained herein are Mr. Marchand’s own, and not necessarily those of the Central Committee, though they do appear to be congruent with the views of substantial number of Mr. Marchand’s fellow Democrats in the 36th Congressional District. They are not intended, and should not be construed as, any form of legal advice.

THE UNBEARABLE TONE DEAFNESS OF BEING CONSERVATIVE

Summary: A lot of conservatives don’t seem to get it. Here in Cathedral City, perennial political wannabe Jens Mueller has managed to reconfirm the view —held by an increasingly large number of Cathedral City residents— that he is a tone deaf right-wing extremist with crypto-Nazi views who should not be anywhere near public office. His apparent admiration for Adolf Hitler’s views on labor automatically disqualifies him from holding any elective office in this country. Meanwhile, in the Roman Catholic Church, angry right-wing Roman Catholics are pitching a fit over Pope Francis’ conciliatory interview in Civiltà Cattolica, while in Washington City, Republicans seem hell-bent on shutting down the United States government and committing political suicide next year.

By: Paul S. Marchand

It’s curious, really, how oddly tone deaf so many self-identified conservatives seem to be. A small number of examples suffice to make the point.

Here in Cathedral City, perennial Council hopeful Jens Mueller, who seems to have forgotten that Adolf Hitler died in 1945, an unmourned suicide, has been busily pushing Hitler’s anti-labor agenda on his so-called Citizens Against Corruption Facebook page. The blowback against him has been sulfurous, and the white wannabe has managed to insert his foot in his mouth and gnaw all the way down to the bone. His National Socialist tendencies will not help him in the forthcoming elections.
Meanwhile, among our brethren and sistren of the Roman Catholic observance, political and religious conservatives in the United States find themselves reeling following Pope Francis’ astonishingly conciliatory 12,000 word interview in Civiltà Cattolica, in which the Roman Pontiff suggested that his church should be less obsessional and less condemnatory about contraception, queerfolk, and women’s reproductive issues.

Closer to home, the GOP finds itself caught in a battle it cannot win as it attempts to shut down the United States government in order to defund the Affordable Care Act.

OUR LITTLE WANNABE HITLERS: “BREAK ALL UNIONS; PRIVATIZE ALL GOVERNMENT FUNCTIONS”

"We must close union offices, confiscate their money and put their leaders in prison. We must reduce workers salaries and take away their right to strike." This quotation, attributed to Adolf Hitler, was supposedly uttered on May 2, 1933, the day the recently installed Reichskanzler broke the German labor union movement.

  According to certain historians, the quotation is apocryphal. Nonetheless, it accurately reflects Hitler’s views about the German labor union movement.

Indeed, on January 4, 1933, three and a half weeks before Reichspräsident Paul von Hindenburg let himself get bamboozled into appointing Hitler as Reichskanzler, Hitler met in Berlin with a number of leading German bankers and industrialists, who proffered significant financial support to the Nazi leader in return for Hitler’s ironclad commitment and promise to smash the German labor union movement. Hitler delivered on that commitment on May 2, 1933.

    Curiously, Hitler’s bad ideas always seem to have a way of coming back to haunt us. Here in Cathedral City, Nazi ideas seems to be enjoying a certain vogue on the far right fringe of our political universe.

    Occupying part of that nutcase right wing in Cathedral City is a Facebook page administered by perennial Tea Partisan Council wannabe Jens “Cowboy” Mueller.

    In a post dated September 15, 2013, Miller wrote “If you want to unleash American potential, I propose the elimination of all public and private unions, by any legal means possible.”

    My response, knowing Mueller’s National Socialist views and proclivities, was: “Jens, you're flat crazy. That was Hitler's position, too.”

    I was somewhat astonished to see even a naturalized German-born American citizen respond with admiration for a monster responsible for the deaths of nearly 40,000,000 human beings.

Mueller’s response was as follows: “He had one good idea then! Out with unions and in with privatization of all government functions.”

    Not only was Mueller’s response tone deaf, but it was a typical example of everything that is wrong with right-wing politicians and wannabes in this country. It was also an insult to the millions of Americans of the Greatest Generation who proudly wore this country’s uniform and went to war to stamp out Adolf Hitler and the Nazi cancer he represented. No aspiring politician in the United States should ever have a kind word for any one of Adolf Hitler’s ideas or views. Not one. 

     This community needs to know what kind of viper is nurturing at its breast. The community needs to know that a man who is prepared to admire Adolf Hitler on one issue will be prepared to admire him on others.

    If you are Jewish, if you are a person of color, if you are a member of a labor union, or if you are queer, Jens Mueller will do his level best to run you out of Cathedral City before turning to his ill-concealed desire to destroy this community on behalf of whatever moneyed corporate interests may be bankrolling his campaign. 

     Perhaps, in the name of our own honored dead who fought to save the world from the horror Hitler had prepared for it, we should send a clear message to Jens Mueller that he is not welcome in our community anymore. 

PAPA FRANCESCO UPSETS THE RIGHT-WING APPLECART

Papa Bergoglio certainly has upset self-identified religious, social, and political conservatives in the United States, who have been accustomed in recent years to be obsessional on certain “litmus test” issues such as queerfolk, contraception, and abortion.

    Pope Francis’ remarks, contained in an astonishing 12,000 word interview published last week in the Jesuit magazine Civiltà Cattolica, and reprinted worldwide in a number of Jesuit publications including America Magazine in this country, were more conciliatory on the subjects of human sexuality, family planning, and reproductive choice than any we have heard from his recent predecessors, the authoritarian John Paul II or the profoundly regressively, excessively Scholastic Benedict XVI.

    Indeed, the tone Pope Francis has set seems to have more in common with the so-called breath of fresh air represented by Pope John Paul I —who was so tragically cut off just 33 days into his tenure of office— and with the aggiornamento ushered in by Bl. John XXIII half a century ago, a process of “updating” the Roman church that brought about Vatican II and so many of the changes from which John Paul II and Benedict XVI tried so hard for so many years to retreat.

    The tone the current Pontiff is setting seems light years removed from the stultifying, authoritarian, neo-Pian posture of 35 years of Papa Wojtyła and Papa Ratzinger, both of whom seemed intent upon restoring in their fullest forms the sterile and conformist dispensations of the period of Pius XII.

    On the Wojtyła/Ratzinger watches, the Roman church adopted an increasingly conservative line. Progressives such as Hans Küng who did not hew to the Vatican’s views were incrementally hounded out, as conservatives within the Roman church eagerly availed themselves of various regressive papal pronouncements, using them as sticks with which to belabor so-called liberals.

    By liberals, ultramontane conservatives meant not only any Roman Catholic who dared to differ from the doctrinal positions of the Roman curia —specifically the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, formerly known as the Holy Office of the Inquisition— but also Roman Catholics who dared preach a gospel of social justice as well as women religious who dared suggest that the Roman church ought to rethink its astonishingly patriarchal views on the position and participation of women in the Body of Christ.

    Moreover, in the United States, the Roman Catholic Church, pushed in that direction by conservative prelates appointed by the authoritarian Polish pontiff, found itself increasingly identifying itself as “the Republican Party at prayer.” Roman Catholic bishops increasingly found themselves identifying with the GOP platform.

    Archbishops such as Denver’s Charles Chaput (now translated to the archbishopric of Philadelphia) went so far in the election cycle of 2004 as to suggest that persons inclined to vote for Democratic candidate John Kerry should perhaps absent themselves from the Eucharist, stating that Kerry voters were “cooperating in evil.”

    Other conservative prelates, feeling themselves emboldened by the Vatican’s apparent willingness to overlook the strong negative optics of Roman Catholic meddling in the American political process, increasingly aligned themselves with the policy positions of the Republican Party.

    Who can forget Peoria Bishop Daniel R. Jenky’s March, 2012, over-the-top attack on the Affordable Care Act in which the prelate explicitly compared President Obama to Adolf Hitler and Iosif Stalin?

     Thus, when Pope Francis uttered words of conciliation and suggested in Civiltà Cattolica that the church should stop treating homosexuality, contraception, and abortion as litmus test issues, and should stop being so obsessional and condemnatory in its words and actions on those subjects, the hair of conservative Catholics in the United States spontaneously combusted.

    In the days since the Pope’s interview in Civiltà Cattolica and America appeared, conservative Catholics have been lining up not only to try to reassure us all that the Pontiff didn’t really mean what the Pontiff had taken 12,000 words to say was exactly what he had meant, but also to presume to “instruct” the head of the Roman Catholic Church on how obviously “wrong” he was.

     If the screamers and hand-wringers on the comment threads had merely been members of such schismatic outlier organizations as the so-called Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), or if they had just been whacked-out Hutton Gibson-esque sedevacantists, lost in their delusional insistence that there is no true Pontiff, that the See of Peter is somehow vacant, and that in some conspiratorial way the papacy is in hiatus, it might be easy to dismiss them.

Unfortunately, it isn’t just ancient fools like Hutton Gibson or schismatics like SSPX who can’t stand the idea of a progressive pope.  A not insignificant number of prelates within the Roman Catholic episcopate in the United States has seen fit —in the words of the Pope himself— to“reprimand” the Pontiff for being so forward as to suggest that the church ought to be more Christlike and less institutionally “Christian.”

    It does seem rather tone deaf for Roman Catholic bishops in the United States (including the “ultraorthodox” Abp. Chaput) to want to reprimand the man they call the Holy Father in Rome, from whom, in Roman Catholic theory, they derive not only their ordinary episcopal authority, but also their magisterium, i.e., their teaching authority, as well.

    The protesting prelates sound less like obedient servants of the Roman church than they do like certain bitching bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Church, a number of whom have been happy to try to secede from the Episcopal Church over such issues as marriage equality or (OMG! WTF?!) the ordination of women to the priesthood.

    It certainly seems as if for every former Episcopal Bishop John-David Schofield (who tried to take the Diocese of San Joaquin out of the Episcopal Church because he disagreed with its stance on queerfolk and on the ordination of women) there is a Daniel R. Jenky, a Thomas Tobin (of Providence, RI), or a Charles Chaput of Philadelphia.

    Perhaps bishops Jenky, Tobin, Chaput, and others of their ilk should think twice about complaining against a Pope to whom they had sworn allegiance.

    Of course, when such authoritarian pontiffs as Wojtyła and Ratzinger were in control, it was easy for Roman Catholic conservatives to be ultramontane. Hiding behind the aegis of the Vatican, they could engage in muscular policing of the spiritual lives of American Roman Catholic churchgoers, go after women religious, repel Democrats and progressives from Communion, and thunderously damn uppity queerfolk to the outer darkness with the metaphorical equivalent of bell, book, and candle.

    Now, however, Roman Catholic conservatives may find themselves caught in a paradox. Having eagerly declared their ultramontane views in the past, they must now determine whether their protestations of unquestioning allegiance to Rome still apply now that a Roman Pontiff has gone and said something they don’t agree with.

    For those of us not of the Roman observance, who see ultramontanism as a cancer in any body politic where there is religious liberty, the Hobson’s choice faced by ultramontane conservative Roman Catholic Americans is delicious to us.

    As certain conservative Roman Catholics used to experience schadenfreude watching the internal anguish within the Episcopal Church over the issue of ordaining women and queerfolk to Holy Orders, many of us —God forgive us— feel a certain schadenfreude watching as conservative Roman Catholics find themselves trying to reconcile their own ultramontane views with the refreshing currents of aggiornamento that seem to be coming from this Pontiff.

    If only these ultramontanists and defenders of so-called orthodoxy would realize how tone deaf they are and how their own hateful messages are undercutting conciliatory one Pope Francis has put out, urbi et orbi, to the city of Rome and to all the world beyond!

But the right-wing will always be tone deaf, for as Talleyrand once said of supporters of France’s restored ancien régime: ils n'ont rien appris, ni rien oublié: they have learned nothing and they have forgotten nothing.

NOTHING LEARNED NOTHING FORGOTTEN IN A NEW THREAT OF GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN

If the ultramontane conservatives within the Roman Catholic Church in the United States find themselves weeping and gnashing their teeth because the new Pontiff doesn’t appear to share their retrograde views, and if those same ultramontanists find themselves unable to moderate their tone, so too does the Republican caucus in Congress seem curiously unable to understand that the American public, especially those of us who left our teen years behind long ago, remembers unkindly the government shutdown engineered by Newt Gingrich and other Shiite Republicans during Bill Clinton’s administration.

    Of course, part of Gingrich’s stated reason for shutting down the United States government under Bill Clinton was wounded amour propre; his nose was out of joint because he had been asked to ride in the rear of Air Force One. The motivations for this attempt at a Republican shutdown of government are just as crass, churlish, and childish.  To destroy “Obamacare,” a piece of legislation they do not like, Republicans will ignore the very clearly expressed sentiments of the American people against the shutdown, place this country in danger from her adversaries, and create havoc in public services across the country.

    This is considerably more serious than right-wing Roman Catholics having a shit fit over a conciliatory interview given by the Roman Pontiff in Civiltà Cattolica. No disrespect to Papa Bergoglio, but the immediate responsibilities of the Vatican in the world pale into insignificance compared to those of the United States of America.

    While it is emphatically not the job of the United States government to mediate the Salvation of the World or to carry out the Great Commission Our Lord laid upon His disciples in the concluding passages of the Gospel according to St. Matthew, it is very much the job of the United States government to try to maintain the peace. Deliberately shutting down perhaps the only government in the world with the resources to maintain some kind of peaceful order in an often fractious global community is more than just the height of irresponsibility.

    Republican obduracy and irresponsibility have come to resemble the kind of hysterical, obsessional, Roman Catholic efforts to undo Queen Elizabeth I during the latter part of the 1500s. Successive 16th-century Roman pontiffs underwrote conspiracies, assassination plots, and proposed invasions of England, all with a view to toppling the woman they called a “cursed Jezebel,” and replacing her on the English throne with her presumably more reliably Catholic cousin, Mary Queen of Scots.

    Yet, across the 45 years of Elizabethn I’s reign, the Vatican’s Tudor Derangement Syndrome never bore fruit, though it did contrive to drive the Roman Catholic cause in England into the realms of treason. 

 Republican sufferers from Obama Derangement Syndrome would be well advised to moderate their tone deaf transports and take another look at the history of 45 years of Queen Elizabeth Tudor.

    They might actually learn again what they have apparently forgotten so badly.

-xxx-

Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City.  He is a descendant of World War II veterans who put everything on the line to bring down Hitler’s Third Reich, and has no sympathy for or truck with National Socialist ideas, and believes that Nazis, neo-Nazis, and crypto-Nazis have no place in American society.  The views expressed herein are his own, and not necessarily those of any other entity or individual.  They are not intended, and are not to be taken as, legal advice.

LITTLE SNAPPERS: Cathedral City’s Crony Culture and Vladimir Vladimirovich Tugs America’s Tail.

Summary: Cathedral City’s municipal culture tends to be characterized by cronyism.  City Hall would prefer to select an unqualified but congenial replacement for our late city clerk over a qualified candidate who won’t take part in a cozy, good old boy dynamic that doesn’t much care for transparency, good government, or keeping the system honest.  Our “leaders,” as sky-clad and inadequate as they are, do not propose to be asked to reflect on their performance by anybody.
    Neither, apparently, does the American public at large, which has gone into paroxysms over V.V. Putin’s op-ed piece in the New York Times, taking exception to American exceptionalism.  While Putin may be an asshole, even assholes sometimes strike nerves.  Has a prideful, unthinking belligerence overtaken the kind of thoughtful introspection so beautifully expressed in Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address?  Does it take a hypocrital Russian thug to ask the kinds of questions we have grown fearful of addressing?


By: Paul S. Marchand

Crony Culture in Cat City

Last night, the Cathedral City city council chose a new city clerk to fill out the unexpired term of the late Pat Hammers. Of the two candidates available to them, they unanimously chose Gary Howell, the less qualified candidate.

The candidate they did choose, however, is an old crony, long associated with and thus acceptable to all of the warring factions of a dysfunctional city council. The chosen candidate is a dependable supporter of the current dispensation in Cathedral City, and can safely be relied upon not to ask embarrassing questions, not to insist on too much transparency in a municipality that makes a virtual fetish of secrecy, and not to work too hard at keeping the system honest.

Full disclosure, I was the unsuccessful candidate. Clearly, better qualifications notwithstanding, I was not congenial either to Maximum Leader Kathleen Joan DeRosa or “Leader of the Opposition” Gregory Pettis. I made it clear that I would be willing to ask unsettling questions, to insist on transparency, and to keep the system honest. These are not the goals and policies of what has become one of the most sadly dysfunctional city councils in the Coachella Valley.

Cathedral City’s municipal culture is one of tergiversation, secrecy, complacency, and constant infighting. It may be as well that the Council unanimously chose an old crony; to participate in such a municipal culture is inevitably to become complicit in its enormities, and that is not a complicity which, upon due and conscientious reflection, I wish to take up.

I have been a strong critic of the way in which Cathedral City has been disserved both by the Maximum Leader and by the “Opposition.” Nonetheless, because I believed that the “Opposition” had more to offer than the Maximum Leader, I had been more inclined to give that “Opposition” the benefit of some doubt. That is no longer the case. Given that neither side on the council has demonstrated the slightest capacity for doing much more than sniping at the other, both sides have now lost whatever support they might have had from me; a plague on both their ramshackle houses.

Speaking of ramshackle, I can’t help but wonder what, if anything, Cathedral City can really offer to the inhabitants of Thousand Palms. Though I had initially supported the idea of annexing Thousand Palms to Cathedral City, the council’s missteps of late, particularly its astonishing failure to keep the Date Palm interchange project moving forward in a timely manner, has caused me some anguished reconsideration of the utility of trying to bring Thousand Palms into Cathedral City. Given the all-too-apparent difficulty this Council seems to have governing our existing city, can the inhabitants of Thousand Palms expect any future better than to be treated as second-class citizens in their own decaying neighborhoods?

Can the inhabitants of Thousand Palms have any confidence whatsoever that their interests will be taken care of by the existing city government of Cathedral City?

Can any of us in fact have any confidence whatsoever that our needs and concerns will be adequately addressed by the current council?

Sadly, I’ve been here before. From 2001 to 2007, I represented Cathedral City on the board of trustees of the Coachella Valley Mosquito and Vector Control District. The “Bug Board” as it is commonly known, was, at the time, a group of good old boys largely controlled by Then-General Manager Donald Gomsi and counsel Lisa Copeland. Because my suggestions for reform and transparency were not congenial to the cranky old white guys who made up the District’s governing board, they engaged in an active effort to convince the Maximum Leader and her then-allies on the city Council to get rid of me when I came up for reappointment to the Bug Board in 2007. Contributions flowed to DeRosa’s campaign, and the quid pro quo was glaringly obvious. DeRosa and her allies replaced me with --- no surprise at all--- their good friend and crony Gary Howell.

Six years later, we seem to have come full circle as the Council has opted to go down the route of the Bug Board, by reinforcing a “you scratch my back, I scratch yours” City Hall culture that incentivizes mediocrity, incompetence, and a disturbing appearance of corruption.

Yet, at some point, reform happens. It will either happen because this Council has a “Road to Damascus” experience and comes to understand that Cathedral City cannot continue as it has done, or it will come because the electorate has a “road to Damascus” moment, at which something like scales falls from their eyes (Acts 9:18) and the electorate sees clearly that Cathedral City has not been well served by its current crop of cronies and time servers. Either way, the Council needs to stop behaving like the leadership of the last days of the Ottoman Empire and instead heed the muted rumble of approaching events. Time is short; 2014 is just months away, and it may not be as easy to bamboozle the electorate as it has been in years past.

Bad Vlad: Putin Tugs America’s Tail

Russian president Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin has published an op-ed piece in the New York Times in which he takes some exception to the idea of American exceptionalism.

 The response from the American public has been remarkably bipartisan. It is also been sulfurous. 

Nonetheless, it sometimes takes a thuggish, homophobic asshole like V.V. Putin to ask the kinds of questions we often don’t like to hear. It’s uncomfortable when “Adam-zad - the Bear that walks like a Man” has the effrontery to suggest that perhaps we need not look so pious after all, and that we may in fact be sky-clad emperors with no clothes.

At the risk of being attacked as a contrarian, or even having my patriotism questioned by knuckle draggers, I daresay that the sulfurous reaction to gospodin Putin’s pinprick on the subject of American “exceptionalism” suggests that he may have struck a nerve.

We Americans have been embracing the idea that we are somehow exceptional since John Winthrop first spoke of the incipient Puritan colony in Massachusetts Bay as “a city that cannot be hid.” We have a uniquely providential view of our own history. For white America, our history is summed up in the Exodus narrative of God’s chosen people going into the Promised Land and forcing out the Canaanites. For black America, that same Exodus narrative has been read to emphasize the mighty acts by which God humbled the arrogant pretensions of Pharoah, led the people of Israel out of the land of Egypt and the house of bondage, and set them on the road to the Promised Land.

Either way, the narrative of our history has been presented in a uniquely Constantinopolitan light; if Constantinople was “the God-guarded city” on a hill that could not be hid, so too has America been characterized as a uniquely God-guarded “city on a hill.” To characterize America that way is to insist that somehow America has been set apart for the fulfillment of some divine purpose. To urge that America has been set apart for such an enterprise is automatically to accept the proposition that we are far too special and far too unique to be subject to the accountabilities of ordinary nations.

Invoking American “exceptionalism” can thus call forth a kind of unthinking, prideful belligerence that rejects the very idea of conscientious introspection. Such a rejection of the idea that we should hold ourselves to strict account seems to underlie the head-exploding response to gospodin Putin’s criticism of our exceptionalistic view of ourselves as above criticism. Still, it is a view from which Abraham Lincoln would have recoiled in horror, as even a first- approximation reading of his masterful, compassionate second inaugural address demonstrates.

Of course, as I suggested, Vladimir Putin is by no means the best messenger for such a message. But one must wonder whether our reaction would have been so thunderous had the op-ed in question carried the byline of, say, British PM David Cameron, or Labour Party leader Ed Miliband, or even of former Australian PM Kevin Rudd. Criticism from other English-speaking countries seems more acceptable, perhaps because we and other English-speaking countries tend to share a common set of values and heritages.

Nonetheless, as hypocritical as Putin’s finger-wagging may be, a basic respect for intellectual honesty ought to militate against rejecting out of hand what Vladimir Vladimirovich has said. For if even a priest in a state of sin can validly celebrate the Sacraments of our redemption, even a major-league douchebag can sometimes ask the right question. Once in a while, as my Texas grandmother used to say, blind hog finds an acorn.

Are we as exceptional as we think we are? Many of us, I among them, hope so, but the proof of our exceptionalism will lie in the extent to which we can engage in careful, self-critical analysis. If all we can do is bluster about the badness of gospodin Putin, we may well have proven his point, and that is not an item of satisfaction I would like to give to Adam-zad - the Bear that walks like a Man, with whom Rudyard Kipling warned us a century and more go that we should make no truce.

-xxx- 

Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City, a fact he finds somewhat embarrassing.  He believes in asking hard questions and in keeping the system open, honest, and transparent --- all attributes which make him uncongenial to City Hall political operators.  He is perfectly willing to declare that our “leaders” are sky-clad and inadequate, and he makes no truce with Adam-zad - the bear that walks like a man.  The views set forth herein are his own, and are not intended as legal advice.

PARADOXES WITHIN PARADOXES: The “Good Enough” Solution to the Syrian Question Is Best.

Summary: As the Syrian Crisis unfolds, it starts to resemble both a weird, 21st-century “remake” of Barbara Tuchman’s classic The Guns of August, married to an odd set of nested paradoxes. We seem caught between the possibility of hostilities and a diplomatic resolution which nobody will find terribly satisfactory. Any peaceful resolution of the Syrian Question will probably depend upon continuing to tolerate for the time being the presence of a noisome dictator. There are no perfect outcomes, and not a lot of even good outcomes. The best we can hope for is a least bad outcome, as we embrace the consolations of sometimes Soviet Admiral Sergei Gorshkov’s philosophy that “good enough is best.”

By: Paul S. Marchand

Watching the so-called Syrian Crisis unfold is somewhat akin to living through a weird, 21st-century “remake” of the late Barbara Tuchman’s now classic The Guns of August. We all have a sense that Syrian dictator Bashar Assad’s use of chemical weapons against other Syrians represents something that is simply “not done.” Assad’s crossing of a so-called red line has been treated by the United States as something akin to Gavrilo Princip’s assassination of Austria-Hungary’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand on that thrice-cursed day of Vidovdan, June 28, 1914.

In making a case to the American public for unilateral military intervention against the Assad regime, President Obama has attempted to follow Theodore Roosevelt’s advice of speaking softly and carrying a big stick. As the President has sought to build up support for a so-called surgical strike against Syria, the world has seen much of the same kind of diplomatic maneuvering that consumed the month of July, 1914. The intervention of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Viktorovich Lavrov --- apparently in response to an off-the-cuff remark from Secretary of State John Kerry at a media availability --- seems to have led to some sort of “road to Damascus” volte-face from the Syrians, who have now acknowledged their possession of chemical weapons and have ventilated, through the Russian Foreign Ministry, a proposal to surrender their chemical weapons inventory to international control.

This was where events stood this evening when the President addressed the nation. Mr. Obama’s remarks were, in all honesty, somewhat paradoxical. On one hand, the President disclaimed any intention of acting as “the world’s policeman,” or of putting American “boots on the ground” in Syria, but he certainly retained in his text some distinct emphasis on the idea that the Syrians --- and their backers in the Kremlin--- had only been brought to their expressed willingness to make concessions by the presence of “credible [American] military force.” Clearly, the Presidential text was overtaken by today’s events.

Still, we may credit the president with not having made the terrible mistake Austria-Hungary made at the end of July, 1914. In that earlier crisis, Vienna had delivered to the Serbian government, which it held responsible for Franz Ferdinand’s assassination, a stringent ultimatum, to which a reply from Serbia was demanded within 48 hours. The Serbs complied with the 48-hour deadline in a document that essentially conceded all of Austria-Hungary’s demands. Indeed, so complete was Serbia’s capitulation that German Emperor Wilhelm II declared that Serbia’s reply had “remove[ed] all cause for war.” 

To the extent that Damascus’s response to the Russian démarche appears to represent a significant climbdown by the Assad regime, the Obama administration would have appeared far too bellicose for its own good had it not expressed a willingness to delay military action and a Congressional vote pending further talks. Not for this administration, then, the senile belligerence of Vienna, or the hell-bent-for-war rejection by the George W. Bush administration of Iraqi diplomatic efforts to stave off the US invasion of a decade ago. This administration, at least for the time being, appears to agree that talking is better than shooting. As Winston Churchill once put it: “jaw jaw is better than war war.”
At all events, however any talks may go forward, we must acknowledge that in the current diplomatic dance over Syria, there remain paradoxes within paradoxes within paradoxes.

First, we must understand that Syria is not Libya. US military efforts against Muammar Qaddafi were essentially in the nature (as an old Chinese proverb has it) of “giving the falling wall a push.” Qaddafi’s ramshackle regime ultimately collapsed of its own contradictions and inconsistencies. Syria, on the other hand, is ruled by a family dictatorship that has perfected over many years the infrastructure and apparatus of ironfisted control. Bashar Assad’s father, Hafez Assad, was easily the most brutal dictator in the Middle East. Writing in his book From Beirut to Jerusalem, New York Times reporter (and quondam Iraq War cheerleader) Thomas Friedman once observed that Hafez Assad played by so-called Hama Rules: the ruthless use of overwhelming force to crush even the slightest dissent. Friedman coined the phrase “Hama Rules” to refer to the so-called Hama massacre of February, 1982, when Syrian forces swept into the city of Hama to crush an uprising of the Muslim Brotherhood. An estimated 40,000 were slain by Hafez Assad’s security forces. From then until now, the Assad family has never been afraid to play by Hama Rules.

But if the Assad family remains willing to play by Hama Rules, using chemical agents to suppress dissent, it also remains uniquely poised to insulate itself from accountability. Any US intervention in the Civil War now raging in Syria would inevitably be spun by the Assad family, by its water carriers, and by the Kremlin as an American assault upon the so-called Arab Nation. It may be paradoxical that Arab dictators who have historically looked to the United States as either a convenient prop or a useful enemy find this country so integral to the maintenance of their regimes, but it remains so. Bashar Assad won’t go because we ask him to, or even because we tell him to; Bashar Assad will go the way so many Baathist dictators have gone. He will go in a coup; he will either go out at gunpoint into a cushy exile or he will go down in a hail of bullets, presumably taking the rest of his family with him; it is the Baathist way.

Indeed, for Bashar Assad’s minority, Alawite government, the best possible guarantee of its continued existence may well be the enmity of the United States. If Sergei Viktorovich’s plan produces some kind of non-military resolution, under which the Assad regime agrees to turn over its chemical assets, presumably to the United Nations, the regime will necessarily have to remain in place and retain sufficient power to ensure the successful implementation of any kind of negotiated settlement. For the United States, the paradox of Syria may be that to secure the elimination of the dictator’s arsenal, we may find ourselves obliged to tolerate for the time being the continued presence of the dictator.

And Americans on both the left and the right should be considerate in their utterance as the parties attempt to resolve this issue short of hostilities. Americans on the right do their cause no favors by lionizing Russian president Vladimir Putin, whose malodorous reputation has only gotten worse as a result of the mindless pursuit and persecution of Russia’s queerfolk by Putin’s government and its wholly owned subsidiary, the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church. American conservatives like Newt Gingrich, who appear to have forgotten that politics should end at the water’s edge, need to moderate their transports and discontinue their unhelpful, partisan attacks on the President. When significant foreign-policy issues are implicated, critics on the American right need to understand that their constant sniping at the President has completely undermined whatever international credibility they once possessed.

By the same token, left-wing critics of the President need to examine their own rhetoric, critically assessing whether their words have a tendency to send signals of encouragement to the Assad regime. There is something more than a little disturbing about seeing protest signs reading “hands off Syria.” Are the carriers of such signs adopting and advocating the Syrian/Bashar Assad point of view, or --- to be charitable--- are they simply intemperate in their choice of words?  Too many of our friends on the so-called progressive side of the aisle often appear disturbingly eager to allow the perfect be the enemy of the good. Sadly, there are no perfect solutions to what has happened in Syria.

Yet, if there are no perfect solutions, or even terribly good solutions, to the Syrian Question, some solution must nonetheless be found. Certainly, under the circumstances, we should not adopt the George W. Bush administration’s preference for reaching the military option first. The President was probably wise to pull back from the threshold of unilateral military action. In this case, military intervention should be very much a “reach me last” option. Nonetheless, pace my friends on the left, we cannot afford to categorically foreclose any military option. Paradoxically, it may prove to be in the national interest of the United States that the Syrians shoot first.

Of course, if a diplomatic solution is found, nobody has to shoot at all, and we would be foolish to throw unnecessary, gratuitous obstacles in the way of such an outcome. Still, the Syrian Question remains a set of nested paradoxes out of which we will be lucky to find a least bad solution, embracing as we do the consolations of Soviet naval mastermind Sergey Georgiyevich Gorshkov’s philosophy that, in the end, “good enough is best.”

-xxx-

Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City, California. The views contained herein are his own, and not necessarily those of any entity with which he is associated. They are not intended as, and should not be construed as legal advice. In the end, good enough usually is best.

AL HOOK: AN APPRECIATION

 By:  Paul S. Marchand

There was a memorial service last Saturday for Alfred Hook, who died last month at the age of 91.  Al and his wife Annie, who died in 2003, were paragons of volunteer civic involvement here in Cathedral City.  There was nary a civic function at which Al and Annie, and later Al alone, were not present as volunteers.

When I first entered public office as a city councilmember, my Council predecessor and dear friend Sarah DiGrandi took me aside and advised me that Al and Annie were people I needed to get to know.  She was absolutely right.

For in every community, there are those stalwart citizens who can be relied upon to do much of the unsung, unglamorous work that helps enhance the quality of community life. Like the so-called Greatest Generation that fought in World War II, these stalwart citizens and do what they do without a lot of expectation of recognition; there is a kind of holy humility to the volunteer work undertaken by the Annie and Al Hooks of the world.

For Al himself was a member of that Greatest Generation that fought and won the Second World War, and which is now slipping into eternity at the rate of roughly a thousand a day. This Greatest Generation, which did so much to save the world, came home from war and with surprising humility and modesty resumed civilian life, its exploits largely unheralded and unsung.  In his volunteer work in Cathedral City, Al Hook embodied the Greatest Generation’s self-effacing ethic of service.

The idea of the self-effacing righteous one who serves and saves is not without precedent or parallel. In Jewish mysticism, the so-called Tzadikim Nistarim, or hidden righteous ones, are believed to be 36 special individuals for whose sake the world continues. Similarly, in the Eighteenth Chapter of Genesis, Abraham the patriarch extracts a promise from God that despite its depravities, God would turn his wrath away from Sodom if ten righteous persons could be found there.

We may never know whether Al Hook was among the world-saving 36, or even one of that salvific quorum of ten on whose putative behalf Abraham was willing to stand up even to God. What we do know is that during his time in our community, Al Hook, in his own unspectacular, self-effacing way, reminded us that there is a special, even holy, dignity in the giving of time, toil, and talent in the service of that community.

Yet, in every community, there are those few for whose sake and by whose effort the Commonwealth continues.  Al was one of them, and I shall miss him. 

May he rest in peace, and angels speed him to that rest.
-xxx-

Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, California, where he served eight years as a city Council member. The views contained herein are his own, and are not intended to constitute legal advice, and should not be so construed.

LITTLE SNAPPERS: THOUGHTS ON LABOR DAY AND THE EMOLLIENT VALUE OF HUMOR

Summary: As we are deluged today with bland, anodyne pronouncements about Labor Day, we often forget that American workers are overworked, underpaid, and generally underappreciated. America lags behind most of the rest of the industrialized world in most of the indices of labor, whether pay, vacation, healthcare, or variety of other significantly indicators.

As much as American workers are underappreciated, so too is the American sense of humor.  Time was that Americans could laugh at things. Today, however, our national conversation has been hijacked by the severely humorless, by grim, prim, dour, sour, Puritans determined to police our utterances with a view to making us take seriously things that often don’t deserve it.

By: Paul S Marchand

ENOUGH WITH BLAND, ANODYNE LABOR DAY PRONOUNCEMENTS

As we read and hear all kinds of anodyne pronouncements today about labor, let’s take a moment to stop and realize how unclothed –skyclad, even– the Emperor really is, and how our workers do not live in anything even resembling a so-called worker’s paradise.  Most of us who get our news from more responsible sources than Fox (or who get our polling data from more responsible sources than Rasmussen) are rightly concerned about worsening economic inequality and the stagnation of wages and purchasing power in the American middle class.  With each year that passes, America’s middle and working classes fall further behind and closer to the poverty line.

 Today is not a day for bland, anodyne pronouncements. Today should be a day of remembrance.  Today we should remember the martyrs of Haymarket; today we should remember the strikers, the agitators, and the intransigent fighters in our own time for the dignity of work and workers; they have been waging a fight sanctified by nothing less than the Gospels and the examples of such great souls as St. Benedict, who used to remind his monks that work is prayer, and that work itself possesses a dignity that makes it precious in the eyes of God.

Today is not a day for bland, anodyne pronouncements. Today is a day when we should hold ourselves, and our government, accountable for America’s poor performance in the realms of labor. We lag behind most of the other industrialized nations the world in terms of wages, health care, parental leave, vacation time, collective bargaining, and a host of other indices in which we often come in woefully behind.

Today is not a day for bland, anodyne pronouncements, nor is it a day for us to embrace our poor labor performance with the kind of unthinking, belligerent pride that so often trumpets itself as “American exceptionalism.”  We really do need to get past the idea that improving our labor practices somehow makes us cheese eating surrender monkeys. That the UK, France, or Germany may engage in some particular labor practice in which we do not does not ipso facto make such practice wrong or immoral.  Yet we Americans, caught up in an often specious feedback loop of exceptionalism, mixed with a rough and ready rugged individualism, liberally adulterated with a “pull yourselves up by your bootstraps” myth, often recoil from the labor practices of Europe or Japan with pious horror.

Instead of offering bland, anodyne pronouncements, maybe it’s time we remembered that the early American fighters for labor were a rowdy, passionate bunch, not particularly interested in making nice when their families and children were starving. Today, maybe we should forgo the hamburgers and hotdogs; maybe we shouldn’t bother with the white shoes; maybe we should take new resolve from our martyrs, determined to continue the work they began, determined to ensure that America no longer cuts such a pitiful figure among the great nations of the industrialized world. 

Instead of offering bland, anodyne pronouncements, we should militantly republish the words of America’s first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, who did not fear to declare a fundamental truth his successors have run from as fast as their legs will carry them. “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.”

LIGHTEN UP, PRIGGISH ONES!

More (relatively humorless) works have been written on the subject of humor than one can shake the metaphorical stick at.

Still, it does seem that the ability to laugh, whether at oneself or at a situation that needs laughing at, is a wasting asset in American society.  Time was that Americans could laugh at things. Today, our national conversation seems to have been hijacked by a notoriously morose group of priggishly prim, grim, dour, sour, severely humorless Puritans, most of them unhealthily ready to police the laughter of their neighbors with a view to making us take seriously things that simply do not deserve it.

Yet, non-Puritan America often manifests a saving grace of humor. Some of it may be crude, overly direct, or even mordantly uncomfortable. The best humor dares to call a spade a spade, and to hold up for critical examination some of the dearest shibboleths of our time.  Abbie Hoffman was right to suggest that “sacred cows make the tastiest hamburger.”

 Yet devoted followers of this or that cause often cannot stand the possibility of levity. The notoriously humorless St. John Chrysostom used to rage against his congregations when they laughed, crying “Christ is crucified, and you laugh!”

Chrysostom has his own modern successors.  Recently, a Facebook friend of mine posted a picture of California’s converted DC-10 fire service water tanker flying low over a residential neighborhood in the path of a wildfire.  I found the picture amusing, and so posted a comment which ran, in sum and substance, “Junior! Stop playing with your drones around the house.” Another person, prim, grim, dour, and sour, with all the humorlessness of an unhappy, deeply closeted upbringing, chose to excoriate me for my “inappropriate” sense of humor, which he saw fit to characterize as “shameful.”

Well, screw him and the horse he rode in on.


 The America I live in still has room for humor, levity, and irony. The America I live in is the America where the first Challenger joke manifested itself within less than half an hour of the doomed space shuttle’s explosion. The America I live in is not afraid to tell George W. Bush and Barack Obama jokes. The America I live in is even secure enough of itself to enjoy jokes at the expense of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, the Prince of Wales, and the rest of the British Royal family, not excluding HM the Queen.

 Because telling jokes and deploying humor is often a critical emollient in troubled times.  We live in a world that author Pat Conroy has trenchantly described as “a vast orb of disillusionment and pain.”  In finding the humor of things we also find the seriousness of things, as well as finding our sense of proportion and soothing Balm of Gilead for anguished souls.

To be able to laugh at disaster or to mock the pretensions of the overprivileged makes it possible to carry on.  To deploy humor against fear, disaster, or pretension is our equivalent of Victor Hugo’s Cambronne in Les Misérables throwing down the elemental, excremental word “merde” in defiant response to demands for his surrender at Waterloo.  “Borne down by numbers, by superior force, by brute matter, he finds in his soul an expression: "merde!" We repeat it,-- to use that word, to do thus, to invent such an expression, is to win!”
To laugh at horror, to laugh at tears, to laugh at anguish, and to find one’s soul in the liberation that comes out of mockery, to to thus, to find such an expression, is likewise to win.

So, I repeat it, screw the humorless, priggish, puritan ones, and the horses they rode in on.  To laugh is to live.

-xxx-

Paul S Marchand is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, California.  The views contained herein are his own, and nobody else’s, and certainly are not intended as legal advice.  If you are a grim, prim, dour, sour, severely humorless prig, you know what advice I would tender to you and to the horse you rode in on.

GET RID OF THE GOLGOTHA GAMES OF SOCHI

Summary: Russia’s bad behavior against its queerfolk has put the International Olympic Committee in a very bad spot. The IOC, which has an unfortunate history of truckling to repressive regimes, (think Berlin, 1936, Tokyo, 1940 [canceled] Moscow, 1980, and Beijing, 2008) must now either kiss up to the Kremlin or get serious about protecting the not insubstantial queer cohort who will be attending, officiating at, or competing in the Winter Olympics of 2014. We don’t want to see our athletes, officials, friends, or families, caught up in new anti-LGBT pogroms, an activity with which Russia has a long and unfortunate acquaintance. Nor do we want to see athletes put in a position of having to pull a “Jesse Owens” protest against a regime that, unlike the Nazis in 1936, doesn’t give a crap about what the outside world thinks, and would just as happily throw such athletes into Vladimir Putin’s new Gulag. At the very least, we should keep our TVs resolutely dark during the games, working to ensure that they get a zero rating and zero share. Maybe it is time to rethink the old idea of a single permanent set of venues for the Games, as the ancient Olympics were always held at Olympia in the Peloponnesus, where new ones could be held as well. It would certainly revive the struggling Greek economy, protect the Euro and the Eurozone, and relieve aspiring Olympic cities around the world from the burden of potentially bankrupting themselves to foot the bill for new Olympic Infrastructure.

By: Paul S Marchand

The concatenation of Russia’s new, draconian anti-LGBT legislation and the impending winter Olympics in the Black Sea resort town of Sochi has managed to put the International Olympic Committee in a well-nigh untenable position, and has exposed the moral bankruptcy of the bureaucracy of so-called Olympic movement.

Faced with remonstrances from much of the civilized world, Russia has apparently seen fit to double down on its hateful legislation, with senior Russian officials going so far as to threaten Olympic athletes who do not knuckle under to Russia’s queer Nuremberg Laws. Now, to make matters worse, the IOC has essentially embraced a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy for the Sochi Games. 

If the IOC thinks it can march queer athletes back into the closet of DADT, it may very well have another thing coming. If the Russian government is foolish enough to believe that its highly equivocal and ambiguous “assurances” to the IOC are worthy of the slightest degree of credence, it, too, may well have another thing coming; the world knows all too well how much faith can be put in the Kremlin’s assurances; all one need do is a little historical research, or perhaps ask the still-living King Michael v. Hohenzollern of Romania, how far Moscow can actually be trusted. 

Of course, the IOC has a long history of truckling to repressive regimes.  The same IOC that had no problem awarding the 1936 Games (both winter in Garmisch-Partenkirchen and summer in Berlin) to Nazi Germany compounded its mistake by awarding the 1940 summer Games to Tokyo. (Those Games were ultimately canceled following the outbreak of World War II.) Awarding the Games to Moscow in 1980 and to Beijing in 2008 only solidified the IOC’s unfortunate reputation for kissing up to dictatorships, as it has again done by awarding the Games to Sochi.

Already, we know that Russia’s new “Black Hundreds” are gearing up for new pogroms against Russia’s queerfolk as their ancestors once rampaged through the Jewish shtetls of the Pale of Settlement during the latter part of the 19th century. Will we see pictures of lesbians or gay men laid out on gurneys with their heads broken in the same way we saw pictures of the bodies of Jewish pogrom victims in the savage Kishinev Pogrom of 1903, laid out, with their lifeless eyes staring from shattered faces?

And if we do, what then will be the reaction of the civilized world?

For there comes a point at which we can have no more truck with barbarism, particularly not a glossy, Internet-enabled barbarism made all the worse for being covered with a veneer of modern, technological conveniences. We dare not fall into the temptation of urging our athletes to put their heads into the bear’s mouth by attempting to engage in some kind of naïve, “Jesse Owens” protest moment.

Forasmuch as we knew in 1936 that Hitler and Co. were intent upon using the Berlin Games as a highly sophisticated public relations and marketing device for the Third Reich, we know nothing of the kind with respect to Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and his gang of ex-KGB thugs. The Nazis at least gave the appearance of being considerate of international opinion. The Russians, by contrast, driven by an historic xenophobia, tend to reject the opinion of the outside world, preferring instead to respond to remonstrances therefrom by proffering an extended medial digit and offering the metaphorical equivalent of “fuck you.”

Well, fuck them, too, and the bear they rode in on.

We dare not put our athletes at risk by encouraging them to engage in “Jesse Owens” protest activities (though in truth, the strongest form of protest Jesse Owens engaged in was defeating much vaunted Nazi athletes on the field). We can predict that the IOC will take a punitive stance toward any such activities, having before us for precedent the splenetic reaction of the IOC and racist Avery Brundage (who didn’t much like Jesse Owens, either) to John Carlos and Tommy Smith’s Black Power salute after medaling in the men’s 200m in México City in 1968.  

Moreover, any athlete who would be foolish enough to defy Russia’s Maximum Leader would necessarily face the very real possibility of falling into the malign hands of the Russian police apparatus. We cannot assume that should an athlete fall into such hands the IOC would do anything better than what the Gospels record Pontius Pilate as having done; the IOC would offer a few tepid protests, wash its hands of the matter, and tamely acquiesce in such an athlete’s destruction. After all, if Josef Stalin could ask “how many divisions has the Pope?” V.V. Putin can certainly inquire into the number of divisions possessed by the IOC.

We should not demand that our queer athletes travel willingly to Golgotha, any more than we should participate in the Golgotha Games of Sochi, even to the extent of watching them on television or streaming them over the ‘Net. We may not be able to stop this IOC-orchestrated glorification of one of the world’s most repressive regimes, but we should be able to work toward ensuring that here in the United States, coverage of these Games gets a zero rating and a zero share.

Moreover, given the IOC’s poor history, maybe it is time that we reevaluated the utility of the so-called Olympic movement and the way in which the IOC awards the Games to various venues around the world. Perhaps we should discontinue the obscene whoredom of cities all over the globe prostituting themselves to get the Games. How far into impoverishment and debt, for example, is Brazil willing to take herself in order to host the Rio de Janeiro Games of 2016? Already, substantial segments of the Brazilian public have registered – in large demonstrations in the streets of Rio, of São Paulo, and as such other Brazilian cities as Brasilia and Belo Horizonte — their disapproval of committing to the construction of whited Olympic sepulchers resources that could have been applied to bettering the lot of Brazil’s poor. I daresay, I think the demonstrators may have a point. In an historically poor country, investing in social justice is always better than building another soccer stadium.

In the past, it has been suggested that the participating nations in the Olympic movement should agree among themselves to a single, permanent set of venues for the Games. Historical experience militates in favor of such a solution. The original Olympic Games were held every four years at Olympia, in the Peloponnesus, for almost 1200 years, from 776 B.C. to A.D. 394. Perhaps returning the summer Games to Olympia, financing the construction of infrastructure with contributions from Olympic-participant nations, would make sense. If nothing else, such capital projects would go a long way toward injecting needed cash into the struggling Greek economy, and, by preventing Greece from returning to its old currency, the Drachma, might even save the Euro and the Eurozone.

All in all, the bad and beastly behavior of the Russians should, if nothing else, challenge us to rethink some of the sacred cows that have grown up around the Olympic Games. If, as Abbie Hoffman pointed out “sacred cows make the tastiest hamburger,” now may be a good time to grill up and serve with fries and a Coke some of the more foolish notions that have engrafted themselves onto Baron de Coubertin’s original notion of a modern Olympics.

-xxx-

Paul S Marchand is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City, California. Though not particularly athletic, he grits his teeth, goes off to the gym ever and anon, and runs himself ragged, all in the service of an ideal of waist management and better overall health. Say the word “cardio” to him and watch his head explode. The views contained herein are his own, and not necessarily those of any organization with which he may be associated, and are certainly not intended as legal advice, though one should always remember to turn off the treadmill before dismounting. Or else: Thump! Ow!