Summary: The death of Fourth District Riverside County Supervisor John Benoit came as a shock to the political community in the Coachella Valley, but sadly, not as a surprise. In a year in which we have been bereft of such people as Glenn Frey, Prince, and Carrie Fisher, we in our Pleasant Desert must add John’s name to that doleful litany. If 2016 sucks, we find ourselves forced here to embrace the suck, swallow hard, and say goodbye to John Benoit.
Riverside County Supervisor John Benoit died earlier this week. His passing offers a curious parallel to the experience of his predecessor in the Fourth Supervisorial District seat, Roy Wilson, who also died in office.
I first met John Benoit in early 2003, when as a newly elected and installed City Councilmember for Cathedral City, I made the semi-obligatory pilgrimage to Sacramento to attend the League of California Cities orientation for incoming elected city officials. Part of my task while there was to introduce myself to the various elected officials in the Assembly and the Other House representing Cathedral City.
Among them was then-Assemblymember John Benoit, representing an adjacent district to my own. Though one of my colleagues was at pains to out me to the Republican Assembl member as a liberal Democrat, her effort to stir up animosity between us backfired. As I left John’s office, leaving my impatient colleague in the corridor outside, John and I quietly assured each other that on matters where common ground was possible, he would be happy to work with me and my colleagues.
That was the beginning of a political friendship between we two Francophones that lasted until John’s death. We both had discovered that, at least in his office in Sacramento, the American tradition, inherited from our British forebears, of political civility and bipartisan cooperation was not yet dead.
In due course, John left the Assembly after being termed out and then, when Roy Wilson passed away, leaving an empty Fourth Supervisorial District seat, John was the logical choice to succeed him. John resigned his then-seat in the state Senate and returned to the Valley to take up Roy’s mantle. When the time came for John to seek election to the seat for a full term in his own right, I was happy to offer him my support.
I did so because, notwithstanding the partisan tribalism that has come to infect our national politics, my experience with John at the state and local level had been positive, beneficial, and informative. Though a number of local Democrats took exception to my crossing the aisle to support John’s candidacy, I did so because I felt that he had demonstrated a pragmatic ability to listen to, and work with, Democrats at the local level. It was my pleasure, during the supervisorial campaign, to offer John such counsel as I could in his race.
When John came up for reelection in 2014, I was happy to support him again, though I was heavily pressured by local Democrats to support termed-out Assemblymember Manuel Perez. I again opted to proffer my support to John because I had formed a good working relationship with them, because he was a known quantity, and, above all, because his district staff looked like California. By that, I mean that his district staff literally included all sorts and conditions of Californians. Native American, Anglo, African American, Latino, straight, queerfolk, Republican, and Democrat alike. I could not say the same thing about Manuel Perez when he was a member of the Assembly. For me, as an openly queer man, the diversity of John’s office staff spoke volumes about the authenticity of his commitment to represent the entirety of his richly diverse constituency.
Moreover, John’s constituent services were top drawer. One never had the feeling that constituent services were only available to contributors, to fellow Republicans, or to members of a particular favorite ethnic or identity grouping. John’s offices did constituent services the way constituent services are supposed to be done; and having referred more than one client to Supervisor Benoit’s office, I was pleased by the reports that came back to me from them.
As County Supervisor, John managed that increasingly rare feat in local politics; he was, despite his Republican affiliation, truly “trans-partisan” in his approach. By “trans-partisan” I mean that he was able to transcend partisanship and the political tribalism that have marred our country so badly in recent years. In my working with John, even when he was in the Legislature as a partisan official, he could find common ground with even a liberal Democrat on issues that were simply too important to see through a partisan lens. After all, potholes don’t take a blind bit of notice of the partisanship of the driver whose day they ruin.
On issues of partisan politics, we could disagree agreeably, sparring with each other but never descending to ugly personal issues or angry triumphalism. And when we sparred, we remained terrible friends and amiable adversaries.
It was a pleasure to have been able to number John Benoit among my friends. I shall miss him terribly.
Requiem Æternam Dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat super eis. Amen.
Wednesday, December 28, 2016
Sunday, December 25, 2016
CHRISTMAS, CELEBRATION OR REBUKE TO SINNERS?
Summary: Christmas is always a conflict at this time of year. Is it a celebration, or a rebuke to sinners? This Christmas, as we await with bated breath coming of an authoritarian, nay, Fascist, regime in Washington, we realize, perhaps more than ever, that it must be both. Our Savior called us to repentance and self-examination, and he also called us to a gospel of radical inclusiveness in which we love our neighbors as ourselves. To live that kind of gospel is necessarily to foreclose the approach of Donald Trump and his supporters, an approach that finds expression in exclusion, in comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted. Today we recall that Jesus came into the world not only to reconcile us to God but to recall us sharply from the errors which made necessary this altogether singular divine intervention in our human history.
It’s Christmas.
This year, as on just about every year of my adult life, I find myself retreating to my office, on the theory that in a silent office, with no phones ringing, no mail delivery, and no other interruptions, I might be able to get some work done.
What began as an ad hoc need to find some time to do some ordinary work back at Christmas, 1989, has become very much a shibboleth since then. It is, I suppose, by way of saying “Bah, humbug!” to a crassly commercialized time of conspicuous consumption is beginning advances every year a little bit further into the liturgical season of Pentecost.
This year, I find in the Christmas season, or at least in the way we Americans do Christmas, less to celebrate than ever before. I find myself cringing at the way Donald Trump and the Republican Party have managed to appropriate the phrase “Merry Christmas,” turning it into a war prize in the annual phony culture war that ineluctably crops up at this time every year since that fascist Bill O’Reilly invented a so-called war on Christmas in order to boost ratings for Fox News.
Now, the Trump people have taken “Merry Christmas" and turned it into an ugly, triumphalist war cry, intended to remind everyone that in Donald Trump’s ‘Murica, we had all better be prepared to toe the line, or else.
Yet, despite the temptation that rises unbidden in my mind to respond to every “Merry Christmas,” Trump-tainted or not, with a snarl of “Bah, humbug!” I find myself confronted every Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with visible reminders that this day is supposed to be something different.
Seeing yesterday a homeless man crossing an intersection near my office, wending his way with a kind of sad, weary dignity, from one side of the street to the other, it came home to me forcibly that, as a Christian, a Catholic, an Anglican, an Episcopalian, I profess and confess a deep and abiding faith in a God Who took human form that we sinful humans might be reconciled to God. God made for that holy purpose an icon of Godself to draw all humankind to God.
And seeing that homeless man, I also remembered the words of the Lucan infancy narrative, and their powerful description of a couple caught up in the bureaucratic toils of an occupying power in an occupied territory who had, when the time came for the Blessed Virgin Mary to be delivered, no place to lay their heads.
Across more than 2000 years, the Lucan infancy narrative, with its central, profound theme of the paradox of power pouring itself into powerlessness, has become and remains one of the most precious possessions of the Western, nay, Christian mind. It is a story known to the entire Christian Republic. It tugs at our heartstrings, because it awakens in us a sense of compunction and compassion for the baby Jesus in the manger. It speaks, in that sense, less about awe then about “aww.”
Yet, perhaps we should bring more awe to our understanding of the story. As the shepherds in the fields gaze with awe upon the infant God in the manger, so, too, should we tell the story of those blessed events in tones of hushed awe, for the Savior of the world is at hand, come, let us adore Him!
But, in rejoicing at this climactic act of divine intervention in human history, we should not allow ourselves to believe that we in any way have deserved this offering of divinity. For we do not deserve anything of our own merits, lost as we are in Original Sin, a sinfulness ever more obviously on display since November 8. What we see, instead, is a love offering, made by a passionate God, Whose passionate love for us is passionately expressed in the Incarnation, passion, death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ our Savior.
For if the world were not lost in sin, it would not have been necessary for God to pour God’s very essence into human flesh in the form of Jesus Christ. In that regard, the Incarnation we celebrate at Christmas stands as much as a rebuke as anything else. Because, in truth, the world has always organized itself very much without reference to the love to which God calls all of God’s children. Indeed, when we consider the events of November 8, 2016, in the United States, we are forced the conclusion that not only does the world organize itself without reference to the teachings and the faith to which God calls us by becoming Incarnate from the flesh of the Virgin Mary in Jesus Christ our Savior, but that in this sinful society, we have chosen to organize our world in flat defiance of the radically inclusive love of God and neighbor for which the suffering Savior was willing to die on the Cross.
The faith which we profess and confess as Christian people, both individually and as a Christian Republic, is about faith, hope, and love, but the greatest of these is love, summed up in the radical inclusiveness which we Christians are called to witness and live not only in the Christmas season, but also on every day of our lives. Instead, we seem to have embraced a faith based upon hate, radical exclusion, and ugly triumphalism.
In the new climate in Donald Trump’s America, we find ourselves emboldened to embrace the worst aspects of our originally sinful natures; to turn our backs upon the strangers among us, to ignore the clear command of God that we should have a preferential option for the poor, to belittle women, to treat queerfolk as some kind of dangerous, “icky,” Other, and to treat our Muslim brothers and sisters, Abrahamic People of the Book, as subversives within our midst, meting out to them the same treatment Adolf Hitler’s Germany meted out to its Jews.
This is much the same kind of world into which Jesus was born in a manger in Bethlehem, consigned there because his parents had no place lay their heads. And indeed, what would the judgmental partisans of Donald Trump have thought a teenage girl traveling through Roman Palestine in the company of an older man to whom she was not married? Add to that the fact that Mary and Joseph were undoubtedly someone on the brown side, and you have a recipe for a terrifying application of America’s of original sin of racism.
For most Americans, confronting the Lucan infancy narrative without benefit of the context or pre-knowledge of 2000 years of retelling, would no doubt arrive at a number of negative, typically American, conclusions. Our American would probably assume a “distinct hint of tint” in this teenage girl and her older boyfriend, whom he would no doubt assume to be the baby-daddy of her unborn child. Our Americans would probably conclude, based on their itinerant status and inability to find lodging, that Our Lady and Joseph were some kind of homeless freeloaders, seeking to benefit from “the hard work of their betters.” In short, without the pre-knowledge and context of those 2000 years of Christian retelling, our American, whether a supporter of Donald Trump or, let us shame the devil and tell the truth, of Hillary Clinton, would probably see Our Lady and Joseph as common welfare cheats.
Yet, the same Jesus Whose birth is so poignantly recalled to us in the Lucan infancy narrative is nonetheless the same Jesus who shares with us the parable of Dives and Lazarus somewhat later in Luke’s Gospel, at 16:19-31, when he reminds us, in a rather pointed terms, of the dreadful fate that awaits those who are not prepared to do right by the poor.
For Christians who may have convinced themselves that there is no hell below us, and above us there is only sky, pace John Lennon, or who may have embodied Baudelaire’s now classic dictum that “the devil’s greatest trick is convincing the world that he does not exist,” the narrative of Dives and Lazarus, freighted as it is with an implicit command to do justice by the poor and to withhold invidious judgments against them, has become a truism devoid of any real meaning.
Yet, as we brace ourselves for the impact of an administration that proposes to govern America by, for, and in the interests of, the wealthiest among us, that believes that they are appointed by God to comfort the comfortable and to afflict the afflicted, the Christmas message could not be clearer or more pointed.
Jesus did not come into the world to comfort the comfortable. He came into the world to comfort the afflicted, and to call the comfortable, whom his prefigurer, St. John the Baptist, had called a “brood of vipers,” to repentance. Jesus did not come into the world to reaffirm in their fullest form the prevailing dispensations of the day. Instead, he came to upset the metaphorical applecart. He came to call the world to a new dispansation: a new commitment to love, a new preferential option for the poor, and a new commitment to works of charity and mercy.
For Jesus reminds us that he came not to bring peace, but a sword (Matt. 10:34). For it’s worth recalling, in these days of self-satisfied, pharisaical Christians, that if the world had not been utterly lost in sin in those days, it would not have been necessary for God to become Incarnate that we might be reconciled to him.
In these last days, about which Jesus warned us “there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders,” (Matt 24:24) we must unhesitatingly bear witness to the true God and the true Christ, Who came among us at Christmas time in great humility to lead all the world to that passionate God Whose passionate love for us is never more passionately on display than in this holy season of the Incarnation.
The Savior of the world is at hand! Come, let us adore him!
Thursday, December 8, 2016
PEARL HARBOR AT 75: WHO DARES TO CONTEMPLATE THE HORRORS TO COME?
I can run wild against the British and the Americans for six months, winning victory after victory, but after that, I have no expectation of success.
-Adm. Yamamoto Isoroku
Tora! Tora! Tora!
-Cdr. Fuchida Mitsuo , over Pearl Harbor, Sunday, December 7, 1941
“I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”
-Attributed apocryphally to Adm. Yamamoto, ostensibly following the Pearl Harbor attack
--------------------------------------------------------------
“I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.” These words, describing Japanese Combined Fleet commander Adm. Yamamoto Isoroku's feelings about the bombing of Pearl Harbor, are among the most quoted words the Admiral never actually said.
Yesterday marked three quarters of a century since the “unprovoked and dastardly attack” on Pearl Harbor by “naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.” The numbers of those who were alive on that dreadful day continue to decrease. The “Greatest Generation” is passing into eternity at the rate of roughly 1100 per day. Soon Pearl Harbor will have passed out of living memory.
My generation, the much-maligned, much envied Baby Boomer generation, born between five and twenty-or-so years after the attack, has no direct memory of Pearl Harbor, only secondhand memories from our parents or grandparents who lived through that time. My late father used to share with me memories of how his eight-year-old self was munching peanuts and drinking an illegal beer at Patsy’s Bar in the Bronx when the news hit that Sunday afternoon. My mother remembers as a toddler the sudden, gravely preoccupied looks of the adults in her family.
By contrast, my own memories of Pearl Harbor were largely formed by Hollywood; my first understanding of the attack came from the movie Tora Tora Tora, the source of the apocryphal quotation about sleeping giants so commonly attributed to Admiral Yamamoto.
It’s no secret that Yamamoto, like many senior personages in the Japanese military and civilian elite, regarded war with Western powers, particularly with the United States, as a mistake. For Japan to have any hope of victory, Yamamoto noted pessimistically, they would have to overcome the United States to such an extent that they could dictate peace terms in the White House itself.
Yet Yamamoto knew the limitations of his country and of the military instrument he had in his hand to accomplish the Empire’s policy. In a conversation with Prime Minister Prince Konoe Fumimaro, Yamamoto told the Prime Minister that he could “run wild against the British and Americans for six months, winning victory after victory, but after that, [he had] no expectation of success.”
For Yamamoto, the Pearl Harbor attack, like the Japanese attack on the Russian fleet at Port Arthur in 1904, was a strategic preemptive blow intended to knock the enemy off balance and keep them off balance long enough for Japan to win enough victories to be able to come to any peace negotiations occupying a position of unassailable diplomatic strength.
But the sudden, almost giddy pace of Japanese successes in the Pacific and East Asia at the end of 1941 and in the opening months of 1942 left the Japanese public vulnerable to what became known as the “victory disease.” To a Japanese public, fed on a steady diet of “Shō,” or “victory” propaganda, the Japanese successes, particularly the fall of Singapore and of the Philippines, seemed to be all the evidence that was required of Japanese invincibility.
At sea, and the Imperial Navy had carried all before it, while on land, the Imperial Army had won victory after victory against numerically superior foes. As Japan’s armed forces rolled ever forward the boundaries of the territories under Japanese occupation, the Japanese public could perhaps be excused for succumbing to the temptations of the Victory Disease.
But, among the managers, as it were, of the Imperial War Effort, there was a sense, similar to Yamamoto’s, of increasing disquiet. Yamamoto’s prophecy, of a six-month window in which he could run wild, proved eerily prescient. With the Japanese defeat at Midway, in June, 1942, Yamamoto’s window of opportunity slammed shut. The Japanese defensive perimeter, the de facto outer boundary of the Empire, had been pushed back to the Marshalls and to the Marianas. Though it would not fall for another two years, Saipan had become the outer bastion of the Empire, the next and inevitable target of the American offensive that would take them all the way to Tokyo.
As the Americans, and to a considerably lesser extent the British and other allies, rolled back the outer defensive perimeter of the Empire, the senior “management elite” of the Empire found themselves confronted with lowering and ominous indications that Japan could not hope to achieve against the United States and United Kingdom the same kind of unambiguous military victory she had gained against the Russian Empire in 1905. Over against the desires of the ultranationalists and hyper militarists in the armed forces, Japan’s civilian leadership realized that it would be necessary to seek some kind of negotiated resolution, preferably with Western powers alone, but if necessary, also including China, with which Japan had been involved in hostilities since 1937. As Professor Iriye Akira has suggested, the major emphasis of Japanese diplomacy from November of 1942 onward was to secure a termination of the war on the best possible terms Japan could obtain.
Unfortunately for the diplomats, their efforts were constrained by the same ultranationalists and hyper militarists whose ineptitude had gotten Japan into war in the first place, and also by the fact that as the war dragged on, and as “the general war situation ... developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage” to use the unforgettable words of the Shōwa Emperor’s surrender broadcast in August, 1945, Japan’s diplomatic options became narrower and narrower as she had less and less to negotiate with.
Finally, with Western allies and the Soviet Union having dispatched Nazi Germany in May, 1945, Japan found herself running out of options. The dropping of the atomic bomb, which was, and is, a morally defensible response to the irresponsible “100 million die together” rhetoric emerging from the Japanese high command during the summer of 1945, was not intended as some kind of geopolitical warning to the Soviet Union, but rather to administer a short, sharp shock to the Japanese system.
Japan’s path to war, which would had led from the Marco Polo Bridge in north China’s Hebei Province to Pearl Harbor, Guadalcanal, Burma, Saipan, and Iwo Jima, now ineluctably led back to the homeland from whence it had come. The feared Bi Nijuku, the Boeing B-29 super fortresses, pouring forth from the Boeing plant on Puget Sound, were now masters of the Imperial skies, and the Japanese people found themselves face down on the ground in fearful adoration of their inexorable approach.
At sea, the Imperial waters where the happy hunting ground of American submarines enjoying a “Happy Time” that would have made German Großadmiral Karl Dönitz envious. And as much as the Imperial seas now belonged to America’s Silent Service, they also belonged to the American battle line, as American battleships steamed unmolested within cannon shot of the Japanese coast, bombarding onshore targets virtually at will.
For the Japanese government, the situation could not have become or been any worse. Who would have dared, in the euphoric days of the fall of 1941, when anything seemed possible, to contemplate the horrors to come? Who in the Japanese foreign office, or in the War or Navy ministries in Tokyo, would have given serious thought to the idea that an American invasion of the homeland was not only possible, but a real probability?
As Japan’s path to war circled back to the homeland, and as longtime opponents of the war must have been biting back hard on the temptation to say “I told you so,” who truly could have thought, just four years prior, the Japan would have been so comprehensively beaten?
75 years on, with Japan’s Maritime Self-Defense Force once again numbered among the top five of the world navies, once again deploying dedicated air capable ships, with Japan’s Land Self-Defense Force in every way emulating the battle worthiness of its Imperial predecessor, and with Japan’s Air Self-Defense Force capable in every way of holding its own against a Chinese, Korean, or Russian antagonist, it might be tempting for younger Americans or younger Japanese to forget how badly the path to war led to Pearl Harbor but also right back to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
-Adm. Yamamoto Isoroku
Tora! Tora! Tora!
-Cdr. Fuchida Mitsuo , over Pearl Harbor, Sunday, December 7, 1941
“I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”
-Attributed apocryphally to Adm. Yamamoto, ostensibly following the Pearl Harbor attack
--------------------------------------------------------------
“I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.” These words, describing Japanese Combined Fleet commander Adm. Yamamoto Isoroku's feelings about the bombing of Pearl Harbor, are among the most quoted words the Admiral never actually said.
Yesterday marked three quarters of a century since the “unprovoked and dastardly attack” on Pearl Harbor by “naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.” The numbers of those who were alive on that dreadful day continue to decrease. The “Greatest Generation” is passing into eternity at the rate of roughly 1100 per day. Soon Pearl Harbor will have passed out of living memory.
My generation, the much-maligned, much envied Baby Boomer generation, born between five and twenty-or-so years after the attack, has no direct memory of Pearl Harbor, only secondhand memories from our parents or grandparents who lived through that time. My late father used to share with me memories of how his eight-year-old self was munching peanuts and drinking an illegal beer at Patsy’s Bar in the Bronx when the news hit that Sunday afternoon. My mother remembers as a toddler the sudden, gravely preoccupied looks of the adults in her family.
By contrast, my own memories of Pearl Harbor were largely formed by Hollywood; my first understanding of the attack came from the movie Tora Tora Tora, the source of the apocryphal quotation about sleeping giants so commonly attributed to Admiral Yamamoto.
It’s no secret that Yamamoto, like many senior personages in the Japanese military and civilian elite, regarded war with Western powers, particularly with the United States, as a mistake. For Japan to have any hope of victory, Yamamoto noted pessimistically, they would have to overcome the United States to such an extent that they could dictate peace terms in the White House itself.
Yet Yamamoto knew the limitations of his country and of the military instrument he had in his hand to accomplish the Empire’s policy. In a conversation with Prime Minister Prince Konoe Fumimaro, Yamamoto told the Prime Minister that he could “run wild against the British and Americans for six months, winning victory after victory, but after that, [he had] no expectation of success.”
For Yamamoto, the Pearl Harbor attack, like the Japanese attack on the Russian fleet at Port Arthur in 1904, was a strategic preemptive blow intended to knock the enemy off balance and keep them off balance long enough for Japan to win enough victories to be able to come to any peace negotiations occupying a position of unassailable diplomatic strength.
But the sudden, almost giddy pace of Japanese successes in the Pacific and East Asia at the end of 1941 and in the opening months of 1942 left the Japanese public vulnerable to what became known as the “victory disease.” To a Japanese public, fed on a steady diet of “Shō,” or “victory” propaganda, the Japanese successes, particularly the fall of Singapore and of the Philippines, seemed to be all the evidence that was required of Japanese invincibility.
At sea, and the Imperial Navy had carried all before it, while on land, the Imperial Army had won victory after victory against numerically superior foes. As Japan’s armed forces rolled ever forward the boundaries of the territories under Japanese occupation, the Japanese public could perhaps be excused for succumbing to the temptations of the Victory Disease.
But, among the managers, as it were, of the Imperial War Effort, there was a sense, similar to Yamamoto’s, of increasing disquiet. Yamamoto’s prophecy, of a six-month window in which he could run wild, proved eerily prescient. With the Japanese defeat at Midway, in June, 1942, Yamamoto’s window of opportunity slammed shut. The Japanese defensive perimeter, the de facto outer boundary of the Empire, had been pushed back to the Marshalls and to the Marianas. Though it would not fall for another two years, Saipan had become the outer bastion of the Empire, the next and inevitable target of the American offensive that would take them all the way to Tokyo.
As the Americans, and to a considerably lesser extent the British and other allies, rolled back the outer defensive perimeter of the Empire, the senior “management elite” of the Empire found themselves confronted with lowering and ominous indications that Japan could not hope to achieve against the United States and United Kingdom the same kind of unambiguous military victory she had gained against the Russian Empire in 1905. Over against the desires of the ultranationalists and hyper militarists in the armed forces, Japan’s civilian leadership realized that it would be necessary to seek some kind of negotiated resolution, preferably with Western powers alone, but if necessary, also including China, with which Japan had been involved in hostilities since 1937. As Professor Iriye Akira has suggested, the major emphasis of Japanese diplomacy from November of 1942 onward was to secure a termination of the war on the best possible terms Japan could obtain.
Unfortunately for the diplomats, their efforts were constrained by the same ultranationalists and hyper militarists whose ineptitude had gotten Japan into war in the first place, and also by the fact that as the war dragged on, and as “the general war situation ... developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage” to use the unforgettable words of the Shōwa Emperor’s surrender broadcast in August, 1945, Japan’s diplomatic options became narrower and narrower as she had less and less to negotiate with.
Finally, with Western allies and the Soviet Union having dispatched Nazi Germany in May, 1945, Japan found herself running out of options. The dropping of the atomic bomb, which was, and is, a morally defensible response to the irresponsible “100 million die together” rhetoric emerging from the Japanese high command during the summer of 1945, was not intended as some kind of geopolitical warning to the Soviet Union, but rather to administer a short, sharp shock to the Japanese system.
Japan’s path to war, which would had led from the Marco Polo Bridge in north China’s Hebei Province to Pearl Harbor, Guadalcanal, Burma, Saipan, and Iwo Jima, now ineluctably led back to the homeland from whence it had come. The feared Bi Nijuku, the Boeing B-29 super fortresses, pouring forth from the Boeing plant on Puget Sound, were now masters of the Imperial skies, and the Japanese people found themselves face down on the ground in fearful adoration of their inexorable approach.
At sea, the Imperial waters where the happy hunting ground of American submarines enjoying a “Happy Time” that would have made German Großadmiral Karl Dönitz envious. And as much as the Imperial seas now belonged to America’s Silent Service, they also belonged to the American battle line, as American battleships steamed unmolested within cannon shot of the Japanese coast, bombarding onshore targets virtually at will.
For the Japanese government, the situation could not have become or been any worse. Who would have dared, in the euphoric days of the fall of 1941, when anything seemed possible, to contemplate the horrors to come? Who in the Japanese foreign office, or in the War or Navy ministries in Tokyo, would have given serious thought to the idea that an American invasion of the homeland was not only possible, but a real probability?
As Japan’s path to war circled back to the homeland, and as longtime opponents of the war must have been biting back hard on the temptation to say “I told you so,” who truly could have thought, just four years prior, the Japan would have been so comprehensively beaten?
75 years on, with Japan’s Maritime Self-Defense Force once again numbered among the top five of the world navies, once again deploying dedicated air capable ships, with Japan’s Land Self-Defense Force in every way emulating the battle worthiness of its Imperial predecessor, and with Japan’s Air Self-Defense Force capable in every way of holding its own against a Chinese, Korean, or Russian antagonist, it might be tempting for younger Americans or younger Japanese to forget how badly the path to war led to Pearl Harbor but also right back to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Saturday, November 5, 2016
RATFUCKING REDUX: A POLICE COUP, PART II
Summary: Has America been sold out at the highest levels?
Has the FBI betrayed us?
Have the protectors of the rule of law become the enemies of liberty?
Has the FBI decided that next Tuesday’s election might not produce its desired result, and stepped in to substitute its judgment for that of an American public the Bureau has decided cannot be trusted to make the “correct” decision?
Is a police coup, or worse, a Russian takeover, underway?
Either FBI Director James Comey has some sort of death wish/thanatos urge, or he has been irredeemably tainted with righteous actor/noble cause or Russian agent corruption. Either way, it’s time for him to get the hell out. Assuming Hillary Clinton wins the election next Tuesday, Barack Obama should ask for his resignation next Wednesday, with immediate effect.
Indeed, Comey’s unsuccessful effort to ratfuck the Clinton campaign last week not only places own reputation at risk, but it wrought havoc within the Bureau itself. Now, not content with simultaneously shooting himself in one foot and putting the other foot in his mouth, Comey has attempted to take his ratfucking to a new level, releasing a leak to the New York Times that the FBI sees “nothing, nothing at all” to any relationship between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin about which the American public ought to worry its pretty little head, but also dredging up decade-and-a-half old documents relating to Bill Clinton’s controversial pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich.
One, two, three strikes, you’re out. Comey’s ham-fisted effort to deliver the election to the head of his own Republican Party represents not only treachery, but a horrible disservice to what was once considered one of the finest, most impartial, crime-fighting operations in the world. Sadly, the FBI has now descended to the level of Russia’s FSB or Augusto Pinochet’s DINA.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Three developments that have occurred in the week since James Comey’s less-than-successful attempt, last Friday afternoon, to ratfuck the Hillary Clinton campaign have disclosed two things beyond reasonable doubt. The first is that it was in fact an attempted ratfucking, a deliberate and carefully planned political dirty trick designed to cause as much damage to the Hillary Clinton campaign as possible, and second, that James Comey himself either has some sort of death wish/thanatos urge, or that he, like WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, is in fact irredeemably tainted with righteous actor/noble cause or Russian agent corruption. Either way, the time has come for James Comey to leave the FBI posthaste before he does the Bureau any more damage than he has already contrived to do.
Friday afternoon, when FBI Director James Comey released his innuendo-heavy, fact-light letter to eight Republican Committee Chairman implying (Nudge nudge!wink wink!) that there might possibly be some email in Huma Abedin’s laptop that might possibly lead to some potentially possible evidence of something on the part of Hillary Clinton that might possibly support some vague inference of possible wrongdoing by the quondam Secretary of State, it was possible, though difficult, for Comey’s defenders to say, in effect, that the director had merely exercised questionable judgment.
Yet, as I noted in my previous post on the subject, the Hillary campaign push back hard against Comey’s dirty trick and within two hours what had appeared to be another Hillary Clinton scandal had become what it really was, a scandal involving James Comey and his misuse of the FBI as what one observer of the situation called “an outpost of the Trump campaign.” By the end of the day on Friday, the FBI was in full crisis mode.
In full crisis mode, the Bureau responded much as it was accustomed to respond under the Directorship of J. Edgar Hoover; a push back against the pushback with its own series of links and information releases designed to damage the Clinton campaign further while exonerating Donald Trump of any suspicion that might come his way from his relationship to Vladimir Putin and the Russian government.
First, the Bureau leaked a story to the New York Times that the FBI had seen “no evidence” of anything untoward in the relationship between Donald Trump and the Moskovskiy Kremlin. This leak, plainly intended as a preemptive strike against the Clinton campaign’s evidence-supported narrative of Trump as being tainted by his close associations with the Kremlin, was belied by numerous investigative reports from such sources as Newsweek, Politico, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, all of which contained more than enough evidence to support a probable cause determination that The Donald had indeed been both metaphorically and physically in bed with the Kremlin, and that he had been badly compromised.
The FBI leaks would not have been released without Comey’s direct approval, either by way of an order from the Director himself, or by way of what Vladimir Putin biographer Masha Gessen has called an “emanation;” not in order as such, so much as a “vague signal [pointing] in the direction in which they should be working.” Either way, whether the directive took the form of an order or an “emanation,” the intent was clear, the Bureau should be unofficially officially on record as believing that there was “nothing, nothing to see here,” on the subject of Donald Trump’s dangerously close relationship with the Kremlin. The clear intent of the directive and the leak it engendered was to represent to the public that the FBI had exonerated Donald Trump of any improper entanglements with an unfriendly foreign power seeking to influence the outcome of the American elections.
We may envisage four hypotheses to account for Director Comey’s piss poor judgment in this matter.
The Overworked Director Needs a Break: this hypothesis, which seems to be the one most favored by both Republican and Democratic observers at the moment, is that Comey is simply so overworked that he fell into a pattern of repeated errors in judgment. In this narrative, Comey’s blunt effort to place his thumb and the Bureau’s thumb in the electoral scales is the result of sheer overwork. This narrative postulates that since July, when Comey came under sustained Republican attack for recommending against prosecution of Hillary Clinton, he has been internalizing and personalizing those attacks. These attacks, in theory, caused the director to doubt his own judgment and to lack confidence in his own ability to command the Bureau.
Supporters of this hypothesis cite his extraordinary memo to the members of the Bureau whereby he attempted to explain his conduct of the other week. However, as evidence has emerged that the Director was very much “on a frolic of his own” when he disclosed the existence of the possibly, perhaps, maybe, significant unreviewed emails, this hypothesis fails of its own frailty and inconsistency. Even if it is true, Mr. Comey should still be asked to resign at once. If Hillary is the President-elect on November 9, outgoing president Barack Obama should request James Comey’s immediate resignation as FBI Director with immediate effect. The penalty in most public and private sector entities for the kinds of errors in judgment of which Comey has obviously been guilty is termination. As I suggested in my previous blog on the subject, James Comey has managed to shatter the FBI’s mystique and to set at naught the trust the public had had in it.
The Righteous Actor in a Noble Cause: if the hypothesis of the stressed out Director making bad decisions is not ominous, the “righteous actor/noble cause” hypothesis is very much so. In this scenario, given credence by the fact that Comey opted to make his announcement over the objections of higher-ups in the Justice Department and senior members of his own Bureau, it becomes fairly clear that the Director has succumbed to the blandishments of the same disease that afflicts Julian Assange, that is, righteous actor/noble cause corruption.
Righteous actor/noble cause corruption occurs when a single individual forms an opinion of his or her cause or conduct that it is, if anything, hyper-righteous, and is noble to the extent that the truly believing warrior in the cause is somehow above any form of scrutiny or criticism, and is beyond the need for critical self-awareness. Knowing Comey’s somewhat self-righteous schoolmarmish demeanor as it has been revealed in numerous media outlets, both traditional and digital, we must acknowledge the possibility that he most definitely suffers from this particular pathology. Like Julian Assange, whose self-righteousness manifests itself in a conviction that he, and he alone, has the moral right to act as judge, jury, and, indeed, executioner, Comey, a self-described “Boy Scout,” seems to delight in setting standards for others that are well-nigh impossible to meet, and up to which he himself might find difficulty living.
For the greatest single downfall of righteous actor/noble cause corruption is that it lends itself so easily and readily to charges of hypocrisy. Knowing what we do about James Comey’s partisan Republican history, it appears safe to hypothesize that in James Comey’s world, the Republicans are necessarily the party of virtue, while the Democrats, particularly their presidential candidate, are the party of vice. And were virtue and vice confront one another, the righteous actor/noble cause actor inevitably begins to see himself as the righteous judge laying down the law and smiting evildoers. If this is how Comey sees himself, and by extension, the Bureau, he needs to be terminated at once. The Federal Bureau of Investigation cannot hope to remain a credible, morally authoritative, incorruptible, incorrupt, federal law enforcement agency if it, itself, is tainted at its highest levels by noble cause/righteous actor corruption.
Because righteous actor/noble cause corruption leads inevitably to the dangerous conclusion that the means employed by the righteous actor in a noble cause are legitimate because justified by their ends. It is a teleological argument which must be carefully weighed on the particular facts of any given case. The ends may justify the means, but to say that the ends always justify the means, and that only the righteous actor in the noble cause is the judge of whether the ends justify the means is, in our American constitutional system, unacceptable. If this is the corruption into which Comey has fallen, the Attorney General should show his ass the door posthaste.
The Cynical Partisan Agent: Still more ominous is the hypothesis that James Comey was acting out of old-fashioned political corruption, not as a righteous actor in a noble cause. In this narrative, which appears to be supported by the facts that have become known since Friday afternoon, James Comey was simply out to ratfuck the Hillary Clinton campaign in the service of Donald Trump and the Republican Party. Certainly, the timing of the event is highly suspicious, and indeed raises probable cause to believe that a ratfucking was intended, and that James Comey, himself, personally, carried it out. Coming as it did eleven days out from the election, well within the sixty day window within which such pronouncements are not supposed to be made, per clear Department of Justice policy, there is certainly evidence to believe that Comey was acting deliberately to use the Bureau to serve the purposes of the Trump campaign. If this is indeed the case, not only should Comey be terminated as FBI director posthaste, he could also be the subject of a criminal investigation carried out by and resident in some other agency than in the Federal Bureau of investigation.
Let the Secret Service do the looking; let the California Highway Patrol and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s office do the looking –- LASO will be motivated to look very carefully at the conduct of a Bureau responsible for the chaos which is overtaken the Department. If the investigations turn up the evidence that may very well exist to support the view that Comey was acting on behalf of the RNC or the Trump campaign, a true bill should issue from the federal grand jury having jurisdiction of the matter, and instead of being merely terminated, James Comey should be facing extensive federal exposure as a criminal.
The Russian Agent: the most ominous hypothesis, of course, is that the Bureau has been infiltrated and compromised by one or more agencies of the Russian State. The possibility that Comey’s revelations, so-called, were part of a Russian Kriegßpiel against the West in general and the United States in particular cannot be discounted.
At the acknowledged risk of being dismissed as a conspiracist, I will point out that I have been warning of the dangers of the Russian kriegßpiel against the West for more than a year now. During the run-up to the unsuccessful Scottish independence referendum, I noted the Kremlin’s maladroit attempts to manufacture sentiment for disunion in the Northern Kingdom. During the run-up to Brexit, I noted Moscow’s “emanations” in favor of Brexit, as I also noted what amounted to the treasonable, pro-Muscovite leanings of such Brexit advocates as Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, and Donald Trump himself.
I also noted The Donald’s very public embrace of Brexit, and embrace which very much mirrors the Kremlin’s favored policy posture, i.e., a weak, disunited Europe at odds with itself and lacking the resolve to resist Russian blandishments. I suggested then, and I suggest again, that the Brexiteers and Donald Trump shared with the Kremlin a common set of anti-Western, pro-Russian policy preferences. It’s also worth recalling how Donald Trump invited UKIP’s Nigel Farage to campaign with him in Mississippi, ignoring the long tradition of not dragging foreigners into American presidential campaigns.
Of course, if it’s contrary to American tradition to drag foreigners into our presidential contests, it was, until last Friday, equally contrary to American tradition for the most powerful law enforcement agency in the country to run what amounts to a police coup, attempting to put its thumb on the scales of the presidential election. But as the evidence has accumulated, implicating rogue agents in the FBI’s New York field office, we can no longer afford to give the Director or even the Bureau the benefit of even slight doubt. According to a recent article in the Guardian, the FBI in general and the New York field office in particular are commonly referred to as “Trumpland,” and Hillary Clinton is viewed by numerous agents in both Washington City and New York City as an incarnation of Antichrist.
Given the clear proclivity of the FBI for attempting to sabotage Hillary Clinton’s campaign by any means available, it doesn’t take a lot to connect the dots to lead from the New York field office to the J. Edgar Hoover building, back to the Kremlin itself. A bunch of Hillary-hating rogue agents in New York tried to throw the election to Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin’s BFF. They are assisted in that regard by the Director himself, apparently motivated by partisan considerations.
The director himself apparently gave an “emanation” to rogue agents in Washington and in New York City to leak information harmful to the Clinton campaign and also information suggesting that the FBI can find no evidence at all of any connection between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Now, it’s worth recalling that America’s other sixteen intelligence and counterintelligence agencies all share a consensus that the Russian government is actively attempting either to directly influence the outcome of the American election, or to cause the American public to entertain grave doubts about that election’s legitimacy, all with a view to destabilizing the United States.
Sixteen of seventeen American intelligence or counterintelligence agencies share this consensus. But not James Comey’s FBI. Instead, the FBI has made a virtual cottage industry of leaks to the media intended to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the consensus of the rest of the intelligence/ counterintelligence community, and, by extension, on the tradecraft capacities of the other sixteen American intelligence and counterintelligence agencies that have been investigating the extent of Russia’s penetration of our electoral process.
Given the FBI’s curiously pro-Russian posture, which dovetails well and ominously with its apparent pro-Trump posture, we may legitimately ask whether that curious coincidence of interest has left the FBI wide-open to plundering Russian forays. We may also reasonably ask whether the FBI’s vulnerability to Russian intrusion, presumably by the FSB or by Russian military intelligence, GRU, has resulted in the Director himself having been turned or compromised in some way by Russian operatives concealed or embedded within the Bureau.
Certainly, if Director Comey entertains a strong anti-Clinton proclivity, if he holds both Bill and Hillary Clinton in the same obvious disdain that Louis Freeh, a previous FBI director, clearly held for both Bill and Hillary Clinton, it would go a long way toward explaining his, and the Bureau’s, apparent hostility toward Hillary’s campaign. And when a highly placed senior official entertains such antipathies and animosities, it enables rogue agents throughout the Bureau. Moreover, a calculus of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” leads by sickening, yet inevitable, degrees to the making of common cause with all manner of enemies national.
In short, Comey’s disdain and antipathy toward Hillary Clinton, and his consequent ill-concealed embrace of Donald Trump, may well have led him, and the Bureau, to make common cause with the Kremlin, whose disdain and antipathy toward Hillary Clinton parallels that of Donald Trump and James Comey himself. Are we seeing an alliance of secret policemen trying to mount a hostile takeover of the United States Government, to run a police coup?
Because, whether Comey’s attempted police coup was the result of noble cause/righteous actor corruption, or whether he was acting out of crassly cynical partisan motivations, is certainly reasonable to hypothesize that either of these two possible motivations could, and did, cause him, and the Bureau, to make common cause with the Russian State, to embrace and adopt the same means and methodologies that characterized Tsar Ivan the Terrible’s Oprichnina, the tsarist Okhrana, Ilyich’s Cheka, or the Cheka’s successors, the KGB and the FSB.
If Comey and the rogue agents of “Trumpland” have in fact adopted the means and methodologies of the historic Russian secret police services, then the Federal Bureau of Investigation may well have outlived its usefulness, and may well have become not a protector of the American rule of law but a positive threat to the American love of liberty. The ultimate casualty of James Comey’s attempted police coup may be the FBI itself, which an increasing number of skeptical Americans are beginning to say should either be disbanded altogether or subject to a thorough housecleaning from the Director down to the janitors who clean the bathrooms in the sub-basements of the Hoover building.
-xxx-
PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City, California. The views expressed herein are his own, and are not intended, and should not be construed as, legal advice.
Has the FBI betrayed us?
Have the protectors of the rule of law become the enemies of liberty?
Has the FBI decided that next Tuesday’s election might not produce its desired result, and stepped in to substitute its judgment for that of an American public the Bureau has decided cannot be trusted to make the “correct” decision?
Is a police coup, or worse, a Russian takeover, underway?
Either FBI Director James Comey has some sort of death wish/thanatos urge, or he has been irredeemably tainted with righteous actor/noble cause or Russian agent corruption. Either way, it’s time for him to get the hell out. Assuming Hillary Clinton wins the election next Tuesday, Barack Obama should ask for his resignation next Wednesday, with immediate effect.
Indeed, Comey’s unsuccessful effort to ratfuck the Clinton campaign last week not only places own reputation at risk, but it wrought havoc within the Bureau itself. Now, not content with simultaneously shooting himself in one foot and putting the other foot in his mouth, Comey has attempted to take his ratfucking to a new level, releasing a leak to the New York Times that the FBI sees “nothing, nothing at all” to any relationship between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin about which the American public ought to worry its pretty little head, but also dredging up decade-and-a-half old documents relating to Bill Clinton’s controversial pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich.
One, two, three strikes, you’re out. Comey’s ham-fisted effort to deliver the election to the head of his own Republican Party represents not only treachery, but a horrible disservice to what was once considered one of the finest, most impartial, crime-fighting operations in the world. Sadly, the FBI has now descended to the level of Russia’s FSB or Augusto Pinochet’s DINA.
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Three developments that have occurred in the week since James Comey’s less-than-successful attempt, last Friday afternoon, to ratfuck the Hillary Clinton campaign have disclosed two things beyond reasonable doubt. The first is that it was in fact an attempted ratfucking, a deliberate and carefully planned political dirty trick designed to cause as much damage to the Hillary Clinton campaign as possible, and second, that James Comey himself either has some sort of death wish/thanatos urge, or that he, like WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, is in fact irredeemably tainted with righteous actor/noble cause or Russian agent corruption. Either way, the time has come for James Comey to leave the FBI posthaste before he does the Bureau any more damage than he has already contrived to do.
Friday afternoon, when FBI Director James Comey released his innuendo-heavy, fact-light letter to eight Republican Committee Chairman implying (Nudge nudge!wink wink!) that there might possibly be some email in Huma Abedin’s laptop that might possibly lead to some potentially possible evidence of something on the part of Hillary Clinton that might possibly support some vague inference of possible wrongdoing by the quondam Secretary of State, it was possible, though difficult, for Comey’s defenders to say, in effect, that the director had merely exercised questionable judgment.
Yet, as I noted in my previous post on the subject, the Hillary campaign push back hard against Comey’s dirty trick and within two hours what had appeared to be another Hillary Clinton scandal had become what it really was, a scandal involving James Comey and his misuse of the FBI as what one observer of the situation called “an outpost of the Trump campaign.” By the end of the day on Friday, the FBI was in full crisis mode.
In full crisis mode, the Bureau responded much as it was accustomed to respond under the Directorship of J. Edgar Hoover; a push back against the pushback with its own series of links and information releases designed to damage the Clinton campaign further while exonerating Donald Trump of any suspicion that might come his way from his relationship to Vladimir Putin and the Russian government.
First, the Bureau leaked a story to the New York Times that the FBI had seen “no evidence” of anything untoward in the relationship between Donald Trump and the Moskovskiy Kremlin. This leak, plainly intended as a preemptive strike against the Clinton campaign’s evidence-supported narrative of Trump as being tainted by his close associations with the Kremlin, was belied by numerous investigative reports from such sources as Newsweek, Politico, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, all of which contained more than enough evidence to support a probable cause determination that The Donald had indeed been both metaphorically and physically in bed with the Kremlin, and that he had been badly compromised.
The FBI leaks would not have been released without Comey’s direct approval, either by way of an order from the Director himself, or by way of what Vladimir Putin biographer Masha Gessen has called an “emanation;” not in order as such, so much as a “vague signal [pointing] in the direction in which they should be working.” Either way, whether the directive took the form of an order or an “emanation,” the intent was clear, the Bureau should be unofficially officially on record as believing that there was “nothing, nothing to see here,” on the subject of Donald Trump’s dangerously close relationship with the Kremlin. The clear intent of the directive and the leak it engendered was to represent to the public that the FBI had exonerated Donald Trump of any improper entanglements with an unfriendly foreign power seeking to influence the outcome of the American elections.
We may envisage four hypotheses to account for Director Comey’s piss poor judgment in this matter.
The Overworked Director Needs a Break: this hypothesis, which seems to be the one most favored by both Republican and Democratic observers at the moment, is that Comey is simply so overworked that he fell into a pattern of repeated errors in judgment. In this narrative, Comey’s blunt effort to place his thumb and the Bureau’s thumb in the electoral scales is the result of sheer overwork. This narrative postulates that since July, when Comey came under sustained Republican attack for recommending against prosecution of Hillary Clinton, he has been internalizing and personalizing those attacks. These attacks, in theory, caused the director to doubt his own judgment and to lack confidence in his own ability to command the Bureau.
Supporters of this hypothesis cite his extraordinary memo to the members of the Bureau whereby he attempted to explain his conduct of the other week. However, as evidence has emerged that the Director was very much “on a frolic of his own” when he disclosed the existence of the possibly, perhaps, maybe, significant unreviewed emails, this hypothesis fails of its own frailty and inconsistency. Even if it is true, Mr. Comey should still be asked to resign at once. If Hillary is the President-elect on November 9, outgoing president Barack Obama should request James Comey’s immediate resignation as FBI Director with immediate effect. The penalty in most public and private sector entities for the kinds of errors in judgment of which Comey has obviously been guilty is termination. As I suggested in my previous blog on the subject, James Comey has managed to shatter the FBI’s mystique and to set at naught the trust the public had had in it.
The Righteous Actor in a Noble Cause: if the hypothesis of the stressed out Director making bad decisions is not ominous, the “righteous actor/noble cause” hypothesis is very much so. In this scenario, given credence by the fact that Comey opted to make his announcement over the objections of higher-ups in the Justice Department and senior members of his own Bureau, it becomes fairly clear that the Director has succumbed to the blandishments of the same disease that afflicts Julian Assange, that is, righteous actor/noble cause corruption.
Righteous actor/noble cause corruption occurs when a single individual forms an opinion of his or her cause or conduct that it is, if anything, hyper-righteous, and is noble to the extent that the truly believing warrior in the cause is somehow above any form of scrutiny or criticism, and is beyond the need for critical self-awareness. Knowing Comey’s somewhat self-righteous schoolmarmish demeanor as it has been revealed in numerous media outlets, both traditional and digital, we must acknowledge the possibility that he most definitely suffers from this particular pathology. Like Julian Assange, whose self-righteousness manifests itself in a conviction that he, and he alone, has the moral right to act as judge, jury, and, indeed, executioner, Comey, a self-described “Boy Scout,” seems to delight in setting standards for others that are well-nigh impossible to meet, and up to which he himself might find difficulty living.
For the greatest single downfall of righteous actor/noble cause corruption is that it lends itself so easily and readily to charges of hypocrisy. Knowing what we do about James Comey’s partisan Republican history, it appears safe to hypothesize that in James Comey’s world, the Republicans are necessarily the party of virtue, while the Democrats, particularly their presidential candidate, are the party of vice. And were virtue and vice confront one another, the righteous actor/noble cause actor inevitably begins to see himself as the righteous judge laying down the law and smiting evildoers. If this is how Comey sees himself, and by extension, the Bureau, he needs to be terminated at once. The Federal Bureau of Investigation cannot hope to remain a credible, morally authoritative, incorruptible, incorrupt, federal law enforcement agency if it, itself, is tainted at its highest levels by noble cause/righteous actor corruption.
Because righteous actor/noble cause corruption leads inevitably to the dangerous conclusion that the means employed by the righteous actor in a noble cause are legitimate because justified by their ends. It is a teleological argument which must be carefully weighed on the particular facts of any given case. The ends may justify the means, but to say that the ends always justify the means, and that only the righteous actor in the noble cause is the judge of whether the ends justify the means is, in our American constitutional system, unacceptable. If this is the corruption into which Comey has fallen, the Attorney General should show his ass the door posthaste.
The Cynical Partisan Agent: Still more ominous is the hypothesis that James Comey was acting out of old-fashioned political corruption, not as a righteous actor in a noble cause. In this narrative, which appears to be supported by the facts that have become known since Friday afternoon, James Comey was simply out to ratfuck the Hillary Clinton campaign in the service of Donald Trump and the Republican Party. Certainly, the timing of the event is highly suspicious, and indeed raises probable cause to believe that a ratfucking was intended, and that James Comey, himself, personally, carried it out. Coming as it did eleven days out from the election, well within the sixty day window within which such pronouncements are not supposed to be made, per clear Department of Justice policy, there is certainly evidence to believe that Comey was acting deliberately to use the Bureau to serve the purposes of the Trump campaign. If this is indeed the case, not only should Comey be terminated as FBI director posthaste, he could also be the subject of a criminal investigation carried out by and resident in some other agency than in the Federal Bureau of investigation.
Let the Secret Service do the looking; let the California Highway Patrol and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s office do the looking –- LASO will be motivated to look very carefully at the conduct of a Bureau responsible for the chaos which is overtaken the Department. If the investigations turn up the evidence that may very well exist to support the view that Comey was acting on behalf of the RNC or the Trump campaign, a true bill should issue from the federal grand jury having jurisdiction of the matter, and instead of being merely terminated, James Comey should be facing extensive federal exposure as a criminal.
The Russian Agent: the most ominous hypothesis, of course, is that the Bureau has been infiltrated and compromised by one or more agencies of the Russian State. The possibility that Comey’s revelations, so-called, were part of a Russian Kriegßpiel against the West in general and the United States in particular cannot be discounted.
At the acknowledged risk of being dismissed as a conspiracist, I will point out that I have been warning of the dangers of the Russian kriegßpiel against the West for more than a year now. During the run-up to the unsuccessful Scottish independence referendum, I noted the Kremlin’s maladroit attempts to manufacture sentiment for disunion in the Northern Kingdom. During the run-up to Brexit, I noted Moscow’s “emanations” in favor of Brexit, as I also noted what amounted to the treasonable, pro-Muscovite leanings of such Brexit advocates as Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, and Donald Trump himself.
I also noted The Donald’s very public embrace of Brexit, and embrace which very much mirrors the Kremlin’s favored policy posture, i.e., a weak, disunited Europe at odds with itself and lacking the resolve to resist Russian blandishments. I suggested then, and I suggest again, that the Brexiteers and Donald Trump shared with the Kremlin a common set of anti-Western, pro-Russian policy preferences. It’s also worth recalling how Donald Trump invited UKIP’s Nigel Farage to campaign with him in Mississippi, ignoring the long tradition of not dragging foreigners into American presidential campaigns.
Of course, if it’s contrary to American tradition to drag foreigners into our presidential contests, it was, until last Friday, equally contrary to American tradition for the most powerful law enforcement agency in the country to run what amounts to a police coup, attempting to put its thumb on the scales of the presidential election. But as the evidence has accumulated, implicating rogue agents in the FBI’s New York field office, we can no longer afford to give the Director or even the Bureau the benefit of even slight doubt. According to a recent article in the Guardian, the FBI in general and the New York field office in particular are commonly referred to as “Trumpland,” and Hillary Clinton is viewed by numerous agents in both Washington City and New York City as an incarnation of Antichrist.
Given the clear proclivity of the FBI for attempting to sabotage Hillary Clinton’s campaign by any means available, it doesn’t take a lot to connect the dots to lead from the New York field office to the J. Edgar Hoover building, back to the Kremlin itself. A bunch of Hillary-hating rogue agents in New York tried to throw the election to Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin’s BFF. They are assisted in that regard by the Director himself, apparently motivated by partisan considerations.
The director himself apparently gave an “emanation” to rogue agents in Washington and in New York City to leak information harmful to the Clinton campaign and also information suggesting that the FBI can find no evidence at all of any connection between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Now, it’s worth recalling that America’s other sixteen intelligence and counterintelligence agencies all share a consensus that the Russian government is actively attempting either to directly influence the outcome of the American election, or to cause the American public to entertain grave doubts about that election’s legitimacy, all with a view to destabilizing the United States.
Sixteen of seventeen American intelligence or counterintelligence agencies share this consensus. But not James Comey’s FBI. Instead, the FBI has made a virtual cottage industry of leaks to the media intended to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the consensus of the rest of the intelligence/ counterintelligence community, and, by extension, on the tradecraft capacities of the other sixteen American intelligence and counterintelligence agencies that have been investigating the extent of Russia’s penetration of our electoral process.
Given the FBI’s curiously pro-Russian posture, which dovetails well and ominously with its apparent pro-Trump posture, we may legitimately ask whether that curious coincidence of interest has left the FBI wide-open to plundering Russian forays. We may also reasonably ask whether the FBI’s vulnerability to Russian intrusion, presumably by the FSB or by Russian military intelligence, GRU, has resulted in the Director himself having been turned or compromised in some way by Russian operatives concealed or embedded within the Bureau.
Certainly, if Director Comey entertains a strong anti-Clinton proclivity, if he holds both Bill and Hillary Clinton in the same obvious disdain that Louis Freeh, a previous FBI director, clearly held for both Bill and Hillary Clinton, it would go a long way toward explaining his, and the Bureau’s, apparent hostility toward Hillary’s campaign. And when a highly placed senior official entertains such antipathies and animosities, it enables rogue agents throughout the Bureau. Moreover, a calculus of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” leads by sickening, yet inevitable, degrees to the making of common cause with all manner of enemies national.
In short, Comey’s disdain and antipathy toward Hillary Clinton, and his consequent ill-concealed embrace of Donald Trump, may well have led him, and the Bureau, to make common cause with the Kremlin, whose disdain and antipathy toward Hillary Clinton parallels that of Donald Trump and James Comey himself. Are we seeing an alliance of secret policemen trying to mount a hostile takeover of the United States Government, to run a police coup?
Because, whether Comey’s attempted police coup was the result of noble cause/righteous actor corruption, or whether he was acting out of crassly cynical partisan motivations, is certainly reasonable to hypothesize that either of these two possible motivations could, and did, cause him, and the Bureau, to make common cause with the Russian State, to embrace and adopt the same means and methodologies that characterized Tsar Ivan the Terrible’s Oprichnina, the tsarist Okhrana, Ilyich’s Cheka, or the Cheka’s successors, the KGB and the FSB.
If Comey and the rogue agents of “Trumpland” have in fact adopted the means and methodologies of the historic Russian secret police services, then the Federal Bureau of Investigation may well have outlived its usefulness, and may well have become not a protector of the American rule of law but a positive threat to the American love of liberty. The ultimate casualty of James Comey’s attempted police coup may be the FBI itself, which an increasing number of skeptical Americans are beginning to say should either be disbanded altogether or subject to a thorough housecleaning from the Director down to the janitors who clean the bathrooms in the sub-basements of the Hoover building.
-xxx-
PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City, California. The views expressed herein are his own, and are not intended, and should not be construed as, legal advice.
Tuesday, November 1, 2016
A MASTER CLASS IN ATTEMPTED RATFUCKING
Summary: Embattled Republican FBI director James Comey tried to reclaim some of his street cred with his fellow Republicans last Friday by trying to ratfuck the Hillary Clinton campaign. The Clinton campaign and the national media were having none of it. Comey’s announcement, strategically timed to “put out the garbage” on a Friday afternoon, had been mercilessly dissected within hours.
In fact, Comey’s error in judgment, and indeed, the embattled FBI director himself, had himself largely become the scandal by the close of business Friday. Though it is not in Hillary Clinton’s nature to invoke victim status, her surrogates have done remarkably effective job of political jujitsu by turning the tables on James Comey and raising some issues concerning him that ought to be deeply troubling to the American public.
Those issues include, among others, the extent to which Comey and the Bureau had treated Donald Trump and his Russian associates with kid gloves while holding Hillary Clinton to unreasonable and impossibly high standards. There is also a real question of whether Comey himself has succumbed to noble cause/righteous actor corruption in believing himself and himself alone to be, in effect, judge, jury, and executioner. For Comey’s sake, it were best if he had succumbed to such corruption, rather than that he had succumbed to the corruption of having been turned or compromised by the Russians.
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Embattled Republican FBI Director James Comey tried to reclaim some of the Republican street cred he had lost in July when the much-vaunted FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server wound up going nowhere. Having disappointed his party by having found nothing to justify prosecuting the Democratic candidate for President, and having been raked over the coals for it by banana Republicans, Comey knew that his personal political viability in any future Republican administration was in serious jeopardy.
So, last Friday, in an apparent effort to save his own political skin, James Comey tried to ratfuck Hillary Clinton and her campaign by releasing a bureaucratically worded letter to Congress in which he implied that there might be additional documentation that was “pertinent” to the investigation he had led the American people in July to believe was closed.
Within hours, the new alleged Clinton “scandal” had melted away to nothing, withering under the bright light of unremitting scrutiny. The emails in question were emails on a laptop belonging to Clinton staffer Huma Abedin and her estranged husband, disgraced former Congressman Anthony “dick pic” Weiner. The emails in question were neither sent to, nor received by, Hillary Clinton. In short, the whole thing appeared to be another phony Clinton scandal ginned up by James Comey and by deplorable Utah Republican Congressman Jason Chaffetz.
Yet, not only was the “scandal” debunked within a matter of hours, but Comey and Chaffetz themselves had also become the center of a broadening scandal which neither of them had foreseen. Worse for Comey, the scandal involving him appears to have done nothing but metastasize since Friday afternoon. Information now available as of Tuesday, November 1, indicates a pattern of conduct which causes us to entertain doubts not only about Comey’s judgment, but also about his basic loyalty to the United States.
We know, in limine, that Comey opted to make his announcement over the objections of Atty. Gen. Loretta Lynch and other senior officials at the Department of Justice. In short, Comey decided to go on what the Common Law charmingly calls “a frolic of his own.” Despite the existence of stated DOJ policy discountenancing making announcements concerning investigations closely prior to an election, Comey essentially told his boss to fuck herself, that he was going to make the announcement anyway.
By doing so, by engaging in a fairly obvious ratfuck for transparently political reasons, James Comey has managed, in one foolish and incontinent maneuver, to tarnish not only his own reputation, but also that of the entire Bureau. It is more than forty years now since J. Edgar Hoover, whose misconduct as Bureau director sullied the agency he headed, died a death unmourned outside the circle of a few FBI apparatchiks.
Since Hoover’s death, the Bureau had heretofore done a fairly decent job reclaiming its reputation. Until Friday afternoon, the Bureau had managed to cultivate for itself a reputation for integrity. It was no longer viewed, as it had been viewed in the Hoover time, as being of vehicle of political retribution, or as a platform from which a politically motivated Bureau director could ratfuck his real or imagined political enemies. The integrity of the Bureau had indeed become something of a byword since Hoover’s death.
Until Friday afternoon.
Because, again, with one ill-considered, incontinent, letter, sent to Congress in a way that was sure to place it in Donald Trump’s hands immediately, James Comey managed to revive the FBI’s prior reputation as being an essentially corrupt tool of the Republican Party, using its investigative resources to give whatever support it could to a Republican candidate.
Indeed, that was the narrative that had very much clamped itself upon the American public’s consciousness by Monday morning. Moreover, during Monday, the situation metastasized further. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) sent a blistering, pugnacious letter to the FBI director taking him, and the Bureau, to task for their astonishing failure to pursue an investigation of Donald Trump’s clear ties to Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin.
While the Republicans were quick to denounce Harry Reid’s letter as a mere stunt, the information that has become available in the twenty-four hour since then suggest that the minority leader’s letter was anything but a political stunt: “in my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisers, and the Russian government.... The public has a right to know this information.”
Yet, Comey, hypocritically invoking the sixty day rule (!) to protect his chosen candidate, has been curiously unwilling to level with the American public about whether the FBI is even investigating the mounting evidence that Donald Trump is indeed a Manchurian candidate. Even though we are becoming aware of the existence of “an established exchange of information between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin of mutual benefit,” the FBI Director has seemed curiously reluctant to investigate.
Yet the director seems willing to commit a great deal of Bureau resources pursuing Huma Abedin on the off chance that some small number of emails on the Abedin/Weiner joint laptop might possibly contain some vaguely incriminating data that might in some vague way, point in the general direction of the quondam Secretary of State. In other words, Comey appears willing to ignore the Russian wolf at the door while sending all his agents to look for an imaginary bogeyman under the bed.
Given the fraught political nature of this election season, when Donald Trump has openly invited the Russian intelligence apparat to hack the Democratic Party, and when just about everybody and his brother seems to have set their moral scruples aside to eagerly traffic in the stolen property WikiLeaks has been peddling, it is not unreasonable to wonder whether we are not being betrayed at the highest political level. If Donald Trump is willing to open the door and let the Russians ransack America’s living room, why shouldn’t James Comey do the same thing?
If, on Friday morning, you had suggested to me that James Comey might either have been compromised by the Russians or have actually been turned by them, I would have fed you your tongue for telling impossible lies. But now, with Halloween behind us and The Day of the Dead before us, I can no longer be sure. Given James Comey’s kid glove treatment of Donald Trump and Trump’s evident willingness to traffic with enemies national, I think patriotic Americans must dare to envisage the hypothesis of the basic disloyalty of the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, of his willingness to promote a candidate favorable to, and controlled by, the Moskovskiy Kremlin.
As happened with Brexit, we must now begin to entertain again an hypothesis that the West is under serious and concerted attack at the hands of James Comey and Donald Trump, and that a Russian Kriegßpiel is very much underway against the United States in particular and the West in general. We are indeed betrayed at the highest political levels. The Republic is in grave danger, and a comprehensive prophylaxis of Donald Trump, James Comey, and the numerous Russian embeds in the Trump campaign, together with a like prophylaxis of Trump supporters is in order. We have spies, saboteurs, and wreckers among us, all of whose activities must be inhibited by any means necessary.
-XXX-
PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City, California, where he spent eight years on the city Council. The views set forth herein are his own and should not be construed as constituting any form of legal advice.
In fact, Comey’s error in judgment, and indeed, the embattled FBI director himself, had himself largely become the scandal by the close of business Friday. Though it is not in Hillary Clinton’s nature to invoke victim status, her surrogates have done remarkably effective job of political jujitsu by turning the tables on James Comey and raising some issues concerning him that ought to be deeply troubling to the American public.
Those issues include, among others, the extent to which Comey and the Bureau had treated Donald Trump and his Russian associates with kid gloves while holding Hillary Clinton to unreasonable and impossibly high standards. There is also a real question of whether Comey himself has succumbed to noble cause/righteous actor corruption in believing himself and himself alone to be, in effect, judge, jury, and executioner. For Comey’s sake, it were best if he had succumbed to such corruption, rather than that he had succumbed to the corruption of having been turned or compromised by the Russians.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Embattled Republican FBI Director James Comey tried to reclaim some of the Republican street cred he had lost in July when the much-vaunted FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server wound up going nowhere. Having disappointed his party by having found nothing to justify prosecuting the Democratic candidate for President, and having been raked over the coals for it by banana Republicans, Comey knew that his personal political viability in any future Republican administration was in serious jeopardy.
So, last Friday, in an apparent effort to save his own political skin, James Comey tried to ratfuck Hillary Clinton and her campaign by releasing a bureaucratically worded letter to Congress in which he implied that there might be additional documentation that was “pertinent” to the investigation he had led the American people in July to believe was closed.
Within hours, the new alleged Clinton “scandal” had melted away to nothing, withering under the bright light of unremitting scrutiny. The emails in question were emails on a laptop belonging to Clinton staffer Huma Abedin and her estranged husband, disgraced former Congressman Anthony “dick pic” Weiner. The emails in question were neither sent to, nor received by, Hillary Clinton. In short, the whole thing appeared to be another phony Clinton scandal ginned up by James Comey and by deplorable Utah Republican Congressman Jason Chaffetz.
Yet, not only was the “scandal” debunked within a matter of hours, but Comey and Chaffetz themselves had also become the center of a broadening scandal which neither of them had foreseen. Worse for Comey, the scandal involving him appears to have done nothing but metastasize since Friday afternoon. Information now available as of Tuesday, November 1, indicates a pattern of conduct which causes us to entertain doubts not only about Comey’s judgment, but also about his basic loyalty to the United States.
We know, in limine, that Comey opted to make his announcement over the objections of Atty. Gen. Loretta Lynch and other senior officials at the Department of Justice. In short, Comey decided to go on what the Common Law charmingly calls “a frolic of his own.” Despite the existence of stated DOJ policy discountenancing making announcements concerning investigations closely prior to an election, Comey essentially told his boss to fuck herself, that he was going to make the announcement anyway.
By doing so, by engaging in a fairly obvious ratfuck for transparently political reasons, James Comey has managed, in one foolish and incontinent maneuver, to tarnish not only his own reputation, but also that of the entire Bureau. It is more than forty years now since J. Edgar Hoover, whose misconduct as Bureau director sullied the agency he headed, died a death unmourned outside the circle of a few FBI apparatchiks.
Since Hoover’s death, the Bureau had heretofore done a fairly decent job reclaiming its reputation. Until Friday afternoon, the Bureau had managed to cultivate for itself a reputation for integrity. It was no longer viewed, as it had been viewed in the Hoover time, as being of vehicle of political retribution, or as a platform from which a politically motivated Bureau director could ratfuck his real or imagined political enemies. The integrity of the Bureau had indeed become something of a byword since Hoover’s death.
Until Friday afternoon.
Because, again, with one ill-considered, incontinent, letter, sent to Congress in a way that was sure to place it in Donald Trump’s hands immediately, James Comey managed to revive the FBI’s prior reputation as being an essentially corrupt tool of the Republican Party, using its investigative resources to give whatever support it could to a Republican candidate.
Indeed, that was the narrative that had very much clamped itself upon the American public’s consciousness by Monday morning. Moreover, during Monday, the situation metastasized further. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) sent a blistering, pugnacious letter to the FBI director taking him, and the Bureau, to task for their astonishing failure to pursue an investigation of Donald Trump’s clear ties to Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin.
While the Republicans were quick to denounce Harry Reid’s letter as a mere stunt, the information that has become available in the twenty-four hour since then suggest that the minority leader’s letter was anything but a political stunt: “in my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisers, and the Russian government.... The public has a right to know this information.”
Yet, Comey, hypocritically invoking the sixty day rule (!) to protect his chosen candidate, has been curiously unwilling to level with the American public about whether the FBI is even investigating the mounting evidence that Donald Trump is indeed a Manchurian candidate. Even though we are becoming aware of the existence of “an established exchange of information between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin of mutual benefit,” the FBI Director has seemed curiously reluctant to investigate.
Yet the director seems willing to commit a great deal of Bureau resources pursuing Huma Abedin on the off chance that some small number of emails on the Abedin/Weiner joint laptop might possibly contain some vaguely incriminating data that might in some vague way, point in the general direction of the quondam Secretary of State. In other words, Comey appears willing to ignore the Russian wolf at the door while sending all his agents to look for an imaginary bogeyman under the bed.
Given the fraught political nature of this election season, when Donald Trump has openly invited the Russian intelligence apparat to hack the Democratic Party, and when just about everybody and his brother seems to have set their moral scruples aside to eagerly traffic in the stolen property WikiLeaks has been peddling, it is not unreasonable to wonder whether we are not being betrayed at the highest political level. If Donald Trump is willing to open the door and let the Russians ransack America’s living room, why shouldn’t James Comey do the same thing?
If, on Friday morning, you had suggested to me that James Comey might either have been compromised by the Russians or have actually been turned by them, I would have fed you your tongue for telling impossible lies. But now, with Halloween behind us and The Day of the Dead before us, I can no longer be sure. Given James Comey’s kid glove treatment of Donald Trump and Trump’s evident willingness to traffic with enemies national, I think patriotic Americans must dare to envisage the hypothesis of the basic disloyalty of the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, of his willingness to promote a candidate favorable to, and controlled by, the Moskovskiy Kremlin.
As happened with Brexit, we must now begin to entertain again an hypothesis that the West is under serious and concerted attack at the hands of James Comey and Donald Trump, and that a Russian Kriegßpiel is very much underway against the United States in particular and the West in general. We are indeed betrayed at the highest political levels. The Republic is in grave danger, and a comprehensive prophylaxis of Donald Trump, James Comey, and the numerous Russian embeds in the Trump campaign, together with a like prophylaxis of Trump supporters is in order. We have spies, saboteurs, and wreckers among us, all of whose activities must be inhibited by any means necessary.
-XXX-
PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City, California, where he spent eight years on the city Council. The views set forth herein are his own and should not be construed as constituting any form of legal advice.
Monday, October 24, 2016
Tom Hayden, An Appreciation
Summary: We lost one of a generation of passionate activists last night. Tom Hayden entered into eternity at the age of 76. For those of us who were old enough to remember Tom in real time, he was that paradoxical figure; the insufferable bombthrower and the principled voice of conscience. With Tom’s death, we bid farewell to another of the great personages of a time we shall not see again. As the 60s fade out of living memory, to be replaced by sepia-toned nostalgia and treacly Hollywood biopics, there is something almost elegiac in the news of Tom Hayden’s passing.
----------------------------------------------
Tom Hayden died last night. He was 76 years old and he had suffered a serious stroke roughly a year and a half ago. His death appears to be from complications thereof. As I look out at the overcast sky today I feel a profoundly elegiac mood, as if something unrecoverable had slipped into eternity, and I’m reminded of a haiku from Bashō:
All along this road
not a single soul – only
autumn evening comes.
A decade ago, we all observed with regret how the so-called Greatest Generation, the men and women who made possible our victory in World War II, had been slipping into eternity at the rate of something approaching 1100 per day. In 2009, we bade farewell to Harry Patch, the last living British veteran of The Great War. Now, we must gird ourselves for a new tranche of departures.
Tom’s death was not exactly unexpected. Eighteen months is a fairly long time to survive after a serious stroke. It gave him, and to some extent, us, time to prepare, for in the words of the Great Litany, we all seek deliverance from “dying suddenly and unprepared.”
And so Tom’s death should be an occasion for us of the mourning that comes naturally on such an occasion; but it should also be a time of remembrance and a time for drawing lessons from a life filled with occasion and consequence.
I don’t propose to recapitulate here the details of Tom Hayden’s biography. That work has been done, and done more ably than I could do, by journalists and obit writers. My purpose is appreciation. My political life and Tom’s both occurred within the large, often fractious, circuit of the Californian Left.
To be a Democrat in California was to confront, and even to embrace, Will Rogers’ timeless paradox: “I’m not a member of an organized political party; I’m a Democrat.” To be a Democrat in California during the latter years of the 20th century meant walking a fine line between what was politically pragmatic and doable and pursuing quixotic and frankly unattainable causes because it was the ideologically pure thing to do.
As the late Coachella Valley queer and democratic activist George Zander used to note, any political party, but particularly the Democratic Party, is made up of an unstable coalition of what George used to call “movement people” and “campaign people.” “Movement people,” or as they sometimes like to call themselves “transformational” people, tend to see politics as an enterprise for the ideologically pure. Such people tend to see themselves as more idealistic, and are more prone to see their politics in binary, black and white, frames.S
“Campaign people,” by contrast tend to be scorned by movement people as excessively “transactional.” Transactional campaign people tend to ask questions like: what is an election calculus for a particular race? How many swing voters do we need to bring into our camp? What will it cost to mount a successful campaign for a given constituency?
Movement people and campaign people are often separated by a seemingly unbridgeable gulf. The movement people tend to be ideologically pure; the campaign people tend to ask, pragmatically, “what works?” To apply an analogy from the history of the People’s Republic of China, movement people tend to be more Maoist in their approach, while campaign people tend to gravitate toward the more pragmatic teachings of Deng Xiaoping, who was reputed to have said “Socialism is what works.” Where movement people have often been willing to sacrifice the good on the altar of the perfect, campaign people have tended to be guided more by the philosophy of Adm. of the Fleet of the Soviet Union Sergei G. Gorshkov, whose favorite motto, apropos of procurement, was “‘good enough’ is best.”
I make no bones about being a campaign person. I’m interested in transformation, but I’m also interested in what we need to do to accomplish the transformation. I saw something similar from Tom Hayden during the years he served in the California Legislature. It would have been easy for Tom to take an uncompromising, bomb throwing, “transformational,” mindset into the Capitol building in Sacramento, and to become a prima donna among the Democratic caucus.
But, the Legislature is not a place for prima donnas. Any Assemblymember is just one of 80, and any Senator is one of 40. In order to get things done in the Assembly, you have to be able to count to 41, as it were, or, in the Other House, to 21. If you can’t muster a majority, you cannot function effectively as a legislator. Yet Tom managed to function effectively in the Legislature, in both the Assembly and in the Other House.
In short, the bomb throwing, Judge Julius Hoffman-baiting transformational activist was able to make perhaps the most important political transformation there is, transitioning from a movement person to a campaign person.
In a very real sense, that is the core of democracy. Our public institutions of self-government cannot function if they are staffed exclusively by “transformational,” movement people. Indeed, much of the long-term success of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s altogether promising campaign for the Presidency of the United States – and, conversely, much of the failure of Bernie Sanders’ insurgent campaign for President–- can be accounted for by the difference between movement people and campaign people.
The Sanders campaign was always about movement people. It billed itself as being a transformational campaign, a “political revolution,” and it attracted movement people to it. In that regard, it has been somewhat like the snakebit campaign of Donald Trump, which has tried to appeal to so-called movement conservatives, albeit with limited success. Hillary, on the other hand, has been careful, methodical, and in many ways classically feminine in her campaigning. The Clinton campaign has been nothing if not careful and exquisitely transactional.
Indeed, the success of the Clinton campaign has mirrored, to a large degree, the success of the Obama campaign of 2008. Barack managed, in 2008, to balance and reconcile the demands of both movement people and campaign people, to be brilliantly transformational while also pulling off a coldly transactional defeat of John McCain.
Tom Hayden managed to balance transformational ardor and transactional pragmatism. His early embrace of Bernie Sanders reflected, I think, his own early transformational proclivities; while his later coming round to Hillary Clinton reflected a transactional view of what was attainable in our politics in 2016. That may be a skill set we are in danger of losing.
The great ones, the old ones, are slipping into eternity. With each obituary we read, we are reminded that those exciting times are passing out of living memory. In 1938, with war looming, Nagai Kafū, the great Japanese novelist of the city of Tokyo, wrote a haiku that is almost untranslatable, but renders approximately as
Falling snow
And Meiji is far away.
Looking out into the pluvial October weather, in a world incrementally impoverished because it no longer has Tom Hayden in it, I think
Falling rain
And Woodstock is far away.
It is to be regretted the Tom Hayden did not survive long enough to witness what the tea leaves now suggest is the well-nigh unstoppable momentum of of Hillary Clinton to the White House. Like Moses, he was allowed to reach the mountaintop, but not to go into the promised land. We can do his memory no greater service than to elect that “nasty woman” President of the United States in 15 days’ time.
May his memory be a blessing; requiem æternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat super eis. Amen.
Friday, October 21, 2016
PWNED BY A GIRL!
Summary: Donald Trump got pwned again Wednesday night by a woman! Indeed, The Donald managed to get himself pwned by easily the most skillful political operator currently active in the United States today with the possible exception of Barack Obama. Hillary Clinton bore in unmercifully on every one of The Donald’s weaknesses, on every one of his inconsistencies, and on every one of his multitudinous soft spots. By the time she was finished with The Donald, he was still standing only by force of habit, like a dinosaur that does not realize yet that its heart has been cut out. In short, Hillary Clinton eviscerated Donald Trump even if she’s far too well bred to have done the victory dance in the gory remains that other, male, politicians might have been tempted to do.
Yet, The Donald could have used Thursday night’s Al Smith dinner as an opportunity for damage control, but instead, like a chimpanzee hurling its feces, The Donald continued to dig himself in deeper with the performance that called forth almost unprecedented boos and catcalls from the normally restrained Al Smith dinner audience. In fine, this may go down as one of the worst 24 to 48 hours of the entire Trump campaign.
Donald Trump got pwned Wednesday night... By a girl!
Actually, it is the third time running that Donald has had his ass handed to him by Hillary Rodham Clinton. Both the New York Times and Vox.com have provided extensive, very able analyses of The Donald’s debate performance the other night. And both of them called particular attention to The Donald’s unwillingness to make a commitment to accept the results of an election that he might happen to lose.
Thursday morning, The Donald managed to kick the turd yet again saying, in effect, of course he will accept the results of the election... if he wins. The likelihood of The Donald actually winning the presidential election is quite small. Though exact figures very from day-to-day, Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com rates the Donald’s chances of victory at somewhere between twelve and fourteen percent. For The Donald, Wednesday night’s debate may well have been his last chance to mitigate the hemorrhage of support he has been experiencing as his campaign enters late stage collapse.
And, mirabile dictu, Hillary demonstrated once again the truth of Albert Einstein’s dictum: “chance favors the prepared mind.” By contrast, Donald Trump once again demonstrated the truth of the old military advantage of the Seven Ps: Piss Poor Preparation Produces Piss Poor Performance. As in the prior two debates, The Donald’s lack of self-awareness and his abysmal want of self-control gave Hillary and her team and altogether perfect blueprint, a roadmap into the vulnerabilities of the Trump psyche, which Hillary exploited brilliantly. Her debate performance last night was, in fine, one of the most brilliant pieces of political and forensic jujitsu ever carried off in a presidential debate. By the time the quondam Secretary of State had finished with The Orange One, there was nothing left. Like a dinosaur that does not realize that its heart has been cut out, The Donald remained standing by nothing more than force of habit. And Hillary herself, having eviscerated The Donald, is far too well brought up to have done the victory dance in the gory remains that other, male, politicians might have done.
Naturally, the Trump people refused to recognize their candidate’s evisceration for what it was; Trump himself engaged in his usual undisciplined emission of tweets in the small hours the morning to reassure the deplorable faithful that he had in fact “won” Wednesday night’s debate in the face of overwhelming evidence the contrary. Of course, some self-sabotaging Democrats insisted this morning that Hillary’s masterful performance had been anything but ladylike. These weak-kneed Stockholm syndrome Democrats felt that Hillary had been “rude” to The Donald, that she had been somehow wrong to “descend to his level.” I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a scandalous misuse of Michelle Obama’s classic adjuration that “when they go low, we go high.”
Because Democrats need to stop unilaterally disarming in political fights. As much as one does not bring a knife to a gunfight, we Democrats should also heed the counsel of Sean Connery’s character in the 1987 remake of the Untouchables: “they pull a knife; you pull a gun. They send one of yours the hospital; you send one of theirs to the morgue!” Hillary understood that last night, even if a lot of puritanically weak-kneed Democrats did not.
And so, despite Republican lies and weak kneed Democratic handwringing, Hillary Clinton well and truly pwned Donald Trump last night. It was, in many ways, emblematic of the methodical way in which Hillary Clinton has built an astonishingly successful campaign, a campaign that, as more than one commentator has observed, made excellent use of the unique, feminine strengths that women can bring to a presidential campaign. While The Donald (and to a lesser extent, Bernie Sanders) were appealing to the macho sensibility inherent in a large rallies and his scripted events, Hillary was quietly meeting with small groups and coalition building in the classic sense of retail politics. She was establishing her bona fides in intimate “small room” settings where she was able to make powerful and long-standing contacts with voters who could carry her “gospel” out into the community. Indeed, Hillary’s campaign had about it a kind of Apostolic quality; Scripture tells us that with Twelve, Jesus set in train the salvation of the world.
Indeed, Hillary learned from the 2008 campaign invaluable lessons that have stood her in good stead in 2016. For this has been a campaign that did not end with a defeated Hillary yielding pride of place to a man, albeit having left 17 million cracks in the glass ceiling, but which blew that glass ceiling to smithereens and shows every indication of triumphantly carrying Hillary back to the White House as the first woman President of the United States. I’m proud to say that #imwithher.
Postscript: The Donald had a perfect chance to redeem his piss poor performance in Wednesday night’s debate, had he prepared properly for the Al Smith dinner last night. But, once again, failing to understand that piss poor preparation produces piss poor performance, The Donald once again scorned preparation and thought that he could wing it. Unfortunately, The Donald’s adolescent faith in his ability to wing it once again let him down. His unbelievably heavy-handed and utterly lame attempts at humor at Hillary Clinton’s expense quickly crossed the line from the sort of dry, self-deprecating humor to be expected from the Al Smith dinner into the scorched-earth realms of sheer political insult.
The boos and catcalls that came The Donald’s way ought to have disabused him of any notion that his attempts at humor had been at all successful. Unfortunately, the Donald remains abysmally un-self-aware of his boorish behavior. In short, in the words of presidential historian Michael Beschloss, The Donald bombed at the Al Smith dinner. While some weak kneed Democrats, seeking some kind of moral equivalency, have tried to frame Hillary'sperformance at the Al Smith dinner as somehow just as bad, the fact remains that for of those of us who saw The Donald’s piss poor performance, he didn’t just bomb, he bombed bigly. Last night could have been the “do over” by which he controlled the damage from Wednesday night, but The Donald managed, as he always seems to do against Hillary Clinton, incontinently to fling away the opportunity.
The final word on Donald Trump’s piss poor performance at the Al Smith dinner can probably go to sometime Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, who said of the Palestinians: “they’ve never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” Like the feckless Palestinians of half a century ago, Donald J. Trump has never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. The Al Smith dinner may have been his last chance to stave off a defeat of historic proportions. Instead, the twenty-eight hours between the start of the third debate and the end of the Al Smith dinner may well have been Donald Trump’s Schwarzer Tag des deutschen Heeres, his own Black Day of the German Army, when the Kaiser’s forces sustained a defeat before Amiens that led to the collapse of the German war effort, the fall of Imperial Germany, and the ignominious flight of the Hohenzollern dynasty into exile. All Trump can hope for at this stage is that there will still be deplorables out there to believe his fabricated Dolchstoßlegende, his phony stab-in-the-back "the election is rigged, rigged, I tell you!" narrative.
-xxx-
PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City, California, where he served for eight years on the city council. He is an unapologetic liberal Democrat and a proud, viscerally partisan, Hillary Clinton supporter. He believes Donald Trump is not only a traitor, but a palpable threat to both America’s national security and the well-being of our public institutions of self-government. The views set forth herein are his own. Come for him, and you may find that he is a surprisingly good shot.
Yet, The Donald could have used Thursday night’s Al Smith dinner as an opportunity for damage control, but instead, like a chimpanzee hurling its feces, The Donald continued to dig himself in deeper with the performance that called forth almost unprecedented boos and catcalls from the normally restrained Al Smith dinner audience. In fine, this may go down as one of the worst 24 to 48 hours of the entire Trump campaign.
Donald Trump got pwned Wednesday night... By a girl!
Actually, it is the third time running that Donald has had his ass handed to him by Hillary Rodham Clinton. Both the New York Times and Vox.com have provided extensive, very able analyses of The Donald’s debate performance the other night. And both of them called particular attention to The Donald’s unwillingness to make a commitment to accept the results of an election that he might happen to lose.
Thursday morning, The Donald managed to kick the turd yet again saying, in effect, of course he will accept the results of the election... if he wins. The likelihood of The Donald actually winning the presidential election is quite small. Though exact figures very from day-to-day, Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com rates the Donald’s chances of victory at somewhere between twelve and fourteen percent. For The Donald, Wednesday night’s debate may well have been his last chance to mitigate the hemorrhage of support he has been experiencing as his campaign enters late stage collapse.
And, mirabile dictu, Hillary demonstrated once again the truth of Albert Einstein’s dictum: “chance favors the prepared mind.” By contrast, Donald Trump once again demonstrated the truth of the old military advantage of the Seven Ps: Piss Poor Preparation Produces Piss Poor Performance. As in the prior two debates, The Donald’s lack of self-awareness and his abysmal want of self-control gave Hillary and her team and altogether perfect blueprint, a roadmap into the vulnerabilities of the Trump psyche, which Hillary exploited brilliantly. Her debate performance last night was, in fine, one of the most brilliant pieces of political and forensic jujitsu ever carried off in a presidential debate. By the time the quondam Secretary of State had finished with The Orange One, there was nothing left. Like a dinosaur that does not realize that its heart has been cut out, The Donald remained standing by nothing more than force of habit. And Hillary herself, having eviscerated The Donald, is far too well brought up to have done the victory dance in the gory remains that other, male, politicians might have done.
Naturally, the Trump people refused to recognize their candidate’s evisceration for what it was; Trump himself engaged in his usual undisciplined emission of tweets in the small hours the morning to reassure the deplorable faithful that he had in fact “won” Wednesday night’s debate in the face of overwhelming evidence the contrary. Of course, some self-sabotaging Democrats insisted this morning that Hillary’s masterful performance had been anything but ladylike. These weak-kneed Stockholm syndrome Democrats felt that Hillary had been “rude” to The Donald, that she had been somehow wrong to “descend to his level.” I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a scandalous misuse of Michelle Obama’s classic adjuration that “when they go low, we go high.”
Because Democrats need to stop unilaterally disarming in political fights. As much as one does not bring a knife to a gunfight, we Democrats should also heed the counsel of Sean Connery’s character in the 1987 remake of the Untouchables: “they pull a knife; you pull a gun. They send one of yours the hospital; you send one of theirs to the morgue!” Hillary understood that last night, even if a lot of puritanically weak-kneed Democrats did not.
And so, despite Republican lies and weak kneed Democratic handwringing, Hillary Clinton well and truly pwned Donald Trump last night. It was, in many ways, emblematic of the methodical way in which Hillary Clinton has built an astonishingly successful campaign, a campaign that, as more than one commentator has observed, made excellent use of the unique, feminine strengths that women can bring to a presidential campaign. While The Donald (and to a lesser extent, Bernie Sanders) were appealing to the macho sensibility inherent in a large rallies and his scripted events, Hillary was quietly meeting with small groups and coalition building in the classic sense of retail politics. She was establishing her bona fides in intimate “small room” settings where she was able to make powerful and long-standing contacts with voters who could carry her “gospel” out into the community. Indeed, Hillary’s campaign had about it a kind of Apostolic quality; Scripture tells us that with Twelve, Jesus set in train the salvation of the world.
Indeed, Hillary learned from the 2008 campaign invaluable lessons that have stood her in good stead in 2016. For this has been a campaign that did not end with a defeated Hillary yielding pride of place to a man, albeit having left 17 million cracks in the glass ceiling, but which blew that glass ceiling to smithereens and shows every indication of triumphantly carrying Hillary back to the White House as the first woman President of the United States. I’m proud to say that #imwithher.
Postscript: The Donald had a perfect chance to redeem his piss poor performance in Wednesday night’s debate, had he prepared properly for the Al Smith dinner last night. But, once again, failing to understand that piss poor preparation produces piss poor performance, The Donald once again scorned preparation and thought that he could wing it. Unfortunately, The Donald’s adolescent faith in his ability to wing it once again let him down. His unbelievably heavy-handed and utterly lame attempts at humor at Hillary Clinton’s expense quickly crossed the line from the sort of dry, self-deprecating humor to be expected from the Al Smith dinner into the scorched-earth realms of sheer political insult.
The boos and catcalls that came The Donald’s way ought to have disabused him of any notion that his attempts at humor had been at all successful. Unfortunately, the Donald remains abysmally un-self-aware of his boorish behavior. In short, in the words of presidential historian Michael Beschloss, The Donald bombed at the Al Smith dinner. While some weak kneed Democrats, seeking some kind of moral equivalency, have tried to frame Hillary'sperformance at the Al Smith dinner as somehow just as bad, the fact remains that for of those of us who saw The Donald’s piss poor performance, he didn’t just bomb, he bombed bigly. Last night could have been the “do over” by which he controlled the damage from Wednesday night, but The Donald managed, as he always seems to do against Hillary Clinton, incontinently to fling away the opportunity.
The final word on Donald Trump’s piss poor performance at the Al Smith dinner can probably go to sometime Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, who said of the Palestinians: “they’ve never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” Like the feckless Palestinians of half a century ago, Donald J. Trump has never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. The Al Smith dinner may have been his last chance to stave off a defeat of historic proportions. Instead, the twenty-eight hours between the start of the third debate and the end of the Al Smith dinner may well have been Donald Trump’s Schwarzer Tag des deutschen Heeres, his own Black Day of the German Army, when the Kaiser’s forces sustained a defeat before Amiens that led to the collapse of the German war effort, the fall of Imperial Germany, and the ignominious flight of the Hohenzollern dynasty into exile. All Trump can hope for at this stage is that there will still be deplorables out there to believe his fabricated Dolchstoßlegende, his phony stab-in-the-back "the election is rigged, rigged, I tell you!" narrative.
-xxx-
PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City, California, where he served for eight years on the city council. He is an unapologetic liberal Democrat and a proud, viscerally partisan, Hillary Clinton supporter. He believes Donald Trump is not only a traitor, but a palpable threat to both America’s national security and the well-being of our public institutions of self-government. The views set forth herein are his own. Come for him, and you may find that he is a surprisingly good shot.
Wednesday, October 12, 2016
WHOSE DAY? COLUMBUS DAY? DAY OF THE RACE? DAY OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES? DAY OF THE ENCOUNTER?
Summary: Every year at Columbus Day, we get our knickers in a knot. Should we embrace a breast-beating 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 us 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.
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By: Paul S. Marchand
Cathedral City, October 12, 2016- today is traditional Columbus Day. Two days was Columbus Day as officially observed, curiously coinciding with Double Ten, the anniversary of the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 that overthrew Imperial China’s Qing Dynasty. Today members of the Italian diaspora celebrate Cristoforo Colombo, for whom an Italian crusier and an ocean liner (and sister to the ill-fated Andrea Doria) were named. The Spanish remember him as Cristóbal Colón, the adelantado, Admiral of the Ocean Sea and Viceroy of the Indies, after whom two cruisers were named, presumably to get the better of the Italians, who only built one of them.
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, despite all the finger-wagging going on in some quarters, Völkerwanderungen themselves are morally neutral phenomena.
Yet, in the last analysis, we all are descendants of immigrants from elsewhere, even the ethnic group Columbus first identified as “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 Inuit 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 through complex state societies ranging from the mound-builder descendants of North America and the Méxica peoples, 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 (coupled with a disturbing European willingness to use it), 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, 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.
Indeed, out of the Columbian encounter and the Columbian exchange that ineluctably followed it has come not merely an exchange -or at least a migration- of populations, but also an exchange of biodiversity as well. In 1492, the cuisine of Europe was innocent of any experience of such things as corn (by which I mean maize, not the grain which the British, who seemed unable to handle the English language, call corn and which the rest of the world calls wheat), tomatoes, potatoes, certain types of chile, vanilla, and those three essentials of decadent sex, chocolate, tobacco, and rubber. By the same token, the kitchens of America lacked citrus fruits, apples, mangoes, rice, onions, wheat, and that great staple of jittery people everywhere, coffee. Today, the Columbian exchange means that all of these foods have a place in the kitchens and on the dining tables of both Europe and the Americas.
But more to the point, the Columbian exchange ultimately produced on this continent “a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” as Abraham Lincoln suggested so movingly at Gettysburg. And indeed, without Columbus, and before him, the Viking explorers, that new nation could never have come into being. And in a sense, that is the historical trade-off we have little choice but to accept. Our forebears did indeed bring forth on this continent a new nation.
And if that new nation did not initially live up to the grandeur of its conception, it still bequeathed to the world heritage of ongoing revolution. The American example has made a tour of the world; every national liberation struggle on the planet for the last 200 years has been a descendent of our American Revolution. Padre Hidalgo in Mexico, the angry, famished, Parisians who stormed the Bastille, Ilyich at the Finland Station in St. Petersburg, Gandhiji in India, Nelson Mandela in South Africa, and a whole host of other revolutionaries bear some measure of debt to the the revolutionary rabble that found its courage and confidence at Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill.
Yet a decent regard for the truth compels us to acknowledge that the American nation, conceived though it may have been with grandeur of vision, started life as a deeply flawed society with very real systemic faults. Perhaps Abraham Lincoln was right to refer to this country as “the last, best hope of Earth,” but the emphasis must still be on the word “hope,” as I believe it was for Lincoln himself. For Lincoln, with Jefferson one of the most formidable autodidacts ever to occupy the White House, must surely have been aware of Massachusetts abolitionist Theodore Parker’s observation, repeated by Martin Luther King Jr., that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Across more than 500 years, the long arc of our moral universe has bent toward justice, often imperceptibly and incrementally. The society we called forth on this continent has had to deal forthrightly and was often difficult honesty of self and purpose with its twin original sins of dispossession and slavery. For the arc of our moral universe to bend toward justice, we have had to dare to visualize and to realize a radical vision of a society in which everyone is created equal, including our First Peoples. A society in which everyone has a place at the table and an equal opportunity to participate in the life of the body politic.
We’re not there yet. If we are to keep bending that arc of the moral universe toward justice, we have no choice but to do right by those whom we have wronged. The long story of the post-contact encounter between the white migrants and the first peoples is one written in blood and tears. It is a grim tale of violence, dispossession, and the steady falling back of native peoples before the advance of the pale invaders from across the water. We cannot, as I suggested, reverse the pragmatic sanction of events. Yet we can and must insist that everyone, native and newcomer alike, have a place at our national table. Knowing as we do that the bones of the ancestors of both newcomer and native have become a part of this land, we have a responsibility to those ancestors to refrain from doing hurtful things like running pipelines through those sacred spaces which the bones of our ancestors have hallowed, far above our poor power to add or detract.
If we are to get a handle on Columbus Day, we have to be careful not to err too much on either side. Because in a sense, our approach to Columbus Day cannot be one of either/or. We cannot postulate of Columbus Day that it is a grim, zero-sum equation in which we can either speak of the triumph of the exploring spirit represented by Columbus and his voyage or of the history of “genocide,”a problematic term, because Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish lawyer who coined the term in 1944, defined it as the intentional destruction of a people. Indeed, to the extent that some of the statistics of loss among the native peoples are horrifying, they must still be accounted more as negligence than as intentional conduct. Still, when vast swathes of humanity die as a result of absentmindedness, the result is equally horrifying.
Nevertheless, we should probably see Columbus Day, or as some commentators have suggested we call it, and as I tend to prefer, Encounter Day, as both a time to commemorate the European exploring spirit that enlarged the frontiers of Europe but also immeasurably enlarged the frontiers of the human mind, as well as a time to acknowledge and do penance for the horrors the European explorers so incontinently set in train. This Day of the Encounter should be a time for introspection without recrimination. It should be a time to teach and the time to learn, a time, as the Buddhist sangha might say to us, to meditate and seek enlightenment.
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. 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 “revise and extend” of an earlier post published at this time last year. Since knickers are still in knots, it remains timely.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
By: Paul S. Marchand
Cathedral City, October 12, 2016- today is traditional Columbus Day. Two days was Columbus Day as officially observed, curiously coinciding with Double Ten, the anniversary of the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 that overthrew Imperial China’s Qing Dynasty. Today members of the Italian diaspora celebrate Cristoforo Colombo, for whom an Italian crusier and an ocean liner (and sister to the ill-fated Andrea Doria) were named. The Spanish remember him as Cristóbal Colón, the adelantado, Admiral of the Ocean Sea and Viceroy of the Indies, after whom two cruisers were named, presumably to get the better of the Italians, who only built one of them.
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, despite all the finger-wagging going on in some quarters, Völkerwanderungen themselves are morally neutral phenomena.
Yet, in the last analysis, we all are descendants of immigrants from elsewhere, even the ethnic group Columbus first identified as “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 Inuit 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 through complex state societies ranging from the mound-builder descendants of North America and the Méxica peoples, 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 (coupled with a disturbing European willingness to use it), 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, 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.
Indeed, out of the Columbian encounter and the Columbian exchange that ineluctably followed it has come not merely an exchange -or at least a migration- of populations, but also an exchange of biodiversity as well. In 1492, the cuisine of Europe was innocent of any experience of such things as corn (by which I mean maize, not the grain which the British, who seemed unable to handle the English language, call corn and which the rest of the world calls wheat), tomatoes, potatoes, certain types of chile, vanilla, and those three essentials of decadent sex, chocolate, tobacco, and rubber. By the same token, the kitchens of America lacked citrus fruits, apples, mangoes, rice, onions, wheat, and that great staple of jittery people everywhere, coffee. Today, the Columbian exchange means that all of these foods have a place in the kitchens and on the dining tables of both Europe and the Americas.
But more to the point, the Columbian exchange ultimately produced on this continent “a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” as Abraham Lincoln suggested so movingly at Gettysburg. And indeed, without Columbus, and before him, the Viking explorers, that new nation could never have come into being. And in a sense, that is the historical trade-off we have little choice but to accept. Our forebears did indeed bring forth on this continent a new nation.
And if that new nation did not initially live up to the grandeur of its conception, it still bequeathed to the world heritage of ongoing revolution. The American example has made a tour of the world; every national liberation struggle on the planet for the last 200 years has been a descendent of our American Revolution. Padre Hidalgo in Mexico, the angry, famished, Parisians who stormed the Bastille, Ilyich at the Finland Station in St. Petersburg, Gandhiji in India, Nelson Mandela in South Africa, and a whole host of other revolutionaries bear some measure of debt to the the revolutionary rabble that found its courage and confidence at Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill.
Yet a decent regard for the truth compels us to acknowledge that the American nation, conceived though it may have been with grandeur of vision, started life as a deeply flawed society with very real systemic faults. Perhaps Abraham Lincoln was right to refer to this country as “the last, best hope of Earth,” but the emphasis must still be on the word “hope,” as I believe it was for Lincoln himself. For Lincoln, with Jefferson one of the most formidable autodidacts ever to occupy the White House, must surely have been aware of Massachusetts abolitionist Theodore Parker’s observation, repeated by Martin Luther King Jr., that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Across more than 500 years, the long arc of our moral universe has bent toward justice, often imperceptibly and incrementally. The society we called forth on this continent has had to deal forthrightly and was often difficult honesty of self and purpose with its twin original sins of dispossession and slavery. For the arc of our moral universe to bend toward justice, we have had to dare to visualize and to realize a radical vision of a society in which everyone is created equal, including our First Peoples. A society in which everyone has a place at the table and an equal opportunity to participate in the life of the body politic.
We’re not there yet. If we are to keep bending that arc of the moral universe toward justice, we have no choice but to do right by those whom we have wronged. The long story of the post-contact encounter between the white migrants and the first peoples is one written in blood and tears. It is a grim tale of violence, dispossession, and the steady falling back of native peoples before the advance of the pale invaders from across the water. We cannot, as I suggested, reverse the pragmatic sanction of events. Yet we can and must insist that everyone, native and newcomer alike, have a place at our national table. Knowing as we do that the bones of the ancestors of both newcomer and native have become a part of this land, we have a responsibility to those ancestors to refrain from doing hurtful things like running pipelines through those sacred spaces which the bones of our ancestors have hallowed, far above our poor power to add or detract.
If we are to get a handle on Columbus Day, we have to be careful not to err too much on either side. Because in a sense, our approach to Columbus Day cannot be one of either/or. We cannot postulate of Columbus Day that it is a grim, zero-sum equation in which we can either speak of the triumph of the exploring spirit represented by Columbus and his voyage or of the history of “genocide,”a problematic term, because Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish lawyer who coined the term in 1944, defined it as the intentional destruction of a people. Indeed, to the extent that some of the statistics of loss among the native peoples are horrifying, they must still be accounted more as negligence than as intentional conduct. Still, when vast swathes of humanity die as a result of absentmindedness, the result is equally horrifying.
Nevertheless, we should probably see Columbus Day, or as some commentators have suggested we call it, and as I tend to prefer, Encounter Day, as both a time to commemorate the European exploring spirit that enlarged the frontiers of Europe but also immeasurably enlarged the frontiers of the human mind, as well as a time to acknowledge and do penance for the horrors the European explorers so incontinently set in train. This Day of the Encounter should be a time for introspection without recrimination. It should be a time to teach and the time to learn, a time, as the Buddhist sangha might say to us, to meditate and seek enlightenment.
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. 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 “revise and extend” of an earlier post published at this time last year. Since knickers are still in knots, it remains timely.
OUT, BUT DOMESTICATED
Summary: For gay men of a certain age, coming out used to be an experience carried out after careful introspection. Many of us of that certain age remember when our sexuality was fraught with the taint of implicit criminality, of the “abominable and detestable crime against nature.” Yet, in some ways, we managed to pull off a kind of collective fabulousness that seems to be disappearing as we have become more integrated, less exotic and more endotic. If at one time coming out was a declaration of independence leading to freedom, now it is become a high school rite of passage akin to getting one’s first driver’s license. In becoming endotic, are we losing touch with our fabulousness? Are we becoming the queer equivalent of the kitschy, plastic coyotes for sale in tourist traps throughout the American Southwest?
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Yesterday, October 11, was the annual repetition of the cultural phenomenon known as National Coming Out Day.
It is a time, perhaps, for queerfolk to contemplate the process by which we emerged from our own individual closets. The series of steps, often incremental and punctuated with false starts, by which we came to own our queer identities.
I, for example, can remember the first time I kissed another boy and liked it -craved it, even- nearly 4 decades ago, when I was all of fifteen. I can remember my first same-sex encounter shortly after that, receiving a hurried blow job in the side yard of a house in Pacific Palisades during a party. I remember what it felt like to “go all the way” with another guy, in a bedroom in a fraternity house on the Vanderbilt campus in Nashville, shortly after turning eighteen.
What I remember so particularly about those initial encounters, those early forays into same-sex intimacy, is how fraught they were. Those first two underage encounters, could, even in ostensibly liberal California, have called forth criminal prosecution. As one senior deputy district attorney put it recently, “the position of this office is that it is absolutely illegal in California for any person under the age of eighteen to be sexually intimate in any way, shape, or form.”
The situation in Tennessee was even worse. My fraternity house fling with that other young man, also eighteen, could have resulted in a felony prosecution for “the abominable and detestable crime against nature,” a serious felony in Tennessee at the time, which could have led to a sentence of multiple years in a state penitentiary.
Moreover, in addition to being tarred with the stigma of criminality, any excursions in same-sex intimacy in the late 1970s and early 1980s also took place against the backdrop of an impending or actual health crisis that, even today, I remember with a combination of apprehension and deep sadness, both fears and tears. For in truth, I came of age, both legally and sexually, at perhaps one of the most devastating times in the entire history of the queer community.
For what middle-aged queer man, “of a certain age,” then living in either New York or Los Angeles, does not remember two stories that appeared simultaneously in the July 3, 1981 editions of the New York Times and the Los Angeles times headlined “Rare Cancer Found in 41 Homosexuals?” Having kissed another boy, and having experienced the equivocal pleasures of my first blow job, I was, at seventeen, paying fairly regular attention to news coverage of what was then called simply “the gay community.”
Of course, since I did not want my parents to become aware that there might be something ... different about their son, I was very careful how I consumed such coverage. My discretion took the form of consuming the news while they were out of the house, and it was thus that I read the story in the Los Angeles Times.
And indeed, I read the story with great care, and as I did so, I found myself filled with the kind of nameless, inchoate dread, a sense that something awful was unfolding, that the metaphorical candy store was closing. The years of sexual liberation, I realized, were coming to an end.
And they were.
The history of the AIDS epidemic is too well known to require extensive recapitulation here. As gay men became ill and began to die at a frightening rate, those of us who were teetering on the brink of disclosure took counsel of ourselves and perhaps a few friends, redecorated our closets, and hunkered down for what promised to be a very long siege. Indeed, some of us retreated so far into the closet that we practically came out in Narnia.
Indeed, as the crisis grew larger, and the disease acquired a name, AIDS, it also assumed near mythic proportions. We were told many fearful things:
It might become airborne,
You could catch it from a toilet seat,
You could catch it from shaking hands or from a chaste peck on the cheek and, most bizarre of all,
Gay men with the disease were licking the fruit (!) in the produce displays in supermarkets in order to spread the disease.
The implication of all this fearmongering and mythmaking was that having any form of sex at all, or sharing the slightest degree of same-sex intimacy, meant that one was signing one’s own death warrant, condemning oneself to a slow and hideous demise.
Much of this fear mongering came, not surprisingly, from our straight neighbors. From those who did not propose to tolerate our presence in the body politic, the warnings were often delivered with ill disguised or undisguised schadenfreude. But worse than that was the fearmongering and mythmaking that came from our allies, in the form of “friendly” admonition or commiseration that did little but reinforce the closetedness that so many of us felt condemned to.
Like many queerfolk, my own coming out was delayed by the health crisis. Through nearly a decade of college and law school, I remained the soul of closeted discretion. My vision of the Narnia at the back of my own closet, the West Hollywood of my fantasies, was a mythical, paradisiacal place where the men were handsome, the sex was hot, the health crisis was far away, and where one need fear neither societal censure nor the prospect of a lingering, languishing death.
Indeed, perhaps the greatest paradox of the AIDS crisis was how it not only brought our existence and our plight to the attention of our straight neighbors, but how, in a way, it forced us to mature as a community. For in a sense, the crisis was our own London blitz, our own Stalingrad, our own Srebrenica, our own Golgotha. Yet, we survived. Like the Abbé Sieyès of the French Revolution, the byword for us was “nous avons vecu:” we lived.
And not only did we survive, we thrived in adversity. We learned how to reach purposefully for the levers of political power. We learned again the lesson of Stonewall: asking nicely gets you nowhere. We learned how to appeal to the sympathy, compunction, and sense of decency of the majority of our straight neighbors. And we appealed most of all to queer “proximity empathy,” that empathic sense that arises in people who realize that a friend, a family member, a neighbor, or a coworker, in short, anyone to whom one may be emotionally connected, is queer.
And, surveying the ground, realizing that the time had probably come when I could no longer conceal this existential fact about myself, I finally came out. It was July, 1990, nine years after those fateful headlines, and two weeks after being admitted to the California Bar. I was 26 when I came out, and indeed, 26 was, at the time, the average age for coming out.
I knew what it had been like to live a life of at least ostensible straightness. Indeed, I was not inexperienced in opposite-sex sexual intimacy. I had managed, despite terrible, probably morally blameworthy, imposture on my part, to provide my opposite-sex partners with reasonably satisfactory sexual experiences. Fortunately, I congratulated myself, I had not got sucked in to an ongoing relationship with any of the women with whom I had gone through the forms of traditional heterosexual intimacy.
Coming out, formally admitting to my family and to my friends, without any quibble, cavil, or demur, that I was in fact a queer boy, a pooftah, a homosexualist (pace, Gore Vidal), a man who had sex with other men, in short that I was as queer as pink ink and as gay as a goose, proved in the event to be every bit the liberating experience it has been described by so many queer writers as being.
Being out to the family meant freedom from the exquisite discretion that I had theretofore felt necessary. I no longer had to be so careful when I looked at the paper. I no longer had to engage in the invidious pronoun shift so well known to queerfolk. I could take the occasional gander at a cute guy, even if I happened to be in the company of relatives.
Being out, in short, meant that I could be candid about myself and the existential reality of what I was and am. Queer pundit Andrew Sullivan has observed that one of the critical marks of differencing the distinguishes gay men from our straight neighbors is our candor about matters sexual. That candor can be liberating, although I don’t know a single gay man who is not been admonished by even supportive family members that he is offering “TMI,” too much information.
Yet, at some point along one’s queer journey, the personal ineluctably becomes the political. And, perhaps ineluctably, I became involved in a series of queer causes. I did the AIDS walk. I marched in the pride parade, swinging a smoking thurible 2 miles down Santa Monica Blvd. at the head of the Episcopal Church contingent. I did pro bono work for AIDS patients, and in 1993, I was one of the first attorneys to challenge California’s ban on same-gender marriage, when I took on the case of two earnest young men who desired to be wed.
And it was then that I started to realize that the queer community, which had seemed to present such a united front to the straights was actually as divided and as full of bureaucrats, careerists, and apparatchiks as any straight community. I realized that there existed an unofficial, and extremely territorial, bureaucracy that had essentially taken possession of the queer community, and was very much determined to protect what it considered its territory against those whom they saw as interlopers. They saw themselves as very much the “Official Movement,” so to speak. They had made themselves very much the go-to people whenever the media, straight or queer, wanted commentary on any development affecting the queer nation.
Not surprisingly, this Official Movement considered itself very much in charge of setting the political agenda for queerfolk everywhere. Indeed, the penalty for not getting in lockstep with the Official Movement on whatever issue was considered important by that Official Movement was to be shunned and ostracized, without limitation of time.
In 1993, the Official Movement, obsessed as it then was with the issue of queerfolk in the military was not ready by any means to deal with marriage equality. Consequently, the Official Movement made it very clear to my marriage case clients and to me that we were “interlopers,” against whom they had set their face.
Indeed, instead of helping us, the Official Movement and its toadies in the queer media did their level best to hinder us, publicly chastising us and speaking of my clients and me that, had any straight person uttered them, would have been considered inappropriate, indeed, this is a homophobic. Both my clients and I put up with many unjust slings and arrows from the Official Movement.
And that, to all intents and purposes, represented the end of my interaction with the Official Movement, and with the people who make up the Official Movement; the operators, the people-on-the-make, the checkbook activists, the gender police, the social-justice-warriors, the PC enforcers, the come-late-to-the-party types, the chow line crashers, and - let us shame the devil and tell the truth - the star fuckers and the victory pimps, the people who will shove you aside to step up to the podia to claim a piece of a victory they had no share in making.
And, the “official movement” is still very much composed of such people today, operators, young-men-on-the-make, checkbook activists, gender warriors, PC enforcers, come late-to-the-party types, chow line crashers, the star fuckers, and the victory pimps. Most of us know who the victory pimps are; they’re the people who appear out of nowhere to participate in any victory the queer nation obtains. After all, as Galeazzo Ciano (Mussolini’s son-in-law and Foreign Minister) so famously put it, “victory has a thousand fathers. Defeat is an orphan.”
When Obergefell v. Hodges came down last year, guaranteeing marriage equality nationwide, the Official Movement, the star fuckers, and the victory pimps emerged from the woodwork and were falling all over each other to muscle their way to the head of the chow line to claim some share of the achievement. As I observed in my blog post of June 26 of last year,
"Bitter, party of one, my table has been ready for a generation, because I see what can happen when an Official Movement muscles its way to the head of the chow line. So, while I was happy for 15 minutes, it’s now back to normal, and I see nothing to celebrate by foregathering in 115° weather to be preached at by people who haven’t got the slightest clue about how our fight developed and how it was won."
And indeed, a great many of the Doyens and Doyennes of the Official Movement really do have not the slightest clue about the manner in which our fight developed, or the manner in which was won. The coiffed, immaculately dressed, well-turned-out, passably cute twentysomethings and thirtysomethings who have become the face of the Official Movement have no idea what it was like during those days before the crisis, those liberated days of the late 1970s when anything seemed possible, even to a proto-homosexual still in his teen years.
Because, to a large extent, we have become domesticated. We are now just as much an integral Footnote Four minority in American society as the Irish, the Jews, the Buddhists, the Pagan/Wiccans and all the other communities that were once considered fashionably exotic. Like the Irish and the Jews, who also have been thoroughly integrated into American society, we’ve gone from being an exotic, quasi-criminal fringe with fabulous taste to being endotic, just like the Irish or the Jews, albeit still with fabulous taste.
And, being domesticated and endotic, should it surprise us that the average age for coming out has dropped from 26 into the early teens. Coming out is now less a process to be carried out with due introspection and complete honesty of self and purpose and more and adolescent rite of passage akin to getting one’s first drivers license. I can’t help but wonder if we haven’t lost something in the process. Like many older gay men, I wonder if we haven’t bereaved ourselves or been bereaved of some of what makes us unique -special, even- in society. In becoming a bourgeois, Footnote Four minority, enjoying significant protections in America’s most populous, bluest states, have we not lost touch with some of that subversive fabulousness which was so integral in making us us?
We queerfolk of a certain age have been tested as in a refiner’s fire. We had to learn the disciplines and protocols of exquisite discretion, of living well under both the disco ball and the sword of Damocles at the same time. Has our domestication, our transformation from exotic to endotic, deprived us of that faculty for living well in a time of crisis, for being fabulous, for seeing the irony in life and for holding up the shibboleths of society to relentless and critical examination? Have we lost our capacity for cultural dissidence? Or is it just that as we’ve get older it’s not so fabulous anymore?
Some months back, I looked in on a dear friend of mine, still fabulous at 65. Being as he is thirteen years my senior, his memories - and those of his equally fabulous husband- of the late 70s are sharper than mine; his experiences differ from mine, yet in many ways, they and I have more in common than either of us does with an out, loud, and proud high school senior taking his boyfriend to the prom, something we could never have done at that age. We were standing by the sliding glass doors in his living room, looking out at the pool under a rainy sky.
It was a somber moment, and my friend turned to me and reminded me of an almost untranslatable haiku from Nagai Kafū, the great Japanese novelist of prewar Tokyo. Kafū’s haiku, in rough translation, is
Falling snow,
And Meiji is far away.
Turning to me as we watched the rain fall, making ripples on the water of the pool, he offered his riff on Kafū’s haiku:
Falling rain,
And Studio 54 is far away.
His haiku was, in its own way, an elegiac lament for a time we were old enough to remember, mature enough to know will never come again, and yet still special enough to us for us to regret its passing.
I’m glad I can be out. I didn’t expect things would turn out as they have. I can be who I authentically am, but I feel much of the collective Outness of our community is in danger of slipping away from us, until we become nothing more than overly domesticated sexual minority kitsch, like mass-produced plastic souvenir coyotes howling at the pot lights in a tourist trap along a dark desert highway.
-xxx-
PAUL S. MARCHAND is a fiftysomething attorney who lives and practices law in Cathedral City, where he served two terms on the city Council. He is as queer as pink ink, and is not apologize for it. The views expressed herein are his own, and are certainly not those of the queer Official Movement. They are not intended as and are not to be construed as legal advice.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yesterday, October 11, was the annual repetition of the cultural phenomenon known as National Coming Out Day.
It is a time, perhaps, for queerfolk to contemplate the process by which we emerged from our own individual closets. The series of steps, often incremental and punctuated with false starts, by which we came to own our queer identities.
I, for example, can remember the first time I kissed another boy and liked it -craved it, even- nearly 4 decades ago, when I was all of fifteen. I can remember my first same-sex encounter shortly after that, receiving a hurried blow job in the side yard of a house in Pacific Palisades during a party. I remember what it felt like to “go all the way” with another guy, in a bedroom in a fraternity house on the Vanderbilt campus in Nashville, shortly after turning eighteen.
What I remember so particularly about those initial encounters, those early forays into same-sex intimacy, is how fraught they were. Those first two underage encounters, could, even in ostensibly liberal California, have called forth criminal prosecution. As one senior deputy district attorney put it recently, “the position of this office is that it is absolutely illegal in California for any person under the age of eighteen to be sexually intimate in any way, shape, or form.”
The situation in Tennessee was even worse. My fraternity house fling with that other young man, also eighteen, could have resulted in a felony prosecution for “the abominable and detestable crime against nature,” a serious felony in Tennessee at the time, which could have led to a sentence of multiple years in a state penitentiary.
Moreover, in addition to being tarred with the stigma of criminality, any excursions in same-sex intimacy in the late 1970s and early 1980s also took place against the backdrop of an impending or actual health crisis that, even today, I remember with a combination of apprehension and deep sadness, both fears and tears. For in truth, I came of age, both legally and sexually, at perhaps one of the most devastating times in the entire history of the queer community.
For what middle-aged queer man, “of a certain age,” then living in either New York or Los Angeles, does not remember two stories that appeared simultaneously in the July 3, 1981 editions of the New York Times and the Los Angeles times headlined “Rare Cancer Found in 41 Homosexuals?” Having kissed another boy, and having experienced the equivocal pleasures of my first blow job, I was, at seventeen, paying fairly regular attention to news coverage of what was then called simply “the gay community.”
Of course, since I did not want my parents to become aware that there might be something ... different about their son, I was very careful how I consumed such coverage. My discretion took the form of consuming the news while they were out of the house, and it was thus that I read the story in the Los Angeles Times.
And indeed, I read the story with great care, and as I did so, I found myself filled with the kind of nameless, inchoate dread, a sense that something awful was unfolding, that the metaphorical candy store was closing. The years of sexual liberation, I realized, were coming to an end.
And they were.
The history of the AIDS epidemic is too well known to require extensive recapitulation here. As gay men became ill and began to die at a frightening rate, those of us who were teetering on the brink of disclosure took counsel of ourselves and perhaps a few friends, redecorated our closets, and hunkered down for what promised to be a very long siege. Indeed, some of us retreated so far into the closet that we practically came out in Narnia.
Indeed, as the crisis grew larger, and the disease acquired a name, AIDS, it also assumed near mythic proportions. We were told many fearful things:
It might become airborne,
You could catch it from a toilet seat,
You could catch it from shaking hands or from a chaste peck on the cheek and, most bizarre of all,
Gay men with the disease were licking the fruit (!) in the produce displays in supermarkets in order to spread the disease.
The implication of all this fearmongering and mythmaking was that having any form of sex at all, or sharing the slightest degree of same-sex intimacy, meant that one was signing one’s own death warrant, condemning oneself to a slow and hideous demise.
Much of this fear mongering came, not surprisingly, from our straight neighbors. From those who did not propose to tolerate our presence in the body politic, the warnings were often delivered with ill disguised or undisguised schadenfreude. But worse than that was the fearmongering and mythmaking that came from our allies, in the form of “friendly” admonition or commiseration that did little but reinforce the closetedness that so many of us felt condemned to.
Like many queerfolk, my own coming out was delayed by the health crisis. Through nearly a decade of college and law school, I remained the soul of closeted discretion. My vision of the Narnia at the back of my own closet, the West Hollywood of my fantasies, was a mythical, paradisiacal place where the men were handsome, the sex was hot, the health crisis was far away, and where one need fear neither societal censure nor the prospect of a lingering, languishing death.
Indeed, perhaps the greatest paradox of the AIDS crisis was how it not only brought our existence and our plight to the attention of our straight neighbors, but how, in a way, it forced us to mature as a community. For in a sense, the crisis was our own London blitz, our own Stalingrad, our own Srebrenica, our own Golgotha. Yet, we survived. Like the Abbé Sieyès of the French Revolution, the byword for us was “nous avons vecu:” we lived.
And not only did we survive, we thrived in adversity. We learned how to reach purposefully for the levers of political power. We learned again the lesson of Stonewall: asking nicely gets you nowhere. We learned how to appeal to the sympathy, compunction, and sense of decency of the majority of our straight neighbors. And we appealed most of all to queer “proximity empathy,” that empathic sense that arises in people who realize that a friend, a family member, a neighbor, or a coworker, in short, anyone to whom one may be emotionally connected, is queer.
And, surveying the ground, realizing that the time had probably come when I could no longer conceal this existential fact about myself, I finally came out. It was July, 1990, nine years after those fateful headlines, and two weeks after being admitted to the California Bar. I was 26 when I came out, and indeed, 26 was, at the time, the average age for coming out.
I knew what it had been like to live a life of at least ostensible straightness. Indeed, I was not inexperienced in opposite-sex sexual intimacy. I had managed, despite terrible, probably morally blameworthy, imposture on my part, to provide my opposite-sex partners with reasonably satisfactory sexual experiences. Fortunately, I congratulated myself, I had not got sucked in to an ongoing relationship with any of the women with whom I had gone through the forms of traditional heterosexual intimacy.
Coming out, formally admitting to my family and to my friends, without any quibble, cavil, or demur, that I was in fact a queer boy, a pooftah, a homosexualist (pace, Gore Vidal), a man who had sex with other men, in short that I was as queer as pink ink and as gay as a goose, proved in the event to be every bit the liberating experience it has been described by so many queer writers as being.
Being out to the family meant freedom from the exquisite discretion that I had theretofore felt necessary. I no longer had to be so careful when I looked at the paper. I no longer had to engage in the invidious pronoun shift so well known to queerfolk. I could take the occasional gander at a cute guy, even if I happened to be in the company of relatives.
Being out, in short, meant that I could be candid about myself and the existential reality of what I was and am. Queer pundit Andrew Sullivan has observed that one of the critical marks of differencing the distinguishes gay men from our straight neighbors is our candor about matters sexual. That candor can be liberating, although I don’t know a single gay man who is not been admonished by even supportive family members that he is offering “TMI,” too much information.
Yet, at some point along one’s queer journey, the personal ineluctably becomes the political. And, perhaps ineluctably, I became involved in a series of queer causes. I did the AIDS walk. I marched in the pride parade, swinging a smoking thurible 2 miles down Santa Monica Blvd. at the head of the Episcopal Church contingent. I did pro bono work for AIDS patients, and in 1993, I was one of the first attorneys to challenge California’s ban on same-gender marriage, when I took on the case of two earnest young men who desired to be wed.
And it was then that I started to realize that the queer community, which had seemed to present such a united front to the straights was actually as divided and as full of bureaucrats, careerists, and apparatchiks as any straight community. I realized that there existed an unofficial, and extremely territorial, bureaucracy that had essentially taken possession of the queer community, and was very much determined to protect what it considered its territory against those whom they saw as interlopers. They saw themselves as very much the “Official Movement,” so to speak. They had made themselves very much the go-to people whenever the media, straight or queer, wanted commentary on any development affecting the queer nation.
Not surprisingly, this Official Movement considered itself very much in charge of setting the political agenda for queerfolk everywhere. Indeed, the penalty for not getting in lockstep with the Official Movement on whatever issue was considered important by that Official Movement was to be shunned and ostracized, without limitation of time.
In 1993, the Official Movement, obsessed as it then was with the issue of queerfolk in the military was not ready by any means to deal with marriage equality. Consequently, the Official Movement made it very clear to my marriage case clients and to me that we were “interlopers,” against whom they had set their face.
Indeed, instead of helping us, the Official Movement and its toadies in the queer media did their level best to hinder us, publicly chastising us and speaking of my clients and me that, had any straight person uttered them, would have been considered inappropriate, indeed, this is a homophobic. Both my clients and I put up with many unjust slings and arrows from the Official Movement.
And that, to all intents and purposes, represented the end of my interaction with the Official Movement, and with the people who make up the Official Movement; the operators, the people-on-the-make, the checkbook activists, the gender police, the social-justice-warriors, the PC enforcers, the come-late-to-the-party types, the chow line crashers, and - let us shame the devil and tell the truth - the star fuckers and the victory pimps, the people who will shove you aside to step up to the podia to claim a piece of a victory they had no share in making.
And, the “official movement” is still very much composed of such people today, operators, young-men-on-the-make, checkbook activists, gender warriors, PC enforcers, come late-to-the-party types, chow line crashers, the star fuckers, and the victory pimps. Most of us know who the victory pimps are; they’re the people who appear out of nowhere to participate in any victory the queer nation obtains. After all, as Galeazzo Ciano (Mussolini’s son-in-law and Foreign Minister) so famously put it, “victory has a thousand fathers. Defeat is an orphan.”
When Obergefell v. Hodges came down last year, guaranteeing marriage equality nationwide, the Official Movement, the star fuckers, and the victory pimps emerged from the woodwork and were falling all over each other to muscle their way to the head of the chow line to claim some share of the achievement. As I observed in my blog post of June 26 of last year,
"Bitter, party of one, my table has been ready for a generation, because I see what can happen when an Official Movement muscles its way to the head of the chow line. So, while I was happy for 15 minutes, it’s now back to normal, and I see nothing to celebrate by foregathering in 115° weather to be preached at by people who haven’t got the slightest clue about how our fight developed and how it was won."
And indeed, a great many of the Doyens and Doyennes of the Official Movement really do have not the slightest clue about the manner in which our fight developed, or the manner in which was won. The coiffed, immaculately dressed, well-turned-out, passably cute twentysomethings and thirtysomethings who have become the face of the Official Movement have no idea what it was like during those days before the crisis, those liberated days of the late 1970s when anything seemed possible, even to a proto-homosexual still in his teen years.
Because, to a large extent, we have become domesticated. We are now just as much an integral Footnote Four minority in American society as the Irish, the Jews, the Buddhists, the Pagan/Wiccans and all the other communities that were once considered fashionably exotic. Like the Irish and the Jews, who also have been thoroughly integrated into American society, we’ve gone from being an exotic, quasi-criminal fringe with fabulous taste to being endotic, just like the Irish or the Jews, albeit still with fabulous taste.
And, being domesticated and endotic, should it surprise us that the average age for coming out has dropped from 26 into the early teens. Coming out is now less a process to be carried out with due introspection and complete honesty of self and purpose and more and adolescent rite of passage akin to getting one’s first drivers license. I can’t help but wonder if we haven’t lost something in the process. Like many older gay men, I wonder if we haven’t bereaved ourselves or been bereaved of some of what makes us unique -special, even- in society. In becoming a bourgeois, Footnote Four minority, enjoying significant protections in America’s most populous, bluest states, have we not lost touch with some of that subversive fabulousness which was so integral in making us us?
We queerfolk of a certain age have been tested as in a refiner’s fire. We had to learn the disciplines and protocols of exquisite discretion, of living well under both the disco ball and the sword of Damocles at the same time. Has our domestication, our transformation from exotic to endotic, deprived us of that faculty for living well in a time of crisis, for being fabulous, for seeing the irony in life and for holding up the shibboleths of society to relentless and critical examination? Have we lost our capacity for cultural dissidence? Or is it just that as we’ve get older it’s not so fabulous anymore?
Some months back, I looked in on a dear friend of mine, still fabulous at 65. Being as he is thirteen years my senior, his memories - and those of his equally fabulous husband- of the late 70s are sharper than mine; his experiences differ from mine, yet in many ways, they and I have more in common than either of us does with an out, loud, and proud high school senior taking his boyfriend to the prom, something we could never have done at that age. We were standing by the sliding glass doors in his living room, looking out at the pool under a rainy sky.
It was a somber moment, and my friend turned to me and reminded me of an almost untranslatable haiku from Nagai Kafū, the great Japanese novelist of prewar Tokyo. Kafū’s haiku, in rough translation, is
Falling snow,
And Meiji is far away.
Turning to me as we watched the rain fall, making ripples on the water of the pool, he offered his riff on Kafū’s haiku:
Falling rain,
And Studio 54 is far away.
His haiku was, in its own way, an elegiac lament for a time we were old enough to remember, mature enough to know will never come again, and yet still special enough to us for us to regret its passing.
I’m glad I can be out. I didn’t expect things would turn out as they have. I can be who I authentically am, but I feel much of the collective Outness of our community is in danger of slipping away from us, until we become nothing more than overly domesticated sexual minority kitsch, like mass-produced plastic souvenir coyotes howling at the pot lights in a tourist trap along a dark desert highway.
-xxx-
PAUL S. MARCHAND is a fiftysomething attorney who lives and practices law in Cathedral City, where he served two terms on the city Council. He is as queer as pink ink, and is not apologize for it. The views expressed herein are his own, and are certainly not those of the queer Official Movement. They are not intended as and are not to be construed as legal advice.
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