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.
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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.
Wednesday, October 12, 2016
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.
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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.
Monday, October 10, 2016
THE CAGED PANTHER PROWLS: DONALD TRUMP LOSES ANOTHER DEBATE
Summary: Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton squared off again for their second debate. Though Republican supporters of Donald Trump are trying mightily to frame the debate as a Trump “win,” serious scientific polling, including the CNN/ORC poll taken last night suggests a very different outcome. Trump wasted no time ramping up his rhetoric, displaying his banana Republican tendencies, his penchant for Putin-like vengeance, and his absolute lack of command of the issues.
But worse even than that, as much as Donald Trump tried to present a more disciplined image of himself as a competent campaigner, his campaign appears to have targeted the wrong Clinton. Bill Clinton, the target of Trump’s hypocritical scorn, is not actually running for president of the United States. Trump’s effort to target the victimized spouse and to blame that victimized spouse for her husband’s alleged infidelities, together with his bizarre physical “manifestations” during the debate, can be regarded as nothing less than a master class in sexist bullying.
At all events, if Donald Trump thought that last night would reverse the irreversible decline of his campaign, he learned that Karl Marx was right to observe that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton took the stage last night for their second debate. To any reasonable person watching the performance, Karl Marx’s comment from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”
Trump’s farcical performance last night managed to veer unsteadily between grotesque physical bullying and creepy banana republic type threats. He prowled about the stage through most of the debate like a caged panther, standing at one point glowering behind Hillary as she responded to a question. As one woman commentator said later, if he had done that to her on the street, she would have had 911 ready to dial on her phone. He sniffled constantly, modeling the demeanor of a man intoxicated after having done several lines of cocaine in the green room.
And indeed, it is entirely possible that The Donald may have been under the influence of cocaine. His bluster, the misplaced self-confidence, and those endless, annoying, ostentatious, sniffles caused many observers of the debate, including former DNC chair Governor Howard Dean to wonder whether The Donald was not in fact coked off his ass
Moreover, cocaine as a drug is remarkable for making its users paranoid, horny... and impotent. Trump’s paranoia, and his dangerous, Putin-like penchant for vengeance were on ample display last night. His threat to appoint a special prosecutor and jail Hillary Clinton was the kind of thing that in normal circumstances we would expect from the dictator in some banana republics somewhere. Never did Donald Trump so resemble Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet as he did in that moment. Dictators imprison their political rivals; we do not expect, and are not disposed to tolerate, such behavior from an American presidential candidate.
Indeed, what we saw last night, in the starkest tones, was how Donald Trump, a serial sexual predator with an obviously diagnosable clinical psychopathology, proposed to govern if we Americans are foolish enough to entrust him with the chance. Never in the history of the United States has any victorious candidate threatened to, let alone attempted to, set the instrumentalities of the criminal law in train against his unsuccessful rival. Donald Trump’s threat to jail Hillary Clinton may well go down as the death knell of his campaign.
And quite right, too! Though many of Trump’s supporters will insist that Trump “won” last night’s debate, spamming online polls to skew the results, his “victory,” such as it may have been, will prove, in the event, to be as illusory as the “victory” of Mike Pence in last week’s vice presidential debate. Pence’s “victory” was soon undone and overshadowed by the devastating revelations concerning The Donald himself, which grabbed the American public’s metaphorical pussy, and haven’t let go. Already, new revelations of further deplorable sexual misconduct have begun to surface, with further adverse effects upon The Donald’s campaign.
Last night, The Donald had a chance to reverse, or at least arrest temporarily, the irreversible decline of his campaign. Yet through most of the ninety minutes of what CBS’s Bob Schieffer has characterized as one of the most “disgraceful” debates in history, Trump was charging willy-nilly around the stage campaigning against Bill Clinton, rather than against the actual Democratic candidate for president. In short, Donald the bully was pursuing the wrong Clinton.
Yet, with his physical “manifestations” on full display in front, as they say in the American South, “of God and everybody,” his creepy, fascistic threats, and his apparent inability or unwillingness to answer the questions put to him, The Donald managed to fling improvidently and incontinently away every single chance he had to use this debate to try to salvage his own campaign. Instead of coming across as presidential, a status he left by default to Hillary Clinton (who pulls it off so very much much better), The Donald came across as the sexist bully he is.
The Donald’s performance may have appealed to angry white men of a certain generation and level of educational attainment, but this election has ceased to be about angry white men of a certain generation and level of educational attainment. This election, more than any other in American history, is an election of color. The presidency of the United States will be decided by women, whom Trump is losing in droves, by communities of color, and by politically engaged queerfolk. Donald Trump’s nightmare voter in this election is an angry, motivated, fearful-of-Trump African-American lesbian.
In my analysis of the first presidential debate, I analogized it to George Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg, the so-called “high water mark of the Confederacy.” This debate I would analogize to a less known pair of battles, the first at Franklin, Tennessee in at the end of November, 1864, and the second before Nashville fifteen days later. At Franklin, the Confederate commander, Gen. John Bell Hood, angry at his own army, and determined to punish it for what he saw as it shortcomings, flung his Confederate troops against union general John M. Schofield’s superior forces. Schofield, who had been withdrawing upon Nashville, remained in possession of the field and continued his withdrawal. Fifteen days later, Hood, still angry, attacked the union fortifications around Nashville, and was decisively beaten. With the defeat at Nashville, the Confederate Army of Tennessee had ceased to exist as a viable fighting force. If Hood mortally wounded his army at Franklin, he would kill it two weeks later at Nashville. D. Eicher Longest Night: A Military History of the Civil War 775.
Trump, who now appears to have incontinently opened up a second front in his campaign by picking fights with his fellow Republicans, has managed to do for his campaign the same bad service that John Bell Hood, who was similarly notorious for his lack of impulse control, did for the dying Confederacy. If the debate first against Hillary Clinton mortally wounded his campaign, this debate may very well have killed it.
Of course, the postmortems may be premature. Trump may well be able to pull some semblance of a campaign back together, even in the face of the revelations of sexual misconduct which have dogged it in recent days. But that may be more of a miracle then can be imagined in the four weeks remaining of this campaign. The Donald would do well to remember the counsels of the Caroline divines, the Restoration theologians who set the Anglican faith on firm footings: “we sinners can pray for a miracle, but we cannot demand one.”
As the Trump campaign begins its endgame, it can be expected to go through the late stage death agonies common to all American political campaigns. Former McCain presidential campaign advisor Steve Schmidt has opined that the election is over; the vote for Hillary Clinton is constitutionally required, but is now virtually superfluous. Other Republican operatives have said much the same thing; only a miracle can save Donald Trump now.
Yet, the Hillary Clinton campaign cannot afford to become complacent. There is, of course, always the risk that WikiLeaks, on orders from the Kremlin, will try some new, outcome determinative, data leak, or that something equally catastrophic might happen. But, at this late date, the Clinton campaign can but press forward, adjuring it supporters to vote, phonebank, engage in aggressive GOTV, and work as if Hillary were not five points up, but three points down. The election, at this stage, is Hillary’s to lose, and we must not permit that to happen.
-xxx-
PAUL S. MARCHAND, Esq. is an attorney who lives and practices law in Cathedral City, where he served for eight years as a member of the city Council. He would consider it a badge of honor to be on Donald Trump’s enemies list. As Pat Conroy put it in The Lords of Discipline, he is willing to lead a revolt in the mountains if Trump becomes president and make a general out of the first national guardsmen who brings him Donald trumps nuts in a mason jar. The views herein are Mr. Marchand’s own and should not be construed as legal advice.
But worse even than that, as much as Donald Trump tried to present a more disciplined image of himself as a competent campaigner, his campaign appears to have targeted the wrong Clinton. Bill Clinton, the target of Trump’s hypocritical scorn, is not actually running for president of the United States. Trump’s effort to target the victimized spouse and to blame that victimized spouse for her husband’s alleged infidelities, together with his bizarre physical “manifestations” during the debate, can be regarded as nothing less than a master class in sexist bullying.
At all events, if Donald Trump thought that last night would reverse the irreversible decline of his campaign, he learned that Karl Marx was right to observe that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton took the stage last night for their second debate. To any reasonable person watching the performance, Karl Marx’s comment from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”
Trump’s farcical performance last night managed to veer unsteadily between grotesque physical bullying and creepy banana republic type threats. He prowled about the stage through most of the debate like a caged panther, standing at one point glowering behind Hillary as she responded to a question. As one woman commentator said later, if he had done that to her on the street, she would have had 911 ready to dial on her phone. He sniffled constantly, modeling the demeanor of a man intoxicated after having done several lines of cocaine in the green room.
And indeed, it is entirely possible that The Donald may have been under the influence of cocaine. His bluster, the misplaced self-confidence, and those endless, annoying, ostentatious, sniffles caused many observers of the debate, including former DNC chair Governor Howard Dean to wonder whether The Donald was not in fact coked off his ass
Moreover, cocaine as a drug is remarkable for making its users paranoid, horny... and impotent. Trump’s paranoia, and his dangerous, Putin-like penchant for vengeance were on ample display last night. His threat to appoint a special prosecutor and jail Hillary Clinton was the kind of thing that in normal circumstances we would expect from the dictator in some banana republics somewhere. Never did Donald Trump so resemble Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet as he did in that moment. Dictators imprison their political rivals; we do not expect, and are not disposed to tolerate, such behavior from an American presidential candidate.
And quite right, too! Though many of Trump’s supporters will insist that Trump “won” last night’s debate, spamming online polls to skew the results, his “victory,” such as it may have been, will prove, in the event, to be as illusory as the “victory” of Mike Pence in last week’s vice presidential debate. Pence’s “victory” was soon undone and overshadowed by the devastating revelations concerning The Donald himself, which grabbed the American public’s metaphorical pussy, and haven’t let go. Already, new revelations of further deplorable sexual misconduct have begun to surface, with further adverse effects upon The Donald’s campaign.
Last night, The Donald had a chance to reverse, or at least arrest temporarily, the irreversible decline of his campaign. Yet through most of the ninety minutes of what CBS’s Bob Schieffer has characterized as one of the most “disgraceful” debates in history, Trump was charging willy-nilly around the stage campaigning against Bill Clinton, rather than against the actual Democratic candidate for president. In short, Donald the bully was pursuing the wrong Clinton.
Yet, with his physical “manifestations” on full display in front, as they say in the American South, “of God and everybody,” his creepy, fascistic threats, and his apparent inability or unwillingness to answer the questions put to him, The Donald managed to fling improvidently and incontinently away every single chance he had to use this debate to try to salvage his own campaign. Instead of coming across as presidential, a status he left by default to Hillary Clinton (who pulls it off so very much much better), The Donald came across as the sexist bully he is.
The Donald’s performance may have appealed to angry white men of a certain generation and level of educational attainment, but this election has ceased to be about angry white men of a certain generation and level of educational attainment. This election, more than any other in American history, is an election of color. The presidency of the United States will be decided by women, whom Trump is losing in droves, by communities of color, and by politically engaged queerfolk. Donald Trump’s nightmare voter in this election is an angry, motivated, fearful-of-Trump African-American lesbian.
In my analysis of the first presidential debate, I analogized it to George Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg, the so-called “high water mark of the Confederacy.” This debate I would analogize to a less known pair of battles, the first at Franklin, Tennessee in at the end of November, 1864, and the second before Nashville fifteen days later. At Franklin, the Confederate commander, Gen. John Bell Hood, angry at his own army, and determined to punish it for what he saw as it shortcomings, flung his Confederate troops against union general John M. Schofield’s superior forces. Schofield, who had been withdrawing upon Nashville, remained in possession of the field and continued his withdrawal. Fifteen days later, Hood, still angry, attacked the union fortifications around Nashville, and was decisively beaten. With the defeat at Nashville, the Confederate Army of Tennessee had ceased to exist as a viable fighting force. If Hood mortally wounded his army at Franklin, he would kill it two weeks later at Nashville. D. Eicher Longest Night: A Military History of the Civil War 775.
Trump, who now appears to have incontinently opened up a second front in his campaign by picking fights with his fellow Republicans, has managed to do for his campaign the same bad service that John Bell Hood, who was similarly notorious for his lack of impulse control, did for the dying Confederacy. If the debate first against Hillary Clinton mortally wounded his campaign, this debate may very well have killed it.
Of course, the postmortems may be premature. Trump may well be able to pull some semblance of a campaign back together, even in the face of the revelations of sexual misconduct which have dogged it in recent days. But that may be more of a miracle then can be imagined in the four weeks remaining of this campaign. The Donald would do well to remember the counsels of the Caroline divines, the Restoration theologians who set the Anglican faith on firm footings: “we sinners can pray for a miracle, but we cannot demand one.”
As the Trump campaign begins its endgame, it can be expected to go through the late stage death agonies common to all American political campaigns. Former McCain presidential campaign advisor Steve Schmidt has opined that the election is over; the vote for Hillary Clinton is constitutionally required, but is now virtually superfluous. Other Republican operatives have said much the same thing; only a miracle can save Donald Trump now.
Yet, the Hillary Clinton campaign cannot afford to become complacent. There is, of course, always the risk that WikiLeaks, on orders from the Kremlin, will try some new, outcome determinative, data leak, or that something equally catastrophic might happen. But, at this late date, the Clinton campaign can but press forward, adjuring it supporters to vote, phonebank, engage in aggressive GOTV, and work as if Hillary were not five points up, but three points down. The election, at this stage, is Hillary’s to lose, and we must not permit that to happen.
-xxx-
PAUL S. MARCHAND, Esq. is an attorney who lives and practices law in Cathedral City, where he served for eight years as a member of the city Council. He would consider it a badge of honor to be on Donald Trump’s enemies list. As Pat Conroy put it in The Lords of Discipline, he is willing to lead a revolt in the mountains if Trump becomes president and make a general out of the first national guardsmen who brings him Donald trumps nuts in a mason jar. The views herein are Mr. Marchand’s own and should not be construed as legal advice.
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