Summary: the Democrats have once again demonstrated that they have the courage of all the wrong convictions. Faced with what is increasingly obviously a Roger Stone/Kremlin ratfucking operation designed to eviscerate the Democratic leadership in the United States Congress, the Democrats have fallen into the usual “they go low we go high “posture of unconditional and abject surrender. The first target of the Stone/Kremlin operation was outgoing Minnesota Senator Al Franken. The second target of the Stone/Kremlin operation was the Father of the House, Michigan’s John Conyers. Democrats should realize that these are preemptive strikes intended to protect Republican Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore. But Democrats, sadly true to form, reacted in their typically puritanical fashion, rushing to judgment and establishing a lynch mob. It is certainly suspicious that Democratic ire should fall on a Jew and on a person of color. We have been played like a Stradivarius, our hypocrisy is plain for all to see, and behind the scenes, Roger Stone and Donald Trump are laughing their asses off. Democrats have a reputation for political cowardice, and they earned it again, in full measure, during the last 10 days.
The other day, embattled Minnesota Senator Al Franken announced that he would be resigning “in the coming weeks.” Last week, Michigan’s John Conyers, the longest-serving representative in Congress, the Father of the House, also resigned.
Both men were caught up in an emergent moral panic of ostensible sexual harassment that appears to be targeting the careers of a number of lawmakers. Let’s shame the devil, told the truth, and admit that the lawmakers in question come from both parties. Arizona Republican Trent Franks, who had planned to leave at the end of January, 2018, announced today that he has moved up his departure and is leaving now. Texas Republican Blake Farenthold is currently under ethics investigation by the House of Representatives, and is expected to call it quits fairly shortly.
Nevertheless, the moral panic in Washington is just a little bit too convenient, and its Democratic targets just a little bit too prominent, to be taken at face value. When Roger Stone tweeted, almost immediately after the Franken “scandal” broke, with information which suggested that Stone had some kind of pre-knowledge of Leeann Tweeden’s allegations, that should have been an indicator to Democrats that this particular moral panic might be something rather more nefarious, that this “moral panic” might in fact be part of a campaign of “active measures,” or dezinformatsiya trafficking in dubious kompromat designed to cause as much harm to prominent Democratic officeholders and to the Democratic Party as possible.
Unfortunately, instead of doing due diligence, which might well have discovered the existence of a coordinated campaign of active measures of dezinformatsiya and kompromat, a whole raft of Democratic officeholders trooped to various microphones and piously declared that they believed in their entirety all of the allegations against Franken and Conyers, no matter how stale, how far-fetched, or how remote in time.
Worse, this lynch mob of Democratic officeholders was not interested in hearing any defense from either Sen. Franken or Rep. Conyers, but was instead determined to see the two men’s metaphorical heads on pikes being led out of the Capitol. Instead of a careful review of the veracity of the allegations, the Democrats climbed onto a puritanical bandwagon of “zero tolerance” and made it clear to both Senator Franken and Congressman Conyers that they were not disposed to do due diligence before hustling the senator and the Congressman straight to the Tarpeian Rock and hurling them to the bottom.
The conduct of the Democratic officeholders who made speed to hurl Senator Franken and Congressman Conyers from the Tarpeian Rock spoke to everything that is wrong with the Democratic Party. It spoke to the puritanical, schoolmarmish tendency of the Democratic Party to buy into the notion that one who is accused of anything at all must be considered guilty until proven innocent. It also spoke to the unfortunate Democratic tendency to be unable to distinguish true moral high ground from a hill on which to undertake an abject surrender.
Democratic protestations that it is somehow important to make an example of Senator Franken and Congressman Conyers fail on two counts.
First, the desire to make an example of these two lawmakers so that we may “establish a clear moral contrast with the Republicans” is worse than feckless. It assumes that the Republican Party and the American electorate possess a moral compass. There is absolutely no evidence to support the proposition that either the Republican Party or the American electorate possess anything even resembling a moral compass. Given this lack of any evidentiary support for the proposition that either the GOP or the American electorate even has a moral compass, democratic invocation of some sort of “moral high ground” starts to look less like a principled stand and more like an unprincipled hunt for a hill upon which to engage in the traditional Democratic tendency toward abject and unconditional surrender.
Second, we should take a look at the targets of this campaign of active measures, dezinformatsiya, and kompromat. For while the Republicans are rallying around a serial outrager of girls and young women in the person of quondam Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, the Democrats have been pursuing two members of their own party who, by definition, are Other. Senator Franken is Jewish; Congressman Conyers is black. And yet the Democratic Party doesn’t seem to have had the good common sense of optics to realize that the lynch mob set in train against both men might very well appear, notwithstanding minority participation therein, like a boneheaded maneuver intended to cast to prominent Others out of the halls of Congress.
Queerfolk observing this phenomenon should consider themselves on notice; the moral panic can be, and will be, extended to include claims of queer sexual misconduct as well as claims of straight sexual misconduct. And when that happens, the Democratic Party, that masterpiece of American cowardice, cannot be expected to rally to the defense of any queer officeholder. What will happen when someone with a queer ax to grind targets California Congressman Mark Takano (D-Riverside) the only gay, Asian member of the House of Representatives? What will happen if Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin, the only open lesbian in the upper Chamber, is targeted?
It is easy to predict what will happen. Democrats, who practically wet themselves trying to get on the bandwagon to condemn Al Franken, the Jew, and John Conyers, the African-American, will find it even easier to fan the flames of moral panic against the strange, exotic, queerfolk in their midst. And people like Roger Stone, Donald Trump, and the Russian intelligence apparat with which they have so obviously and notoriously coordinated, will be happy to provide kompromat and to undertake Active Measures and spread dezinformatsiya intended to drive queer Democrats from office. And, Goddammit, stupid Democrats will be more than happy to help them do it.
In my previous post, I sounded the alarm bell that this kind of moral panic, stirred up by Republicans to ratfuck the Democratic Party, would be something the Democrats would fall for, hook, line, and sinker. I was right.
We should have had the courage of our Democratic convictions. We should have done our due diligence before jumping on the moral panic bandwagon. We should not have allowed ourselves to become part of a lynch mob. We should have stood with Al Franken and John Conyers.
Our Democratic failure to stand with Al Franken and John Conyers is a failure of our moral compass and our respect for the rule of law. Our eagerness to rush them to the Tarpeian rock and hurl them over it is a nasty revelation of our own internalized anti-Semitism, our own internalized racism, and our own internal unwillingness to do the kind of due diligence we should have done.
When they pulled a knife, we should have pulled a gun. When they sent one of ours the hospital, we should have sent one of theirs to the morgue. Instead, we scrambled up on a spurious piece of “moral high ground” and once there, we ran up the white flag.
The Democratic reputation for political cowardice has never been better deserved that it has been in the last 10 days.
Friday, December 8, 2017
Tuesday, November 21, 2017
WEAPONIZING A MORAL PANIC
Summary: there is a Republican conspiracy aimed at two of our giants of Congress, Al Franken and John Conyers. The Republicans, led apparently by that freak Roger Stone, are busily exploiting the moral panic that revelations about allegations of sexual harassment has engendered. The Republicans have weaponized a very real social phenomenon, and are using it to attempt to protect Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore and the harasser-in-chief Donald Trump.
Last week, Al Franken.
This morning, John Conyers.
There appears to be a moral panic developing, centered on allegations of “powerful men” allegedly “harassing,” “disrespecting,” or “victimizing” women. Now, sexual harassment is a real thing, and both women — and men — can be its victims. Nevertheless, the moral panic that is apparently taking shape appears to bear all the hallmarks of an organized Republican effort to weaponize it and to use it against Democrats. The involvement of Republican dirty trickster (and possible Russian asset) Roger Stone ought to tip us off that this moral panic may not be genuine.
The recent allegations of “sexual misconduct” almost uniformly involve Democratic officeholders. It may not be too much to say, though certain Democrats love to pooh-pooh the idea, that there is a real and palpable Republican conspiracy in place, which the evidence available to us suggests may have been orchestrated by that malignant freak Roger Stone.
Why would Republicans be interested in trashing the reputations of Democratic officeholders. Aside from the overall strategic goal of weaponizing normal human behavior for nefarious political purposes, the Republicans have a very clear and obvious tactical goal here.
That goal is to protect the Senate candidacy of quondam Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, who was suspended from the bench twice for his flagrant defiance of the United States Constitution he swore an oath to protect and uphold.
Thus far, the Russians — er, the Republicans — have done passably well in protecting Roy Moore, the Kremlin’s candidate for Senator from Alabama. In doing so, they have played many Democrats like a Stradivarius. Too many Democrats have responded to the Franken imbroglio like prim, prissy, schoolmarms, rushing into print with cowardly attacks on the Minnesota senator, calling for his resignation and, to all intents and purposes, demanding the man’s head on a pike.
Even worse, the Bernard Sanders-aligned “Justice Democrats” have also begun agitating for Franken’s removal and replacement with Minnesota Representative Keith Ellison. If we didn’t know how poor the Sanders people’s sense of optics was, all we need to point out is that agitation for the removal of a Jewish senator and his replacement by a Muslim congressman bears all the hallmarks of a convenient anti-Semitism which ought to have no place in the ranks of the Democratic Party.
The cowardice of Democrats in this moral panic is by no means surprising. Democrats suffer from two political ailments that they need to purge from their body politic. The first is the tendency, any time someone like Leeann Tweeden comes forward with some “salacious” allegation, no matter how old or stale, to go into a crouch, piss themselves, and engage in theatrical mea culpas while floating away on waves of their own fear pee. Unfortunately, Al Franken lived down to that stereotype, rather than by allowing the situation to develop for a few days before pushing back.
The second political ailment from which Democrats suffer is the one that permits interlopers and fifth columnists like Bernard Sanders and his fifth column closet Trump supporters to attempt a hostile takeover of the Democratic Party. Simply put, it’s the unfortunate tendency Democrats have to want to occupy unimpeachable a high moral ground, and to want to be led to that unimpeachable high moral ground by candidates of unimpeachable virtue and purity.
While the Russians — er, Republicans — are content to cast their votes for real, admitted, harassers and victimizers of women, for reasons of partisanship and cynicism, Democrats demand a kind of perfection from their candidates that we should not expect to see in the Calendar of Saints. While the Republicans would give a pass to a man who shot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue, the Democrats, always prim, proper, dour, sour, and schoolmarmish, would willingly get themselves into a pearl clutching swivet if a Democratic officeholder or political hopeful double parked his car or made an off-color remark to one of the finches in the ficus tree in his front yard.
And because Democrats want to attain utopia in a day, and demand to be led there by candidates of dazzling Simon purity, they are often tragically unready and unprepared when Republican dirty tricksters and ratfuckers like Roger Stone and his ilk set in train the kind of obvious conspiracy that is now being run against Al Franken and John Conyers.
Al Franken and John Conyers are two stalwarts of the Democratic Party. They deserve the full throated and unhesitating protection and support of that selfsame Democratic Party. They do not need to be stabbed in the back by whiny, pearl-clutching so-called liberals who have neither the courage of conviction nor the willingness to push back against dishonorable tactics.
Because Democrats should be pushing back against what is increasingly obviously a Republican/Russian disinformation operation to try to drive Al Franken and John Conyers out of the Congress of the United States. We need at all times, but particularly now during the Trumpoe Vremya, the Trump Time, to be willing to push back, and to push back hard against people, even ostensibly in our own ranks, who try to ratfuck the Democratic Party. Our operating philosophy should be taken from Sean Connery’s unforgettable line in the 1987 remake of The Untouchables: “they pull a knife; you pull a gun. They send one of yours to the hospital; you send one of theirs to the morgue!”
Democrats have been bringing knives to gunfights for too long. Given what we are starting to know about Leeann Tweeden, this case represents the perfect opportunity for Democrats to un-limber much heavier artillery than we have been accustomed to bring to a fight.
They pull a knife; we pull a gun. They send one of ours the hospital, we send one of theirs to the morgue!
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices in Rancho Mirage. He is a former member of the Cathedral City city council and a former member of the Riverside County Democratic Central Committee, which he left in disgust because they were more interested in playing nice with the Republicans than in fighting to win. The views set forth herein are his own.
Last week, Al Franken.
This morning, John Conyers.
There appears to be a moral panic developing, centered on allegations of “powerful men” allegedly “harassing,” “disrespecting,” or “victimizing” women. Now, sexual harassment is a real thing, and both women — and men — can be its victims. Nevertheless, the moral panic that is apparently taking shape appears to bear all the hallmarks of an organized Republican effort to weaponize it and to use it against Democrats. The involvement of Republican dirty trickster (and possible Russian asset) Roger Stone ought to tip us off that this moral panic may not be genuine.
The recent allegations of “sexual misconduct” almost uniformly involve Democratic officeholders. It may not be too much to say, though certain Democrats love to pooh-pooh the idea, that there is a real and palpable Republican conspiracy in place, which the evidence available to us suggests may have been orchestrated by that malignant freak Roger Stone.
Why would Republicans be interested in trashing the reputations of Democratic officeholders. Aside from the overall strategic goal of weaponizing normal human behavior for nefarious political purposes, the Republicans have a very clear and obvious tactical goal here.
That goal is to protect the Senate candidacy of quondam Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, who was suspended from the bench twice for his flagrant defiance of the United States Constitution he swore an oath to protect and uphold.
Thus far, the Russians — er, the Republicans — have done passably well in protecting Roy Moore, the Kremlin’s candidate for Senator from Alabama. In doing so, they have played many Democrats like a Stradivarius. Too many Democrats have responded to the Franken imbroglio like prim, prissy, schoolmarms, rushing into print with cowardly attacks on the Minnesota senator, calling for his resignation and, to all intents and purposes, demanding the man’s head on a pike.
Even worse, the Bernard Sanders-aligned “Justice Democrats” have also begun agitating for Franken’s removal and replacement with Minnesota Representative Keith Ellison. If we didn’t know how poor the Sanders people’s sense of optics was, all we need to point out is that agitation for the removal of a Jewish senator and his replacement by a Muslim congressman bears all the hallmarks of a convenient anti-Semitism which ought to have no place in the ranks of the Democratic Party.
The cowardice of Democrats in this moral panic is by no means surprising. Democrats suffer from two political ailments that they need to purge from their body politic. The first is the tendency, any time someone like Leeann Tweeden comes forward with some “salacious” allegation, no matter how old or stale, to go into a crouch, piss themselves, and engage in theatrical mea culpas while floating away on waves of their own fear pee. Unfortunately, Al Franken lived down to that stereotype, rather than by allowing the situation to develop for a few days before pushing back.
The second political ailment from which Democrats suffer is the one that permits interlopers and fifth columnists like Bernard Sanders and his fifth column closet Trump supporters to attempt a hostile takeover of the Democratic Party. Simply put, it’s the unfortunate tendency Democrats have to want to occupy unimpeachable a high moral ground, and to want to be led to that unimpeachable high moral ground by candidates of unimpeachable virtue and purity.
While the Russians — er, Republicans — are content to cast their votes for real, admitted, harassers and victimizers of women, for reasons of partisanship and cynicism, Democrats demand a kind of perfection from their candidates that we should not expect to see in the Calendar of Saints. While the Republicans would give a pass to a man who shot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue, the Democrats, always prim, proper, dour, sour, and schoolmarmish, would willingly get themselves into a pearl clutching swivet if a Democratic officeholder or political hopeful double parked his car or made an off-color remark to one of the finches in the ficus tree in his front yard.
And because Democrats want to attain utopia in a day, and demand to be led there by candidates of dazzling Simon purity, they are often tragically unready and unprepared when Republican dirty tricksters and ratfuckers like Roger Stone and his ilk set in train the kind of obvious conspiracy that is now being run against Al Franken and John Conyers.
Al Franken and John Conyers are two stalwarts of the Democratic Party. They deserve the full throated and unhesitating protection and support of that selfsame Democratic Party. They do not need to be stabbed in the back by whiny, pearl-clutching so-called liberals who have neither the courage of conviction nor the willingness to push back against dishonorable tactics.
Because Democrats should be pushing back against what is increasingly obviously a Republican/Russian disinformation operation to try to drive Al Franken and John Conyers out of the Congress of the United States. We need at all times, but particularly now during the Trumpoe Vremya, the Trump Time, to be willing to push back, and to push back hard against people, even ostensibly in our own ranks, who try to ratfuck the Democratic Party. Our operating philosophy should be taken from Sean Connery’s unforgettable line in the 1987 remake of The Untouchables: “they pull a knife; you pull a gun. They send one of yours to the hospital; you send one of theirs to the morgue!”
Democrats have been bringing knives to gunfights for too long. Given what we are starting to know about Leeann Tweeden, this case represents the perfect opportunity for Democrats to un-limber much heavier artillery than we have been accustomed to bring to a fight.
They pull a knife; we pull a gun. They send one of ours the hospital, we send one of theirs to the morgue!
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices in Rancho Mirage. He is a former member of the Cathedral City city council and a former member of the Riverside County Democratic Central Committee, which he left in disgust because they were more interested in playing nice with the Republicans than in fighting to win. The views set forth herein are his own.
Thursday, October 12, 2017
OCTOBER 12, ENCOUNTER DAY
Summary: Every year at Columbus Day, or perhaps, more accurately, Encounter 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/Encounter Day is, and will always remain, a paradox.
By: Paul S. Marchand
Cathedral City, October 12, 2017- Today is traditional Columbus Day. This day members of the Italian diaspora celebrate Cristoforo Colombo, for whom an Italian crusier and an Italian ocean liner (and sister to the ill-fated Andrea Doria) were named. The Spanish remember him as Cristobal Colon, the adelantdo, Admiral of the Ocean Sea and Viceroy of the Indies after whom the Spanish named not one, but two cruisers, presumably to get the better of the Italians, who only built one of them.
Commemoratively named warships notwithstanding, the view of many Americans of this day is colored, so to speak, by 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 others 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.
For, 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 whose Inca inhabitants knew it as 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."
Despite the facile characterization of the pale people as eager perpetrators of “genocide,” we should be chary of attaching such a label to what transpired in the Western Hemisphere. Though the statistics of morbidity among indigenous peoples are certainly the statistics of apparent genocide, we need to be aware that genocide, in international law, is a specific intent crime, i.e., the deliberate extermination of a particular prople, in whole or in part. Though we may be appalled at the morbidity statistics, the evidence suggests that the butcher’s bill was inflicted as the result of negligence, inattention, and a lack of knowledge rather than as the result of deliberate policy, and thus does not rise to the level of genocide as that term is understood in international law.
Thus, 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 Nãos, 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.
Nor can we forget the other ramifications which have preceded from a biological phenomenon which has become known as the Columbian Exchange. Without the Columbian Exchange, the cuisines of Europe would be innocent of such now-integral foods and stimulants as the potato, the tomato, corn (which the British, who cannot seem to handle their own language, use to describe the grain properly known as “wheat.”) chocolate, vanilla, and tobacco. Similarly, without the Columbian Exchange, the tables of the New World would entirely lack such staples as citrus fruits, apples, bananas, mangoes, onions, wheat, rice, and that staple of insomniacs everywhere, coffee. Indeed, until the arrival of Hernán Cortés, the horse, which had originated in what is now North America but had become extinct there, had been unknown to the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere.
Moreover, while the pale invaders from across the water must take responsibility for such diseases as the measles, the emergence of syphilis, which for almost four centuries cut a horrifying swath across Europe, can be laid at the door of the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere. In short, the Columbian Exchange, like so many other phenomena throughout history, in the end must be accounted morally neutral. We should be foolish indeed to judge either Christopher Columbus or the Columbian Exchange by the purportedly modern standards of the 21st century. As Winston Churchill observed in 1938, in our own time, “we have seen archbishops pistolled in the nape of the neck in the warm, bluntly lighted corridors of modern prison.” We have seen women and children machine gunned and hacked to death in their scores, hundreds, and thousands. We possess the capacity to extinguish all life on this planet. We thus have little claim to vaunt some kind of superior civilization to that in which Christopher Columbus lived.
The invasion of the pale people from across the water 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, or Encounter Day, like Coyote, must be a shape-shifter. It must be an occasion for celebrating the nobility of the exploring spirit, but also for reflection on the duties we all owe to one another as common human inhabitants of the place we all call home.
As progressives, we must particularly be attuned on Columbus/Encounter 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/Encounter 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? Whose day is Encounter Day? It is all of 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 revision 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, 2017- Today is traditional Columbus Day. This day members of the Italian diaspora celebrate Cristoforo Colombo, for whom an Italian crusier and an Italian ocean liner (and sister to the ill-fated Andrea Doria) were named. The Spanish remember him as Cristobal Colon, the adelantdo, Admiral of the Ocean Sea and Viceroy of the Indies after whom the Spanish named not one, but two cruisers, presumably to get the better of the Italians, who only built one of them.
Commemoratively named warships notwithstanding, the view of many Americans of this day is colored, so to speak, by 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 others 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.
For, 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 whose Inca inhabitants knew it as 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."
Despite the facile characterization of the pale people as eager perpetrators of “genocide,” we should be chary of attaching such a label to what transpired in the Western Hemisphere. Though the statistics of morbidity among indigenous peoples are certainly the statistics of apparent genocide, we need to be aware that genocide, in international law, is a specific intent crime, i.e., the deliberate extermination of a particular prople, in whole or in part. Though we may be appalled at the morbidity statistics, the evidence suggests that the butcher’s bill was inflicted as the result of negligence, inattention, and a lack of knowledge rather than as the result of deliberate policy, and thus does not rise to the level of genocide as that term is understood in international law.
Thus, 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 Nãos, 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.
Nor can we forget the other ramifications which have preceded from a biological phenomenon which has become known as the Columbian Exchange. Without the Columbian Exchange, the cuisines of Europe would be innocent of such now-integral foods and stimulants as the potato, the tomato, corn (which the British, who cannot seem to handle their own language, use to describe the grain properly known as “wheat.”) chocolate, vanilla, and tobacco. Similarly, without the Columbian Exchange, the tables of the New World would entirely lack such staples as citrus fruits, apples, bananas, mangoes, onions, wheat, rice, and that staple of insomniacs everywhere, coffee. Indeed, until the arrival of Hernán Cortés, the horse, which had originated in what is now North America but had become extinct there, had been unknown to the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere.
Moreover, while the pale invaders from across the water must take responsibility for such diseases as the measles, the emergence of syphilis, which for almost four centuries cut a horrifying swath across Europe, can be laid at the door of the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere. In short, the Columbian Exchange, like so many other phenomena throughout history, in the end must be accounted morally neutral. We should be foolish indeed to judge either Christopher Columbus or the Columbian Exchange by the purportedly modern standards of the 21st century. As Winston Churchill observed in 1938, in our own time, “we have seen archbishops pistolled in the nape of the neck in the warm, bluntly lighted corridors of modern prison.” We have seen women and children machine gunned and hacked to death in their scores, hundreds, and thousands. We possess the capacity to extinguish all life on this planet. We thus have little claim to vaunt some kind of superior civilization to that in which Christopher Columbus lived.
The invasion of the pale people from across the water 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, or Encounter Day, like Coyote, must be a shape-shifter. It must be an occasion for celebrating the nobility of the exploring spirit, but also for reflection on the duties we all owe to one another as common human inhabitants of the place we all call home.
As progressives, we must particularly be attuned on Columbus/Encounter 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/Encounter 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? Whose day is Encounter Day? It is all of 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 revision of an earlier post published at this time last year. Since knickers are still in knots, it remains timely.
Sunday, September 24, 2017
#TakeaKnee, America
Summary: This weekend, as numerous football players and other athletes in sporting venues across America take a knee in defiance of Russia’s puppet in the White House, Trump cultists and so-called patriots have demonstrated their disdain for freedom all over social media by condemning the athletes who have taken a knee when the national anthem is played. These Trump cultists and “patriots” apparently neither know nor care much about American values. They do not know or do not care that the Supreme Court of the United States has ruled on several occasions that withholding participation in the Pledge of Allegiance or even taking a knee at the national anthem is perfectly constitutional. The Russian puppet in the White House is trying very hard to appropriate the national symbols and our national values for himself. Taking a knee is a powerful, uniquely American, way of saying “no.”
#TakeaKnee as if your life depends upon it.
#TakeaKnee as if your liberty depends upon it.
#TakeaKnee as if your pursuit of happiness depends upon it.
The ghosts of Lexington, of Concord, and of Bunker Hill demand it of your patriotism.
-------------------------------------
As numerous professional football players, accompanied by at least one major league baseball player, chose to take a knee during the playing of the national anthem, the Russian puppet in the oval office saw fit to continue the trumpertantrum he began late last week at a campaign rally in Alabama in which he chose to pick a fight with former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick about Kaepernick’s having knelt during the playing of the national anthem to protest police brutality against African-Americans.
This act of protest kneeling, which the ever adaptable, ever promiscuous English language has now christened “taking a knee,” has gone viral, and Donald Trump has only encouraged it by politicizing it. As a number of commentators have suggested, the Russian puppet in the Oval Office has managed to give political cachet and social respectability to conduct that, during the George W. Bush or Barack Obama administrations would have been met by most Americans with Stares of Wintry Disapproval.
However, by having turned taking a knee into a political phenomenon, The Donald has managed to swim deeply in the dank, fetid, fever swamps of America’s original sin of racism. Moreover, in his divisive encourage-the-Kremlin-by-dividing-America way, the Donald has provoked even lily white scions of Pale Privilege into hitherto unwonted expressions of empathy and solidarity with their African-American teammates.
Yet, while even high school athletes are standing up for freedom by kneeling down, Trump and his cultists are doing the Kremlin’s work for it by trying to create the impression that taking a knee is somehow “disrespectful” or unpatriotic. This comes almost directly out of the old Soviet criminal code which defined so-called anti-Soviet activities as criminal offenses for which the offender could be sent to some grim Siberian Gulag. One need not look too far beyond social media to see how little Trump and his cultists understand our American Constitution.
While Trump and the cultists would happily define taking a knee as some kind of new anti-Trump activity meriting incarceration in some grim new American Gulag, the blunt truth is that taking a knee is a perfectly constitutionally defensible form of protest. The First Amendment guarantees that
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
The rights guaranteed by the First Amendment are nonnegotiable. They are part of the fundamental constellation of freedom for which Americans have been willing to lay down their lives, to face foreign shot and foreign shell, foreign fevers and foreign steel, and for which they been willing to die on battlefields from Gettysburg to Galveston in the service of a vision of a more perfect union.
Yet, to borrow from G.K. Chesterton, who famously observed that “the Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried,” the American ideal itself has been found difficult and largely left untried. Americans love to talk about national symbols. Americans love to get dewy eyed when they hear the strains of the national anthem or see the American flag rippling in the breeze, but most Americans, particularly Trump cultists, have not the slightest understanding of the relationship between such symbols and the “city on a hill which cannot be hid” of which Massachusetts Puritan John Winthrop spoke in 1630, and which has become, since John F. Kennedy gave it new prominence in a January 9, 1961 address to the Great and General Court of the Commonwealth Of Massachusetts, an integral part of our political discourse.
Yet, as powerful as the national symbols are, they are not themselves the nation; they do not themselves embody the values we profess to represent; in and of themselves, they mean nothing. The Star-Spangled Banner is just a song written by a Maryland slaveholder lawyer. The flag the Star-Spangled Banner references is nothing more than a collection of pieces of cloth sewn artfully together.
But the union they symbolize means, and must mean, a great deal more than that. The preamble to the Constitution sums up the objective of the document in six words: To Form a More Perfect Union. And to form that more perfect union we Americans have been struggling for nearly two and a half centuries. We have struggled to expand the national table to make room for people of color, for women, for people of every faith and of no faith at all, for the disabled, and, most recently, for queerfolk.
Yet as we have inserted additional leaves into that national table, we have failed to integrate into our thinking one of the truest tests of any working democracy. For in a truly free and democratic society, the test of how well the society is functioning is not how well it protects the majority, how well it looks after the well off, the well-connected, the affluent, or the comfortable. The true test of how well our free and democratic society is working is how well it protects the rights of the dissenting and outspoken minority, how well it levels the playing field so that an African-American kid from the projects, the Latina child of migrant farmworkers, the working poor white kid of a single parent, the paralyzed child confronting a lifelong disability, or the queer person in a community that has had to learn how to live as if each day contained 25 hours, can enjoy the same breadth of opportunity and live the same American dream as the most privileged Pale Person in our society.
By that standard, America is failing the test. In his novel Hawaii, the late James Michener snuck in a rather acidulous observation that “Americans despise most freedoms.” Michener was right, most Americans are uncomfortable with freedom. Most Americans are uncomfortable with the idea that in a truly free and democratic society taking a knee is an outward and visible manifestation of what it is to be truly American. Moreover, most Americans don’t seem terribly comfortable with the idea that taking a knee should be something that in America does not and should not carry an adverse consequence.
Back in 1943, in the middle of World War II, the greatest existential crisis America has ever faced, the Supreme Court of the United States had before it a case involving a Jehovah’s Witness schoolchild from West Virginia who had not taken a knee during the playing of the national anthem, but who had declined, on religious grounds, to say the Pledge of Allegiance. In West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, (1943) 319 U.S. 624, the Court sided with the Jehovah’s Witness schoolchildren. In his majority opinion for the Court, Justice Robert Jackson observed that “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein....”
A generation later, a group of of school students in Des Moines, Iowa, wore black armbands to school in protest of the war in Vietnam. The school district reacted with the typical disdain for freedom to be expected from most school districts. The oldest members of the group were suspended, and litigation ensued. When the case reached the Supreme Court, the Court held for the students. In Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, (1969) 393 U.S. 503, the court upheld the right of pupils to engage in symbolic activity that was “closely akin to pure speech.” Writing for the majority, Justice Abe Fortas observed "It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate." Id. at 506.
Yet, notwithstanding the clear constitutional instruction in both Barnette and in Tinker, a large part of the American public still continues to believe that freedom is too dangerous to entrust to schoolchildren, athletes, or anyone else holding an unpopular view. Indeed, in Texas, schoolchildren are actually told that it is unlawful, and that they can be sent to jail for, not saying the Pledge of Allegiance to the U.S. and Texas flags. Elsewhere throughout the country, policies are in place in numerous local entities that fly in the face of the Constitution by mandating participation in flag salutes or standing for the national anthem.
However, under the clear constitutional teaching of Barnette and Tinker, no American citizen can be required to participate in the Pledge of Allegiance, any more than a citizen can be required to stand for the national anthem. It is, in fact, the absolute right of everyone of us to decline to participate in what many of us, in the Trump era, consider to be a well-nigh totalitarian exercise in idolatrous flag worship.
Now it may cause a certain amount of agita to that portion of the American public was subscribes to the Trump cult, or which otherwise despises most freedoms. But the heckler’s veto has never been recognized in American law. As much as it may irritate someone no end to see another person taking a knee, or declining to participate in the Pledge of Allegiance, the true test of a free and democratic society is not how well it protects the rights of the one who takes offense, but how well it protects the rights of the one who dissents, the one who chooses to take a knee or to remain silent or even seated during the pledge.
Because, in the final analysis, America was founded by dissenters. Ours is a nation conceived, as Abraham Lincoln so famously put it at Gettysburg, in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. How can we claim to be true to that founding vision if we insist upon denying to our fellow Americans the right to take a knee or to withhold participation in the Pledge of Allegiance? America does not exist to enforce some kind of communitarian adherence to an officially defined set of national orthodoxies.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. From Thomas Jefferson’s soaring words in the Declaration of Independence have come all of our law and our prophets.
We are a free and democratic society, born of dissent, made strong by disobedience, baptized in the blood and fire of a Revolution which has made a triumphal tour of the world. The struggle that began at Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill continues on football fields across America as a new generation of Americans challenges our commitment to our revolutionary heritage, standing up by kneeling down.
Take a knee as if your lives depended upon it, take a knee as if your liberty depended upon it, take a knee as if your ability to pursue happiness depended upon it.
#TakeaKnee America.
#TakeaKnee as if your life depends upon it.
#TakeaKnee as if your liberty depends upon it.
#TakeaKnee as if your pursuit of happiness depends upon it.
The ghosts of Lexington, of Concord, and of Bunker Hill demand it of your patriotism.
-------------------------------------
As numerous professional football players, accompanied by at least one major league baseball player, chose to take a knee during the playing of the national anthem, the Russian puppet in the oval office saw fit to continue the trumpertantrum he began late last week at a campaign rally in Alabama in which he chose to pick a fight with former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick about Kaepernick’s having knelt during the playing of the national anthem to protest police brutality against African-Americans.
This act of protest kneeling, which the ever adaptable, ever promiscuous English language has now christened “taking a knee,” has gone viral, and Donald Trump has only encouraged it by politicizing it. As a number of commentators have suggested, the Russian puppet in the Oval Office has managed to give political cachet and social respectability to conduct that, during the George W. Bush or Barack Obama administrations would have been met by most Americans with Stares of Wintry Disapproval.
However, by having turned taking a knee into a political phenomenon, The Donald has managed to swim deeply in the dank, fetid, fever swamps of America’s original sin of racism. Moreover, in his divisive encourage-the-Kremlin-by-dividing-America way, the Donald has provoked even lily white scions of Pale Privilege into hitherto unwonted expressions of empathy and solidarity with their African-American teammates.
Yet, while even high school athletes are standing up for freedom by kneeling down, Trump and his cultists are doing the Kremlin’s work for it by trying to create the impression that taking a knee is somehow “disrespectful” or unpatriotic. This comes almost directly out of the old Soviet criminal code which defined so-called anti-Soviet activities as criminal offenses for which the offender could be sent to some grim Siberian Gulag. One need not look too far beyond social media to see how little Trump and his cultists understand our American Constitution.
While Trump and the cultists would happily define taking a knee as some kind of new anti-Trump activity meriting incarceration in some grim new American Gulag, the blunt truth is that taking a knee is a perfectly constitutionally defensible form of protest. The First Amendment guarantees that
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
The rights guaranteed by the First Amendment are nonnegotiable. They are part of the fundamental constellation of freedom for which Americans have been willing to lay down their lives, to face foreign shot and foreign shell, foreign fevers and foreign steel, and for which they been willing to die on battlefields from Gettysburg to Galveston in the service of a vision of a more perfect union.
Yet, to borrow from G.K. Chesterton, who famously observed that “the Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried,” the American ideal itself has been found difficult and largely left untried. Americans love to talk about national symbols. Americans love to get dewy eyed when they hear the strains of the national anthem or see the American flag rippling in the breeze, but most Americans, particularly Trump cultists, have not the slightest understanding of the relationship between such symbols and the “city on a hill which cannot be hid” of which Massachusetts Puritan John Winthrop spoke in 1630, and which has become, since John F. Kennedy gave it new prominence in a January 9, 1961 address to the Great and General Court of the Commonwealth Of Massachusetts, an integral part of our political discourse.
Yet, as powerful as the national symbols are, they are not themselves the nation; they do not themselves embody the values we profess to represent; in and of themselves, they mean nothing. The Star-Spangled Banner is just a song written by a Maryland slaveholder lawyer. The flag the Star-Spangled Banner references is nothing more than a collection of pieces of cloth sewn artfully together.
But the union they symbolize means, and must mean, a great deal more than that. The preamble to the Constitution sums up the objective of the document in six words: To Form a More Perfect Union. And to form that more perfect union we Americans have been struggling for nearly two and a half centuries. We have struggled to expand the national table to make room for people of color, for women, for people of every faith and of no faith at all, for the disabled, and, most recently, for queerfolk.
Yet as we have inserted additional leaves into that national table, we have failed to integrate into our thinking one of the truest tests of any working democracy. For in a truly free and democratic society, the test of how well the society is functioning is not how well it protects the majority, how well it looks after the well off, the well-connected, the affluent, or the comfortable. The true test of how well our free and democratic society is working is how well it protects the rights of the dissenting and outspoken minority, how well it levels the playing field so that an African-American kid from the projects, the Latina child of migrant farmworkers, the working poor white kid of a single parent, the paralyzed child confronting a lifelong disability, or the queer person in a community that has had to learn how to live as if each day contained 25 hours, can enjoy the same breadth of opportunity and live the same American dream as the most privileged Pale Person in our society.
By that standard, America is failing the test. In his novel Hawaii, the late James Michener snuck in a rather acidulous observation that “Americans despise most freedoms.” Michener was right, most Americans are uncomfortable with freedom. Most Americans are uncomfortable with the idea that in a truly free and democratic society taking a knee is an outward and visible manifestation of what it is to be truly American. Moreover, most Americans don’t seem terribly comfortable with the idea that taking a knee should be something that in America does not and should not carry an adverse consequence.
Back in 1943, in the middle of World War II, the greatest existential crisis America has ever faced, the Supreme Court of the United States had before it a case involving a Jehovah’s Witness schoolchild from West Virginia who had not taken a knee during the playing of the national anthem, but who had declined, on religious grounds, to say the Pledge of Allegiance. In West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, (1943) 319 U.S. 624, the Court sided with the Jehovah’s Witness schoolchildren. In his majority opinion for the Court, Justice Robert Jackson observed that “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein....”
A generation later, a group of of school students in Des Moines, Iowa, wore black armbands to school in protest of the war in Vietnam. The school district reacted with the typical disdain for freedom to be expected from most school districts. The oldest members of the group were suspended, and litigation ensued. When the case reached the Supreme Court, the Court held for the students. In Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, (1969) 393 U.S. 503, the court upheld the right of pupils to engage in symbolic activity that was “closely akin to pure speech.” Writing for the majority, Justice Abe Fortas observed "It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate." Id. at 506.
Yet, notwithstanding the clear constitutional instruction in both Barnette and in Tinker, a large part of the American public still continues to believe that freedom is too dangerous to entrust to schoolchildren, athletes, or anyone else holding an unpopular view. Indeed, in Texas, schoolchildren are actually told that it is unlawful, and that they can be sent to jail for, not saying the Pledge of Allegiance to the U.S. and Texas flags. Elsewhere throughout the country, policies are in place in numerous local entities that fly in the face of the Constitution by mandating participation in flag salutes or standing for the national anthem.
However, under the clear constitutional teaching of Barnette and Tinker, no American citizen can be required to participate in the Pledge of Allegiance, any more than a citizen can be required to stand for the national anthem. It is, in fact, the absolute right of everyone of us to decline to participate in what many of us, in the Trump era, consider to be a well-nigh totalitarian exercise in idolatrous flag worship.
Now it may cause a certain amount of agita to that portion of the American public was subscribes to the Trump cult, or which otherwise despises most freedoms. But the heckler’s veto has never been recognized in American law. As much as it may irritate someone no end to see another person taking a knee, or declining to participate in the Pledge of Allegiance, the true test of a free and democratic society is not how well it protects the rights of the one who takes offense, but how well it protects the rights of the one who dissents, the one who chooses to take a knee or to remain silent or even seated during the pledge.
Because, in the final analysis, America was founded by dissenters. Ours is a nation conceived, as Abraham Lincoln so famously put it at Gettysburg, in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. How can we claim to be true to that founding vision if we insist upon denying to our fellow Americans the right to take a knee or to withhold participation in the Pledge of Allegiance? America does not exist to enforce some kind of communitarian adherence to an officially defined set of national orthodoxies.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. From Thomas Jefferson’s soaring words in the Declaration of Independence have come all of our law and our prophets.
We are a free and democratic society, born of dissent, made strong by disobedience, baptized in the blood and fire of a Revolution which has made a triumphal tour of the world. The struggle that began at Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill continues on football fields across America as a new generation of Americans challenges our commitment to our revolutionary heritage, standing up by kneeling down.
Take a knee as if your lives depended upon it, take a knee as if your liberty depended upon it, take a knee as if your ability to pursue happiness depended upon it.
#TakeaKnee America.
Sunday, September 10, 2017
TIME FOR FACEBOOK TO FACE THE MUSIC
Summary: It has become disturbingly clear in the last couple of weeks that Facebook, the social media behemoth, has functioned as a knowing, a willing, deliberate participant in Russia’s effort to influence the outcome of the 2016 elections. It’s also become clear, after a much longer accumulation of evidence, that Facebook, as an institution, or at least a lot of Facebook’s management personnel, have been actively seeking to further the campaigns of Bernard Sanders and his twin, Donald Trump. Facebook has become a dank cesspit of Hillary-hatred, and it should answer therefor.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
If you’ve ever been sent to Facebook jail, i.e., banned or blocked from Facebook because something you said offended someone in their so-called community standards department, you know that Facebook has in place a whole series of opaque, nontransparent policies by which it purports to police its site.
What we have started to see is that this pattern of policing establishes that Facebook has for a long time been totally in the tank against Hillary Clinton, a dank cesspit of Hillary-hatred. Moreover, that same pattern of policing was also followed up by Facebook getting caught in an awkward lie about selling advertising to Russian trolling entities seeking to influence the outcome of the 2016 election. Indeed, a simple Google search of “Facebook selling ad space to Russian troll farms” pulls up approximately 1,300,000 results.
This rather shocking information, disclosed to investigators just a few days ago, after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had gone on record repeatedly denying the existence of any Facebook ad deal with Russian entities, raises some fairly serious questions about the institutional loyalty of Facebook to the United States, about Zuckerberg’s trustworthiness, and about whether Facebook knew or should have known what was going on, especially in light of Adrian Chen’s June, 2015 (!) reporting on Russian troll farms in the New York Times magazine, and similar reporting in The Guardian from April of that year.
Certainly, it’s fairly clear that there was no love lost between Facebook and Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign. Yet, Hillary was one of the best prepared candidates we've had, not just on the Democratic side, but in general.
Unfortunately, a great many people couldn’t get past the fact that Hillary Clinton was a strong woman with a strong track record of strong achievements.
The Sanders campaign, acting out of what now appears to have been a combination, let us tell the truth and shame the devil, of traditional Eastern European Jewish misogyny, coupled with the equally pernicious political misogyny of the Third International, appealed to the worst form of sexual prejudice in American society.
The misogyny of the "progressive" Sanders left, irrespective of source, created a malign chemistry which found its bitterest form when its superannuated comsymp gasbag from Burlington didn't get the Democratic nomination. Instead of doing what Democrats used to do, which is rally to the party’s candidate after the primaries were over, the “Bernie or bust” contingent chose to fight the Party to the bitter end, like Japanese holdouts on Pacific islands after World War II.
Not only did the “Bernie or bust” militant tendency act as a fifth column for Trump, they also eagerly cohabited, as it were, with the Russian intelligence apparat, giving aid and comfort to their trolls.
In all this, Facebook was complicit. It had and maintained, and continues to have and maintain, a double standard, rigorously policing posts from Hillary supporters and censoring them at the drop of a hat, while giving complete carte Blanche to Trump and Sanders trolling.
Indeed, evidence now suggests that a substantial percentage of Trump and Sanders comments on Facebook were, and continue to be, posted by Russian or Eastern European sock puppets masquerading as Americans to inject phony news stories, or “fake news” into the American social media universe. Moreover, it now appears that Facebook may very well have known exactly what was going on.
Add to that the existence of the eager collusion, now established by clear and convincing evidence, between the Trump campaign and the Russian intelligence apparat, and it’s not hard to see why Facebook should be justifiably facing a public relations nightmare.
It’s not difficult deplore the way Facebook consistently enables Sanders and Trump. Nor is it difficult to deplore the way in which Clinton supporters, who have been calling out such trollery on Facebook have suffered institutional retaliation, by being blocked or banned from Facebook. Such blocking and banning suggests that the Hillary supporters have hit uncomfortably close to home.
For example, a couple of friends of mine, both supporters of Hillary Clinton, were recently banned from Facebook after posting mildly uncomplimentary posts about Donald Trump and Bernard Sanders to which Facebook's so-called Community standards department took exception. This, after both of these friends had been subjected to all manner of vicious personal attacks from Trump and Sanders trolls.
This supports an inescapable conclusion that Facebook is a dank cesspit of Hillary-hate, and that their so-called community standards operation is a bunch of Trump and Sanders trolls. Facebook, in short, maintains, has maintained, and will probably continue to maintain, a policy of maximum leeway for Trump and Sanders trolling, but a zero tolerance policy toward anything that would offend the snowflake sensibilities of Trump or Sanders cultists.
Wait till the snowflakes start bawling and squalling and slinging snot. And wait until Facebook begins lashing out at the bad publicity that is justly coming its way for selling ads to known Russian intelligence operations trying to influence our elections.
Facebook has evidently violated not only federal election law, in taking foreign money to buy ads to influence the outcome of the election, but also California election law, which not only prohibits the same thing, but also makes illegal the donation of more than $99 to any political campaign without full disclosure of the identity of the contributor.
It's time Facebook faced the music. Since it is headquartered in California, it should have to answer not only to the Federal Elections Commission, but also to the California Fair Political Practices Commission, for its substantial undisclosed contributions for the Trump and Sanders campaigns. And I'll be most curious to see how it explains itself to special counsel Robert Mueller for its acceptance of ad buys it knew or should have known were unlawful.
Mark Zuckerberg should think long and hard about retaining competent DC criminal defense counsel.
Thursday, August 10, 2017
WILL OUR INSTITUTIONS SAVE US FROM DONALD TRUMP?
Summary: Will our institutions save us from Donald Trump? There are those who believe that we are so totally fucked that our institutions are too corrupt to save us from Donald Trump. There are those who believe, with undue optimism, that Trump must go down and that we have nothing to worry about. Then there are those of us who believe that Trump can be taken down by our civil society and public institutions of self-government, but that we must work to shore up those institutions and not let them be corrupted by Trump or his supporters. Madison and the framers of the Constitution builded better than they knew, in creating a system of checks and balances. But it falls to us to protect our institutions and to make sure that those institutions can function with the self-confidence and the testicular fortitude needed to bring our current national nightmare to an end.
-------------------------------------
"Our institutions will save us from Donald Trump; there is nothing to worry about."
"Our institutions may save us from Donald Trump, but we must be watchful, we must hold our institutions accountable, and we must safeguard them so that they can perform their prophylactic function."
"Our institutions can only save us from Trump if we act strongly to increase their power, being militant and uncompromising in so doing."
"We’re fucked; our institutions cannot save us, for they have been hopelessly and irredeemably corrupted by Donald Trump."
These four soundbites essentially sum up the current range of prevailing opinion about the capacity of the United States and her public institutions of civil society to stand up to the existential menace that is Donald Trump.
The view that we have nothing to worry about, that our institutions will save us from Donald Trump, strikes one as unduly optimistic, given the cultlike mentality of many Trump supporters.
By the same token, the view that we are essentially fucked, and that our institutions cannot save us from a Trump-induced slide into fascism, strikes one as being more despairing than is warranted by the current situation.
A few months ago, we might have been right to adopt such a despairing view. We had been warned by such formidable journalists and commentators as the Russian American Masha Gessen, author of The Man without a Face, a well-received biography of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, that, essentially, all was lost. Trump, Gessen assured us, would encounter little if any difficulty in corrupting our public institutions of civil society and self-government.
Gessen warned us that the election of Donald Trump portended an all-but-ineluctable slide into fascism. Yet, as the Trump administration slouches past the 200 day mark (curious that we should be counting the days of the Trump administration as if they were the 900 days of the Siege of Leningrad), the trend that seems to be emerging is not of an ineluctable surrender to the fascism represented by the Mussolini wannabe in the White House, but of a Madisonian battle among competing centers of power. Madison’s theory that tyranny would be checked in the United States by the competing, territorial ambitions of separate power centers within the government seems to be experiencing a strong reaffirmation of its basic viability.
For despite the way the presidency has taken on many of the attributes of Byzantine Emperorship, in which the head of state moves in a bubble, less a man than a jeweled effigy onto which a divided people a project whatever inconsistent expectations they see fit, the presidency still remains largely what Madison and the framers of the Constitution intended it should be, a temporary chiefship of one branch of the government, accountable and answerable to the sovereign people referenced in the very first words of the preamble to the Constitution, and more immediately, to the coequal branches of government mentioned in, and deriving their authority equally from that selfsame Constitution.
The Constitution was written in the expectation that competing and conflicting centers of power within the government would act to limit one another. Indeed, our entire constitutional theory can arguably be summed up in the phrase “checks and balances.”
Yet, if Madison and the other framers envisioned those checks and balances as a functioning within the initial textual confines of the three branches of government described and prescribed in the Constitution, they may have nonetheless builded better than they knew. It is almost inconceivable that Madison and the other framers could not have had the prescience to realize that many of the checks and balances they had envisaged would come not only from the clash of competences all three coequal and territorial branches of government, but also from within those individual branches of government themselves.
When, during the Watergate imbroglio, Richard Nixon sought to set the CIA and the FBI at odds against one another, Nixon, a clever California lawyer, realized that the executive branch itself might well have given rise to a whole series of conflicting power centers. As we face a worse crisis than Watergate, in which the evidence seems to be accumulating that we truly have a Manchurian candidate President in the White House, we see the same kind of conflicting power structures and power centers emerging once again within the executive branch.
Certainly, the intelligence community, which in the past has so often been at war with itself, seems to be finding a kind of common ground against the Russophile Manchurian candidate in the White House. Nearly a year and a half ago, when Donald Trump’s candidacy for president seemed like a bizarre a long shot, a piece of guerrilla theater designed to boost The Donald’s ratings on NBC, I predicted elsewhere in this blog that if The Donald got out of hand, and that if The Donald managed to alienate the intelligence community, he might well pay a heavy price therefor.
Now, with The Donald having gone out of his way to insult and piss off America’s seventeen intelligence gathering agencies, and with a full on investigation being undertaken by special counsel Robert Mueller, it becomes easy to perceive the existence of an all-out conflict between the executive and a considerable part of the executive branch itself.
As much as the executive seems to be imposing its own internal checks and balances on Gospodin Prezidyent Shitgibbon Trumpov, the Congress also seems to be awakening to its critical duties of oversight and institutional accountability. Though we saw California Republican Congressman Devin Nunes stoop very close to treason by attempting to interfere with investigatory work of the House Intelligence Committee of which he was chairman, our public institutions — of which Ms. Maria Alexandrovna Gessen was perhaps more ready to despair than she should have been— of self-government rallied firmly against what Nunes was trying to do. Nunes has since been obliged to recuse himself as chair of House Intelligence.
On the other side of the capitol, the Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by North Carolina Republican Richard Burr, and vice chaired by Virginia Democrat Mark Warner, and on which both of our powerful California women, Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris, sit, took a lesson from Devon Nunez’s misconduct and chose to proceed in a far more upright and bipartisan manner. Both committees are also working to avoid stepping on each other’s toes, or on the toes of the investigation undertaken by special counsel Mueller.
Yesterday, we learned that FBI agents executed a search warrant, on July 26, apparently issuing out of the Northern District of Virginia (the traditional go-to jurisdiction for national security cases), on the Alexandria, Virginia residence of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort. All this despite the increasingly desperate efforts of Gospodin Prezidyent Shitgibbon Trumpov to prevent the investigation into his, and his campaign’s, collusion with the Russian State from proceeding any further.
So, pace Masha Gessen, at the moment the public institutions of self-government and civil society upon which we rely to impose checks and balances and to prevent a lawless president from becoming a dictator seem, at the moment, to be performing their prophylactic and disinfectant function. For, as Justice Louis D. Brandeis famously observed: “"Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman."
Brandeis’s dictum is as applicable to government misconduct as to any misconduct which may occur in the private sector. And as long as there exist strong, Madisonian, public institutions of self-government possessing the confidence and, let us shame the devil and tell the truth, the institutional ego, and the testicular fortitude to shine bright lights into the dark corners of governmental and political misconduct, we may still be cautiously optimistic that our institutions can save us, if we are prepared to hold them accountable, to give them the tools they need to perform their prophylactic function, and as long as we ourselves are militant in demanding accountability.
For there is no doubt that Donald Trump is an evil man, set, if he can get away with it, on undermining the foundations of American civil society, on destroying the credibility of our civic institutions and of our public institutions of self-government. We cannot permit this to happen. It must be prevented by any means necessary.
As a City Councilman, I believed absolutely that the most important requisite for success at any level of government was to ensure that the public could and did have confidence in the integrity of the process not only by which policy was developed and implemented, but also by which the body politic itself was governed by the people’s representatives.
We may thus dare hope that Maria Alexandrovna is wrong, and that our civil society and our public institutions of self-government will stand up to gospodin prezidyent Shitgibbon Trumpov, that they will bring him down, and, to riff on Abraham Lincoln, that this nation, under God, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all are created equal, will have a new birth of freedom, and correct and honorable government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
-------------------------------------
"Our institutions will save us from Donald Trump; there is nothing to worry about."
"Our institutions may save us from Donald Trump, but we must be watchful, we must hold our institutions accountable, and we must safeguard them so that they can perform their prophylactic function."
"Our institutions can only save us from Trump if we act strongly to increase their power, being militant and uncompromising in so doing."
"We’re fucked; our institutions cannot save us, for they have been hopelessly and irredeemably corrupted by Donald Trump."
These four soundbites essentially sum up the current range of prevailing opinion about the capacity of the United States and her public institutions of civil society to stand up to the existential menace that is Donald Trump.
The view that we have nothing to worry about, that our institutions will save us from Donald Trump, strikes one as unduly optimistic, given the cultlike mentality of many Trump supporters.
By the same token, the view that we are essentially fucked, and that our institutions cannot save us from a Trump-induced slide into fascism, strikes one as being more despairing than is warranted by the current situation.
A few months ago, we might have been right to adopt such a despairing view. We had been warned by such formidable journalists and commentators as the Russian American Masha Gessen, author of The Man without a Face, a well-received biography of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, that, essentially, all was lost. Trump, Gessen assured us, would encounter little if any difficulty in corrupting our public institutions of civil society and self-government.
Gessen warned us that the election of Donald Trump portended an all-but-ineluctable slide into fascism. Yet, as the Trump administration slouches past the 200 day mark (curious that we should be counting the days of the Trump administration as if they were the 900 days of the Siege of Leningrad), the trend that seems to be emerging is not of an ineluctable surrender to the fascism represented by the Mussolini wannabe in the White House, but of a Madisonian battle among competing centers of power. Madison’s theory that tyranny would be checked in the United States by the competing, territorial ambitions of separate power centers within the government seems to be experiencing a strong reaffirmation of its basic viability.
For despite the way the presidency has taken on many of the attributes of Byzantine Emperorship, in which the head of state moves in a bubble, less a man than a jeweled effigy onto which a divided people a project whatever inconsistent expectations they see fit, the presidency still remains largely what Madison and the framers of the Constitution intended it should be, a temporary chiefship of one branch of the government, accountable and answerable to the sovereign people referenced in the very first words of the preamble to the Constitution, and more immediately, to the coequal branches of government mentioned in, and deriving their authority equally from that selfsame Constitution.
The Constitution was written in the expectation that competing and conflicting centers of power within the government would act to limit one another. Indeed, our entire constitutional theory can arguably be summed up in the phrase “checks and balances.”
Yet, if Madison and the other framers envisioned those checks and balances as a functioning within the initial textual confines of the three branches of government described and prescribed in the Constitution, they may have nonetheless builded better than they knew. It is almost inconceivable that Madison and the other framers could not have had the prescience to realize that many of the checks and balances they had envisaged would come not only from the clash of competences all three coequal and territorial branches of government, but also from within those individual branches of government themselves.
When, during the Watergate imbroglio, Richard Nixon sought to set the CIA and the FBI at odds against one another, Nixon, a clever California lawyer, realized that the executive branch itself might well have given rise to a whole series of conflicting power centers. As we face a worse crisis than Watergate, in which the evidence seems to be accumulating that we truly have a Manchurian candidate President in the White House, we see the same kind of conflicting power structures and power centers emerging once again within the executive branch.
Certainly, the intelligence community, which in the past has so often been at war with itself, seems to be finding a kind of common ground against the Russophile Manchurian candidate in the White House. Nearly a year and a half ago, when Donald Trump’s candidacy for president seemed like a bizarre a long shot, a piece of guerrilla theater designed to boost The Donald’s ratings on NBC, I predicted elsewhere in this blog that if The Donald got out of hand, and that if The Donald managed to alienate the intelligence community, he might well pay a heavy price therefor.
Now, with The Donald having gone out of his way to insult and piss off America’s seventeen intelligence gathering agencies, and with a full on investigation being undertaken by special counsel Robert Mueller, it becomes easy to perceive the existence of an all-out conflict between the executive and a considerable part of the executive branch itself.
As much as the executive seems to be imposing its own internal checks and balances on Gospodin Prezidyent Shitgibbon Trumpov, the Congress also seems to be awakening to its critical duties of oversight and institutional accountability. Though we saw California Republican Congressman Devin Nunes stoop very close to treason by attempting to interfere with investigatory work of the House Intelligence Committee of which he was chairman, our public institutions — of which Ms. Maria Alexandrovna Gessen was perhaps more ready to despair than she should have been— of self-government rallied firmly against what Nunes was trying to do. Nunes has since been obliged to recuse himself as chair of House Intelligence.
On the other side of the capitol, the Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by North Carolina Republican Richard Burr, and vice chaired by Virginia Democrat Mark Warner, and on which both of our powerful California women, Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris, sit, took a lesson from Devon Nunez’s misconduct and chose to proceed in a far more upright and bipartisan manner. Both committees are also working to avoid stepping on each other’s toes, or on the toes of the investigation undertaken by special counsel Mueller.
Yesterday, we learned that FBI agents executed a search warrant, on July 26, apparently issuing out of the Northern District of Virginia (the traditional go-to jurisdiction for national security cases), on the Alexandria, Virginia residence of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort. All this despite the increasingly desperate efforts of Gospodin Prezidyent Shitgibbon Trumpov to prevent the investigation into his, and his campaign’s, collusion with the Russian State from proceeding any further.
So, pace Masha Gessen, at the moment the public institutions of self-government and civil society upon which we rely to impose checks and balances and to prevent a lawless president from becoming a dictator seem, at the moment, to be performing their prophylactic and disinfectant function. For, as Justice Louis D. Brandeis famously observed: “"Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman."
Brandeis’s dictum is as applicable to government misconduct as to any misconduct which may occur in the private sector. And as long as there exist strong, Madisonian, public institutions of self-government possessing the confidence and, let us shame the devil and tell the truth, the institutional ego, and the testicular fortitude to shine bright lights into the dark corners of governmental and political misconduct, we may still be cautiously optimistic that our institutions can save us, if we are prepared to hold them accountable, to give them the tools they need to perform their prophylactic function, and as long as we ourselves are militant in demanding accountability.
For there is no doubt that Donald Trump is an evil man, set, if he can get away with it, on undermining the foundations of American civil society, on destroying the credibility of our civic institutions and of our public institutions of self-government. We cannot permit this to happen. It must be prevented by any means necessary.
As a City Councilman, I believed absolutely that the most important requisite for success at any level of government was to ensure that the public could and did have confidence in the integrity of the process not only by which policy was developed and implemented, but also by which the body politic itself was governed by the people’s representatives.
We may thus dare hope that Maria Alexandrovna is wrong, and that our civil society and our public institutions of self-government will stand up to gospodin prezidyent Shitgibbon Trumpov, that they will bring him down, and, to riff on Abraham Lincoln, that this nation, under God, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all are created equal, will have a new birth of freedom, and correct and honorable government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City, California. He served two terms on the city Council there. He is an unapologetic Hillary Clinton liberal Democrat. The views herein are not intended, and should not be construed as, legal advice. Of course, the views herein are entirely his own.
Tuesday, July 4, 2017
IN A TIME OF DIVISION, A REMINDER OF THE FIRST THINGS THAT OUGHT TO UNITE US.
Summary: The United States is the first country in the world to be founded upon a written ideological statement. Across 240 years, the soaring, hortatory, inspiring words of the Declaration of Independence have been for generations of Americans the ur-text for our national consciousness of what it means to be American, of what it means to live in a nation that holds these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. Yet, in a time of division fostered by a crass, Russian-controlled wannabe despot, far too many of us have lost sight of the unparalleled magnificence of vision that called the United States into being.
-----------------------------------------------
It was twelvescore and one years ago, in a blazing Philadelphia summer, that one of the most extraordinary political events in the last thousand years happened on this continent. A fractious, nervous group of men agreed to declare independence from the colonial power to which they had heretofore owed and borne allegiance. As Abraham Lincoln expressed it 87 years later at Gettysburg, they “brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
But now, as we come to the 241st anniversary of that singular event, called into being by a group of men who knew viscerally, that they would, as Benjamin Franklin wryly observed, have to hang together or they would certainly hang separately, we seem to have lost our American faculty for hanging together. We seem to have lost sight of and lost touch with the clear-sighted, magnificent vision that emboldened the men (and women, pace Abigail Adams) of that summer of 1776 in Philadelphia.
We have lost sight of Massachusetts Puritan John Winthrop’s vision of America as “a city upon a hill,” watched by the whole world. Instead, a minority of the American electorate, taking advantage of an electoral college system conceived in slavery and dedicated to the protection of the Peculiar Institution as it existed in the 1780s, has inflicted upon us a corrupt, Russian-controlled wannabe despot under whose malign misgovernment, America is rapidly ceasing to be that city on a hill, watched and admired by the whole world.
If one may be forgiven a reference to the history of Russia, that country which seems to have affected in a bloodless conquest of our city on a hill, Donald Trump bears a resemblance to the worst of the Romanov Russian emperors. Lacking the drive and judgment of a Peter the Great, the intellectual vision of a Catherine the Great, or even of the humbleness before God (Micah 6:8) of Tishaishii Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich (r. 1645-1676), Donald Trump stands out as a combined simulacrum of the Emperor Pavel (Paul) Petrovich (r. 1796-1801) and his father Emperor Peter III (r. January-July 1762): spoiled, entitled, arrogant, paranoid, narcissistic, and such generally bad men that both had to be physically eliminated to ensure the security and survival of the Russian state.
To remind ourselves that we are the proud inheritors of that magnificent vision which called forth a great nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, and remind ourselves that we are the heirs of those men and women who dared to take up arms against the enormities of the British Crown and by opposing, end them, I incorporate in this post the entirety of the Declaration of Independence, urgently commending every word of it to your reading. As the words of the collect appointed in the Book of Common Prayer for the Sunday closest to November 16 urge us, let us “hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them.”
In Congress, July 4, 1776.
THE UNANIMOUS DECLARATION OF THE 13 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.
We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.
Georgia
Button Gwinnett
Lyman Hall
George Walton
North Carolina
William Hooper
Joseph Hewes
John Penn
South Carolina
Edward Rutledge
Thomas Heyward, Jr.
Thomas Lynch, Jr.
Arthur Middleton
Massachusetts
John Hancock
Maryland
Samuel Chase
William Paca
Thomas Stone
Charles Carroll of Carrollton
Virginia
George Wythe
Richard Henry Lee
Thomas Jefferson
Benjamin Harrison
Thomas Nelson, Jr.
Francis Lightfoot Lee
Carter Braxton
Pennsylvania
Robert Morris
Benjamin Rush
Benjamin Franklin
John Morton
George Clymer
James Smith
George Taylor
James Wilson
George Ross
Delaware
Caesar Rodney
George Read
Thomas McKean
New York
William Floyd
Philip Livingston
Francis Lewis
Lewis Morris
New Jersey
Richard Stockton
John Witherspoon
Francis Hopkinson
John Hart
Abraham Clark
New Hampshire
Josiah Bartlett
William Whipple
Massachusetts
Samuel Adams
John Adams
Robert Treat Paine
Elbridge Gerry
Rhode Island
Stephen Hopkins
William Ellery
Connecticut
Roger Sherman
Samuel Huntington
William Williams
Oliver Wolcott
New Hampshire
Matthew Thornton
-----------------------------------------------
It was twelvescore and one years ago, in a blazing Philadelphia summer, that one of the most extraordinary political events in the last thousand years happened on this continent. A fractious, nervous group of men agreed to declare independence from the colonial power to which they had heretofore owed and borne allegiance. As Abraham Lincoln expressed it 87 years later at Gettysburg, they “brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
But now, as we come to the 241st anniversary of that singular event, called into being by a group of men who knew viscerally, that they would, as Benjamin Franklin wryly observed, have to hang together or they would certainly hang separately, we seem to have lost our American faculty for hanging together. We seem to have lost sight of and lost touch with the clear-sighted, magnificent vision that emboldened the men (and women, pace Abigail Adams) of that summer of 1776 in Philadelphia.
We have lost sight of Massachusetts Puritan John Winthrop’s vision of America as “a city upon a hill,” watched by the whole world. Instead, a minority of the American electorate, taking advantage of an electoral college system conceived in slavery and dedicated to the protection of the Peculiar Institution as it existed in the 1780s, has inflicted upon us a corrupt, Russian-controlled wannabe despot under whose malign misgovernment, America is rapidly ceasing to be that city on a hill, watched and admired by the whole world.
If one may be forgiven a reference to the history of Russia, that country which seems to have affected in a bloodless conquest of our city on a hill, Donald Trump bears a resemblance to the worst of the Romanov Russian emperors. Lacking the drive and judgment of a Peter the Great, the intellectual vision of a Catherine the Great, or even of the humbleness before God (Micah 6:8) of Tishaishii Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich (r. 1645-1676), Donald Trump stands out as a combined simulacrum of the Emperor Pavel (Paul) Petrovich (r. 1796-1801) and his father Emperor Peter III (r. January-July 1762): spoiled, entitled, arrogant, paranoid, narcissistic, and such generally bad men that both had to be physically eliminated to ensure the security and survival of the Russian state.
To remind ourselves that we are the proud inheritors of that magnificent vision which called forth a great nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, and remind ourselves that we are the heirs of those men and women who dared to take up arms against the enormities of the British Crown and by opposing, end them, I incorporate in this post the entirety of the Declaration of Independence, urgently commending every word of it to your reading. As the words of the collect appointed in the Book of Common Prayer for the Sunday closest to November 16 urge us, let us “hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them.”
In Congress, July 4, 1776.
THE UNANIMOUS DECLARATION OF THE 13 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.
We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.
Georgia
Button Gwinnett
Lyman Hall
George Walton
North Carolina
William Hooper
Joseph Hewes
John Penn
South Carolina
Edward Rutledge
Thomas Heyward, Jr.
Thomas Lynch, Jr.
Arthur Middleton
Massachusetts
John Hancock
Maryland
Samuel Chase
William Paca
Thomas Stone
Charles Carroll of Carrollton
Virginia
George Wythe
Richard Henry Lee
Thomas Jefferson
Benjamin Harrison
Thomas Nelson, Jr.
Francis Lightfoot Lee
Carter Braxton
Pennsylvania
Robert Morris
Benjamin Rush
Benjamin Franklin
John Morton
George Clymer
James Smith
George Taylor
James Wilson
George Ross
Delaware
Caesar Rodney
George Read
Thomas McKean
New York
William Floyd
Philip Livingston
Francis Lewis
Lewis Morris
New Jersey
Richard Stockton
John Witherspoon
Francis Hopkinson
John Hart
Abraham Clark
New Hampshire
Josiah Bartlett
William Whipple
Massachusetts
Samuel Adams
John Adams
Robert Treat Paine
Elbridge Gerry
Rhode Island
Stephen Hopkins
William Ellery
Connecticut
Roger Sherman
Samuel Huntington
William Williams
Oliver Wolcott
New Hampshire
Matthew Thornton
Monday, May 29, 2017
THE SADDEST MEMORIAL DAY IN HISTORY
SUMMARY: our Memorial Day, that sacred day when we remember and rededicate ourselves to the calls of social justice which hundreds of thousands of our countrymen fought and died more than 150 years ago, has been profaned this year almost beyond redemption. It has been profaned by a lewd man, a coarse man, a wicked man, a man conceived in bigotry and awash in treason.
America’s wars have always had about them a sense of social justice, waged as they have been by American fighting men and women of every sort and condition imaginable on this planet. What makes America an extraordinary nation is her diversity, her astonishing ability to be a place of refuge where the ancient quarrels have no meaning, where the Frenchmen and the German, the Gael and the Sassenach, the Christian, Jew, and the Muslim, all serve together, in the same uniform under the same flag, by the same appellation.
Donald Trump does not understand social justice; he rejects diversity, and he sees America as just one of a league of ordinary nations. On this Memorial Day, when the sadness is so deep no tears can come, we must resist this man with all the strength and all the perseverance God has given us. Let us say an unequivocal “no” to the wannabe dictator, and let us not be found wanting in this hour.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Memorial Day is about social justice. From its beginnings as a celebration among South Carolina freedmen of the lives of the Union troops who had died to save the union and extirpate the Peculiar Institution of chattel slavery, Memorial Day has become a time to remember all who have laid what Abraham Lincoln, in his immortal letter to Mrs. Bixby, referred to as “costly sacrific[es] upon the altar of Freedom.”
For all the tacky, jingoistic excesses into which our memorials for the fallen have sometimes veered, we have never until now allowed our pride and gratitude to suffer profanation.
Until now.
If last year we could still dare to hope that we were living in an America in which the arc of our moral universe, though long, nonetheless bent toward justice, the passage of a year has bereft us entirely of that hope, instead reminding us that America is no longer a shining city on a hill but rather part of the league of ordinary and disreputable nations.
We have managed to profane everything about America that had been good, decent, true, aboveboard, honest, worth crossing oceans for, and worth laying down our lives for. We accomplished all this by allowing a vulgar, crass, gross, coarse, wicked, traitorous man to steal the presidency with the active assistance and collusion of Bernard Sanders and the Russian State.
Because we have managed to profane so badly what Massachusetts Puritan John Winthrop once famously described as that city on a hill on which lay the eyes of a watching world, we Americans, those who have borne arms for this country and those who have not, find ourselves grappling with a sadness so deep no tears will come.
Has it come down to this? Did our American fighting men and women, particularly the estimated 1.4 million who laid that most costly and ultimate sacrifice upon the altar of Freedom, do so in order that America might be governed by a downright moron, by a gibbering idiot whose basic loyalties to America and to the West are open to the greatest question?
What an insult Donald Trump has been to our sacred dead! His performance at the recent NATO and G-8 summits has been likened to that of a drunken tourist. He has managed, perhaps in furtherance of instructions from Kremlin, to drive such a wedge between the United States and Europe that German Chancellor Angela Merkel, speaking at a rally in Munich, was moved to pronounce what may have been the epitaph of NATO, telling her Bavarian audience that Europe could no longer rely on the US or the UK to help provide for the defense of the continent.
In short, Donald Trump has given the Kremlin everything it has been seeking since 1949. I will leave for another time the particulars of the betrayal which Donald Trump, his supporters, and those of Bernard Sanders, have been responsible.
For now, however, I will content myself with the observation that the current occupant of the White House, along with his organized crime family, represents a searing repudiation of every American value we have been raised to hold dear.
War has few, if any upsides, but for the United States, the minute pearl of consolation we have always been able to draw out of the rough oyster of war is that every one of America’s conflicts has had the effect of incrementally precipitating the American body politic toward greater inclusion, toward forming a more perfect union in which all men truly are created equal. Our wars have always had an implicit social justice dimension to them.
Yet the current occupant of the White House, together with his organized crime family, scoffs at the very notion of social justice. With his open and overt racism, the current occupant of the White House demonstrates that he is truly “a man of the 50s:” a man of the 1850s.
Yet to scoff at social justice, or to scoff at environmental justice, and to scoff at the idea of any kind of justice, which the criminal in the White House has done so often, is openly and notoriously to declare that one is willfully, knowingly, volitionally, out of touch with the values we consider integral to our American way of life.
In every one of America’s wars, those who laid down their lives in the service of this country laid down those lives, at least in some measure, in the service of a vision of America as that city on the hill upon which rested the eyes of all people, of America as the exceptional nation, of America as the nation that had transcended the ancient quarrels and rivalries and tribalisms of the ancestral lands from which we all migrated, even Indians.
Our fallen did not face foreign shot, foreign shell, and foreign steel, bear foreign plagues, foreign pestilences, and foreign afflictions in the service of an ordinary nation. Our American fighting men and women did not march and countermarch in the service of European dynastic quarrels over a few acres of Silesian snow or a few French fortresses.
What has sustained us has been our sense of ourselves as an extraordinary nation, as a nation called into being as a place of refuge where the ancient quarrels were no more, where the Frenchmen and the German, the Gael and the Sassenach, the Christian, the Jew, and the Muslim, could fight together in the same uniform, under the same flag, for the same country, under the same common appellation. Our diversity has been our greatest strength, and it continues to be expressed in our original and true national motto “E Pluribus Unum,” of many, one.
Yet the current occupant of the White House scorns the diversity that has made this nation truly extraordinary and exceptional. Instead of seeing America as melting pot or, in a more modern understanding, as a tossed salad, the current occupant of the White House sees this country through a Russian lens, as a squabbling congeries of antagonistic tribes, unfit for self-government, but fit rather only for rule by an autocrat, preferably of Muscovite derivation.
On this Memorial Day, we Americans have a stark choice. We can either accept and normalize the sinister, malignant views of the wannabe dictator in the White House, turning our backs upon the sacrifice of the 1.4 million Americans who laid the ultimate sacrifice on the altar of Freedom, insulting her memory and setting at naught their heroism and their offering of life itself. Or we can reject the malignant and warped ideals, wrong ideology, and skewed values of the wannabe dictator in the White House. We can say to our war dead that we take up their quarrel, remembering the heart wringing words of John McCrae’s In Flanders Fields:
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
The sadness of this Memorial Day is so deep that no tears will come. Our duty to the fallen is simple. Resist. Resist all our soul. With all our strength. With all our mind. With all our perseverance, as God gives us strength to persevere. We must be equal to the task of building again that city on a hill that cannot be hid, for the whole world is watching.
The. Whole. World. Is. Watching.
-xxx-
America’s wars have always had about them a sense of social justice, waged as they have been by American fighting men and women of every sort and condition imaginable on this planet. What makes America an extraordinary nation is her diversity, her astonishing ability to be a place of refuge where the ancient quarrels have no meaning, where the Frenchmen and the German, the Gael and the Sassenach, the Christian, Jew, and the Muslim, all serve together, in the same uniform under the same flag, by the same appellation.
Donald Trump does not understand social justice; he rejects diversity, and he sees America as just one of a league of ordinary nations. On this Memorial Day, when the sadness is so deep no tears can come, we must resist this man with all the strength and all the perseverance God has given us. Let us say an unequivocal “no” to the wannabe dictator, and let us not be found wanting in this hour.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Memorial Day is about social justice. From its beginnings as a celebration among South Carolina freedmen of the lives of the Union troops who had died to save the union and extirpate the Peculiar Institution of chattel slavery, Memorial Day has become a time to remember all who have laid what Abraham Lincoln, in his immortal letter to Mrs. Bixby, referred to as “costly sacrific[es] upon the altar of Freedom.”
For all the tacky, jingoistic excesses into which our memorials for the fallen have sometimes veered, we have never until now allowed our pride and gratitude to suffer profanation.
Until now.
If last year we could still dare to hope that we were living in an America in which the arc of our moral universe, though long, nonetheless bent toward justice, the passage of a year has bereft us entirely of that hope, instead reminding us that America is no longer a shining city on a hill but rather part of the league of ordinary and disreputable nations.
We have managed to profane everything about America that had been good, decent, true, aboveboard, honest, worth crossing oceans for, and worth laying down our lives for. We accomplished all this by allowing a vulgar, crass, gross, coarse, wicked, traitorous man to steal the presidency with the active assistance and collusion of Bernard Sanders and the Russian State.
Because we have managed to profane so badly what Massachusetts Puritan John Winthrop once famously described as that city on a hill on which lay the eyes of a watching world, we Americans, those who have borne arms for this country and those who have not, find ourselves grappling with a sadness so deep no tears will come.
Has it come down to this? Did our American fighting men and women, particularly the estimated 1.4 million who laid that most costly and ultimate sacrifice upon the altar of Freedom, do so in order that America might be governed by a downright moron, by a gibbering idiot whose basic loyalties to America and to the West are open to the greatest question?
What an insult Donald Trump has been to our sacred dead! His performance at the recent NATO and G-8 summits has been likened to that of a drunken tourist. He has managed, perhaps in furtherance of instructions from Kremlin, to drive such a wedge between the United States and Europe that German Chancellor Angela Merkel, speaking at a rally in Munich, was moved to pronounce what may have been the epitaph of NATO, telling her Bavarian audience that Europe could no longer rely on the US or the UK to help provide for the defense of the continent.
In short, Donald Trump has given the Kremlin everything it has been seeking since 1949. I will leave for another time the particulars of the betrayal which Donald Trump, his supporters, and those of Bernard Sanders, have been responsible.
For now, however, I will content myself with the observation that the current occupant of the White House, along with his organized crime family, represents a searing repudiation of every American value we have been raised to hold dear.
War has few, if any upsides, but for the United States, the minute pearl of consolation we have always been able to draw out of the rough oyster of war is that every one of America’s conflicts has had the effect of incrementally precipitating the American body politic toward greater inclusion, toward forming a more perfect union in which all men truly are created equal. Our wars have always had an implicit social justice dimension to them.
Yet the current occupant of the White House, together with his organized crime family, scoffs at the very notion of social justice. With his open and overt racism, the current occupant of the White House demonstrates that he is truly “a man of the 50s:” a man of the 1850s.
Yet to scoff at social justice, or to scoff at environmental justice, and to scoff at the idea of any kind of justice, which the criminal in the White House has done so often, is openly and notoriously to declare that one is willfully, knowingly, volitionally, out of touch with the values we consider integral to our American way of life.
In every one of America’s wars, those who laid down their lives in the service of this country laid down those lives, at least in some measure, in the service of a vision of America as that city on the hill upon which rested the eyes of all people, of America as the exceptional nation, of America as the nation that had transcended the ancient quarrels and rivalries and tribalisms of the ancestral lands from which we all migrated, even Indians.
Our fallen did not face foreign shot, foreign shell, and foreign steel, bear foreign plagues, foreign pestilences, and foreign afflictions in the service of an ordinary nation. Our American fighting men and women did not march and countermarch in the service of European dynastic quarrels over a few acres of Silesian snow or a few French fortresses.
What has sustained us has been our sense of ourselves as an extraordinary nation, as a nation called into being as a place of refuge where the ancient quarrels were no more, where the Frenchmen and the German, the Gael and the Sassenach, the Christian, the Jew, and the Muslim, could fight together in the same uniform, under the same flag, for the same country, under the same common appellation. Our diversity has been our greatest strength, and it continues to be expressed in our original and true national motto “E Pluribus Unum,” of many, one.
Yet the current occupant of the White House scorns the diversity that has made this nation truly extraordinary and exceptional. Instead of seeing America as melting pot or, in a more modern understanding, as a tossed salad, the current occupant of the White House sees this country through a Russian lens, as a squabbling congeries of antagonistic tribes, unfit for self-government, but fit rather only for rule by an autocrat, preferably of Muscovite derivation.
On this Memorial Day, we Americans have a stark choice. We can either accept and normalize the sinister, malignant views of the wannabe dictator in the White House, turning our backs upon the sacrifice of the 1.4 million Americans who laid the ultimate sacrifice on the altar of Freedom, insulting her memory and setting at naught their heroism and their offering of life itself. Or we can reject the malignant and warped ideals, wrong ideology, and skewed values of the wannabe dictator in the White House. We can say to our war dead that we take up their quarrel, remembering the heart wringing words of John McCrae’s In Flanders Fields:
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
The sadness of this Memorial Day is so deep that no tears will come. Our duty to the fallen is simple. Resist. Resist all our soul. With all our strength. With all our mind. With all our perseverance, as God gives us strength to persevere. We must be equal to the task of building again that city on a hill that cannot be hid, for the whole world is watching.
The. Whole. World. Is. Watching.
-xxx-
Wednesday, April 5, 2017
TREASON WITHIN THE BELTWAY: Joe McCarthy and Andrei Ya. Vyshinsky Were Right
SUMMARY: Joseph R. McCarthy and Andrei Ya. Vyshinsky were right. We are surrounded by traitors, spies, saboteurs, and wreckers. Last year I warned about the dangers of the systematic betrayal and sellout of this country that seem to be underway at the highest levels of the Trump campaign. Though my words were pooh-poohed at the time, particularly by Democrats who were more afraid of being thought tainted by “McCarthyism” then they were of losing what might be an existential election in our history, my fears have been borne out. Every policy undertaken by the Trump administration has been tainted with treason. The policy direction of the United States under Donald Trump is not in America’s interest, but that of Russia. The revelations of the nature and extent of Trump and his associates’ connection with the Moskovsky Kremlin are rapidly approaching critical mass for probable cause to believe the treason has been committed and that Trump and his personnel have committed it. Trumpism, as I warned last year, is treason.
Joseph R. McCarthy and Andrei Ya. Vyshinsky were right. We are surrounded by traitors, spies, saboteurs, and wreckers.
In June, 2016, I posted in this blog a warning that Trumpism is treason. The better part of year later, my warning has been vindicated and largely borne out by events. The amount of aid and comfort which has flowed from the Trump, or should I say Trumpov, administration to the Kremlin has been astonishing, frightening, and, thankfully, the subject of increasing scrutiny by the media. By the media, whom gospodin Trumpov has insistently characterized in Leninist terms as “enemies of the people.”
Last June, I suggested that gospodin Trumpov’s uncritical support for Brexit was intended to provide aid and comfort to the Kremlin’s ongoing Kriegßpiel against the West, to the Kremlin’s effort, underway since 1949, to fracture the Atlantic alliance and the generations long project of European unity that was French statesman Robert Schuman’s lifework.
I suggested also that gospodin Trumpov’s ongoing and continuous critique of NATO, and his uncritical admiration for Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, together with his “policy” formulations on the American position in Asia were all intended to affect a diminishment of American stature, American authority, and American power, not only in the region but also worldwide.
To these ominous and lowering warning signs we may now add a further and much more comprehensive bill of particulars.
The steady drip, drip, drip of revelations concerning the contacts of people in or close to the Trumpov administration, including quondam National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, Reichsleiter Jared Kushner, Atty. Gen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, campaign advisers Paul Manafort, J.D. Gordon, and Carter Page, Trumpov sons Uday and Qusay (Donald, Jr. and Eric), Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Commerce Sec. Wilbur Ross, and Trumpov dirty trickster Roger Stone, with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, Russian banking/business interests, or agencies of the Russian government itself, has continued, slowly accumulating toward a critical mass which would justify any federal grand jury in the country in returning a true bill of indictment for treason against some, or all, of the senior leaders of the Trumpov administratsiya. (Since we appear to have been the victims of a hostile takeover, we may all have to start learning to Russianize our vocabulary.)
In short, we have been betrayed at the highest levels by those who now occupy the highest levels of government in this country.
As Thomas Jefferson once put it, let facts be submitted to a candid world.
THE BORDER WALL: By insisting upon building a foolish and useless border wall along the Mexican border, Trumpov and his administratsiya have managed single-handedly to degrade our relationship with México to the point of rupture. Relations between the White House and Los Pinos are at a low point not seen since the days of Woodrow Wilson and Victoriano Huerta. The prime beneficiaries of any rupture between the United States and México are, of course, Beijing and the Kremlin. The red Chinese and the Russians will be happy to occupy the vacuum engendered by the diplomatic falling out between Washington City and México City engineered by Trumpov and his alt-right racist, Russophile, supporters.
TRUMPCARE: The Republican effort to roll back Obamacare, as the Affordable Care Act has come to be known, is nothing more than a gratuitous effort to undo one of the cornerstones of Barack Obama’s legislative legacy. However, by depriving millions of Americans of healthcare, the administratsiya not only condemns those millions of Americans to sickness and possible death, but it also provides aid and comfort to the Kremlin in the process. It is in Russia’s state interest if millions of Americans are too sick to participate in the American economy or to stand watch at the walls of the West. A sick America is a weak America. A weak America is one that lacks sufficient strength to withstand the lascivious oglings of Adam-zad, the bear that walks like a man, with whom, Rudyard Kipling once warned us, we should make no truce.
THE END OF INTERNET PRIVACY: The extent to which the Kremlin benefits from the end of Internet privacy could not be more clear. By permitting Internet providers to sell the search history of subscribers, the Trumpov administratsiya has extended an engraved invitation to phony business concerns fronting for Russian intelligence, or to American law enforcement, to buy from Internet service providers information which would otherwise be barred to them by American trade regulations or, in the case of American law enforcement, by the Fourth Amendment.
THE DONALD’S UNCRITICAL ATTITUDE TOWARD VLADIMIR VLADIMIROVICH: Gospodin Trumpov’s unwillingness to say anything at all even slightly critical of the Russian strongman strongly suggests, to the point of probable cause to support criminal prosecution, that the allegations contained in the so-called Steele dossier are at least partially true, and that the Russians have assembled a considerable amount of kompromat on gospodin Trumpov which renders him susceptible to blackmail, and thus to Kremlin control.
THE DONALD’S CURIOUS LACK OF UNDERSTANDING OF THE IMPORTANCE OF THE ATLANTIC ALLIANCE: If insulting our neighbors immediately to the south was not bad enough, The Donald’s insulting behavior toward German Chancellor Angela Merkel stands as yet another demonstration of his status as the Kremlin’s poodle. Our relationship with the Bundesrepublik has been a foundation of our foreign policy for nearly 70 years. Indeed, our commitment to the Atlantic alliance and our till-recent wholehearted support of the European unity project have been part not only of our foreign policy, but also of the foreign policies of the rest of the world as well. By behaving toward Chancellor Merkel like a wiseguy from a Mafia protection racket, gospodin Trumpov has not only demonstrated his fundamental lack of respect for our Atlantic alliance partners, but also his fundamental preferential option for the thug in the Kremlin. If this does not give aid and comfort to the Russian state, then nothing does.
THE DONALD’S HOSTILITY TOWARD CRUCIAL AMERICAN INSTITUTIONS: Now, a certain reasoned skepticism toward the institutions of American civil society is not, in and of itself, treasonable. One may criticize the judiciary if one disagrees with the reasoning of a judicial opinion or with the proclivities of a judicial nominee. But what one must not do, particularly not if one occupies a high-ranking post in the executive branch of the government, is to attack the legitimacy of the judiciary per se. By attacking federal District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, impugning his integrity because the Hoosier-born judge presiding over the Trump University fraud case is of Mexican heritage, and by attacking “so-called” District Judge James Robart for ruling against him in Washington v. Trump, gospodin Trumpov has given aid and comfort to the Kremlin through his outrageous contempt of court, by which he intended to, and did, call the legitimacy of the Courts of the United States into question.
In addition to attempting to delegitimize the Courts of the United States, The Donald has also given aid and comfort to the enemies of freedom worldwide by attacking the American media, one of the freest and most fearless in the world. The freedom of the American press is one of the greatest, noblest attributes of our society, its freedom to speak truth to power is an essential component of American liberty and formidable to tyrants only. Once again, attacking the legitimacy and the critical structural role of our media does nothing to help the American people, but instead gives a boost to Vladimir Vladimirovich and his Kremlin thugs.
One could go on with a lengthy bill of particulars against gospodin Trumpov and his administratsiya; at the risk of sounding like Soviet show trials prosecutor Andrei Ya. Vyshinsky, every single thing this administration does is touched by and tainted with treason and betrayal. If there are “spies, saboteurs, and wreckers” at every level of the federal government, it is only because gospodin Trumpov and his associates have worked to place them there.
But as much as there are indeed spies, saboteurs, and wreckers at every level of government in the United States and the West, Americans still don’t like to contemplate that possibility. Indeed, Democrats, members of my own party, have been so conditioned over the last 60 years to reject and oppose anything that smacks of “McCarthyism” that the administratsiya and their Republican fellow travelers on Capitol Hill and throughout Washington City have managed to co-opt “McCarthyism” into their arsenal, using it as a weapon to try to shut down any efforts by Democrats or left-leading media to call the nation’s attention to the systematic treason that is being perpetrated inside the Beltway.
Because we have been so conditioned to reject anything that smacks of “McCarthyism,” we Democrats tend, when confronted with allegations that we are involved in some sort of so-called witch hunt, to go into a crouch and piss all over ourselves, floating away on waves of our own fear pee, terrified of being thought complicit in “McCarthyism” or witch hunting. Our reluctance to embrace the hard teaching that Joe McCarthy was right to be worried about subversion (even if his methodology and execution were morally blameworthy), or the equally hard teaching that sometimes subversion is real, and that it extends to the highest levels of government, crippled Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
When the Donald openly asked Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails, that should have been an immediate disqualifying moment. His party either lacked sufficient courage or sufficient fundamental loyalty to this country to tell The Donald that he could no longer be their standard bearer. Though Trump’s call was accurately characterized at the time as manifesting criminal intent, the GOP chose to put party over country, to put the Kremlin over the Capitol, to all intents and purposes running up the Russian flag over the Capitol building and Trump Tower.
Despite such obvious GOP disloyalty to this country to invite Russia, and of course WikiLeaks to commit plundering, criminal forays into the DNC, into Hillary Clinton, and, indeed, into the email accounts and Twitter feeds of loyal Americans everywhere, the Clinton campaign was too fearful of the decades of “anti-McCarthy” conditioning to which Democrats had subjected themselves to take the gloves off and proceed to destroy Trumpov so comprehensively that The Donald would have been a grease spot on Fifth Avenue in front of Trump Tower by the time the proceedings were over.
Instead, Hillary let herself be guided, nay, misled, by the counsels of cowardice which preemptively equated any attack on gospodin Trumpov with McCarthyism and witch hunts. The Clinton campaign knew or should have known that the weapon of “McCarthyism” would be deployed against them no matter what they did. Indeed, WikiLeaks and the traitor Julian Assange --who have never had anything at all even slightly unkind to say about Russia or Vladimir Vladimirovich– were quick to deploy exactly such a weapon.
What Hillary and her campaign staff should have done would have been to take a leaf out of the Republican book, coming out forthrightly with a ringing declaration that the country was in danger, and that Joe McCarthy had indeed been right.
By pulling their punches, by not exploiting the endless opportunities Trump had given them to shape the narrative, by constantly letting themselves be put on the defensive, the Hillary Clinton campaign managed to lose an election they were overwhelmingly favored to win by every single polling outfit in the country.
But the piss poor performance of the Clinton campaign is not our subject. The fact remains, as has been suggested hereinabove, that we have been, and are being, betrayed and sold out at the highest levels. The direction of American policy is not in America’s interest, but in Russia’s. We may only hope that before this country slips away from us entirely, our besieged and beleaguered institutions will rally against the Russian traitor and usurper currently residing in the White House.
This country faces an existential crisis.
Joseph R. McCarthy and Andrei Ya. Vyshinsky were right. We are surrounded by traitors, spies, saboteurs, and wreckers.
In June, 2016, I posted in this blog a warning that Trumpism is treason. The better part of year later, my warning has been vindicated and largely borne out by events. The amount of aid and comfort which has flowed from the Trump, or should I say Trumpov, administration to the Kremlin has been astonishing, frightening, and, thankfully, the subject of increasing scrutiny by the media. By the media, whom gospodin Trumpov has insistently characterized in Leninist terms as “enemies of the people.”
Last June, I suggested that gospodin Trumpov’s uncritical support for Brexit was intended to provide aid and comfort to the Kremlin’s ongoing Kriegßpiel against the West, to the Kremlin’s effort, underway since 1949, to fracture the Atlantic alliance and the generations long project of European unity that was French statesman Robert Schuman’s lifework.
I suggested also that gospodin Trumpov’s ongoing and continuous critique of NATO, and his uncritical admiration for Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, together with his “policy” formulations on the American position in Asia were all intended to affect a diminishment of American stature, American authority, and American power, not only in the region but also worldwide.
To these ominous and lowering warning signs we may now add a further and much more comprehensive bill of particulars.
The steady drip, drip, drip of revelations concerning the contacts of people in or close to the Trumpov administration, including quondam National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, Reichsleiter Jared Kushner, Atty. Gen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, campaign advisers Paul Manafort, J.D. Gordon, and Carter Page, Trumpov sons Uday and Qusay (Donald, Jr. and Eric), Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Commerce Sec. Wilbur Ross, and Trumpov dirty trickster Roger Stone, with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, Russian banking/business interests, or agencies of the Russian government itself, has continued, slowly accumulating toward a critical mass which would justify any federal grand jury in the country in returning a true bill of indictment for treason against some, or all, of the senior leaders of the Trumpov administratsiya. (Since we appear to have been the victims of a hostile takeover, we may all have to start learning to Russianize our vocabulary.)
In short, we have been betrayed at the highest levels by those who now occupy the highest levels of government in this country.
As Thomas Jefferson once put it, let facts be submitted to a candid world.
THE BORDER WALL: By insisting upon building a foolish and useless border wall along the Mexican border, Trumpov and his administratsiya have managed single-handedly to degrade our relationship with México to the point of rupture. Relations between the White House and Los Pinos are at a low point not seen since the days of Woodrow Wilson and Victoriano Huerta. The prime beneficiaries of any rupture between the United States and México are, of course, Beijing and the Kremlin. The red Chinese and the Russians will be happy to occupy the vacuum engendered by the diplomatic falling out between Washington City and México City engineered by Trumpov and his alt-right racist, Russophile, supporters.
TRUMPCARE: The Republican effort to roll back Obamacare, as the Affordable Care Act has come to be known, is nothing more than a gratuitous effort to undo one of the cornerstones of Barack Obama’s legislative legacy. However, by depriving millions of Americans of healthcare, the administratsiya not only condemns those millions of Americans to sickness and possible death, but it also provides aid and comfort to the Kremlin in the process. It is in Russia’s state interest if millions of Americans are too sick to participate in the American economy or to stand watch at the walls of the West. A sick America is a weak America. A weak America is one that lacks sufficient strength to withstand the lascivious oglings of Adam-zad, the bear that walks like a man, with whom, Rudyard Kipling once warned us, we should make no truce.
THE END OF INTERNET PRIVACY: The extent to which the Kremlin benefits from the end of Internet privacy could not be more clear. By permitting Internet providers to sell the search history of subscribers, the Trumpov administratsiya has extended an engraved invitation to phony business concerns fronting for Russian intelligence, or to American law enforcement, to buy from Internet service providers information which would otherwise be barred to them by American trade regulations or, in the case of American law enforcement, by the Fourth Amendment.
THE DONALD’S UNCRITICAL ATTITUDE TOWARD VLADIMIR VLADIMIROVICH: Gospodin Trumpov’s unwillingness to say anything at all even slightly critical of the Russian strongman strongly suggests, to the point of probable cause to support criminal prosecution, that the allegations contained in the so-called Steele dossier are at least partially true, and that the Russians have assembled a considerable amount of kompromat on gospodin Trumpov which renders him susceptible to blackmail, and thus to Kremlin control.
THE DONALD’S CURIOUS LACK OF UNDERSTANDING OF THE IMPORTANCE OF THE ATLANTIC ALLIANCE: If insulting our neighbors immediately to the south was not bad enough, The Donald’s insulting behavior toward German Chancellor Angela Merkel stands as yet another demonstration of his status as the Kremlin’s poodle. Our relationship with the Bundesrepublik has been a foundation of our foreign policy for nearly 70 years. Indeed, our commitment to the Atlantic alliance and our till-recent wholehearted support of the European unity project have been part not only of our foreign policy, but also of the foreign policies of the rest of the world as well. By behaving toward Chancellor Merkel like a wiseguy from a Mafia protection racket, gospodin Trumpov has not only demonstrated his fundamental lack of respect for our Atlantic alliance partners, but also his fundamental preferential option for the thug in the Kremlin. If this does not give aid and comfort to the Russian state, then nothing does.
THE DONALD’S HOSTILITY TOWARD CRUCIAL AMERICAN INSTITUTIONS: Now, a certain reasoned skepticism toward the institutions of American civil society is not, in and of itself, treasonable. One may criticize the judiciary if one disagrees with the reasoning of a judicial opinion or with the proclivities of a judicial nominee. But what one must not do, particularly not if one occupies a high-ranking post in the executive branch of the government, is to attack the legitimacy of the judiciary per se. By attacking federal District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, impugning his integrity because the Hoosier-born judge presiding over the Trump University fraud case is of Mexican heritage, and by attacking “so-called” District Judge James Robart for ruling against him in Washington v. Trump, gospodin Trumpov has given aid and comfort to the Kremlin through his outrageous contempt of court, by which he intended to, and did, call the legitimacy of the Courts of the United States into question.
In addition to attempting to delegitimize the Courts of the United States, The Donald has also given aid and comfort to the enemies of freedom worldwide by attacking the American media, one of the freest and most fearless in the world. The freedom of the American press is one of the greatest, noblest attributes of our society, its freedom to speak truth to power is an essential component of American liberty and formidable to tyrants only. Once again, attacking the legitimacy and the critical structural role of our media does nothing to help the American people, but instead gives a boost to Vladimir Vladimirovich and his Kremlin thugs.
One could go on with a lengthy bill of particulars against gospodin Trumpov and his administratsiya; at the risk of sounding like Soviet show trials prosecutor Andrei Ya. Vyshinsky, every single thing this administration does is touched by and tainted with treason and betrayal. If there are “spies, saboteurs, and wreckers” at every level of the federal government, it is only because gospodin Trumpov and his associates have worked to place them there.
But as much as there are indeed spies, saboteurs, and wreckers at every level of government in the United States and the West, Americans still don’t like to contemplate that possibility. Indeed, Democrats, members of my own party, have been so conditioned over the last 60 years to reject and oppose anything that smacks of “McCarthyism” that the administratsiya and their Republican fellow travelers on Capitol Hill and throughout Washington City have managed to co-opt “McCarthyism” into their arsenal, using it as a weapon to try to shut down any efforts by Democrats or left-leading media to call the nation’s attention to the systematic treason that is being perpetrated inside the Beltway.
Because we have been so conditioned to reject anything that smacks of “McCarthyism,” we Democrats tend, when confronted with allegations that we are involved in some sort of so-called witch hunt, to go into a crouch and piss all over ourselves, floating away on waves of our own fear pee, terrified of being thought complicit in “McCarthyism” or witch hunting. Our reluctance to embrace the hard teaching that Joe McCarthy was right to be worried about subversion (even if his methodology and execution were morally blameworthy), or the equally hard teaching that sometimes subversion is real, and that it extends to the highest levels of government, crippled Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
When the Donald openly asked Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails, that should have been an immediate disqualifying moment. His party either lacked sufficient courage or sufficient fundamental loyalty to this country to tell The Donald that he could no longer be their standard bearer. Though Trump’s call was accurately characterized at the time as manifesting criminal intent, the GOP chose to put party over country, to put the Kremlin over the Capitol, to all intents and purposes running up the Russian flag over the Capitol building and Trump Tower.
Despite such obvious GOP disloyalty to this country to invite Russia, and of course WikiLeaks to commit plundering, criminal forays into the DNC, into Hillary Clinton, and, indeed, into the email accounts and Twitter feeds of loyal Americans everywhere, the Clinton campaign was too fearful of the decades of “anti-McCarthy” conditioning to which Democrats had subjected themselves to take the gloves off and proceed to destroy Trumpov so comprehensively that The Donald would have been a grease spot on Fifth Avenue in front of Trump Tower by the time the proceedings were over.
Instead, Hillary let herself be guided, nay, misled, by the counsels of cowardice which preemptively equated any attack on gospodin Trumpov with McCarthyism and witch hunts. The Clinton campaign knew or should have known that the weapon of “McCarthyism” would be deployed against them no matter what they did. Indeed, WikiLeaks and the traitor Julian Assange --who have never had anything at all even slightly unkind to say about Russia or Vladimir Vladimirovich– were quick to deploy exactly such a weapon.
What Hillary and her campaign staff should have done would have been to take a leaf out of the Republican book, coming out forthrightly with a ringing declaration that the country was in danger, and that Joe McCarthy had indeed been right.
By pulling their punches, by not exploiting the endless opportunities Trump had given them to shape the narrative, by constantly letting themselves be put on the defensive, the Hillary Clinton campaign managed to lose an election they were overwhelmingly favored to win by every single polling outfit in the country.
But the piss poor performance of the Clinton campaign is not our subject. The fact remains, as has been suggested hereinabove, that we have been, and are being, betrayed and sold out at the highest levels. The direction of American policy is not in America’s interest, but in Russia’s. We may only hope that before this country slips away from us entirely, our besieged and beleaguered institutions will rally against the Russian traitor and usurper currently residing in the White House.
This country faces an existential crisis.
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