Summary: every now and again, like the late Chief Justice Warren Burger, I’ll fire off a couple of “little snappers,” brief observations in this blog about things that get me going, but which aren’t worth lengthy discussion.
This week, I deal with John McCain, Donald Trump, and Cathedral City council wannabe Ernesto Gutierrez, and some of the other usual suspects.
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I’ll admit it, I didn’t expect Arizona Republican Senator John McCain’s death to hit me quite as hard as it did. I expect part of it is simply the ineluctably of advancing age. When you are Teetering On the Brink of an Age Range, especially if, like every other middle-aged gay man in this valley, you remember the AIDS epidemic, you start taking more than abstract notice of the obituary notices in the local Gannett publication, or the obits of famous people with whom you may have interacted.
Nonetheless, John McCain’s death struck me with considerably greater force than I might have expected, particularly given that John was a conservative Republican and I am a liberal Democrat. But Senator McCain and I had a number of things in common. Though the senator had a not undistinguished career in the United States Navy, whereas my naval service was cut short by the Reagan Administration’s cynical bargain with the religious right expressed in the so-called 123 words which purported to exclude queerfolk altogether from the military, we do, to some degree, share that common naval nexus.
I suppose my appreciation for the Arizona senator stems in the larger part, however, from the fact that he was, like I am, a believer in Regular Order. Senator McCain did not appear particularly enamored of parliamentary tricks, even those intended to secure partisan advantage for his own, Republican Party. He famously demanded to know on the Senate floor why that body was not proceeding according to regular order in addressing legislative issues. As a lawyer, whose life is wrapped up in “regular order,” I could appreciate Senator McCain’s insistence on Regular Order.
I can also appreciate the difference between John McCain’s “straight talk,” and the bullshit pablum Donald Trump uses to convince his redeless base that he is “telling it like it is.” John McCain, with his “straight talk,” told it like it was. By contrast, Donald Trump, Sarah Palin, and that superannuated Bolshevik Bernard Sanders offer their redeless followers little but pablum, populism, and prevarication. John McCain could tell you to “keep your eyes in the boat” without having that admonition come across as an unjustified reproof.
Finally, I must appreciate John’s insistence on putting patriotism and principle ahead of partisanship. His gentle, but devastating reproof of the woman who insisted to him that Barack Obama was “an Arab,” his almost preternaturally graceful concession speech on election night, 2008, and his last political testament to the country all spoke of the nobility of spirit that many of us fear is passing not merely out of the Republican Party, but out of our national life altogether.
America, and the world, are a little bit less for not having John S. McCain in them. To riff on Mao Zedong, who once said “in agriculture, learn from Dazhai; in industry, learn from Daqing,” in America, in politics, let us learn from the nobility of spirit of the late John S. McCain.
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As much as I was moved to sadness by the deathwatch and passing of John S. McCain, I find myself moved to the extremest annoyance by the antics of Cathedral City council wannabe Ernesto Gutierrez and his redeless followers. By all indications, Gutierrez is a particularly perfervid follower of Donald Trump. If so, we in Cathedral City, or at least in Gutierrez’s constituency, should reject his candidacy with all of the energy at our command.
Yes, dammit, I am talking about nationalizing the Cathedral City elections this fall. Because whether we like it or not, every election at every level this fall will, to some degree, be nationalized.
Every election, at every level, will be a referendum on Donald J. Trump and his collection of grifters, drifters, reivers, and potential Criminal RICO defendants. If, as Republican strategist Rick Wilson has suggested, everything Trump touches dies (with the possible exception of the mainstream media and the legal profession), that should certainly apply to the political fortunes of the little Trumps among us, the people who want to offer to their potential constituencies the same kind of preposterous populist pablum which emerges from the logorrheic mouth of Donald Trump like an endless offering of feces thrown by an addlepated chimpanzee. If H.L. Mencken was right to suggest that “democracy is the worship of jackals by jackasses,” we are certainly seeing it in Cathedral City.
What is worse, is that we are apparently seeing an effort by former Cathedral city mayor Kathleen DeRosa to try to revive the shambles of a political machine. DeRosa knew in 2014 that in a straight up contest between her and now-Mayor Stan Henry, Stan would have mopped the floor up with her. Sources have informed me several times that one of the two of them put a poll in the field, a real poll, not a push poll, which showed DeRosa being defeated by double digits in any hypothetical DeRosa/Henry race. Rather than take such a trouncing, and lose face, DeRosa tried to convince the community, with limited success, that Stan Henry was her hand-picked, “anointed” successor. While it was a not unimpressive exercise in making a virtue of necessity, it was still recognized by most of the community as a desperate face-saving, self-serving lie.
But, now, the quondam mayor wants back in. She’s clever enough to know that she can’t do so directly. First she has to secure the election of like-minded Trump supporters to the Council. She must, in short, secure the election of people who think like her to whom she has markers, who owe her.
The rest of the community must not permit that to happen.
We have made too much progress in the last four years to allow it to be undone by a redeless follower of Donald Trump. We must nationalize this election; we must make it about Republicans and Democrats, and we must prevent the Stockholm syndrome Trump followers in our community from gaining a political foothold or beachhead.
Gutierrez claims to be “one of us.” To borrow a line from a member of my own family, “what is this ‘we’ shit, Pocahontas?” Perhaps Gutierrez is attempting to play a Latino identity politics card, assuming that because Cathedral city is roughly 55% Latino, all he needs to do is wave his name in front of them for Latino voters to flock to him. If so, he may well find himself speedily disabused of such foolhardy ideations. While he may attempt to position himself as an ordinary, family-values, good Christian guy, his social media postings reveal that he is a rabidly anti-choice supporter of Donald Trump.
To that extent, it is obvious that Mr. Gutierrez has failed to read the tea leaves of the constituency. Cathedral city breaks strongly Democratic. That is the case no matter where one lives, who one loves, or what one’s ethnicity may happen to be. In addition to being roughly 55% Latino, Cathedral City is anywhere between 35 and 45% LGBT. Statistically, since we know that such percentages necessarily imply overlap; we must conclude that Cathedral city is home to a not insubstantial number of Latino queerfolk.
Additionally, we should take into account the fact that Cathedral city is demographically one of the younger cities of the upper Valley. Not “God’s waiting room” like Rancho Mirage, Palm Desert, or Indian Wells, Cathedral city is also not nearly so much a place of refuge for Bay Counties transplants as is Palm Springs. In short, Cathedral city looks a lot more like California than do many other Coachella Valley cities.
Because Cathedral city looks more like the California aggregate, Ernesto Gutierrez should be careful about the conclusions he draws about this constituency. Cathedral City tended to be broadly reflective of California in its electoral choices in 2016. California as a whole rejected Donald Trump, and so did Cathedral City. A Council candidate with a history of fealty to Donald Trump and a presence on social media that would make cringe any constituent not falling off the hard right edge of the world should not be surprised if the voters choose someone else.
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Finally, as promised, a parting note on the unspeakable Donald Trump. Like millions of other Americans, I’ve preordered two copies of Bob Woodward’s Fear: Trump in the White House. I’ve also added to my collection Omarosa Manigault-Newman’s book Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House and Michael Wolff’s’ Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House. So far, Omarosa’s book very much tracks what I saw in Fire and Fury, and I expect that the Woodward book will be not dissimilar.
All them should be read not merely as fairly devastating exposés of the banality (pace Hannah Arendt), venality, incompetency, incoherence, and dysfunction of easily the worst presidential administration in living memory, but also as excellent vade mecums for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s possible prosecution of the Donald. The Omarosa and Wolff books do, in fact, read like the so-called speaking indictments special counsel Mueller has used in such brilliant effect in his prosecutions of George Papadopoulos and Paul Manafort.
I’ll be waiting with some degree of anticipation to get my mitts on Fear. It promises to be interesting reading.
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Paul S. Marchand has been practicing law for almost 30 years. The more he practices, more he gets it right. He lives in Cathedral City and practices in Rancho Mirage. He is an unapologetic liberal Democrat, which has probably earned him a place on one of Donald J. Trump’s enemies lists, which he will wear as a badge of honor.
This post is a revised and extended version of an earlier post published on August 31, 2018.
