IN THE SMILE OF THE BEAUTIFUL CHILD WE OVERCOME KOYAANISQATSI

Summary: In the nearly 30 years since I was first admitted to the practice of law, I’ve established shibboleth of coming into my office on Christmas Day and meditating on the Incarnation of the Savior. In a time of koyaanisqatsi, of life out of balance, every fiber of my Christian being cries out against the evil thing in the White House, but every fiber of my Christian being also assures me that if the Christian Republic bears steady and staunch witness against him, the People of God will prevail. Strong in the power of powerlessness the Gandhiji and Martin Luther King taught us, we the people will prevail; We will overcome koyaanisqatsi. God wills it.


Cathedral City, December 25, 2019 –- In the nearly 30 years since I was admitted to the practice of law, I have maintained a more or less constant shibboleth of coming into the office on Christmas Day. In the silence of the office, with no phone calls, no interruptions, no unwanted human interaction, I actually find a place to get some work done, but perhaps more importantly, to find a quiet place for meditation in this Incarnation season, to deal with the quotidian crises of koyaanisqatsi, by which the Hopi described a “life out of balance.”

Every time I try to overcome koyaanisqatsi, this Advent and Christmas season, to banish that Thing in the White House from my contemplations of the season, Donald Trump goes and does something new to replenish the endless aquifers of outrage bubbling beneath the surface of American society. Just a few days ago, for example, The Donald delivered remarks to American troops in Afghanistan in which he unburdened himself off a lengthy litany of grievances against Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Party, and loyal Americans who believe that his conduct rises to the level of “treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors.” What made The Donald’s Festivus-like gripe and grumble session so objectionable was that he was delivering his remarks in his capacity as commander-in-chief of the armed forces in a context that should have been entirely apolitical.

The other occurrence that impinged upon this Advent and Incarnation season was an editorial in Christianity Today —the evangelical magazine founded by the late Billy Graham— calling for Donald Trump’s removal from office, and the ineluctable Nonconformist evangelical Protestant backlash against it. The editorial was not itself heretical, but the backlash against it manifested all the worst sorts of ethnonationalist Protestant heresy that has become so dangerously prevalent in this country.

As one who stands somewhat on the theological right, that is one who believes in the Incarnation, the Virgin Birth, the Grace of the Sacraments (all seven of them), the Latin Catholic Deposit of Faith, the Apostolic Succession, and the triad of Scripture, tradition, and reason, I have never had a great deal of patience for Christian denominations which stand on the theological left edge of the Reformation, but which seek political power by aligning themselves with the political right. It is always been curious to me how, in America, the theological right and the political left overlap, and the theological left and the political right overlap. In short, show me a Christian of the theological right, and I will almost inevitably be will to show you, in that same individual, a person on the political left.

Of course, if this year we have not seen The Donald trying to hold the government of the United States hostage for his ridiculous border wall, we still see The Donald systematically betraying this country and her interests to the Russian State. We see The Donald systematically disassembling the American security relationship with Japan and the Republic of [South] Korea; we see The Donald picking tariff battles with China but saying almost nothing about Beijing’s systematic repression of the Uighurs in East Turkestan (Xinjiang). We see The Donald failing to defend American values or promote American interests abroad. We still live in a time of koyaanisqatsi.

But worst of all, here in our own country, we see The Donald, guided by that unspeakable golem Stephen Miller (a Shonda for the goyim, worthy of being read forever out of the Congregation of Israel, declared herem, and forever uncountable toward a minyan), pursuing policies that, in 1945, would have brought any German before the war crimes trials at Nuremberg. How can we speak of modeling American values, how can we speak of modeling Christian values, how can we speak of living the truth of this Incarnation season when we remain silent in the face of evil policy that sanctions the breaking up of families, the caging of children, and turning a blind eye as infants and teenagers languish and die while in the custody of ICE, the Border Patrol, or other American bureaucracies?

Particularly at Christmas, when millions of Americans renew their yearly conversation with that Lucan infancy narrative which, across 2000 years, has become one of the most precious possessions of the Western mind in general and the Christian Republic in particular, how can we ignore what is going on in our own backyards? We have become conditioned and indifferent to daily outrages against the human person, human rights, and human dignity. We ignore the caged children; we look the other way when we see a homeless person, with all her worldly possessions crammed into a purloined shopping cart, making their way with a kind of sad, weary dignity from one side of the street to another.

For me, as a Christian, a Catholic, and Anglican, and Episcopalian, who professes and confesses a deep, absolute, and abiding faith in a God Who took human form in order to reconcile us simple humans to God, and who made for that holy purpose an icon in the form of Jesus Christ to draw all humankind to God, I find myself badly conflicted on this Christmas. Over against revolting expositions of far too many Americans declining God’s invitation in Christ to be, in the words of the late Rep. Elijah Cummings “better than that,” a great proportion of the American people instead prefer to gravitate toward the perverse blandishments of Antichrist, expressed in the hateful words of Donald Trump.

Yet, even as God Godself became incarnate from the Virgin Mary in human form in Jesus Christ, quietly rebuking the powers of koyaanisqatsi and of the powers that be with what we might now call Gandhiji’s paradox of the power of powerlessness, we can see even among us signs of God’s ineffable presence in a world that organizes itself rather without reference to first things and to eternal things. As happened last year about this time, God vouchsafed all of us who could see a small assurance that God’s ineffable presence as I looked out again into the Whitewater Wash and saw there a homeless man, sharing his meager foodstuff with a small flock of pigeons, in a kind of Franciscan feast of the impoverished.

It reminded me then and there that there is indeed something fundamentally out of balance in our lives, something koyaanisqatsi, as the Hopi hight say, in the way contemporary American society organizes itself. For there is something truly koyaanisqatsi about the heresies implicit in the so-called Prosperity Gospel beloved of so many evangelical Protestant Nonconformist. There is something koyaanisqatsi in the way we have appropriated the Christmas narrative and twisted it into something I cannot imagine that God ever intended the incarnation of our Savior ever to represent. 

In a time when Gospodin Trump and his minions of Antichrist have sought to entice us to live down to all of the worst aspects of our originally sinful human nature, when our institutions are trying to push back by impeaching him in the hopes that he may be removed from office, we should answer with a resounding “no” to Trump and all that Trump stands for.

Instead, we should reacquaint ourselves with the eternal truths contained in our Christian Incarnation narrative. We should reacquaint ourselves with the inconvenient truth that our Savior, his mother Mary, and Joseph were situationally homeless. Not only that, we should also remember that Lucan infancy narrative reminds us that the Holy Family became refugees fleeing Herod’s slaughter of the Holy Innocents.

In short, the Holy Family represented precisely the kind of people against whom Gospodin Trump, the Shonda golem Stephen Miller, and their supporters have been accustomed to fulminate. However, their fulminations will prove unavailing. For we have the assurances of God Incarnate in Jesus Christ that Gospodin Trump and all his minions of Antichrist will not prevail. 

For when the Savior comes, He brings with Him what Gandhiji called the power of powerlessness, the ability of nonviolence to rebuke and overcome all terrors. For we who have welcomed into our hearts this beautiful Child, we who have believed and preached Christ crucified, we who have borne witness to God conquering death by death, can be assured, as Paul writes in his Epistle to the Romans that

Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us. For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Rom. 8:37-39)

The baby in the manger or the mature man with His disciples supping for the last time in the upper room may not have been much to look upon, but the power of God is ineluctable; the power of God can turn every wall, it can reduce every fortification, and it can do so in the manner in which French playwright Edmund Rostand described a beautiful young girl gaining access to a grim fortress by convincing the sentries to grant her entry: “she smiled at them.”

On this Day when we commemorate the Incarnation of the Savior of the World in that manger in Bethlehem more than 2000 years ago, we acknowledge His conquest of our sinful hearts by acknowledging the smile of the Beautiful Child.

And as we know that the beautiful Savior is with us, we know that we, too, can rebuke, resist and overcome the evil that is this day in our midst.

The Savior of the World is at hand!

Oh! Come let us adore Him!

Merry Christmas!

-xxx-

 
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney. He lives in Cathedral City, where he served two terms on the city Council, and he practices law in Rancho Mirage. He is a religiously Conformist member of the Episcopal Church, that  relentlessly nice denomination of Christians who like to eat little sandwiches with the crusts cut off and drink tea with their pinkies extended. The views contained in this post are his own, unless you like them, in which case, they can be yours, too.

THE CURIOUS GAP BETWEEN THE PUNDITOCRACY AND THE UN-CONSULTED VOTER: THOUGHTS ON LAST NIGHT'S DEMOCRATIC DEBATE

Summary: Thursday night’s Democratic debate, the last in the hypertrophic Democratic primary campaign before the infamous Iowa caucuses, produced the usual gaggle of pundits and talking heads all trying to spin the results of last night’s debate in favor of which ever candidate any given pundit happened to support at that moment. Perhaps we, the unconsulted voters of the provinces, need to make our opinions known rather than assume that our opinions should be dictated by the chattering classes or the punditocracy, however well-meaning they may be.

If one thing was clear from last Thursday night’s Democratic debate, it was that Joe Biden has got his groove back. By contrast to the other six candidates on the stage, Uncle Joe came across as measured, experience, confident, and most of all, presidential. Given how the punditocracy has been so fond of assuming that the quondam Vice President would inevitably collapse, last night’s performance inevitably gave his supporters aid and comfort, boosting morale and improving his chances of victory in the unrepresentative, anti-democratic, racially problematic, Iowa caucuses.

Of course, we should also acknowledge a point made by Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar and South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, that there is very much a double standard in place in the heavily gendered enterprise of political campaigning. Men, in short, are allowed, even expected, to behave like assholes, to flaunt their male privilege and not be called upon it. Women, on the other hand, can’t be sharp elbowed or pointed in their critiques without being accused of being hoydens, harridans, or harpies.

Neither Elizabeth Warren nor Amy Klobuchar have yet to accumulate the sheer credibility and clout of House Speaker Nancy D’Allesandro Pelosi, who because she is who she is, and because of her sheer political skill, gets to be sharp elbowed, pointed, and deeply critical without anyone daring to call her a hoyden, a harridan, or a harpy. In short, Nancy Pelosi is a diva, and if there is one rule for coming at a diva, very simply it is: don’t.

Moreover, gay men, who, Lindsey Graham notwithstanding, are not divas like the divine Miss Nancy, are often subject to the same kind of disability; a gay man who deploys sharp elbows or pointed language does so at the acknowledge risk of being called a drama queen or worse.

Nonetheless, when Elizabeth Warren came out swinging at Pete Buttigieg, unsurprisingly given his ascent to near front runner status in Iowa, Senator Warren, without realizing how much she was standing into danger, was foolish enough to sail right into a trap of her own making. With flags flying, sails billowing, and guns blazing, Senator Warren attacked Mayor Buttigieg for the manner in which Mayor Pete engages in campaign fund-raising.

Not to put too fine a point on it, Mayor Pete eviscerated Senator Warren in front of a substantial debate audience at Los Angeles’s Loyola Marymount University. Where Senator Warren had attempted to play the Bernie Sanders purity card, Mayor Pete noted, somewhat acerbically, that not only was he the least well-off of the candidates on the debate stage that night but also that Senator Warren was herself a millionaire, and that Senator Warren had used exactly the same kind of fundraising strategies in her Senate campaign as those for which she was criticizing Mayor Pete. For Senator Warren, her attack on Mayor Pete’s fundraising, while it may play well among the Sanders/Warren activist faction on Twitter, was, for most watchers, an unforced error that was, in effect, a double whammy.

For not only had Senator Warren attempted a sharp elbowed attack that would have garnered criticism even had she been a male candidate, but the double standard identified, ironically enough, by Mayor Buttigieg and Senator Klobuchar herself, worked to her and Senator Klobuchar’s additional disadvantage in that it opened her up to some highly gendered criticism from both sides of the political divide.

Amy Klobuchar did not fare much better against Mayor Pete. Indeed, Senator Klobuchar’s response to Mayor Pete can be described as being akin to the umbrageous response of a terribly grand French noblewoman of the ancien régime trying to swat down a brash, but savvy, peasant from the provinces.

Buttigieg’s criticism of the culture in Washington DC, and its frequent out-of-touchness with the lives of the unconsulted voters in “flyover country,” struck a nerve with Senator Klobuchar, though the criticism itself, aimed squarely at a singularly dysfunctional “Inside the Beltway” culture, was by no means unfounded or out of line. Indeed, having lived just over the Maryland line in the relatively affluent suburb of Bethesda, I know how alien the world beyond the Capital Beltway can seem to denizens of the District of Columbia or to those of us who lived within a mile of Westmoreland Circle. Buttigieg’s barb hit Senator Klobuchar dead amidships below the waterline, and it stung. The unbrageousness of Senator Klobuchar’s response, resembling also that of the commander of the besieged fortress hurling maledictions down upon the besieging troops, was testament to the correctness of Mayor Buttigieg’s criticisms.

And, like her senatorial colleague, Senator Klobuchar comes across, judged by that double standard as she is, as hoydenish, harridan-like, and harpyesque. Like Senator Warren, she stood into danger, sailing in to the attack with her own flags flying, sails billowing, and guns blazing, only to rip her keel out on the hidden rocks of Buttigieg’s response. The South Bend mayor may have been flustered, but he kept his cool, his composure, and his control. The “gay dude from Mike Pence’s Indiana” demolished, hopefully once and for all, the stereotype of the mincing, lisping, ineffectual, homosexual. If nothing else, Pete Buttigieg’s performance last night should have put paid to the idea that a gay man, at least an openly gay man, pace James Buchanan, cannot be president.

Of course, the right despises Pete Buttigieg because his existence is a living, breathing rebuke to their Bible brandishing invocation of Leviticus 18:22, and the semi-Marxist Sanders/Warren left wing of the Democratic Party, while often concealing their views behind anodyne, politically acceptable jargon, tends to share the Leninist/Soviet critique of homosexuality — particularly male homosexuality — as a bourgeois affectation by which queer men are held to lack the necessary strength and temper of the will to make the revolution and accomplish the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Off on the fringes of the debate, where the revolution was neither won nor lost, wealthy candidates Andrew Yang and Tom Steyer did little to move the needle for their campaigns. Though Yang possesses the saving grace of the deft touch of humor that seems to have rather disappeared from the hypertrophic Democratic campaign, his remarks could not escape a certain problematic quality. How much has to be offered to the American people to bribe them to vote for a particular candidate? Similarly, Tom Steyer failed to impress, either.

Which leaves us Bernard Sanders and Joe Biden.

It was hard not to get a little annoyed with Gospodin Sanders last night. Early on in the debate, waving his bony finger and raising his voice, the Independent Vermont Senator pronounced the US Mexico Canada free-trade agreement (also known as Child of NAFTA) as an “outrage.” Certainly, Gospodin Sanders seems to have bought entirely into the traditional Ming and Qing Dynasty concepts of trade being a privilege rather than the Western concept of trade being a right. Clearly, to the doctrinaire bloviating blowhard Burlington Bolshevik, the concept of the free movement of goods or services is “an outrage.”

But perhaps worse for Bernie is that his entire debate performance consisted of the same stump speech in answer to every single question put to him. At a certain point, a grim, prim, finger wagging, voice raised, doctrinaire delivery of the same “eat the rich, down with the billionaire class” screed begins to lose traction with all but the most hardened “progressive” Democrats. His propensity for interrupting bought him a wonderfully deft put down from Joe Biden, which had the salutary effect of shutting Bernie up for most of the rest of the debate.

And indeed, in this debate, Uncle Joe, whom so many people had been inclined to write off as being in some kind of political death spiral, showed that he had his groove back. He came across as prepared, confident, commanding, and above all, presidential. The way in which he put down Senator Sanders and his propensity for interruption demonstrated a kind of command of the debate stage that had not existed in the earlier cattle call debates.

In short, the nautical analogy of Joe Biden sailing through these debates like a great British three-decker line of battleship of the great blood and thunder Royal Navy days of Horatio Nelson, Samuel Hood, Cuthbert Collingwood or John Jarvis, first Earl St. Vincent still applies. Even more than in previous debates, Biden sailed through this one and, mirabile dictu, sustained no damage at all. The candidates who could have damaged him, most notably Kamala Harris, are gone now.

Subsequent events may prove me quite wrong, but I believe that if any candidate solidified his position last night, it was Uncle Joe, followed by Mayor Pete. Print me to suggest that what we may be seeing is less a primary among several possible viable Democratic contenders for the nomination then it is at this point a free-for-all audition to see who gets to be Joe Biden’s Vice President and who fills out the cabinet roster of his Heads of Department. A man whom that thing Donald Trump fears so badly that Trump is willing to risk his own impeachment to try to pressure one or more foreign governments in Kyiv and in Beijing into sabotaging that man’s candidacy is more than qualified to replace the criminal Donald Trump as President of the United States.

-xxx-


Paul S. Marchand, Esq. Is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City, where he served as a member of the city Council for eight years. He practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. The views expressed herein are his own, and not necessarily those of the Biden campaign or of any other campaign. “Progressives” should get off their high horse.

HOW BERNARD SANDERS AND HIS REDELESS FOLLOWERS ARE POISONING THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY AND PAVING THE WAY FOR A SECOND TRUMP TERM

Summary: the doctrinaire cancer of purity testing and activist Leninism has begun to metastasize within the Democratic Party. The tone of the 2020 primary, like that of the 2016 primary, has been one of sneering, nastiness, pettiness, confrontation, condescension, and of sheer unwillingness on the part of a great many Democratic activists, particularly in the Sanders/Warren wing of the left side of the Party, to acknowledge that the sniping, the backbiting, and the propagandistic promulgation of a Sanders “we wuz robbed!” Dolchstoßlegende benefits no one except Donald Trump and his organized crime campaign.
-----------------------------
While I loathe the Russian/Republican Party, I can’t help but feel a certain measure of disdain and unease for my own Democratic Party.  Activists on the Sanders/Warren wing of the left side of the Democratic Party, not satisfied with relentlessly attacking current front runner Joe Biden have begun to fear the possible advent of a newer, younger, queerer possible front runner in the form of South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, on whom the vials of wrath and vitriol appear to have been well and truly opened.

This outpouring of what the Los Angeles Times today referred to as a “sneering tone,” of barely concealed anger at Mayor Buttigieg certainly puts one in mind of the sneering, misogynistic tone that Bernard Sanders and his redeless followers adopted toward former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton during the 2016 primary. The tone of the Sanders faction’s critique of Secretary Clinton was, to put it mildly, hateful, misogynistic, and steeped in male, Trumpian, privilege. Worse, the insistent Sanders "we wuz robbed" Dolchstoßlegende in which Sanders and his foolish followers claimed that they were deprived of the 2016 nomination through sharp practice at the DNC, benefited, and benefits, no one but Donald Trump. 

To put it bluntly, Bernard Sanders and his followers managed to inject a poison into the Democratic body politic in the 2016 primary cycle that has come back to haunt us in the 2020 cycle. That it is indeed a poisonous tone can be illustrated by the fact that the redelessly doctrinaire Sanders followers seemed to care not one whit that their confrontational, condescending, pugnacious, partisanship cost them friends within the Democratic Party and elsewhere.

 Indeed, we saw, throughout the 2016 election cycle, how not only did at least 15% of Sanders primary voters cast general election ballots for the unspeakable, soon-to-be impeached, Donald Trump, the Kremlin’s chosen candidate, but how even more of them eagerly and uncritically adopted the Trump-WikiLeaks-Kremlin narrative and talking points to attack Hillary, even after Secretary Clinton had clinched the nomination of her Party to be it standardbearer for the presidency of the United States. What we saw, in short, was a nasty case of sore-loserism, misogyny, and spite emanating from the Independent Vermont Senator and his hyperventilating followers. 

Now, with Pete Buttigieg rising in the polls and presumably siphoning off support from the sour, superannuated, shtetl Stalinist, the loudmouth Leninist loser, the blowhard bloviating Burlington Bolshevik Bernard Sanders, it is perhaps ineluctable that the vials of wrath and vitriol would again be opened. As much as the Sanders campaign in 2016 could justly be taxed with setting a bitter, divisive, misogynistic tone, in 2020 it can with equal justice be taxed with setting a bitter, divisive, Sanders- against-the-world tone that traffics in left bourgeois homophobia, left bourgeois misogyny, and (snortgiggle!) charges of ageism against Joe Biden, who is two years Bernard Sanders’s junior. 

And certainly, the Sanders campaign has managed to enlist the support of the default group of publications of the radical left. The Nation, once mordantly — and accurately — characterized by a Republican humorist P.J. O’Rourke as “that compendium of the snits and quarrels of the Old Left,” very publicly announced an “anti-endorsement” of the quondam Vice President.

Further into the realms of Marxist dialectic, the Intercept, Glenn Greenwald’s house organ for the traitor Edward Snowden, and the Marxist periodical Jacobin have both been banging the drums for Bernard Sanders quite loudly and insistently. Moreover, as Buttigieg has improved his standing in the polls, the Marxist magazines and “that compendium of the snits and quarrels of the Old Left” have fallen into lockstep to excoriate Mayor Pete for being, among others, insufficiently queer, too queer, too white, too privileged, too corporate, and just too much of everything that the doctrinaire left in this country despises. Even his relative poverty compared to the other Democratic candidates has been held against him. In all this, it’s not hard for a queer person to sense a kind of dog whistle homophobia. 

Of course, queerfolk are despised by both the hard right and the hard left. The hard right, waving their copies of the King James Bible, excoriates queerfolk on the strength of certain verses in Leviticus, on whose authority they seek to compass our vanishing. The hard left, for their part, tend to adopt the Marxist-Soviet critique of queerfolk as not having the strength of will necessary to help accomplish the dictatorship of the proletariat. (This, notwithstanding the fact that the first foreign affairs, commissar of the Soviet Union, Gyorgy Chicherin, was an openly queer man who accomplished a great deal in advancing the dictatorship of the proletariat.)

Either way, the right-bourgeois will treat queer folk as unspeakable and not to be received in a social setting. But at least with the right bourgeois, queerfolk know where they stand. It is with the left bourgeois that queer folk are perpetually uncertain; from the left bourgeois, such as Bernard Sanders or even Mark Zuckerberg, one can expect lip service to the idea of tolerance for queerfolk, but privately, when they think no one is listening, left bourgeois personages such as Gospodin Sanders or Gospodin Zuckerberg will privately assure their intimates that we are really not their kind, dear.

 What this means, in short, is the Democratic Party has allowed itself to imbibe, in full measure, the same poison that has so badly damaged its counterpart, the Republican Party. Bernard Sanders, for example, has much to account for with respect to the poisoning with Vermont’s nuclear waste of poor, politically powerless communities of color in Barnwell, South Carolina and Sierra Blanca, Texas. In neither case did Gospodin Sanders apparently bother to acquaint himself with the fact that the communities to be poisoned with Vermont’s toxic atomic detritus were in fact communities of color. When Gospodin Sanders took a shellacking in the 2016 primary elections in Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama, largely because he had not connected with African-American voters in those states, he pooh-poohed the poll results in primitive, racially insensitive terms. Of course, we all know how Sanders and his redeless followers, together with WikiLeaks, that asset of the Russian state, travestied both Hillary and Chelsea Clinton in the most offensive, misogynistic terms imaginable.

And it is happening all over again.

An Internet meme of some vintage suggests:
“Dear Liberals and Independents,
In 2020 there will be a candidate competing against Donald Trump for President.

It is very likely this candidate:
    -Isn’t your first choice
    -Isn’t 100% ideologically pure
    -Has made mistakes in their life
    -Might not really excite you that much
    -Has ideas you may be uncomfortable with

Please start the process of getting over that shit now instead of waiting till 2020.”

 

Democrats need, indeed, to start getting over that shit now, rather than getting into an endless conniption over who is their first choice, who is 100% ideologically pure, who has a totally clean record, who excites one, and who is free from any discomforting ideas.

Our candidate will not be a Messiah. Our candidate may well be prone to gaffes, or have some blots on his or her legislative escutcheon. Shit, some of them may even have said "no" to a Girl Scout cookies salesgirl in 1983. As Democrats, we need to remember that even our heroes have feet of clay. We can’t afford the vain and frivolous luxury of purity tests or looking into a candidate’s distant past to find that one indiscretion which the Marxist left defines as disqualifying.

We are in the fight of our political lives against an incipient dictator. We can’t afford to fight from a crouch or allow ourselves to be washed away on waves of fear pee every time the Republicans and the Kremlin say “boo.” 

Instead, we must be guided by the advice that Sean Connery’s character tendered to Kevin Costner’s character 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 the morgue!”

The vanity and frivolous luxury of ideological purity testing, heresy hunting, or being terrified of making a gaffe cannot be allowed to metastasize. We can’t afford the equally vain and frivolous luxury of Michelle Obama’s well-meaning but unacceptable counsel of going high when they go low.

Instead, we must be prepared to meet them in the basement with a switchblade. 

The future of the Republic demands from us a kind of steely, Bolshevik resolve, a willingness to be Stakhanovite, and the readiness (hopefully in a merely metaphorical sense) to kill or die in the service of vision of America that must not be allowed to waste away or be sacrificed on the altar of the Republican Party’s insensate desire for power.

Citoyens, la patrie est en danger!

PUTTING ASIDE THE CULTURE WARS AND TRULY GIVING THANKS THIS THANKSGIVING

Summary: Thanksgiving, once a relatively unexceptionable holiday characterized by a very large cheat meal and the sedentary contemplation of football, has become the latest casualty in America’s ongoing culture wars. On one hand, there is Donald Trump, trying, utterly without evidentiary foundation, to advance some kind of “war on Thanksgiving” narrative. On the other, there are the so-called Social Justice Warriors of the Sanders/Warren left, who have been enthusiastically taking Trump’s bait and, like the woke scolds they are, attacking the current Thanksgiving holiday with every bit of politically correct scorn they can muster.
    While Thanksgiving merits careful, introspective examination, it decidedly does not merit either Donald Trump’s efforts to politicize it with a phony “war on Thanksgiving” or the Sanders/Warren left’s attempts to delegitimize and whitewash the holiday as some sort of racist enterprise.
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Cathedral City, November 28 – Today is Thanksgiving. Outside the rain is coming down slowly, steadily, heavily. If 19th centuryJapanese printmaker Ando Hiroshige were depicting the rain, he would use black lines to depict heavy precipitation, rather than the white lines he customarily used to betoken a lighter rain. A little bit west of here, in the San Gorgonio Pass communities of Banning and Beaumont, the snow is falling and sticking. Roads are closing at low-water crossings; withal, the weather this Thanksgiving day is simply miserable. It’s the kind of weather for crawling into bed with a boyfriend and beguiling the hours in languid lovemaking.

But still, it is Thanksgiving Day. And in Donald Trump’s America, that means a new front in America’s ongoing culture wars. At a rally in Sunrise, Florida the other night, Donald Trump, without any facts or evidence whatsoever, implied that the “radical left” was out to force a change of the name of Thanksgiving. Ever trafficking in divisive culture war political tropes, Gospodin Trump apparently wants to expand the so-called War on Christmas into a so-called War on Thanksgiving. Not surprisingly, Trump State Media (AKA Fox News), Trump’s Russian trolls on social media (particularly on Facebook), and Trump’s addlepated base eagerly embraced Gospodin Trump’s bullshit War on Thanksgiving narrative.

 Of course, Trump and his handlers knew that they were baiting the Social Justice Warriors of the Sanders/Warren left, who, for their part, enthusiastically rose to debate by producing a whole raft of opinion pieces damning Thanksgiving as an awful, racist, white supremacist glorification of “genocide.”

Wow. Just wow.

As a man of the left myself, I had not thought it possible that others of the left, even those further to the left than me, could have been so foolish as to take Donald Trump’s bait. It is disappointing, but not surprising, that the Sanders/Warren left should have allowed itself to be bereft of its higher mental faculties, its capacity for cogent, careful thinking, and its intellectual rigor so completely by the malignant narcissist in the White House. It is disappointing, but not surprising, that the dialogue and dialectic of the American left should have been reduced to such a pitiably reactionary state that taking Donald Trump’s bait and engaging him in exactly the culture war battles he is spoiling to fight constitutes Social Justice Warriors’ misplaced idea of disciplined thinking.

Some years ago, when the last of my unjustly maligned Boomer generation was in college, certain leftist academics ---who had considerably more intellectual rigor and intellectual chops than their current successors in the Academy can ever hope to possess— argued, with not inconsiderable justification, that Thanksgiving should be held up to careful, considerate, intellectually rigorous examination for the lessons that George Washington’s and Abraham Lincoln’s Thanksgiving day proclamations, as well as the original Thanksgiving celebrations themselves, had for the United States and for the American people.

On October 3, 1789, Pres. George Washington issued a proclamation designating Thursday, November 26, 1789 as a national day of Thanksgiving. The sentiments of Washington’s proclamation were unexceptionably Anglican. No surprise there; Washington himself was an unexceptionably Anglican Virginia Tidewater planter, a man with impeccable Anglican credentials, including a stint on the vestry of his Anglican parish church. Washington’s Thanksgiving proclamation made absolutely no reference to any of the various antecedents of our modern Thanksgiving that we now celebrate.

Seventy-four years to the day after Washington had issued his Thanksgiving proclamation, Abraham Lincoln issued a like proclamation, not quite so Anglican in sentiments, which has become the basis for our modern American Thanksgiving Day holiday.

In neither case did either proclamation make any mention whatsoever of the 1621 “Thanksgiving” celebrated by the Pilgrims of the Plimouth colony in Massachusetts. Yet, somehow, this nonconformist Massachusetts Bay “Thanksgiving” feast has become the model for our current Thanksgiving Day celebrations and, in many ways, the source material for America’s foundation myth.

Who of us, at least those of us who attended elementary school somewhere in this country, cannot recall Thanksgiving Day pageants in which students, and sometimes teachers, got togged up in, for lack of a better phrase, Pilgrim drag and acted out the mythological narrative of Myles Standish, Priscilla Mullins, John Winthrop, and all the other Pilgrim Separatist Nonconformists who had come to Plimouth aboard the Mayflower, ostensibly seeking religious freedom.

Growing up in the public schools in Los Angeles, I too participated in this rather outré exercise in pageantry. It seemed somewhat odd to me to witness, for example, one of my classmates, an Ethiopian girl from an ancient, Christian, African civilization dressed up like a comely Wampanoag Indian maiden, or a Mexican-American kid named Cuauhtemoc, and his brother, with the equally Méxica/Aztec/Chicano name of Ahuizotl, portraying Myles Standish and John Winthrop respectively, while their sister Xochitl inhabited, with great aplomb, the role of Priscilla Mullins.

In all this cross-cultural cross-dressing and appropriation, it seems to have occurred to no one that the first Thanksgivings in what are now the United States occurred long before the Pilgrims arrived at Plimouth. On September 8, 1565, for example 800 Spaniards, under the leadership of Pedro Menéndez de Avilés came ashore to found the city of San Augustín, now St. Augustine, Florida. Almost immediately they came ashore, Menéndez and his company gave a feast for themselves and the local native tribe, accompanied by a Mass of Thanksgiving.

On April 30, 1598, a Spanish settlement party under Don Juan de Oñate held a feast of Thanksgiving in what is now the town of San Elizario, down valley from what is now the city of El Paso, Texas. A Mass of Thanksgiving was celebrated, a feast was had, and another pre-Plimouth Thanksgiving joined the historical record.

On December 4, 1619, English settlers at Berkeley Hundred in Virginia were celebrating what may very well have been the first English-speaking Thanksgiving in the Americas. Unlike the Massachusetts event, two-plus years later, the Berkeley Hundred Thanksgiving was also Anglican in its theology and its liturgics.

The conclusion that ineluctably forces itself upon the observer, particularly upon an observer who is Conformist, i.e. Anglican, in religion, is that the Massachusetts Bay-centric creation narrative foisted off upon the schoolchildren of such diverse communities as Los Angeles, El Paso, St. Augustine, or even Berkeley Hundred itself, has a number of serious flaws.

First and foremost, is the fact that the entire Plimouth Rock narrative sets up the Separatist, Nonconformist Pilgrims, as heroes of the piece akin to something out of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, with the Anglican Church of England in an unspeakably villainous role. Now we may assume that part of that narrative stems from the American penchant for equating religious freedom with the freedom of Nonconformity to have its own way. For in truth, freedom of religion in the United States has historically implied the freedom of Protestant Nonconformist religion.

For years, for example, the military only recognized two kinds of Christianity: Roman Catholic and a generic “Protestant.” It did not recognize as equally valid, equally separate branches all the Church the Eastern Orthodox churches, the ancient Eastern churches, including the Coptic and Ethiopian churches, the Lutheran churches or the Anglican/Episcopal churches.  Indeed, in the “heroic Pilgrims at Plimouth Rock” narrative promulgated to schoolchildren around the country, the Anglican/Episcopal church comes in for particular condemnation.

Add to this Nonconformist bias the inescapable fact that Berkeley Hundred lies in the Commonwealth of Virginia, an undeniably Confederate state during the Late Unpleasantness, and it becomes fairly easy to determine why the Berkeley Hundred Thanksgiving of December, 1619, should have been swept under the metaphorical rug in favor of the 1621 events at Plimouth. Moreover, the Nonconformist bias in much of American historiography also accounts for the almost entire “whitewashing” of the San Augustín and San Elizario thanksgivings under Menéndez and Oñate.

Yet, despite the attempted scrubbing of these earlier Thanksgiving celebrations from American history, the idea of setting aside a day to give thanks is itself theologically unexceptionable. To those of us who are Conformist in our religion, the scriptural command that comes down to us from 1 Thessalonians 5:18, “[i]n every thing give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you,” comes close to being a Kantian categorical imperative.

Occasions of Thanksgiving, therefore, whether on the officially proclaimed day at the end of November, or any other time, ought to be times when we eschew culture war disputations, when we turn aside from the Trumpian temptation to “own the libs,” when we avoid the equally tempting Bolshevik enterprise of demonstrating how woke we are, and when we avoid endless arguments over the propriety of the Oxford comma.

Thanksgiving, whether today or on any other day, should be a time for contemplating first things, eternal things, hopeful things, and holy things. From the standpoint of Conformist religion, Thanksgiving, in these final days of the liturgical season after Pentecost, as we gear up for Advent and Christmas, New Year’s and Epiphanytide, ought to be a time for stock taking, introspection, and getting in touch with what it means to be a part of a community in which, as former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams reminds us, “[w]e have to learn to be human alongside all sorts of others, the ones whose company we don't greatly like, whom we didn't choose....”

Perhaps, above all else, we ought to declare, even if fleetingly, an armistice in the culture wars and  get in touch today with what it means to be thankful to live in a community where we have the opportunity to learn to be human alongside all sorts of others. It may be, in the end, what saves us.

-xxx-

Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City, where he served eight years on the city Council, and practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. He makes no bones about being gay and about being Conformist in his religion.

LITTLE SNAPPERS: THE PYONGYANG STYLINGS OF FRANK LUNTZ AND THE HYPOCRISY OF BOY-ZILLIONAIRE MARK ZUCKERBERG

Summary: after Maximum Leader Donald Trump was booed by an estimated 41,000 baseball fans during game five of this year’s World Series, right wing acolytes dutifully repaired to Trump State Television, also known as Fox News, to deplore the fans’ exercise of their First Amendment rights. They were accompanied, sadly, by a whole contingent of schoolmarmish Democrats bleating the same refrain. The hell with all them. The Constitution guarantees the right of free speech and assembly. Kudos to the 41,000 fans who insisted upon their constitutional freedoms, even in the face of a wannabe dictator.

Meanwhile, the solipsistic boy-zillionaire Mark Zuckerberg, easily the most toxic person in the country after Donald Trump, continues to try to defend his dangerous and un-American platform before Congress. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and Orange County’s own Katie Porter took Gospodin Zuckerberg behind the woodshed. Unfortunately, as much as AOC and Katie Porter, with some help from “give ‘em hell Maxine” Waters, demonstrated to Mr. Zuckerberg the disdain in which he is held by the increasingly large number of Americans, all that will happen is to drive Gospodin Zuckerberg even further into the arms of Gospodin Trump, Gospodin Putin, and the Moscow Kremlin.

-------------------------------------------------------------

    “The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”
   
    -U.S. Const. Art. II. § 4

    “[T]hey should hold those fans accountable.”

    -Republican propagandist Frank Luntz on the Ingraham Angle, Monday, October 28, 2019

    “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.”

    -U.S.Const. Amend. 1

    “... Frightens me worse than bombs.”

    -George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, 1946

    Aux Barricades, Citoyens!

    -French revolutionary slogan

“Maximum Leader” Donald Trump’s ego took a bruising Sunday night during Game 5 of the 2019 World Series. During the fourth inning of the game, played in Washington DC’s Nationals Stadium, located in the city that voted 96% against Donald Trump in the 2016 election, fans, noticing Moscow’s man in the stands, began to boo The Donald. The boos soon morphed into a crowd-wide chant of “lock him up,” evidencing the manifest belief of a substantial number of fans present that Donald Trump is a traitor to the United States, guilty of “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” 

The condemnations quickly started rolling in. The schoolmarmish left, always ready to present its throat to be cut, or its orifices to be violated, was quick to chide the fans for unsportsmanlike behavior. From the right, the condemnations were a little bit more disturbing. Speaking on the “Ingraham Angle” on Fox News, a.k.a., Trump State Television, Republican propagandist Frank Luntz suggested that some entity, presumably the unbelievably corrupt William Barr’s Justice Department, “should hold those fans accountable.”

Aside from sounding like the suave Pyongyang stylings to be expected from the North Korean state, Luntz’s comments reflected a dangerous lack of a basic understanding of the United States Constitution. The First Amendment is very clear. “the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble,” is not to be trammeled, violated, invaded, infringe, or abridged on the mere ipse dixit of Donald Trump or his redeless followers. Contrary to the fondest imaginings of The Donald and his redeless, right wing followers, the Constitution of the United States has not been suspended.

The fans who were calling for Donald Trump to be locked up were well within their free speech and peaceable assembly rights. The Donald, for all his thinness of skin, really has no card to play here. One who occupies the office of President of the United States, no matter how illegitimately or with what Russian assistance he may have bought the office, is nonetheless expected to have a skin like that of a rhinoceros. He ought to bear up, as Abraham Lincoln put it, “like the boy that stumped his toe,—'it hurt too bad to laugh, and he was too big to cry.'”

Donald Trump's failure to understand that the Constitution demands of him a certain thickness of skin frightens me, as George Orwell once put it in his essay Politics and the English Language, "worse than bombs."  But, Donald Trump and his enablers, who all seem to be suffering from or enabling the same kind of dangerous psychopathology, love to dish it out, but seem curiously unable to endure the slings and arrows of an outraged population. And so, the Donald, venturing into a crowd that he and his campaign operatives had not vetted, assumed the risk that a bunch of angry Americans, proud and jealous of their constitutionally guaranteed rights of free speech, peaceable assembly, and petition, would have given The Donald a piece of their collective mind.

And  having given The Donald a piece of their collective mind, the 41,000 fans who remonstrated with him in the bluntest terms imaginable, deserve much better than to be chided by schoolmarmish Democrats about their “unsportsmanlike” utterance, and certainly deserve far better than to be implicitly threatened by Frank Luntz or other thuggish Trump “enforcers.”

    * * * * *

Of course, Donald Trump is not the only person in our body politic wishing he could hire enforcers to stop people from remonstrating with him. The arrogant, Asperger boy-zillionaire Mark Zuckerberg must certainly have wished, as he testified last week before Congress, that he could’ve hired a couple of burly Samoans to bitch slap Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), Irvine Congresswoman Katie Porter, and Los Angeles’s own “give ‘em hell, Maxine” Waters.

Zuckerberg, who has, in the last couple of years, garnered to himself a reputation for being one of the most toxic personalities in the United States, and whose platform is the subject of well-nigh universal disdain within the body politic, seems not to understand that his evident desire to transform himself into some kind of “Citizen Kane” is not sitting well with the American public. 

The extent of Zuckerberg’s dangerous ego is perhaps nowhere better demonstrated than in his push to create a crypto currency to compete with Bitcoin, the preferred crypto currency of criminal enterprises all over the world. Moreover, Facebook’s preferred name for this crypto currency, “Libra,” meaning “pound,” reflects an ill-concealed desire on the part of the boy-zillionaire to compete with Sterling, which though somewhat dickie in light of boorish Boris Johnson’s Brexit bumblings, is still one of the most significant, and the oldest, currencies in the world, dating back to the eighth century. 

Of course, not satisfied with trying to set up Facebook Libra as a substitute for currencies issued by sovereign nation states, Gospodin Zuckerberg also sees Facebook is acting as some sort of political arbiter within various bodies politic around the world. His testimony before Congress last week, in which he skated very close to, if not crossing the edge of, perjury, was a bravura performance of arrogance, obfuscation, deflection, dismissiveness, disrespect, disingenuousness, and the occasional outright lie. 

Of course, what has got most Democrats and other rightly thinking Americans so annoyed at Facebook and Gospodin Zuckerberg is Gospodin Zuckerberg’s blithe willingness to take what Senator Elizabeth Warren has called “gobs of money” to continue to promote the Trump campaign’s lies. As Senator Warren has opined, Facebook has “incredible power to affect elections and our national debate. They’ve decided to let political figures lie to you.” 

But while Facebook will allow political figures to pay them gobs of money to lie to the American public, Facebook’s own moderators have been censoring the commentary of individual users for years. Facebook makes no secret of its preferential options for Donald Trump, Bernard Sanders, and the anti-vax movement. Criticize any of those three, and a user can find him or herself sent to “Facebook jail” for lengthy periods of time. Hypocrisy? Very much so. 

What has been so responsible for the boy-zillionaire’s personal toxicity, to say nothing of the disdain in which his platform is held is the casual, solipsistic arrogance Mark Zuckerberg has displayed again and again toward the United States Congress. His behavior toward the state of California, whose welcoming climate for innovators and inventors made Facebook of the monopolistic giant it is today, has been equally reprehensible.

When state Senator Richard Pan was physically attacked outside the Capitol building in Sacramento by an anti-vax fanatic who posted a video of the attack to Facebook, Facebook refused Senator Pan’s request to take the video down, offering some typically weasel-worded, mealymouthed Facebook gobbledygook explanation as to how the video “didn’t violate community standards.” That’s very much akin to Facebook’s contemptible behavior with respect to the genocide of the Rohingya, the mosque massacres in Christchurch, (where Facebook continued to keep a live stream video of the shooting up for 17 minutes, ostensibly because they didn’t think it violated their “community standards,”) or various other displays of egregious hate speech that by any objective measure should violate Facebook’s precious “community standards.”

Moreover, it is becoming fairly clear, especially given Zuckerberg’s statement that a Warren presidency would “suck” for Facebook, that Facebook is slowly but surely being co-opted by the American right and by Donald Trump. Facebook is happy to take gobs of money from Trump, from Trump supporters, from the Kremlin, and from Gospodin Yevgeniy Prigozhin (“Putin’s chef,” the Russian oligarch who runs a whole clutch of pro-Putin troll factories). And in taking gobs of money from all these malign actors, Facebook turns its back on any kind of American patriotism whatsoever. Maybe it's time we citizens stormed the barricades, like the angry inhabitants of Paris stormed the Bastille on July 14, 1789, setting in train the revolution that destroyed the ancien régime.

The world got along just fine under an ancien régime without Facebook for the first 4.5 billion years of Its history. We can get along without Facebook now. It is time for Facebook to be investigated either as a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization under the federal criminal RICO statute, or as a criminal syndicalist organization under California state law. Either way, it’s time to break up Facebook, forfeit its assets to the State of California, prosecute Gospodin Zuckerberg, and incarcerate him, as Oregon Senator Ron Wyden has suggested, preferably in the supermax prison at Pelican Bay, without limitation of time.

    -xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. He makes no secret of his disdain for Gospodin Zuckerberg and his platform. He agrees with Senator Elizabeth Warren that Facebook should be broken up, no matter how much such an outcome might “suck” for the boy-zillionaire. The opinions set forth in this post are Mr. Marchand’s own, though he expects that Mark Zuckerberg, with all his Trumpian thinness of skin, won’t like them one little bit.

THE DEMOCRATIC DEBATE: A PROBABLE MASTER CLASS IN SNATCHING DEFEAT FROM THE JAWS OF VICTORY

Summary: the Democratic Party has a remarkable faculty for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. At every level, Democrats have a disturbing propensity for missing the point, addressing issues that may be of interest to policy wonks, but which don’t address the pressing political issues or crises of the immediate moment.

The other night’s Democratic debate was no exception to that rule. Democrats should have been talking about the man upon whom the 2020 presidential election will be a referendum; they should have been attacking Donald Trump in this debate. Instead, they wasted a great deal of time parsing the distinction between Obamacare and “Medicare for All,” or nattering on about free college for millennials and post-millennials, and trying to outdo one another with the sweet bribes that would be offered to the electorate, before being taken away in taxes. That’s a way of sending a signal to the constituency that the Party has utterly missed the point. “Empty calories.”
----------------------------------------------------

Democrats have an almost unerring ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. It can happen, as it did in 2016, by Democrats pooh-poohing and tut-tutting the very notion of the existence of a Russian plot to steal the election for Donald Trump, deriding it as a red scare or as “McCarthyism.” Democrats got wise to what the Russians were doing, but they got wise to it six months too late, after a Russian asset had been installed as President of the United States.

At every level, Democrats have a disturbing propensity for missing the point. For example, In local California elections, positions such as city councilmember, Board of Education member, special District board member (if elected), and County supervisor are ostensibly nonpartisan. Too damn many Democrats still fondly cherish the naïve political belief that local races are indeed nonpartisan.

In reality, all local races are very much partisan. For years, the California Republican Party grasped this fundamental political truth, while Democrats primly, schoolmarmishly, pursed their lips and insisted otherwise. Because local elected offices are the training ground for legislative or statewide office, the California GOP carefully recruited local Republican activists to run for local offices. Once selected, these Republican officeholders were the bench from which the California Republican Party might draw the next tranche of partisan officeholders in Sacramento.

Until recently, however, the California Democratic Party did not seem to have grasped this fundamental lesson. Again and again, Democratic activists at all levels of the State Party pooh-poohed the very notion that it was important to cultivate candidates for local office. Consequently, throughout much of California, County and local officeholders tended to be overwhelmingly Republican.
Indeed, when activists in our local Desert Stonewall Democrats launched a campaign in the late 1990s to “turn the Coachella Valley blue,” other Democratic clubs pooh-poohed and tut-tutted as if we were promulgating some vile, malignant, pernicious political heresy. When I ran successfully for the Cathedral City City Council in 2002, a number of our local Democrats remonstrated with me for having the bad taste and poor form to pitch myself to the local Party as a Democrat.

That was the situation in the Coachella Valley at the beginning of the noughts, the first decade of this calamitous 21st century. Now, however, as we near the end of the tweens, the initial effort by a bunch of queer Democrats to turn the Coachella Valley blue has been more successful than we could imagine. The lion’s share of the Valley is represented in Congress by a Latino Democrat. The lion’s share of the Valley is also represented in the Assembly by a Latino Democrat. Democrats and queerfolk are to be found on city councils, school boards, and special District boards throughout the Valley. 

Yet, despite our Democratic progress, despite the fact that the Valley is trending not merely purple but deep blue, some of our most ancient, most venerable (perhaps “most antiquated” might be a more accurate framing) Democratic clubs still keep missing the point. For example, during the 2012 cycle, when the Party needed to have all hands on deck to ensure Barack Obama’s reelection, and to ensure that our now-Congressman Raul Ruiz was successful in his challenge to Mary Whitaker Bono Baxley McGillicuddy, some of our Democratic clubs were devoting entire meetings, not to getting these good Democrats elected or reelected, but to pissing and moaning about the dangers of hexavalent chromium in agricultural wastewater.

Like the Republican fixation on chemtrails, the local Democratic fixation on hexavalent chromium, while interesting from a public health point of view, had absolutely nothing to do with the issue at hand, which was making sure that Barack Obama got reelected and that Raul Ruiz turfed out Mary Bono. The time spent whingeing about how hexavalent chromium was eventually going to kill us all (and all of us will die, eventually, hexavalent chromium notwithstanding) could and should have been better spent planning Get Out The Vote activities to support Democratic candidates.

In short, too damn many of our local Democratic activists were more interested in spending time missing the point then they were in mobilizing the electorate to support the Democratic Party, the Democratic platform, and Democratic candidates.

Much the same thing happened in the other night’s hypertrophic, hyperventilating, overlong, flabby debate. I foresaw accjurately that that sour, superannuated, shtetl Stalinist, that loudmouth Leninist loser, that bloviating, bourgeois, Burlington Bolshevik Bernard Sanders, would stand at his podium brandishing his bony finger at the audience, lecturing them on the evils of the “millionaire and billionaire class,” while offering for the umpteenth time his tired and tiresome class warfare platform to the viewing public for its consumption.

Similarly, I not inaccurately foresaw Elizabeth Warren falling into the temptation of spending far too much of her time attacking big tech, particularly Facebook and that neotenous Asperger Mark Zuckerberg, whose resemblance to Star Trek’s Commander Data seems to become more pronounced with each passing day.

I was relieved not to see Joe Biden being baited into a sterile debate about busing in the late 1970s, but I most definitely saw the other candidates desperately trying to score policy points. Withal, the most delightful moment of the debate was when Kamala Harris went after Donald Trump a couple of minutes into the debate.
Unfortunately, none of the other candidates followed Kamala in her devastating, delicious put down of The Donald. Instead, they spent a great deal of time doing what Cory Booker warned him not to do; they got into attacking one another over relatively minor policy differences that can and should be litigated in a new Democratic administration. All this quibbling over minor differences of policy misses the point. The issue before the Democratic candidates last night was Donald J. Trump.

Both Republican and Democratic observers and commentators have for years recognized the most fundamental political truth of every presidential election: it is a referendum on the incumbent, or, if the incumbent is termed out, a referendum on his party and its track record. In 1992, for example, the banner in the Bill Clinton War Room read “it’s the economy, stupid.” That didn’t mean that the campaign should be fought on questions of policy. It meant that under George Herbert Walker Bush, the economy was tanking and the Clinton campaign had an opportunity fight the election on that basis.

The Clinton strategy -aided indirectly by such media efforts as CBS’s ongoing series of reports from Ray Brady on the “The Money Crunch-” was not so much to talk about wonkish issues of the economy, which has rightly been termed “the dismal science,” but to hammer George H. W. Bush on the piss poor performance of the American economy on his watch.

The Clinton 1992 strategy of attacking the Bush administration and the incumbent President proved to be an unexpected, brilliant success. American voters did indeed blame George H. W. Bush for the lackluster economy, and they gave Bill Clinton the White House. That, and the sheer nuttiness of Ross Perot’s quixotic third-party bid, pounded the nails into the political coffin of George Herbert Walker Bush.

Democrats need to understand that Trump is the issue, the whole issue, and nothing but the issue. The other night’s Democratic debate needed to focus on Trump, 
on Trump’s deferential attitude toward Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, 
on Trump’s treasonably incompetent mishandling of the situation in Syria 
on his shameful, dishonorable, nay, treasonable abandonment of the Kurds, 
on Trump’s truculent, dismissive attitude toward our Atlantic Alliance partners,
on Trump’s efforts to destroy the European Union, 
on Trump’s efforts to fragment the United Kingdom, and 
on Trump’s efforts to set Americans at odds against each other on a “divide and conquer” theory of governance.

In short, Democrats should have followed Kamala Harris’s line of attack, which she delivered beautifully but then got drawn off into wonkish policy discussions which basically amounted to which Democrat could offer the sweetest bribes to the electorate. Blame the candidates, blame the party, blame the moderators; withal the debate came across as flabby, and about as full of shit as a Christmas goose, like cotton candy: all spun sugar, empty calories, and absolutely no nutritional value.

This Democratic debate should have been focused on Trump’s corrupt, venal, borderline treasonable, efforts to involve foreign powers such as Russia, Ukraine, and China in his reelection effort. 

Hell, Mick Mulvaney gave away the store this afternoon, admitting that there had indeed been a quid pro quo sought with Ukraine by which Ukraine would receive military assistance in return for providing dirt on Joe Biden! The Democratic candidates should have concentrated upon the impeachment process now underway in the House of Representatives. Moreover, they should have framed that discussion in the context of rallying around their fellow Democrat, Joe Biden, on the not contemptible theory that Democrats need to circle their wagons, much as the Cherokee used to circle their wagons on the Trail of Tears to defend themselves against angry whites seeking to compass their vanishing. Democrats should have said, one and all, that at this debate sniping at other Democrats, particularly at Joe Biden, was simply out of bounds.

But they didn’t. Democrats, like parties of the left all over the world, have a felt need to attack one another over minor doctrinal differences, as they did last night, and to engage in vicious heresy hunting that has the effect of giving aid and comfort to the party opposite. Perhaps no “Democratic” candidate exemplifies and personifies this left deviationist error quite so much as Bernard Sanders, the finger wagging Bolshevik from Burlington. His, and his followers’, betrayal of Hillary Clinton, The Democracy’s 2016 nominee, together with well-documented Sandernista misogyny, cost the Party and the United States the 2016 election. I predicted accurately that, given the tone of acrimony and backbiting which the Sanders people introduced to the Democratic primary campaign in 2016, that the candidates in tonight’s debate would take a metaphorical leaf out of the Sanders book and attack one another in the same testy manner in which the Sandernistas attacked Hillary Clinton.

In short, those of us watching this debate were right to have expected a kind of barely concealed acrimony that will accomplish nothing, clarify nothing, and aid and comfort no one except Donald J. Trump. The debate the other night night not only missed the point, it was also nothing but a master class, taught by masters, in the art of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Like its predecessors, this debate was nothing more than an “empty calories” waste of time.

-xxx-

Paul S. Marchand, Esq. is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. As much as the foolishness and idiocies of the Democratic Party are enough to set his diminishing resources of hair on fire, the Republicans are even worse. The opinions set forth herein are his own, and are not intended as, and should not be construed as constituting, any form of legal advice. If you take them as legal advice, you may not be the kind of person Mr. Marchand would care to have as a client.

QUEER, BUT ASSIMILATED

Summary: For gay men of a “certain age,” coming out used to involve a great deal of introspection and a certain amount of, wait for it, drama. Many of us of that certain age remember when being queer carried with it a taint of implicit criminality, of the “abominable and detestable crime against nature.” Now, a taint is simply a slang term for the perineum; yet, despite that implicit taint of criminality with which we were tarred, queer-folk managed to pull off a kind of fierce, fabulous exoticism that saw us through the AIDS crisis in the battle for marriage. Now, however, we are becoming more assimilated and more integrated, less exotic than endotic. Coming out, once a kind of personal Declaration of Independence, has become more of a high school rite of passage akin to getting one’s first drivers license. We are out now, but we have been assimilated, as if the Borg had paid us a visit.

Today is National Coming out Day. It’s an unofficial holiday for encouraging timorous queerfolk cowering in the Narnia at the back of their closets to do more than take a tentative peek out of the closet door. NCOD is supposed to engender busting down the closet door, ripping it off its hinges, and emerging like a butterfly from its chrysalis singing “I am what I am.”

It’s also, perhaps, a time for those of us who are out, who are fully fledged queerfolk, to do a little retrospection about the process by which we emerged from our own individual closets. To take a look at the steps, often incremental and punctuated with false starts, by which we came to own our queer identities.

For example, I can remember the first time I kissed another boy and liked it — a lot — more than 4 decades ago, when I was a mere stripling of fifteen. I remember my first encounter with another man, receiving a hurried blow job in the side yard of a house in Pacific Palisades during a party. Similarly, I can remember what it was like to “go all the way” with another guy, in a bedroom in a fraternity house on the Vanderbilt campus in Nashville, shortly after turning eighteen. I can remember the masculine physicality, the pleasure of our mutual explorations, and how at a certain point we both attained climax and fell into each other’s arms in the blissful sleep that only men can enjoy after sex.

Yet those initial encounters, those early forays into same-sex intimacy were highly fraught. My first two underage encounters could, even in ostensibly liberal California, have called forth criminal prosecution and significant exposure. California remains a state where at least one senior deputy district attorney can proclaim that “the position of [her] office is that it is absolutely illegal in California for any person under the age of eighteen to be sexually intimate with any other person whomsoever, in any way, shape, or form.”

The situation in Tennessee was even worse. My frat house fling with that other man, even though we were both over eighteen, could have resulted in a felony prosecution against both of us for “the abominable and detestable crime against nature,” defined under Tennessee’s then applicable law as a very serious felony calling for a sentence of up to 20 years in the state penitentiary.

Moreover, in addition to being tarred with the taint and stigma of criminality, any excursions in same-sex intimacy in the late 1970s and early 1980s also and necessarily took place against the backdrop of an impending or ongoing health crisis. Even today, I remember the AIDS crisis with a combination of apprehension and deep sadness. For in truth, I came of age — both legally and sexually — at one of the most devastating times in queer history.

For what middle-aged queer man, of that certain age, then living in either New York or Los Angeles does not remember the two companion articles that appeared concurrently in the July 3, 1981 additions of the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, headlined “rare cancer found in 41 homosexuals.” Having experienced the welcome, if equivocal, pleasures of masculine intimacy, I was, at seventeen, paying fairly regular, if discreet, attention to news coverage of what was then known simply as “the gay community.”

Thus, I read the story in the Los Angeles Times with great care and mounting apprehension, feeling a kind of nameless, inchoate, dread, not unlike that which millions of Americans have felt since the coming of Donald Trump to the presidency on January 20, 2017. I sensed that something terrifying was unfolding, the metaphorical candy store in which so many queerfolk had romped so pleasurably, was closing. The years of sexual liberation, of sex without consequence, were coming to an end.

As indeed they were.

The history of the AIDS epidemic is far too well-known, among both queerfolk and among our straight neighbors to require recapitulation. As gay men became ill and began to die at a frightening rate of all kinds of frightening ailments, those of us who were beginning to contemplate coming out took counsel of ourselves and perhaps a few very close friends. We redecorated our closets and hunkered down what promised to be a very, very long siege, one which might make the 900 days of Leningrad seem tame. Indeed, some of us retreated so far into our closets that we practically emerged in Narnia.

The fears the AIDS crisis engendered were often over the top and mythic in their proportion. The implication of all the fear mongering and mythmaking was that sharing even the slightest degree of same-sex intimacy was tantamount to signing one’s own death warrant, condemning oneself to a slow and hideous demise.

Much of this fear mongering came, not surprisingly, from our straight neighbors. From those who objected to our presence in the body politic, the fear mongering was delivered with ill disguised or open Schadenfreude. But worse was the “concern trolling” from those who profess themselves to be allies, in the form of “friendly” admonition or commiseration that did little but reinforce the closetedness to which so many of us felt condemned.The responses of the straight community ineluctably took the form of law enforcement "solutions" and a kind of atavistic appeal to neo-Victorian prudery which is still with us in the form of the #metoo movement.

Like many queerfolk, I allowed my own coming out to be delayed by the health crisis. Throughout the 1980s, through nearly a decade of college and law school, I remained the soul of closeted discretion. My vision of the Narnia at the back of my own closet, the West Hollywood of my fantasies, was a mythical, paradisiacal place where the men were handsome, the sex was hot, the health crisis was far away, and where one need fear neither societal censure nor the prospect of a lingering, languishing death.

Indeed, perhaps the greatest paradox of the AIDS crisis was how it not only brought our existence and our plight to the attention of our straight neighbors, but how, in a way, it forced us to mature as a community. For in a sense, the crisis was our own London blitz, our own Stalingrad, our own Srebrenica, our own Golgotha.

Yet, like the fabulous Gloria Gaynor, we survived.  Like the Abbé Sieyès father of the French Revolution, the byword for us was “nous avons survecu:” we survived.

And not only did we survive, we thrived in adversity. We learned how to reach purposefully for the levers of political power. We learned again the lesson of Stonewall: asking nicely gets you nowhere. We learned how to appeal to the sympathy, compunction, and sense of decency of the majority of our straight neighbors. And we appealed most of all to queer “proximity empathy,” that empathic sense that arises in people who realize that a friend, a family member, a neighbor, or a coworker, in short, anyone to whom one may be emotionally connected, is queer.

And, surveying the ground, realizing that the time had probably come when I could no longer conceal this existential fact about myself, I finally came out. It was July, 1990, nine years after those fateful headlines, and two weeks after being admitted to the California Bar. I was 26 when I came out, and indeed, 26 was, at the time, the average age for coming out.

I knew what it had been like to live a life of at least ostensible straightness. Indeed, I was not inexperienced in opposite-sex sexual intimacy. I had managed, despite terrible, probably morally blameworthy, imposture on my part, to provide my opposite-sex partners with reasonably satisfactory sexual experiences. Fortunately, I congratulated myself, I had not got sucked in to an ongoing relationship with any of the women with whom I had gone through the forms of traditional heterosexual intimacy. 

Coming out, formally admitting to my family and to my friends, without any quibble, cavil, or demur, that I was in fact a queer boy, a pooftah, a homosexualist (pace, Gore Vidal), a man who had sex with other men, in short that I was as queer as pink ink and as gay as a goose, proved in the event to be every bit the liberating experience it has been described by so many queer writers as being.

Being out to the family meant freedom from the exquisite discretion that I had theretofore felt necessary. I no longer had to be so careful when I looked at the paper. I no longer had to engage in the invidious pronoun shift so well known to queerfolk. I could take the occasional gander at a cute guy, even if I happened to be in the company of relatives.

Being out, in short, meant that I could be candid about myself and the existential reality of what I was and am. Queer pundit Andrew Sullivan has observed that one of the critical marks of differencing the distinguishes gay men from our straight neighbors is our candor about matters sexual. That candor can be liberating, although I don’t know a single gay man who has not been occasionally admonished by even supportive family members that he is offering “TMI,” too much information.

Yet, at some point along one’s queer journey, the personal ineluctably becomes the political. And, perhaps ineluctably, I became involved in a series of queer causes. I did the AIDS walk. I marched in the pride parade, swinging a smoking thurible 2 miles down Santa Monica Blvd. at the head of the Episcopal Church contingent. I did pro bono work for AIDS patients, and in 1993, I was one of the first attorneys to challenge California’s ban on same-gender marriage, when I took on the case of two earnest young men who desired to be wed.

And it was then that I started to realize that the queer community, which had seemed to present such a united front to the straights was actually as divided and as full of bureaucrats, careerists, and apparatchiks as any straight community. I realized that there existed an unofficial, and extremely territorial, bureaucracy that had essentially taken possession of the queer community, and was very much determined to protect what it considered its territory against those whom they saw as interlopers. They saw themselves as very much the “Official Movement,” so to speak. They had made themselves very much the go-to people whenever the media, straight or queer, wanted commentary on any development affecting the queer nation.

Not surprisingly, this Official Movement considered itself very much in charge of setting the political agenda for queerfolk everywhere. Indeed, the penalty for not getting in lockstep with the Official Movement on whatever issue was considered important by that Official Movement was to be shunned and ostracized, without limitation of time.

In 1993, the Official Movement, obsessed as it then was with the issue of queerfolk in the military, was not ready by any means to deal with marriage equality. Consequently, the Official Movement made it very clear to my marriage case clients and to me that we were “interlopers,” against whom they had set their face.

Indeed, instead of helping us, the Official Movement and its toadies in the queer media did their level best to hinder us, publicly chastising us and speaking of my clients and me that, had any straight person uttered them, would have been considered inappropriate; indeed, they were homophobic. Both my clients and I put up with many unjust slings and arrows from the Official Movement.

And that, to all intents and purposes, represented the end of my interaction with the Official Movement, and with the people who make up the Official Movement; the operators, the people-on-the-make, the checkbook activists, the gender police, the social-justice-warriors, the PC enforcers, the come-late-to-the-party types, the chow line crashers, and - let us shame the devil and tell the truth - the star fuckers and the victory pimps, the people who will shove you aside to step up to the podia to claim a piece of a victory they had no share in making.

And, the “official movement” is still very much composed of such people today, operators, young-men-on-the-make, checkbook activists, gender warriors, PC enforcers, come late-to-the-party types, chow line crashers, the star fuckers, and the victory pimps. Most of us know who the victory pimps are; they’re the people who appear out of nowhere to participate in any victory the queer nation obtains. After all, as Galeazzo Ciano (Mussolini’s son-in-law and Foreign Minister) so famously put it, “victory has a thousand fathers. Defeat is an orphan.”

When Obergefell v. Hodges came down in 2015, guaranteeing marriage equality nationwide, the Official Movement, the star fuckers, and the victory pimps emerged from the woodwork and were falling all over each other to muscle their way to the head of the chow line to claim some share of the achievement. As I observed in my blog post of June 26 of that year,

"Bitter, party of one, my table has been ready for a generation, because I see what can happen when an Official Movement muscles its way to the head of the chow line.  So, while I was happy for 15 minutes, it’s now back to normal, and I see nothing to celebrate by foregathering in 115° weather to be preached at by people who haven’t got the slightest clue about how our fight developed and how it was won."

And indeed, a great many of the Doyens and Doyennes of the Official Movement really do have not the slightest clue about the manner in which our fight developed, or the manner in which was won. The coiffed, immaculately dressed, well-turned-out, passably cute twentysomethings and thirtysomethings who have become the face of the Official Movement have no idea what it was like during those days before the crisis, those liberated days of the late 1970s when anything seemed possible, even to a proto-homosexual still in his teen years.

Because, to a large extent, we have become domesticated. We are now just as much an integral Footnote Four minority in American society as the Irish, the Jews, the Buddhists, the Pagan/Wiccans and all the other communities that were once considered fashionably exotic. Like the Irish and the Jews, who also have been thoroughly integrated into American society, we’ve gone from being an exotic, quasi-criminal fringe with fabulous taste to being endotic, just like the Irish or the Jews, albeit still with fabulous taste.

And, being domesticated and endotic, should it surprise us that the average age for coming out has dropped from 26 into the early teens? Coming out is now less a process to be carried out with due introspection and complete honesty of self and purpose and more and adolescent rite of passage akin to getting one’s first drivers license. I can’t help but wonder if we haven’t lost something in the process. Like many older gay men, I wonder if we haven’t bereaved ourselves or been bereaved of some of what makes us unique -special, even- in society. In becoming a bourgeois, Footnote Four minority, enjoying significant protections in America’s most populous, bluest states, have we not lost touch with some of that subversive fabulousness which was so integral in making us us?

We queerfolk of a certain age have been tested as in a refiner’s fire. We had to learn the disciplines and protocols of exquisite discretion, of living well under both the disco ball and the sword of Damocles at the same time. Has our domestication, our transformation from exotic to endotic, deprived us of that faculty for living well in a time of crisis, for being fabulous, for seeing the irony in life and for holding up the shibboleths of society to relentless and critical examination? Have we lost our capacity for cultural dissidence? Or is it just that as we’ve get older it’s not so fabulous anymore?

About three years back, I looked in on a dear friend of mine, then still fabulous at 65— and still fabulous now at 68.  Being as he is thirteen years my senior, his memories - and those of his equally fabulous husband- of the late 1970s are sharper than mine; his experiences differ from mine, yet in many ways, they and I have more in common than either of us does with an out, loud, and proud high school senior taking his boyfriend to the prom, something we could never have done at that age. We were standing by the sliding glass doors in his dining room, looking out at the pool under a rainy sky.

It was a somber moment, and my friend turned to me and reminded me of an almost untranslatable haiku from Nagai Kafu, the great Japanese novelist of prewar Tokyo. Kafu’s haiku, in rough translation, is

Falling snow,
And Meiji is far away.

Turning to me as we watched the rain fall, making ripples on the water of the pool, he offered his riff on Kafu’s haiku:

Falling rain,
And Studio 54 is far away.

His haiku was, in its own way, an elegiac lament for a time we were old enough to remember, mature enough to know will never come again, and yet still special enough to us for us to regret its passing.

I’m glad I can be out. I didn’t expect things would turn out as they have. I can be who I authentically am, but I feel as if much of the collective Outness of our community is in danger of slipping away from us, as if we had been assimilated by the Borg, until we become nothing more than overly domesticated sexual minority kitsch, like mass-produced plastic souvenir coyotes howling at the pot lights in a tourist trap on a dark desert highway.

-xxx-

PAUL S. MARCHAND is a fiftysomething attorney who lives and in Cathedral City — where he served two terms on the city Council — and practices law in the neighboring Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage,. He is as queer as pink ink, and does not apologize for it. The views expressed herein are his own, and are certainly not those of the queer Official Movement. They are not intended as and are not to be construed as legal advice. This post is a revision and extension of a similar post from October, 2016.

OCTOBER 12: NEITHER COLUMBUS DAY NOR INDIGENOUS PEOPLES’ DAY; WHY NOT CALL IT 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.  Perhaps we should call the commemoration by the more neutral, more fitting, title of Encounter Day

Cathedral City, October 11, 2016- Tomorrow is traditional Columbus Day. It is theoretically supposed to commemorate the achievement of Christopher Columbus, a Genoese navigator (and possible Sephardic Jew) who, by sailing across the Atlantic in the late summer and early fall all the Year of Grace 1492, proved what had long been believed and generally accepted in European thought: the sphericity of the earth. Italy and Spain both named warships for the Admiral of the Ocean Sea, and there have been a raft of ocean liners named for him as well.

Commemoratively named warships and ocean liners 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 other something like "now might be a good time to review our immigration policies."

Yet, after 500 years, it is too late for the native people in the underbrush to review immigration policies. Now in the last generation, there is been a great deal of white liberal guilt, pearl clutching, handwringing, and revisionist history that has arisen around October 12, the Day of the Race, Columbus Day, or, as politically correct legislative bodies around the country now wish to call it, Indigenous People’s day. 

Permit me to suggest that if we must rename the commemoration of the arrival of Columbus’ Flota (or maybe with just three ships, it merits being described as a flotilla) at San Salvador in the Bahamas, we should perhaps try to commemorate the encounter itself, and refer to October 12 not by some Eurocentric, triumphalist description as Columbus Day, or by some politically correct moniker such as Indigenous Peoples’ Day, but by the more neutral and more historically just appellation of “Encounter Day,” even as we remember the New Yorker cartoon with its Indians along the shoreline discussing the importance of reviewing their immigration policies.

The cartoon in question strikes us as funny because we know the history of the 500-plus years since Columbus' arrival in/encounter with 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.  Of course, we should remember that the tenure of European occupation in the Western Hemisphere did not begin with the Colombian Encounter on October 12, 1492. In fact, we cannot know when the Europeans first encountered the Western Hemisphere. Some suggest that there may have been Egyptian, Carthaginian, or Roman expeditions to what is now the New World. Irish tradition has it that St. Brendan sailed to the New World with 15 monastic companions in an Irish curragh sometime in the early part of the sixth century.

More reliable, archaeologically-backed research indicates that the first European encounter with the Americas which we have a strong empirical basis to believe actually happened was that of Bjarni Herjólfsson in the year 986. Originally chronicled in the Norse Groenlandinga Saga, Herjólfsson’s voyage has been lent credence by the archaeological evidence of a Norse settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows on the island of Newfoundland. Established around the year 1000, L’Anse aus Meadows, together with the Norse settlements in Greenland, establishes a European tenure of occupation in the Americas stretching back more than a thousand years.

No matter whose tradition one accepts, the history of the European-American encounter is more complex and more nuanced than our politically correct historical revisionists might like to believe.  The Americas were not -as generations of American 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 of the Colombian Encounter, all of this had gone.  The westward migration, the völkerwanderung, 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: Norwegian scholar Helge Ingstad once declared that Columbus has succeeded largely because he and his fellows had firearms.), Superior agricultural and industrial technology, and the spread of European diseases -trivial childhood ailments to whites, fatal to unexposed Indians- together with firearms and edged weapons of Toledo steel, 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, or Encounter Day, 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 from Europe 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 as defined by Raphael Lemkin, the originator of the concept of genocide, is itself a specific intent crime, i.e., the deliberate, non-negligent, non-accidental, 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, or even aboard the White Star liner Oceanic, which brought my Limerick-born Irish grandmother across the Atlantic in 1913, and packed back whence they came; their bones and the bones of their children have, as much as the bones of the First Nations, 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 (a word 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, brilliantly 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, or his contemporaries the Méxica tlatoani Motecuhzoma Xocoyotzin, or the Sapa Inca Huayna Capac 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 Burkean conservatives and Gladstonian liberals, and as Democrats, 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. . And our lives slip away, moment by moment, lost in that vast terrible in-between....."  Whose day is Columbus Day?  Whose day is Indigenous Peoples' Day? Whose day is Encounter Day? It belongs to all of us, a day on which, perhaps more than on any other holiday or commemoration, 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 in Cathedral City, where he served two terms on the City Council, And practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage.  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 in the year 2017.  Since knickers are still in knots, it remains timely.