ATTACK OF THE BULLSHIT PEDDLERS: THE “PROGRESSIVE” ATTEMPT TO FABRICATE AN ANTI-BIDEN NARRATIVE.

Summary: Democrats, who can’t seem to stand prosperity, have foregathered to try to take out the front runner in the hypertrophied, hyperventilating, hyperbolic, Democratic primary campaign. The attempt to fabricate some kind of “Biden is racist/Biden is too old/Biden’s implosion is imminent,” narrative would be risible if it didn’t say such unfortunate things about a Democratic Party that does not seem to have the will to victory

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

Like my close contemporaries Barack and Michelle Obama, and Kamala Harris, I’m a late bloomer Boomer. Born toward the end of the baby boom generation which ran from 1947 through 1964 —and now, in the eyes of the supercilious millennials who make up the so-called progressive wing of my Democratic Party—  teetering on the brink of antiquity, I find myself realizing that my frame of reference, my weltanschauung, if you will, is more similar to that of Joe Biden, the Obamas, and even that of Kamala Harris then it is to, say, my personal trainer, who was born in the 1990s.

Like Barack, Michelle, and Kamala, together with many other late bloomer boomers, I was experiencing of the not unmixed joys, if one may use such a word, of late adolescence and early adulthood when the digital revolution snuck up on us and mugged us. Those of us who were adolescents or young adults during those years in the late 1970s when the first personal computers had their advent, had spent our youth in a world very much like that of Joe Biden. When we wanted to send a message in writing, we either put pen to paper, we pecked it out on a typewriter --electric if we were lucky enough to have one, manual for most of us. We did our shopping either at brick-and-mortar stores or from the pages of a paper catalog which arrived at our domiciles courtesy of the United States Postal Service. When we wanted to listen to music on demand, we spun platters of vinyl on turntables, or, as the quondam Vice President might put it, on a record player. In my early adulthood, CDs were in their infancy and streaming audio was the stuff of science fiction, along with Captain Picard’s replicated tea, “Earl Grey, hot.” 

The computers and devices on which all of us, even Boomers, depend, have largely changed our Boomer world. Unfortunately, the convenience afforded by our various devices has merely papered over a ravening gap between the generations. Indeed, Politico’s Ryan Lizza, writing the day before yesterday in Politico, observed that 

To Biden’s advisers and allies, the gap between a press corps, as well as the wider online political class, that is largely in its twenties and thirties and a candidate who would be 78 at his Inaugural explains a lot about why the pundits and Twitter activists are so confounded by the former vice president’s resilience.

Moreover, 

 “The [press corps covering the Biden campaign] view this party as dominated by woke millennials and through the lens of coastal issues. They are products, increasingly, of fairly elite schools and they don’t talk to a lot of voters who don’t look and talk like them except their parents, who also tend to be similar to them. Occasionally they are shocked to learn they have relatives who voted for Donald Trump. And they were not on the ground in the Midwest primaries for governor races in 2018 in Michigan and Ohio and Wisconsin where more moderate and older and more experienced candidates won against young cool left — often people of color — primary opponents.”

The same objection has also been voiced by acerbic political commentator Bill Maher, who from his relative antiquity of 63, has made it fairly clear that he has little patience for the so-called woke left.

And if the Biden camp has felt a certain not unjustifiable disdain for the woke, millennial left, certain parts of that woke left have made no secret of their active loathing for Joe Biden and the moderate majority of the Democratic Party. For example, writing in Truthout not too long ago, woke left activist William Rivers Pitt (born in 1971) turned the quondam Vice President’s debate remark about record players into a racist screed apparently equal, in Pitt’s mind, to the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Indeed, the largely Generation-X and millennial commentariat, smugly convinced of their own superiority to all those fusty old boomers and pre-boomers, and secure in their conviction of their own wokeness, has managed to do fairly well in creating a “but his gaffes” narrative of Joe Biden as a “fragile front runner,” and a doddering, superannuated, gaffe prone old man whose candidacy will inevitably collapse of its own age, its own inconsistencies, or its own un-wokeness.

Yet, what all the woke hipsters of Generation-X and the millennial cohort seem not to remember is a rather time-honored truth in politics, as much as in anything else, that youth, skill, and enthusiasm will be defeated by age and treachery. Much of the woke contingent, which, paradoxically enough, seems to profess a curious fondness and loyalty toward Bernard Sanders, the oldest candidate in the primary, seems to overlook the fact that the 40-plus voters who make up the majority of the Biden base are not looking for a candidate who will usher in enormous, transformative change in American society in the next four years. Rather, the 40-plus voters of the Biden base, having learned from bitter experience not to upset the apple cart, are looking for a candidate right now who can, in the words of one commentator of Boomer years, right the ship and get us out of the storm in which the antics of Donald Trump have placed us.

We don’t need, quite frankly, to be lectured by contingent of brats who have not yet acquired the wisdom or the understanding to realize that, as Bill Clinton, a Boomer of 73 now, noted, during his own 1992 primary campaign, that when selecting a standard-bearer, “Democrats want to fall in love; Republicans just fall in line.” Older Democrats, accustomed to having had their asses kicked with the stolen election of 2000, the stolen election of 2004, and midterms and local elections around the country, have begun to feel a hell of a lot less need to “fall in love” with a candidate of absolutely unimpeachable purity on every conceivable issue. Democrats who have begun to see silver threads among the gold or the ebony have learned that sometimes the Rolling Stones were right, "you can't always get what you wanted, but you might find sometimes that you get what you need" if you're willing to hold your nose, swallow hard, and fall in line.

And while we’re still alive, we'll take the pragmatic option. We’ll opt for the candidate who doesn’t necessarily come trailing clouds of transformative, purist, glory. We’ll opt for the candidate with a history of experience; we’ll opt for the man of sorrows who is acquainted with grief; will opt for the old guy who’s been around and yet who doesn’t insist on waving his finger in our face and shouting at us all the time, as that tiresome fellow Bernie Sanders is wont to do; while we are still alive, we who are teetering on the brink of an age range will opt for Joe Biden. 

What we Boomer Democrats want, we Boomer Democrats who are teetering on the brink of old farthood, is for the Democratic Party to get its act together. We want the Democratic Party to recover what it had in 2008 and 2012, the will to victory. We're tired of being told our mettle is bred out, that we are to out of touch, that we are too "socialist," and that we don't have the temperament for the fight. Let's remember the words of the Sean Connery character in the 1987 remake of The Untouchables: "they pull a knife, [we] pull a gun; they send one of [ours] to the hospital, we send one of theirs to the morgue."  

We must be rude, partisan, unfair and hectoring to the Republicans, but we must have a truce within our own fortress.

And be damned to the woke left and their pretensions.

 

-xxx-

Paul S. Marchand, Esq. Is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. At 392 (in coyote years), he is teetering on the brink of an age range, though AARP has been trying to recruit him since he was a mere stripling of 290.he makes no claim, and advances no pretension, to being particularly woke, just to being an old line yellow dog/coyote Democrat. Call him neoliberal, a corporate shill, or Republican-lite, and expect him to belabor you about the head and shoulders with whatever cast-iron skillet is ready to hand. The views expressed herein are his own.

A WIND AGE, A WOLF AGE, A SWORD AGE, AN AX AGE: Why 9/11 Was More Like June 8, 793 than December 7, 1941.

Summary: 9/11 was not an attack like Pearl Harbor. Instead, it was more like the Viking raid on the island of Lindisfarne in June, 793. Since 9/11, the Roman West has been clenching its collective hands around the hilts of swords. Since 9/11, America has fallen into a more or less permanent state of hostilities; the very thought of peace has slipped away from us. Children who were toddlers when 9/11 happened are now serving second or subsequent deployments in Afghanistan. We have become mistrustful, distrustful, paranoid, and Balkanized. We have flung ourselves into the arms of the most dishonest and deceitful president in our history. We had not thought that even so large-scale a terrorist outrage as 9/11 could have undone so many, so badly, so completely

----------------------------------------
Cathedral City, September 11, 2019 – Since almost before the dust had settled from the terrorist outrages of September 11, 2001, it had become fashionable to analogize 9/11 to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

Such an analogy was tempting.  After all, millions of Americans living on that day, my late father among them, could remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news of the attack, much as my late father could remember sitting in Patsy’s Bar in the Bronx, munching peanuts and sipping an illegal beer as the news broke of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Yet, while tempting, the Pearl Harbor analogy was and is inapt.

Instead, we should reach much further into history if we are to find an historical event to which 9/11 can be meaningfully and actually compared.

Rather than thinking back to December 7, 1941, we should take ourselves back to June 8, 793 to the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, off England’s Yorkshire coast.  On that date, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tersely observes, “the harrying of the heathen miserably destroyed God’s house in Lindisfarne by rapine and slaughter.”

The “harrying of the heathen” by which the monastery at Lindisfarne was “miserably destroyed” was the first in a series of Viking raids that would cast a pall of terror over Christian Europe for the better part of the next 300 years.

The Lindisfarne raid raised the curtain upon a time that the Norse sagas themselves described as “A Wind Age, a Wolf Age, a Sword Age, an Ax Age,” in which the minsters and monasteries, the cathedrals and cloisters, of Western, Christian Europe echoed with the clamant petition “a furore Normannorum libera nos, Domine,” from the fury of the Northmen deliver us, O Lord.

Writing from the court of the Emperor Charlemagne, the English monk Alcuin expressed the shock he and his contemporaries felt about the Viking descent on what had been one of the holiest and most richly endowed monasteries in all of England:

    “Lo, it is nearly 350 years that we and our fathers have inhabited this most lovely land, and never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race, nor was it thought possible that such an inroad from the sea could be made.”

In the aftermath of the events of 9/11, one could easily adapt Alcuin’s words to the events of that thrice-cursed day with little change:

    “'Lo, it is nearly 400 years that we and our fathers have inhabited this most lovely land, and never before has such terror appeared in America as we have now suffered ... nor was it thought possible that such an inroad from the sky could be made.”

What makes Lindisfarne so much more apt an historical analogy to 9/11 than Pearl Harbor could ever have been lies in the fact that whereas the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was carried out by a state actor in pursuit of clearly defined military and diplomatic goals, both the Lindisfarne raid and the outrages of 9/11 were carried out by nonstate actors engaged in an attempt to sow fear and terror among an unarmed civilian target population --- whether that be the monks of the Holy Island, or the American public.

Thus, while Imperial Japan possessed in every respect the institutions and attributes of a modern state --- nay, even those of a Great Power, nothing similar can be said of either the Viking raiders at Lindisfarne or of Al Qaeda.  To the extent that the Lindisfarne raiders possessed any kind of political organization, it did not extend beyond some kind of rude, rudimentary system of primitive chieftainries -- little more than glorified, armed farmers.  Al Qaeda, while organized in a way not dissimilar to a Mafia crime family, possessed no meaningful political organization at all.

Herein lies the paradox.  While the Japanese attack against Pearl Harbor engendered in the American public a strong sense of outrage and desire for revenge, it did not call forth primal fear or terror; while America knew herself to be at war, she also knew that the war would be fought “over there,” and that it would be a military enterprise, with relatively clearly defined objectives and war aims.

By contrast, the raiders at Lindisfarne and the terrorists of Al Qaeda were and are practitioners of a kind of violence that depends for its very success upon instilling into the target population an ongoing back-of-the-lizard-part-of-the-brain sense of permanent fear and apprehension, in which our hands are always tight upon the hilts -- real or metaphorical -- of our swords.

For both the Viking and the terrorist understood and understand the utility of creating a climate of terror, whether that be the sort of sheer unreasoning panic embodied by the Lindisfarne monk or the Manhattan stockbroker fleeing for dear life, or the more subtle and endemic low-grade terror that keeps us gripping those sword hilts, looking over our shoulders, glancing sidelong at the dark-complexioned among us, or scanning the skies for any indication that the airplane overhead may be about to do something awful. 

By creating such a climate of fear and terror, both the Viking and the Al Qaeda terrorist sought to demoralize their targets and to disrupt the ability of those targets to respond effectively.  The distinction between military and civilian targets to which a state actor is at least theoretically bound by international law and custom, means nothing to the raider storming ashore at Lindisfarne or the terrorist preparing to drive a plane full of terrified civilian passengers into the side of a building.

This, then, is why the Pearl Harbor analogy to 9/11 ultimately fails.  While the historical record of Japan’s conduct during the Second World War is by no means free of crimes and atrocities, we must acknowledge that in large measure even the Imperial Japanese Army tended for the most part to observe some degree of distinction between the front and the rear, between the zone of battle and the civilian zone behind the lines.  The Viking raider at Lindisfarne and the Al Qaeda terrorist make no such distinction; for them the battlefield is anywhere and everywhere.

Pearl Harbor precipitated the United States into a declared, conventional war; 9/11 was merely the opening curtain to a new wind age, a new wolf age, a new sword age, a new ax age.  If we have had difficulty figuring out in these last eighteen years how to respond, it is because we have not faced an ongoing challenge of this kind since the last great Viking raid was turned back by King Harald II Godwinson of England at Stamford Bridge –- barely a hundred miles from Lindisfarne itself -- in September, 1066.

Our challenge, then, on this 18th anniversary of the inroad from the sky that on September 10, 2001 we had not thought possible, is threefold.

First, we must reject the counsels of cowardice and division into which far too many in our government fell far too eagerly in the months and years that followed 9/11.  In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the goodwill of the world flowed powerfully toward a wounded nation and a shocked people. “Nous sommes tous américains,” the Paris newspaper Le Monde eopined the following day; we are all Americans.

Yet, by petulantly insisting that “you’re either with us or against us,” our government managed to squander that goodwill within weeks.  In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the American people were more at one than had been the case for a long time.  Yet, by equating questioning with dissent, and dissent with disloyalty, and by insisting that we sacrifice many of our cherished civil liberties in the interests of creating a national security state, our government managed to fragment beyond repair the unity which had for a brief, glimmering, moment brought us together.

Now, with 9/11 steadily receding into our distant rearview mirror, we once again find ourselves with a government that, influenced by the brazen truculence of its so-called Maximum Leader, has well-nigh squandered the good will of our alliance partners and the rest of the world.

That same Donald Trump administration has, to an even worse degree than the George W. Bush administration, equated dissent with disloyalty, aroused in the American people a sense of hyper- partisan tribalism, and has managed again to fragment beyond repair any unity we had had, and any hope of putting the Humpty Dumpty that was the American nation back together.

Second, we must overcome our solipsistic, parochial insistence on regarding 9/11 as a sui generis event of which other countries have, and can have, no understanding.  As much as Lindisfarne proved to be no isolated occurrence, nether was 9/11.  We therefore cannot afford the vain and frivolous luxury of discounting the terrorist outrages that occurred in Mumbai, in Nairobi, in Dar es Salaam, in Bali, in London, in Madrid, or elsewhere. 

For contrary to what some on the far reaches of the political right might urge, empathy is not necessarily a dirty word; when those who have been targets of terror can empathize together they can draw strength from one another, take good counsel together, and create long-term faculties of resistance, much as Christian Europe came together in the end not merely to resist the Vikings but to assimilate them into Western civilization. For when all is said and done, what draws us together, as the late Ursula K. Le Guin observed, is suffering. Suffering leads to the development of faculties of empathy, understanding, common effort, and common resistance. Perhaps this is why Donald Trump likes to speak so slightingly of the very concept of empathy, deriding those who feel it as “weak.”

Finally, we must decisively reject the counsels of those who would see in the terrorist outrages since 9/11 some kind of existential clash of civilizations.  Inductive reasoning -- drawing conclusions about the generality from particular incidents -- is always dangerous.  We know from direct observation, for example, that Al Qaeda represents neither all Arabs nor all Muslims, and that as and to the extent that our own Roman-descended civilization and Islamic civilization can engage with one another, we together can resist the bomb throwers and terrorists on the fringes of our respective communities.  We also know from direct observation, that much of Al Qaeda’s appeal has been driven by a perception that the West has had a preferential option for uncritically backing the dictators who for so many decades have throttled the democratic aspirations of so many in the Arab world in particular and the larger Islamic world in general. 

It may also be that Al Qaeda itself has become dated and unfashionable, rather like a ridiculous late 1970s hairdo; an organization that thrives in a political winter often cannot survive a thaw, as the terminal years of the Soviet Union so amply demonstrated.  With Osama bin Laden dead and the Arab world going through a process of revolution and civil conflict not unlike that of Europe in 1848, we may perhaps anticipate that as the Viking age ended at Stamford Bridge, the ability of Al Qaeda to trouble the world may be declining toward its own final Stamford Bridge-type dénouement.

We should nonetheless keep our hands tight on the hilts of our swords; a dying organism is still capable of lashing out, even as a star burns more brightly just before going nova.  But eighteen years after 9/11, we may dare hope that some of the progress that has been made and some of the lessons that have been learned may stand us in good stead, even as we learn how to resist the blandishments of The Donald and his political tribe, and we may dare hope that sooner, not later, this current “wind age,” this current “wolf age,” this current “sword age,” this current “ax age,” may come to an unlamented end.

-xxx-

Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, where he served eight years on the City Council.  The views expressed herein are his own.  All rights reserved.  This post is an adapted an updated version of a post from the year 2011.