ON MEMORIAL DAY, 2019, LESSONS FROM LINCOLN

Summary: Memorial Day usually calls for all manner of bloviating, “patriotic,” stupefying, speechifying from all manner of public speakers who do not realize that Gen.  William T. Sherman was right to declare that “war is hell,” and that “its glory is all moonshine.” Our reflections on this day when we commemorate those who laid the costliest sacrifice imaginable on the altar of freedom should instead be informed by the words of a President who, though a stranger to war at the beginning of  his administration, learned through the four years that separated Fort Sumter from Appomattox, the existential sorrow and sadness of war.

Today is Memorial Day.  Today we will hear a great deal of bloviating on the glories of war, especially from people who have never heard a shot fired in anger, or who avoided service by faking bone spurs.  “War is hell,” Gen.  William T. Sherman (he who redeveloped the hell out of downtown Atlanta) once said, “its glory is all moonshine.” As we remember today those who “laid [the ultimate] sacrifice upon the altar of freedom,” let us leave off with the bloviating and the “patriotic,” but stupefying, speechifying.

Instead, let us read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest the words of Abraham Lincoln, the American President who, though largely a stranger to war at the beginning of his administration, became far too well acquainted with the existential sorrow and sadness of war in the four years between Fort Sumter and Appomattox.

The first text is the Gettysburg address, delivered on November 19, 1863. 

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

"Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

"But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

The second text, dated a few days short of a year later, is that of the President’s condolence letter to Lidia Bixby, of Boston, who Pres. Lincoln had heard had apparently lost five of her sons on the field of battle.  Though Lincoln had been misinformed, the sentiments of his letter still make it one of the finest expressions of condolence ever written or proffered.

"Executive Mansion,

"Washington, Nov. 21, 1864.

"Dear Madam,

"I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle.

"I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save.

"I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of Freedom.

"Yours, very sincerely and respectfully,
A. Lincoln."

These two texts, coming from the mind and the pen of arguably the greatest of American Presidents, express the reality of Memorial Day better than any canned, carefully scripted, politically calculated, triangulated speech ever could.  They stand out as two of the greatest state papers in the history of the United States, and arguably as two of the greatest state papers ever written in the English language. 

There should be no other words this Memorial Day.

 

FACEBOOK DELENDA EST

Summary: After someone close to the Donald Trump reelection campaign (very likely Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale) disseminated a doctored video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi intended to make the Speaker looked drunk, stoned, or otherwise incapacitated, responsible media operations, including Google’s YouTube, yanked the phony video within hours.  But not Facebook.  Facebook, stubbornly declaring that the video didn’t violate its murky, highly subjective, (in other words, bullshit), “community standards,” insisted that its users could “decide for themselves,” an abdication of responsibility that came across as sleazy, immoral, and quite possibly criminal as well.
    Recently, Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes suggested, in an op-ed piece in the New York Times, that Facebook should be broken up, that it should be required to divest itself of the apps that it spun off as it grew including, most notably, Instagram and WhatsApp.  After Facebook refused to pull down the doctored Pelosi video, and after Facebook livestreamed 17 minutes of the mosque massacres in Christchurch, New Zealand, it is no longer sufficient to speak of breaking up the platform.  The conversation must now (assuming the advent of a Democratic administration in January 2021) be about putting Facebook out of business as a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization, and forfeiting its assets the United States and/or the State of California.  As Marcus Portius Cato once said, Cartago delenda est: Carthage must be destroyed.  Perhaps now is the time for the liberal democracies of the world to say Facebook delenda est.

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Last week, after planned Trump-Schumer-Pelosi infrastructure talks fell apart because Donald Trump had a temper tantrum over allegedly nasty things Nancy Pelosi said about him, Speaker Pelosi addressed the issue in remarks at the Center for American progress.  The Trump campaign, ever ready to use immoral, sleazy, and even criminal means to attack its perceived enemies, doctored the video with the intent of making Speaker Pelosi appeared drunk, stoned, or otherwise incapacitated.  The fakery was crude and easily detected, and indeed was detected within a couple of hours of the doctored videos being posted on YouTube and Facebook.

YouTube, a subsidiary of Google, immediately did the right thing and yanked the videos, determining that it would be inappropriate for YouTube to be complicit in the dissemination of disinformation from the Trump campaign, presumably from Brad Parscale, Trump’s campaign manager.

But not Facebook.

Facebook’s half-assed response to the revelation that these videos, which had been shared thousands of times on its platform, was simply to “de-promote” the faked, Russian-style disinformation videos, but not to remove them.  Instead, Facebook doubled and tripled down on its posture, proclaiming, in tones of what Winston Churchill once described as “injured guilt,” that they were a “social media organization,” not a news organization.  Facebook was guilty of a similar enormity after the mosque massacres in Christchurch, New Zealand, when its explanation for livestreaming seventeen, yes, seventeen, minutes of the shooting, was equally muddled and equally morally abhorrent.

What we have seen from Facebook since roughly 2011 is that Facebook has stumbled, staggered, shuffled, and shambled from one scandal to another.  First it was a series of privacy gaffes which formed the subject of a 2011 consent agreement with the Federal Trade Commission, which Facebook then went and breached, subjecting it, this spring, to a potential $5bn fine.  Next came the Cambridge Analytica imbroglio, which gave Facebook another black eye, then it was the exposure of Facebook’s complicity in the genocide of the Rohingya and the intercommunal strife in Sri Lanka.  Of course, we cannot afford to forget the 17 minutes of livestreamed horror in Aotearoa/New Zealand, which caused the Kiwis to question whether Facebook had any moral compass whatsoever.

Of course, if we cannot forget or forgive Facebook’s obvious moral bankruptcy in Aotearoa, or its craven misconduct in Sri Lanka and Myanmar, we also should be equally ill inclined to forget or forgive Facebook's knowing complicity in the Russian attack and the Russian active measures against our election in 2016.  Who can forget how Gospodin Zuckerberg scoffed at the idea that the Russians might have misused his platform to steal the election from Hillary Rodham Clinton? 

As much as he would not even entertain the idea that the Russians had misused his platform to elect Donald Trump, Gospodin Zuckerberg would no doubt have scoffed at the idea that his employees, who like so many Bay area millennials, made absolutely no secret of their preferential option for Bernard Sanders, applying Facebook’s murky, subjective, indefensible, bullshit so-called community standards to make sure that Facebook gave an indulgent pass to every pro-Sanders attack, and to every vile calumny against the Clinton family, while running aggressive interference for the Independent Vermont senator.  Thousands of Clinton loyalist Facebook users were blocked from using the platform (commonly referred to as being “sent to Facebook jail,”) for voicing the slightest criticism of Gospodin Sanders, while vicious, misogynistic attacks by “Berniebros” against Sec. Clinton were given the most indulgent treatment imaginable.

Now that we see the Trump campaign, probably at the urging of campaign manager Brad Parscale as aforementioned, using crude, Soviet/Russian-style tactics to attempt, with limited success, to smear House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, what is even more disturbing is how Facebook has made itself willingly, even eagerly, complicit in such sleazy, immoral, dishonorable, even criminal, tactics.  This really ought to be the straw that breaks Gospodin Zuckerberg’s back.

And the responsibility, nay, the liability and the accountability for Facebook’s latest act of wrongdoing ought to land squarely and unequivocally on Mark Zuckerberg himself.  Gospodin Zuckerberg personally owns 60% of Facebook’s stock.  That makes Mark Zuckerberg the unilateral arbiter of a great deal of the speech that takes place in liberal democracies.  In a sycophantic “60 Minutes” segment some years ago profiling Facebook, a number of senior Facebook managers acknowledged that just about every management decision at the company had to pass the so-called Zuck Test, essentially admitting that Gospodin Zuckerberg is himself in absolute control of, and therefore responsible for, everything that happens at Facebook.

Nearly 260 years ago, the great Prime Minister William Pitt, later first Earl of Chatham, in his October 2, 1761 resignation speech from King George III’s Privy Council, stunned his colleagues by articulating the principle of ministerial responsibility thus: “being responsible, I will direct.  I will be responsible for nothing I do not direct.” The corollary to the Great Pitt's definition of ministerial responsibility is that he or she who directs must be responsible. In In re Yamashita (1946) 327 U.S. 1; SCOTUS defined in no uncertain terms the principle of command responsibility when it sanctioned the execution for war crimes of Japanese Gen. Yamashita Tomoyuki as the officer bearing “command responsibility” for numerous Japanese atrocities in Manila and throughout the Philippines during the Japanese occupation of those islands.

Given our strong commitment to the Great Chatham’s concept of ministerial responsibility, and to the Common Law/Law of Armed Conflict concept of command responsibility, it is fair to say that the time may very well be at hand for an incoming Democratic administration in January 2021 to set in motion the wheels of federal prosecution, concurrently with California Atty. Gen.  Xavier Becerra, to take Gospodin Zuckerberg’s toys away from him. Gospodin Zuckerberg has not been responsible, therefore he should not be allowed to direct anything at all.

Now while Gospodin Zuckerberg's defenders may insist, in cognate tones of injured guilt to Gospodin Zuckerberg himself, that it would be wrong to impute Gospodin Zuckerberg any sort of malice, urging instead that Gospodin Zuckerberg can be held responsible for nothing more than misplaced Silicon Valley idealism, the law may very well hold otherwise.  One need not entertain actual malice to have malice at law imputed to one.  Malice at law can be imputed, for example, when a shooter discharges, say, an AR-15 into a moving passenger train.  Notwithstanding the actor's assertions of "no malice," the risk of severe injury or death to at least one passenger is sufficiently great that the law will simply impute malice.

Now it may be possible that Gospodin Zuckerberg is simply suffering from Asperger’s syndrome or some other form of high-functioning manifestation that nonetheless places him somewhere on the autism spectrum. Certainly, Gospodin Zuckerberg’s curious inability to understand the optics of the scandals into which Facebook has stumbled, staggered, shuffled, and shambled more or less constantly since 2011, raises an inference that he is somewhere on the autism spectrum.  However, being on the autism spectrum should not be an excuse when one is at the helm of one of the largest multibillion-dollar corporations on the planet. 

Indeed, as French public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy has suggested, “Trump and Zuckerberg, though they probably agree on nothing, are the two blades of a pair of scissors,:” joint enemies of American leadership and of the rules-based international liberal democratic order throughout the world.  If so --if, in fact, Gospodin Zuckerberg is, either through being somewhere on the autism spectrum, or as a result of some dangerous political leaning, recklessly or even knowingly complicit in the siege against liberal democracy being mounted by such people as Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Binyamin Netanyahu, Hungary’s Orbán Viktor (who manages to make Hungarian Fascist dictator Nagybányai Horthy Miklós look almost respectable), and, of course, our own Donald Trump, then in fact the law can rightly impute malice to him.

Under such circumstances, either the federal government or the State of California would be justified in investigating Facebook and Gospodin Zuckerberg as a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization.  Certainly, there may be a case to made for wire fraud if Facebook is disseminating information knows to be false and fraudulent.  There may also be a case to be made for a seditious conspiracy to attack the authority of the Speaker of the House of Representatives.  In either case, an incoming Democratic administration should green-light such investigations immediately.

In his May 9, 2019 op-ed piece in the New York Times, Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes suggested that Facebook should face antitrust enforcement action, being obliged to divest itself of Instagram and WhatsApp, and that Facebook be barred for at least three years from acquiring any further platforms or apps.  Given how Facebook has ranged itself so sleazily and so criminally on the side of falsehood and fraudulent disinformation, and given how we now know who side Facebook is really on, mere antitrust enforcement is insufficient.  Facebook’s credentials as an enemy of democracy have been clearly established.  Nothing less than a criminal RICO investigation and prosecution will suffice to protect the Republic and liberal democracy itself against Facebook and against Gospodin Zuckerberg, with the implication of complete criminal asset forfeiture to the United States and/or the State of California very much on the table.

To borrow from Marcus Portius Cato's insistent trope that Cartago delenda est: Carthage must be destroyed, perhaps the time is at hand to repeat that trope, applying it to Facebook, among our own public institutions of self-government

Facebook delenda est.

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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who practices in Rancho Mirage and lives in neighboring Cathedral City, where he served eight years as a member of the city council. Like an increasing number of Americans, and like his fellow member of the Francophonie, French public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy, he believes that Facebook and Gospodin Zuckerberg represent an existential threat to the rules-based liberal democratic order that has brought freedom and liberty to so much of the world in the last 120 years, and that therefore the democratic world should take comprehensive steps to put Facebook out of business and put Gospodin Zuckerberg behind bars as a serial violator of the Sherman Antitrust Act.

WOMEN OF COLOR HOLD UP A CONSIDERABLE PORTION OF THE SKY

Summary: Mao Zedong was right when he observed that “women hold up half the sky.” What he did not realize, because he was a member of China’s dominant Han majority is that women of color often hold up considerably more than half the sky, and they do so unsung, unheralded, and unrecognized. Certainly, Alabama Democratic Sen. Doug Jones ought to have a clear sense of how integral women of color can be. Joe Biden should be particularly aware that much of his voting strength, notwithstanding Anita Hill, inheres in African-American women.
 
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Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong had a reputation for being a fair to middling poet in the Chinese language. In one of his poems, he observed that “women hold up half the sky.” Now the Chairman was a member of the dominant Han majority in his country; Han Chinese enjoy a kind of privilege that makes the much maligned privilege of white people in the United States pale in comparison. Mao was woke enough to realize that women, unheralded, unrecognized, and unsung, really do hold up half the sky above not only the Middle Kingdom, but everywhere under Heaven. However, as a Han man, brought up with all of the quotidian assumptions that underlie the privilege of any dominant ethnicity, it probably never occurred to The Chairman that minority women, particularly women of color, often have to hold up distinctly more than half the sky in their own communities.

Certainly, this has been the case in communities of color in the United States. The sheer toughness of African-American women, their often rocklike constancy in the face of discrimination and systemic racism, has become proverbial. “She was warned, she was given an explanation, nevertheless she persisted,” could have been applied to African-American voting rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer (famed for her aphorism “we are sick and tired of being sick and tired,”) or to Rosa Parks seeking to ride in the front of the bus, long before it was ever applied to Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

Yet among a largely white, largely male, class of pundits and prognosticators, the inchoate political potential of African-American women has often been ignored or understated. When Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III left the Senate to become Donald Trump’s Attorney General in 2017, it created a vacancy in the Senate seat he had held since 1997. After the usual political jockeying, a special election was held to fill the vacant seat. The Republicans, after ousting appointed incumbent Luther Strange, chose former Chief Justice Roy “Ten Commandments” Moore as their standardbearer. The Democrats chose former U.S. Attorney (N.D.Ala.) Doug Jones.

The pundits and prognosticators in Washington City and New York, taking a cursory look at Alabama and taking into account its deep Republicanism, quickly concluded that Roy Moore was the prohibitive favorite. Alabama, they thought, was so intractably, tribally, Republican in its allegiance that the pundit class assumed that the ever increasing revelations of Roy Moore’s Roman Polanski-like predilection for pubescent girls would mean nothing to voters. Their reading of the tea leaves therefore had Roy Moore winning by a landslide.

After all, this was the Alabama of George “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever,” Wallace, of Bull Connor, of the violence of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, and all the other enormities of the civil rights movement. What they had not remembered was the Alabama of Rosa Parks, that Uppity Woman who had the Effrontery To Want to Ride in the Front of a City Bus in Montgomery.

On election night, the Washington City and Manhattan prognosticators and pundits expected to be able to call the election in Roy Moore’s favor within roughly an hour of polls closing. That was not to be. 

Through the counties that made up the so-called Alabama black belt, and in Alabama’s larger cities, including Montgomery, Birmingham, Mobile, Tuscaloosa, and Huntsville, Jones outperformed Roy Moore, often by double digits. Contrary to Maoist orthodoxy, the cities overwhelmed the countryside. As the night wore on, the pundits and prognosticators realized, to their pleasant surprise, that they had, in fact, misread the tea leaves. By the end of the night, Doug Jones was the Democratic Senator-elect from Alabama.

The voting bloc that had been the most consistent in his support for Doug Jones proved to be those unsung, unrecognized, unheralded African-American women whom nobody had expected to hold the balance of power. Doug Jones’s upset victory brought home an important lesson:  Democratic politicians who ignore women of color, whether Latina women in the Southwest or African-American women in the South or in the African-American diaspora in northern and Midwestern cities, do so at their peril.

In 1932, the turnout of African-American women in northern cities helped Franklin Roosevelt give Herbert Clark Hoover the bum’s rush from the White House. 

In 1936, African-American women helped pad Franklin’s margin when he administered an epic shellacking to Kansas’s Alf Landon. 

In 1940, African-American women helped give Franklin his unprecedented third term as the war clouds gathered, and in 1944, African-American women, seeing, like all Americans, the glimmering light of potential victory and the end of the horrible war, helped vouchsafe Franklin his even more unprecedented fourth term.

In 1948, African-American women held the line for Harry Truman, helping ensure his defeat of New York Gov. Tom Dewey.

In 1960, African-American women helped secure Jack Kennedy’s razor thin margin of victory over Richard Nixon.

In 1964, African-American women helped cement the Kennedy legacy by voting for Lyndon Johnson and keeping Barry Goldwater the hell out of the White House.

In 1976, African-American women rallied to Jimmy Carter, and in 1992 they rallied to another Southern governor, Bill Clinton, to whom they rallied again to defend his presidency against Bob Dole in 1996.

In 2008, African-American women turned out in historic numbers to elect the first African-American president, and they defended his presidency against Mitt Romney in 2012.

Barring Franklin Roosevelt’s trouncement of Alf Landon in 1936 and LBJ’s major ass whipping of Barry Goldwater in 1964, it is probably safe to suggest that African-American women played an integral role in securing the victory of a whole bunch of Democratic presidents.

As Joe Biden cements his status as the prohibitive favorite for the Democratic nomination for president next year, he will need to remember that while it is always possible for him to lose while carrying a majority of African-American women, it is simply not possible to win without African-American and other women of color.

As America becomes less white, and as the future assumes a more female form, any victorious Democratic coalition (and it’s important to realize that The Democracy is less a political party that it is a political movement) will necessarily have to include women of color. Women like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, or Ilhan Omar are no longer curiosities in our political culture. They are women of color, and they are here to stay.

Moreover, these Uppity Women of color, who owe so much, so very much, to white women like Abigail Adams, Jeannette Rankin, also owe an even greater debt to women like Fannie Lou Hamer, Shirley Chisholm, and the rock-like Dolores Huerta, who truly held up half the sky over César Chávez.

Men like Bernard Sanders, who have always been curiously tone deaf to the way women of color hold up so very much of the sky, may do well in small, heavily white, caucus states. But in places like Alabama, where Hillary Clinton trounced his butt in the primaries because of her simpático not just with women, but with women of color, Bernie may very well find himself trounced again.

For Democrats, the 2020 election, both in the primary and general election cycles, may very well belong ineluctably not simply to women, but to women of color, who, unheralded, unrecognized, and unsung, have held up a lot more than half the sky for a very, very long time.

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Paul S. Marchand, Esq., a damn man, is an attorney, former City Councilman, and Democratic loudmouth who lives in Cathedral city and practices law in the adjacent jurisdiction of Rancho Mirage (where they only have white chocolate). He appreciates, from personal experience, how important women of color are in the political life of the Democratic Party. The views contained herein are his own, and not necessarily those of the Democratic Party.

LEARNING NOTHING, FORGETTING NOTHING, THE SLIPPAGE OF BERNIE SANDERS

Summary:  As the 2020 Democratic presidential primary season cranks its way into the repetitive foreplay of the 2019 pre–primary season, poll numbers for Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders are looking progressively less promising (all puns fully intended) then they had earlier this spring. On the other hand, Joe Biden’s poll numbers have quickly established him as the prohibitive favorite; at this stage, despite the fulminations of Sanders and his redeless followers, the primary is very much Joe Biden’s to lose.

What Biden brings to the fight, that Sanders has never been able to muster, is the sheer insurgent joy of a well thought fight. In short, Biden brings a kind of Cavalier joie de vivre that Sanders, the Cromwellian Roundhead, is entirely incapable of mustering. To the extent that joy cometh in the morning (Ps, 30:5), Biden still has the advantage.

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Frankly, it’s hard to tell whether the Democratic 2020 presidential primary, which is now underway much too far in advance, has started to resemble a pilgrimage, a gladiatorial contest, or an orgy.

The backbiting, the dirty tricks, the hit pieces, and the sheer nastiness of the primary season all put us in mind of the Democratic primary season of 2016. The Democrats, like the Bourbons of the ancien régime in France, have lived down to Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord’s mordant witticism that “Ils n'ont rien appris, ni rien oublié,” they have learned nothing and they have forgotten nothing.

In the learned nothing and forgotten nothing department may be found particularly Bernard Sanders and his redeless, pugnacious, always-ready-for-a-fight online followers, the so-called Berniebros whose penchant for attacking other candidates or other social media commenters soon became common fodder for watercooler discussions among the American left. Joan Walsh, writing in The Nation, asserted in May, 2016, that “Bernie Sanders is Hurting Himself by Playing the Victim.”; the same month, Harold Meyerson, writing in The American Prospect, warned about “How the Bros Are Undermining Bernie.”

Three years on, the Bros seem to have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Neither has Sen. Sanders. Just recently, this February, in fact, the Chicago Tribune’s Steve Chapman, making “The Case Against Bernie Sanders”  observed, as numerous other commentators had done, that the Vermont Senator’s “humorless dogmatism” was undermining his campaign. 

If many Democrats fear that Joe Biden is “too old,” or too gaffe-prone to be president, they overlook the fact that Biden is nevertheless noticeably happy in this battle. There is an insurgent, effervescent joy that Joe Biden has brought to this campaign that Bernard Sanders seems utterly incapable of mustering.

Recently, a Biden-supporting queer friend of mine suggested that Joe was rather like the William Hurt character in Kiss of the Spider Woman, playing opposite Raul Julia in the classic scene in which Hurt’s character, imprisoned for being queer, offers Julia’s character, the imprisoned revolutionary, a morsel of avocado. Raul Julia’s character rejects the proffered avocado with the observation that “what life offers... is the struggle.”

In many ways, the difference between the effervescent Joe Biden and the humorless, dogmatic Bernard Sanders can be perfectly summed up by the exchange between the two characters in that scene in Kiss of the Spider Woman. Put another way, harking back to mid-17th century England, the Biden effort comes across with much more a Cavalier sensibility, effervescent, possessed of a sense of joie de vivre, and above all, capable of smiling, laughing, and shrugging off the occasional gaffe.

By contrast, Bernard Sanders, together with his followers, his proverbial Bros, really does come across as grim, prim, dour, sour, doctrinaire, dogmatic, pious, self-righteous, and, da capo al fine, utterly humorless. The entire Sanders campaign has been framed like some kind of Leninist exercise by which aspirants for admission to Komsomol were assigned to write essays on the evils of capitalism and the inevitable triumph of Marxism-Leninism. The whole Sanders effort, in short, resembles nothing so much as an attempted Soviet Mosfilm cover of Ninochka, the 1939 MGM film starring the unforgettable Greta Garbo as a no-nonsense Soviet diplomat. 

Mosfilm would have made a pig’s breakfast of Ninochka. Comedy did not go over particularly well in Stalin's Soviet Union.

But even worse, the Sanders effort has come to resemble that of Oliver Cromwell and his Roundheads, determined to impose upon the United States the same kind of pious, self-righteous, priggish regime that Old Noll, his Roundheads, and his Major Generals imposed upon Great Britain and Ireland from the execution of King Charles I 1649 until the triumphant return of King Charles II in 1660.

Yet, America neither needs nor desires, nor will it accept, a political dispensation where joy is banished and where it’s Lent in America. Jimmy Carter, an otherwise thoroughly decent and honorable man, learned this lesson to his great political sorrow in 1980. During the Carter years, there was a Lenten sensibility in America. One small example will suffice to make the case: in 1977, under pressure from the Carter Administration, American auto manufacturers ceased production of convertibles because they were ostensibly unsafe. 

In less than three months after the administration's ukaz, a thriving after market had sprung up to convert hard tops into convertibles. European manufacturers continued to produce convertibles, most notably the MGB, the swan song of Morris Garages of Abington, Oxfordshire. American consumers were not happy at being stripped of their choice to buy convertibles by what they perceived as a hypertrophied, schoolmarmish government bureaucracy determined to deprive them of all their joie de vivre.

Similarly, in the 1961 mayoral campaign in the city of Los Angeles, under then-Republican incumbent Mayor Norris Poulson, homeowners throughout the city were required to segregate their garbage, much as California homeowners are required to segregate their garbage today. The trash segregation policy proved unpopular, and Poulson was challenged for the mayoralty of Los Angeles by former Democratic Congressman Sam Yorty. Among the planks in Yorty’s platform was an abolition of the garbage segregation requirement. Resentful San Fernando Valley residents put Yorty over the top, knocking Norrie Polson out of office.  When Yorty was elected, it was said by Angeleño political wags that Sam Yorty had been swept into office on a wave of garbage.

While it may actually have been a bit much to say that Sam Yorty was really swept into office on a wave of garbage, and equally a reach to suggest that Ronald Reagan was swept into office in a convertible with the top down, it would nevertheless not be too far off the mark to suggest that the Carter administration’s pressure on the then big four automakers to discontinue convertible manufacture, added to the administration’s less than adroit handling of the Iran hostage crisis, may have played a part in Reagan’s victory in 1980,

Suffice it to say, however, that Ronald Reagan understood the temper of America in the early 1980s. His “it’s morning in America” campaign was nothing short of brilliant. It beat Fritz Mondale’s Carter administration redux messaging all to hell. Unfortunately, Bernie Sanders seems to have bought, hook line and sinker, into the Carter/Mondale “it’s Lent in America” messaging. After all, joy cometh in the morning. Ps. 30:5

It may very well be that Joe Biden’s sunny, effervescent, youthful approach to his campaign is part of the reason why Sanders seems to be slipping in the polls. The American public wants a happy warrior; not a hectoring scold.

As long as Bernie Sanders continues to act the part of the superannuated shtetl Stalinist scold, the loudmouth Leninist, the bloviating bourgeois Bolshevik, the man devoid of a sense of humor who sparks no joy, he can expect to be trounced in the primaries, particularly among the women of color who, as I’ll discuss in my next post, will be so enormously consequential in the Democratic primaries of 2020.

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Paul S. Marchand, Esq. Is an attorney, former City Councilman, and Democratic loudmouth who lives in Cathedral city and practices law in the adjacent jurisdiction of Rancho Mirage (where they only have white chocolate). He appreciates, from personal experience, how important women of color are in the political life of the Democratic Party. The views contained herein are his own, and not necessarily those of the Democratic Party.

TIME TO LOWER THE SHERMAN ANTITRUST ACT HAMMER ON FACEBOOK

Summary: calls for the breakup of Facebook are coming more often and faster than we had a right to expect.  Facebook represents an almost textbook example of the kind of monopoly power against which Sen. John Sherman (brother of the Gen. Sherman who redeveloped the hell out of downtown Atlanta in 1864) inveighed so strongly back in 1890.  Facebook’s well-nigh unilateral control over speech and viewpoints, as well as its evident desire to control the political discourse of the United States, makes it a prime candidate for Sherman Act intervention.  It’s time to take Gospodin Zuckerberg’s toys away from him and have him sent to his room with no supper.


What conclusions can be drawn from an analysis of the following official text from Facebook? 

"We base our policies our Community Standards on input from the people who use Facebook around the world, as well as experts.”

First, let us hone in on the word “experts.” That tells us that Facebook uses a particular group of motivated individuals, usually outsourced in countries of the East Bloc.  In short Facebook’s so-called experts are, in all likelihood, motivated East Bloc trolls who consider themselves to have an obvious dog in our American hunt.

“We base our policies are community standards on input from people who use Facebook around the world.”

Second, let’s take that phrase apart.  “We base our policies are community standards....” What outsourced East Bloc individual, not fluent in English, composed this ridiculous fragment?  Again, it’s obvious that Facebook outsources its moderation and community standards enforcement to countries in the East Bloc.  They also probably outsource a substantial portion of their moderation to countries in South Asia, particularly India.

At all events, Facebook’s so-called community standards are based upon the “community standards” of illiberal non-American countries.  When moderators apply the “community standards” of Bangalore, Berlin, Bucharest, Budapest, Warsaw, or other countries east of Calais, we may expect a significant level of disrespect for American canons of free speech.

Facebook’s well-nigh unitary control of a great deal of speech in our public spaces ought to cause us significant concern for the future of free societies.  Facebook’s suppression of Sen.  Elizabeth Warren’s calls for the platform to be broken up, together with Facebook’s ill concealed preference for Bernard Sanders and its ill concealed de facto undeclared campaign contributions to Donald Trump ought to cause us considerable agita about the extent to which one monopolistic organization can affect both our politics and our freedom.

When Facebook applies the “community standards” of Bangalore, Budapest, Berlin, or Bucharest to conversations in Palm Springs, Palo Alto, Petaluma, or Pasadena, or even Pocatello, something is very wrong. 

When Gospodin Zuckerberg scoffs at the idea that Russian intelligence may have been gaming his platform to influence the 2016 presidential election, something is very wrong. 

When Gospodin Zuckerberg permits the platform to live stream 17 minutes of the mosque massacres in Christchurch, New Zealand, something is very wrong. 

When Gospodin Zuckerberg looks the other way while agents of the Burmese state stir up on his platform genocidal violence against the Rohingya, something is very wrong. 
When Gospodin Zuckerberg shades the truth to the United States Congress, and then works assiduously to convey an impression that our representatives are too old and too out of touch to understand the dynamics of his platform, something is very wrong.
 
In a recent op-ed piece in the New York Times, Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes suggested that the time was at hand for Facebook to be broken up, to required to spin off the Instagram and WhatsApp platforms, and to be barred from further platform acquisitions for at least three years.  In short, it really is time to bring down the hammer of the Sherman Antitrust Act on an organization that, in 2019, represents virtually a textbook example of the evils against which Sen. Sherman inveighed when he carried his initial legislation back in 1890.

The representatives and senators who voted for the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890 were not nearly so old and out of touch as Gospodin Zuckerberg might have been pleased to describe them had he been alive when the antitrust bill was under consideration by Congress.  The 51st Congress knew full well how dangerous monopoly power could be.  They had the fortitude and the hardihood to take on industrial exponents of monopoly power.  We should expect similar things from the 116th Congress.  It’s well past time to lower the hammer of the Sherman Antitrust Act on Gospodin Zuckerberg and his dangerous monopoly, as well as to send Gospodin Zuckerberg to his room with no supper.

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Paul S.  Marchand is a lawyer who lives in Cathedral City, California, where he served two terms as a member of the city Council.  Mr.  Marchand practices law (on the theory that the more you practice, the more you’ll get it right) in the next-door community of Rancho Mirage.  His disdain for Facebook is the product of his strong views on monopoly capitalism, and also of his disdain for certain candidates ostensibly running as Democrats in the 2020 election cycle.

MAJORING IN MORAL ROT: THE UNIQUE AND TRUMPIAN PHENOMENON OF THE COLLEGE ADMISSIONS SCANDAL

Summary: Nothing reveals the moral rot at the heart of Donald Trump’s America quite is much as the ongoing college admissions scandal, in which well-off, well-connected, sophisticated parents of aspiring, college-bound teenagers sought through criminal means to game the college admissions system for their children. Not only will this impose upon those children a lifelong, emotionally stunting, and at least somewhat deserved, stigma, but it will also lead to “reforms” that will inevitably fall the hardest upon students whose families are not white, well-off, or well-connected. As is often said in workplaces around the country, shit flows downhill; expect the proletariat to be punished for the peccadilloes of the princes.
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Cathedral City, March 26, 2019 – The moral rot at the heart of Donald Trump’s America was never more starkly exemplified or revealed then it has been by the ongoing college admissions scandal. The outlines of the scandal are tolerably well known to most of the American public. A not insubstantial number of individuals, many of them household names in the entertainment industry, sought to game the college admissions system to ensure that their children could secure places at what the charging documents in the scandal refer to as “selective” or “highly selective” institutions of higher learning such as USC, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, or any of a number of institutions that have historically served as the default education factories for the so-called best and brightest among us.

Some of the institutions in question, such as scandal plagued USC, which just today brought on board a new president, have long had reputations for being little more than football factories with a few academic departments attached to its athletic apparatus. Throughout Southern California, USC students have historically had a reputation for hubris, and USC alumni have garnered a similar reputation for feeling deeply entitled. The disdain in which USC is held, even by alumni of not dissimilar institutions, including Vanderbilt, from which I graduated, is commonly expressed in the question and answer form of “who is your favorite college football team?” To which the answer is “anybody who’s playing USC.”

Nevertheless, despite the scandals swirling about its campus, USC continues to remain one of the premier higher educational institutions in Southern California. And in many ways, USC, together with its crosstown rival UCLA, symbolizes the meritocratic paradigm that has come to symbolize America’s omnipresent, but poorly disguised, class system. In theory, possession of a degree from a prestigious university, UCLA, USC, the Ivies, or even, God help us, Vanderbilt (if you happen to live below the Mason-Dixon line) has been a ticket to upward mobility in American society. Go to college, do well, and you can expect to write your own ticket. Certainly, there are more options available to someone from Cal, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, UT Austin, Northwestern, or the University of Chicago then are usually available to the graduates of the local community college or state college. Though groundbreaking work of great genius may come from single mother’s undergraduate child attending, say,  Cal State Dominguez Hills, the fact remains that in general, the “selective” or “highly selective” institutions of higher education in this country tend to be the beneficiaries of a self-sustaining chain reaction, as it were, which attracts the “best and brightest” because it has always attracted the “best and brightest.”

Therefore it should not be surprising that admission to such institutions should be highly sought after, and that the process of securing shortcuts or preferences in that admissions process should ineluctably become monetized. Now, it is no secret that the college admissions process in this country has become dysfunctional; the playing field has become unequal.

Time was, during that long ago period when I myself was navigating the badly charted waters of the college admissions process, that aspiring students were evaluated on what amounted to a triad of factors. One of these, admittedly not always the most important, was one’s academic performance. The second factor was one’s performance on standardized tests. I have no doubt that my very superior performance on the verbal component of the SAT went a long way toward compensating for my somewhat indifferent academic record. A 780 verbal, even from an Irishman of the Hibernian diaspora who had followed in the footsteps of James Joyce and made the tongue of the conqueror entirely his own, undoubtably covered a multitude of secondary academic sins. The final set of data points evaluated by college admissions staff was the applicant’s extracurricular activities. Obviously, being on the high school football team was, pace Joe Biden, “a big fuckin’ deal,” but other extracurricular activities were also scrutinized.

However, in the nearly 40 years since I navigated the jungles of the college admissions process, that process has become more and more skewed in favor of the white, the well-off, and well-connected. When I was a high school senior, a 4.0 grade point average was considered the highest attainable. Today, grade inflation has resulted in GPAs of 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, and similar nonsensical numbers. Applicants with a “mere” 4.0 should abandon all hope of entering an “elite” school. Similarly, standardized test scores have undergone similar inflation. Today, a student with less than a 1470 on his or her SAT is at a significant disadvantage in the post-secondary admission process. When I was applying to college 38 years ago, an overall score of 1300 on the SAT was not only highly recommending, but it automatically placed one in the top 10% of the California state aggregate.

Extracurricular activities have also become similarly inflated. When I was applying to college, during the foggy days of the Reagan administration, extracurricular activities, as distinct from high school sports, might consist of something like the debate society, working on a political campaign, or the astronomy club. Now the scions of the well-off and the well-connected are expected to produce the kind of prodigies of leadership and entrepreneurship that my generation had tacitly conceded to people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s. Now we find that anything short of, say, establishing a thriving hospital for legless lepers in Lesotho just doesn’t cut it with the admissions staff of a “highly selective” university.

It’s hardly surprising under such circumstances that not only would middle and working-class children feel deterred from even applying to a school that expects their applicants to have a 5.0 grade point average, a perfect 1600 SAT score, and to be the founder of that thriving hospital for legless lepers in Lesotho.

Even children of well-off, well-connected parents from the so-called Hollywood elite, to say nothing of their helicopter parents themselves, would necessarily feel a little bit insecure given the expectation of so many admissions offices that only the paragons of paragons are worthy of admission. After all, even the daughter of a movie star, or the athletically mediocre son of an influential political fixer might find somewhat daunting the prospect of trying to establish that health care provider for legless lepers in Lesotho.

So what do the helicopter parents of the political or entertainment demographics do to assuage their, and their children’s, insecurities about the prospects of obtaining that meritocratic education that may be the only thing standing between them and a host of “horrible” outcomes? For many well-off, well-connected, parents, the road to collegiate criminality tends to be paved with an aggregate consisting in equal parts of class insecurity and the clawing fear of looking back to see that their poorer past, their less famous past, their less influential past, is gaining on them.

In many ways, there is actually something almost admirable about the motivations of the parents involved in the scandal to cheat on behalf of their children. Among the Japanese population in Hawai’i, there is a phrase, kodomo no tame ni, “for the sake of the children,” which has become a shorthand to explain the fears and the motivations of the Nikkei of the 'āina for their children. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” St. John 15:13. To that extent, the parents caught up in this scandal are perhaps more to be pitied than censured.

The moral rot of the whole sorry episode inheres, however, in the casual acceptance of the notion that it is morally permissible to game the system to secure a preferential option for one’s own child at the expense, not only of other children, but of one’s own child’s autochthonous sense of self.  In a meritocratic society, such as that which America theoretically is, self-knowledge, self-awareness, self-realization and self independence are critical components in the maturation process of any human being. How can these be present when our young adult’s first autonomous achievement, that second great rite of passage after receiving a driver’s license, is attained not on one’s own merits, but because of the illicit intervention of one’s parents, assisted by a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization working together in a criminal enterprise and conspiracy?

For parental intervention and other artifacts of gaming the system are often easily detected within a student body. When I was an undergraduate, the better part of forty years ago, we tended to divide the student body into two broad categories. Because I was an interdisciplinary East Asian studies major, I shorthanded these two categories as the “mandarins” and the “gentry.”

The mandarins, of which I was one, tended to flatter ourselves that we had perhaps secured admission to the institution on our own merits. We had had sufficiently impressive academic performance and extracurricular activities to pique the interest of the admissions office, and we had performed well enough on the high-stakes standardized tests that the admissions office had been willing to swallow hard and check the yes box on our applications.

In that regard, we were somewhat akin to the traditional Mandarin class of Imperial China, which was selected from among successful takers of the Chinese Imperial Civil Service Examinations. Like the mandarins of Imperial China, we had tested our way into the system, and unless we really screwed things up, we knew that a degree from the institution to which we had secured admission was almost inevitable.

The gentry, for whom we mandarins felt a certain measure of disdain, unless we were having sex with them, (for a bit of whoopee covers its own multitude of sins,) tended themselves to fall into three subcategories. The first were the legacies, those whose parents were themselves alumni of the institution, or, in some cases, whose parents were members of the faculty. The second were the jocks, the kids whose value added to the University inhered not in their brains, but in their brawn, and in the amount of revenue they could draw to the institution and its athletic programs. The third group of gentry consisted of the wealthy dimwits whose presence at the institution could only be explained by their parents having made substantial contributions to the institution itself, after the fashion of Fred Trump or Charles Kushner greasing the skids for Donald  and Jared to the University of Pennsylvania or Harvard, respectively. We mandarins especially disdained this last category of advantaged dimwits; we despised them for much the same reason our faculty despised them, because they lowered the curve and cheapened the value of the Vanderbilt degree. 

Now secrets travel with astonishing speed on a University campus. What is on Monday a closely held secret in the Chancellor’s or president’s office will be known to the reporters of the student newspaper by Wednesday, and may very well find itself published by Friday. WikiLeaks has nothing on the average college campus; student journalists are astonishingly good at rooting out what the administration and faculty do not want them to hear.

Consequently, universities are like sieves. There is no doubt, therefore, that in very short order the identities of the students whose parents committed the crimes charged in the indictments that are at the center of this scandal will become known to their peers all over campus. And when that happens, the effects will be terrible to behold. The children of this scandal can expect to find themselves targeted not only by the faculty and administration of their institutions, but also — and more damningly — by their peers. They may very well be shunned, called out publicly, or even run off the campus. At all events, they will be seen as tainted, unworthy, and beneath contempt. Thanks, mom and dad.

Yet as much as the children of scandal will themselves be damaged by the public exposure thereof, the true collateral damage will fall on those who have to apply to the next entering class of freshmen, as well as upon those displaced students whose meritorious places in a given freshman class were occupied by students who didn’t secure admission honestly, but who instead gained their places through dishonest, criminal means. In the grim, zero-sum game that is the academic admissions process, the admission of the unqualified student whose parents gamed the system on his or her behalf necessarily means that a more qualified student does not gain admission to the institution. 

Because one of the inevitable outcomes of this scandal will be that the institutions affected, even if only to salvage their own damaged amour propre, will institute a series of so-called reforms, ostensibly designed to ensure against cheating and trying to game the admissions system. Unfortunately, as with so many so-called reforms, the "reforms" of the college admissions system will fall most heavily upon middle and lower income families.

Indeed, it is virtually inevitable that lower and middle income families will be hardest hit by any “reforms” set in train to salvage the wounded amour propre of embarrassed institutions. The unintended consequence of any of these foreseeable “reforms” will play into the already classist nature of the existing college admissions process. The playing field will continue to be skewed because middle and lower income families cannot usually be expected to possess the wherewithal, either in terms of the means or the sophistication, to be able to game the system as effectively as their better-off, better-connected competitors in the admissions process. After all, who is better capable of gaming the system to a child’s advantage, the wealthy studio executive from Brentwood, or the single mother barista from Boyle Heights? Who is better qualified and better positioned to be victorious in the inevitable academic admissions “arms race” that will follow? 

Of course, even those of us who were mandarins among our student bodies should not deceive ourselves. Even a studio executive’s child from Brentwood might very well have the academic chops and the test scores to be a Mandarin. After all, mandarin status also tended to be dependent, even 40 years ago, on attending the “right” high school. The industry kids, the college administrator’s child, or the Suffragan Bishop’s niece from Harvard-Westlake, the prestigious Los Angeles private high school which was my own secondary alma mater (class of ‘81) ineluctably stand a better chance of being able to navigate even a truly meritocratic system than do the barista’s child, the nurse’s kid, or the parish priest’s nephew from Boyle Heights’s Roosevelt High.

The demographic that can send its kids to Harvard-Westlake will tend inevitably to be better educated, better-off, better-connected, and more skilled at gaming the system, even in noncriminal ways, than will the demographic whose children attend Roosevelt High. And when the “victimized” institutions named in the charging documents institute their “reforms” to address the gaming of the admissions system, they will be attempting to return to the status quo as it existed before the scandal broke, a status quo that still advantages the white, the well-off, and the well-connected. Unfortunately, while they may not appreciably change the game for the graduate of Harvard-Westlake, the “reforms” can foreseeably be expected to make the college admissions process even more difficult for that barista’s child, that nurse’s kid, or that parish priest’s nephew coming out of Roosevelt High.

The college admissions system has become so dysfunctional, so weighted in favor of the white, the well-off, and the well-connected that it has started to resemble a Democratic Party caucus mobbed by supporters of Bernard Sanders. As much as caucuses themselves are racist, classist enterprises that tend to advantage of the white, the well-off, and the well-connected, and will continue to do so, until caucuses are replaced by truly democratic closed primaries in which every member of a given party may vote, but only members of the party may vote, the college admissions process can be expected to continue as an enterprise that advantages the children of the white, the well-off, and the well-connected, who attend the “right” high schools, live in the “right” neighborhoods, and undertake the “right” kind of extracurricular activities.

The instant scandal has done nothing but expose the moral rot at the heart of Trump’s America, the ravening insecurities of the parents who tried to game the system, and how they were emboldened by the Gilded Age ethical lapses of Trump, the Republican Party, and the administration, and the venality of so many people throughout the college admissions industrial complex. Every time in this country that we confront an educational crisis, the haves and the have mores find soft landings, while the proletariat are invariably punished for the peccadilloes of the princes.

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Paul S. Marchand, Esq. grew up in Los Angeles, where his status as the son of a public arts administrator and a university official, together with his domicile in the Hollywood Hills and his Zelig-like neighborhood propinquity to Superior Court judges, well-known entertainment industry personnel and recording artists was enough to help get him admitted to the prestigious private high school now known as Harvard-Westlake. That, together with what was then considered a recommending score on the SAT, was enough to get him into Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, Tennessee, from which he graduated in three years as part of the class of 1984. He cheerfully admits to having been one of the mandarins. The views set forth herein are his own, not those of any institution with which he may have been affiliated, or of the Episcopal Church in the diocese of Los Angeles, and are not to be construed as legal advice.

NOTRE DAME D’ANGOISSE

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee....
    -Traditional Marian devotion in the Latin Church

Never ascribe to wickedness or malevolence what can be accounted for by negligence, incompetence, or stupidity.
    -Hanlon’s Razor, variously attributed, in various forms

O, Solomon, I have surpassed thee!
    -Justinian, at the dedication of the Church of the Holy Wisdom (Hagia Sophia) in Constantinople, December 24, 563

À toutes les Gloires de la France. (To all the glories of France)
    -inscription on the architrave over the portico of the Palais De Versailles

Summary: It has been two days now since a fire in the ancient roof timbers of Notre Dame de Paris did what has been described as “catastrophic” damage to the 850-year-old Cathedral of Paris, located on the Île de la Cité, the iconic, or may we say the cardinal, church of France, of ancient France, of Catholic France, of France the conservator and curator of our common Roman civilizational heritage. As the embers cool, and personnel from the national government, the regional government, and the city government of Paris can venture in to the charred, yet still holy space to take stock, we may begin to acquire a sense of the extent of the terrible loss to the civilization of the Greco-Roman West. Yet at the same time, this calamity may have recalled France to her Gallican Catholic identity.

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The French word for anguish is “angoisse.” Monday, the entire world received a gut check and a lesson in helpless anguish. As we watched from our devices of every kind, we can see an existential disaster unfolding before us as the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris lit up in flames that could be seen all over the Cité and through much of adjacent Paris.

Watching a precious symbol of Paris and of France burn, powerless to do anything to stop the flames, hoping against hope that the Paris Fire Department, les pompiers braves, would be able to knock down the fire, groups of Parisians, come together in that kind of horror you just can’t turn your eyes from, spontaneously began to sing the words of the Ave Maria, one of the oldest Marian hymns of the Latin Church:

Je vous salue, Marie,
pleine de grâce:
le Seigneur est avec vous;
vous êtes bénie entre toutes les femmes,
et Jésus, le fruit de vos entrailles,
est béni.
Sainte Marie, Mère de Dieu,
priez pour nous, pauvres pécheurs,
maintenant et à l'heure de notre mort.

Hail Mary, full of grace,
The Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou amongst women,
And blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God,
Pray for us sinners,
Now and at the hour of our death.

Watching Parisians watching the beating heart of their city in flames, knowing that neither we nor they could alter the progress of the catastrophe, was enough to move to the tears the least tender; and to impel to prayer the most incredulous, and to cause many of us participating vicariously in the disaster from half a world away to fall out of touch with our own composure. Like those of the watchers on the banks of the Seine, our hearts, too, were fractured by what we had seen.

But now, two days later, as the last of the embers dies, and as various French officials begin to enter the damaged, yet still sacred, space dedicated to the Holy Mother of God to try to ascertain the extent of the damage, it falls to us to follow the lead of the Paris Public Prosecutor, who is satisfied at this time that the evidence points to the fire having been an accident. Or, to apply the words of Hanlon’s Razor, (an offshoot of Occam’s Razor)  we should never ascribe to wickedness or malevolence what can be accounted for by negligence, incompetence, or stupidity.

Notwithstanding the free-bubbling conspiratorial afflatus emerging from certain malodorous corners of the Internet, we should not lay this catastrophe at the door of ISIL/Daesh, other Islamic jihadists, or even at the door of right-wing provocateurs from the front mationale seeking to fabricate on the Île de la Cité some kind of 2019 iteration of the Reichstag fire.

What do we think? What do we know? What can we prove?

Until and unless substantial further information is developed that would permit us to envisage the hypothesis of some kind of malevolent actor having been involved, we should perhaps draw a first approximation conclusion that if any human actor was involved in this disaster, the conflagration may have been the result of nothing more and nothing less then an overheated power tool coming into close proximity with one of the 800-plus-year-old roof timbers in the so-called forest in the attic above the vaulted ceiling of the Cathedral.

After eight centuries in an attic with little to no climate control of any kind, the so-called forest above the ceiling of Notre-Dame should have been a nightmare of any member of any fire service anywhere in the world. Ancient, tinder dry, possibly riddled with rot, and essentially inaccessible to first responders, the roof timbers of Notre-Dame de Paris were, to use a cliché almost as old as the timbers themselves, a disaster waiting to happen.

And happen it did. Notre-Dame is one of the most important churches in all of the Roman West. Not only is it perhaps par excellence one of the quintessential Gothic masterpieces of the High Middle Ages, as well as being one of the great repositories of French art and culture, but it is also, in virtue of its chapter’s custodianship of such relics as a piece of the True Cross and of the Crown of Thorns which, in tradition, encircled the “sacred head, sore wounded” of our Suffering Savior, an integral part of the Deposit of Faith of the Latin Church, that is to say, the Roman, Anglican, Lutheran, and Protestant churches of the West.

Notre-Dame is not merely a sacred space, but a space rich with historical associations for France and for Europe, as well as for the United States. In 1804, Napoleon Bonaparte was crowned Emperor of the French by Pope Pius VII. On August 26, 1944, the Cathedral was the venue for a Te Deum service giving thanks for the Allied liberation of Paris from four years of Nazi occupation. Though German snipers within the Cathedral attempted to disrupt the service, they were not successful. The sheer physical courage that day of Gen. Charles De Gaulle, who, notwithstanding the bullets, made his way unflinchingly up the center aisle of the nave to his seat in the choir has become one of the glories of France that will never be forgotten.

 And because Notre-Dame is so integral to the life of Paris and to the life of France, it was hardly surprising that Pres. Emanuel Macron should have announced on the very evening of the fire that the great church would be rebuilt. Already, French billionaires and millionaires, The Very People whom that Tiresome Little Man Bernard Sanders loves to belabor, are stepping up to commit hundreds of millions of euros to the reconstruction effort. Almost €1bn has already been pledged.

We may not know how long the reconstruction will take, but whoever is President of the French Republic when the work is done, may be excused a little frisson of pride, and even the temptation to look up at the soaring vaults of the nave, or to step out from the south transept, take a short walk to look at the rebuilt spire and roof of Our Lady’s church and say quietly the words of Justinian when the rebuilt Church of the Holy Wisdom in Constantinople was re-consecrated in the year 563: “O Solomon, I have surpassed thee!”

 Yet, to the extent that the 850-year-old Cathedral church of Our Lady of Paris is reconstructed, the reconstruction cannot be allowed to be “true to period.” Yesterday’s conflagration ought to be a reminder to officials of the French Republic, which is the owner of Notre-Dame de Paris, that 21st-century technology must be deployed to serve the needs of a 12th-century Cathedral.

The roof trusses, installed 800+ years ago and constructed of oak and chestnut, gave good service across eight centuries, but the fire danger implicit in the use of wood structural members for such a building as Notre-Dame, which was and will be again, God willing, an active church, after all, militates in favor of rebuilding the roof using non-flammable lightweight steel alloy struts and trusses. Moreover, the authorities should envisage the hypothesis of installing an inert gas or water vapor system in the attic as a fire suppression strategy. Sprinklers should not be used lest the weight of water collapse the vaulting and send it tumbling down upon worshipers a hundred-plus feet below. 

However, as much as Notre-Dame and the other great Gothic cathedrals scattered across France represent a large part of the glories of France, they are also in need of examination and possible retrofitting against the now manifest danger of fire. Whether one is speaking of Albi, Amiens, Beauvais, Bourges, Chartres, Laon, Lyon, Noyon, Orléans, Reims, Rouen, St. Denis, Senlis, Sens, Strasbourg, Tours, or any of numerous other Gothic edifices within The Hexagon that is France, one is necessarily speaking of structures that may well have scores or even hundreds of years of deferred maintenance.

Notre-Dame, with its ancient wooden roof, is not dissimilar to the Hōryuji temple complex in Nara, Japan. Indeed, the wooden buildings in the Hōryuji complex are said to be among the oldest still existing wooden structures in the world. One of them, the Kondō, constructed in the third quarter of the seventh century, suffered severe fire damage in 1949, and was reconstructed. The damage to the Kondō, and that to Notre-Dame de Paris, stands out as a reminder to us that civilization in both the Sinosphere and in the Greco-Roman West is an ongoing work, an act of faith in ourselves and in our capacity to leave lasting achievements to our posterity.

 If we have wept for the damage to the church dedicated to the Holy Mother of God, it is because, as participants in the civilization of the Greco-Roman West, we believe that our Greco-Roman civilization is worth cherishing. When the great bells in the towers of Notre-Dame tolled to mark the Liberation of Paris in 1944, or the terrorist outrages of September 11, 2001, they reminded us that we belong to the great enterprise of civilization.

If the catastrophe of Notre-Dame helps to remind the French, the people of the Francophonie, and the people of the civilized world that France, Christian France, Catholic France, civilized France, France même, remains an integral part of the radically inclusive Christian civilization of the Greco-Roman West, then perhaps we may take a minute pearl of consolation from a charred and distinctly rough oyster, as France, even if only for a fleeting moment, comes again in contact with her Gallican-Catholic identity.


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Paul S. Marchand is a lawyer and former Cathedral City city councilmember. He lives in Cathedral City and practices law in neighboring Rancho Mirage. Like so many people with Francophone names, he mourns for Notre Dame de Paris, but as a Christian, he believes that by the power of the Resurrection, Notre-Dame, God willing, will be again the beating heart of Paris and of France.