Summary: Bernard Sanders and his toxic Berniebros are setting up the Democratic Party for another vicious, internecine battle just like the one they inflicted upon the Party in 2016. In 2016, the target of their toxic, misogynistic rage was Hillary Clinton. Now it is Pete Buttigieg. No matter where you go on social media, any news item or mention of Mayor Pete will be polluted by the ineluctable swarm of nasty, hateful, homophobic comments from Sanders supporters. It really is time to put an end to Bernard Sanders’s hostile takeover bid for the Democratic Party.
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As the 2016 Democratic primary got underway, with Hillary Clinton quickly emerging as the prohibitive favorite of the Party, Bernard Sanders and his supporters made it very clear that they weren’t having any of it. On leading social media, whether Facebook or Twitter, the Berniebros unleashed a torrent of toxic, hateful misogyny and dog whistle racism.
Sanders, an ideologue of the “my way or the highway” school, made only minimal efforts to control the bad behavior of his supporters. Even when it had become mathematically impossible for Sanders to secure the Democratic nomination, he and his supporters continued their monthslong temper tantrum. When Hillary administered an epic shellacking to Sanders in primaries throughout the deep South, where, as the sometime First Lady to Bill Clinton, “America’s first black president,” she polled remarkably well among electorates of color, Sanders dismissed those results as being, in effect, just the votes of a bunch of uppity Negroes. When Sanders was called upon to explain how he had been instrumental in trying to poison the small African-American community of Barnwell, South Carolina and the minuscule Latino colonia of Sierra Blanca, Texas with nuclear waste from Vermont, he refused to do so.
When the Democratic national convention in Philadelphia nominated Hillary Rodham Clinton to be its candidate for the Presidency of the United States, Sanders was observed to be visibly pouting, and his supporters staged a walkout and a protest in front of the convention center, where they chanted Trump campaign slogans. Instead of committing wholeheartedly and full-throatedly to support the nominee of the Party, Sanders’s support for Sec. Clinton was pro forma, lukewarm, and utterly insincere.
The list of Sanders’s crimes against the Democratic Party in 2016 was lengthy and extensive. His supporters hacked a DNC database. When they were caught, and the party imposed mild, tepid, woefully non-deterrent sanctions, the Sanders campaign turned around and sued the DNC and its leadership. Bernard Sanders failed to reprove in any meaningful way his supporters who had made a pig’s breakfast of the Nevada caucuses, threatening death and other serious bodily harm to senior officials of the Nevada Democratic Party. His remonstrance to his supporters was, again, pro forma, lukewarm, and utterly insincere.
Moreover, as the delegate math made Sanders’s path to the Democratic nomination increasingly untenable, his supporters – with his tacit approval– eagerly fabricated and disseminated what the Germans might call a disinformation Dolchstoßlegende, in other words, a convenient narrative to excuse and exonerate the Sanders campaign for having lost the primary to Hillary Clinton by nearly 4 million votes. This convenient “stab in the back” narrative, accused the DNC and Hillary Clinton supporters of having “stolen” the nomination from Bernard Sanders by every nefarious means available.
This bit of information warfare was eagerly prosecuted by Russian asset Julian Assange through WikiLeaks, a notorious disseminator of Kremlin disinformation. The Dolchstoßlegende of the “stolen primary” was also eagerly and uncritically disseminated by such leftist media outlets as The Nation, the Intercept, Jacobin, and others, including the ridiculous H.A. Goodman writing in the Huffington Post. As much as the forming-at-the-mouth neo-Leninist, neo-Trotskyite militant tendencies of the left rallied to the support of the Burlington Bolshevik, so, too, did the campaign of Donald Trump. Indeed, the extent to which Bernard Sanders and his redeless followers enthusiastically and uncritically availed themselves of Trump talking points against Hillary became something of a scandal within the Democratic Party.
Following the nominating convention at Philadelphia, Sanders’s supporters continued eagerly and uncritically to repeat the Trump/WikiLeaks talking points against Sec. Clinton as if they were gospel. In short, Bernard Sanders and his toxic, redeless, mostly millennial followers did everything they could to harm Hillary Clinton, to harm the Democratic Party, and to make it abundantly clear that Bernard Sanders was, has been, and continues to be, a fifth column operator for Donald Trump.
Now in 2020, not satisfied with having stabbed Hillary Clinton in the back in the 2016 campaign, Bernard Sanders is trying to do it all over again. This time, however, his target is former South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg. There is underway, an organized, coordinated, deliberate, open and notorious effort on the part of the Sanders campaign to conduct social media information warfare and agitprop against Mr. Buttigieg.
On every social media thread you can find that even mentions Pete Buttigieg, the hateful, toxic, dog whistle homophobic, obviously-coordinated-by-the-Sanders-campaign attacks are abundant. As in 2016, Sanders and his supporters have eagerly fabricated anew what the Germans would call ein anderer neues Doschstoßlegende, another new, convenient, “we wuz robbed,” stab-in-the-back narrative intended to exonerate or excuse any poorer than expected performance in any given contest in which Sanders is a participant.
For Bernard Sanders and his redeless followers have constructed a mythos of his divine right entitlement to victory in any democratic electoral contest in which his name is on a ballot or a presidential preference card.(referencing, of course, the utterly clusterfucked Iowa caucuses, which ought to be abolished) If Sanders is not victorious in these particular contests, his campaign quickly whips up a set of talking points, conspiracy theories, and personal attacks. The anger of the Sanders campaign at the effrontery of voters who choose other candidates is palpable and Trumpian.
Following the Iowa caucuses, Sanders and his people lashed out at Mayor Pete because Mayor Pete had been an Uppity Enough Homosexual to claim victory, a perfectly reasonable undertaking given how the trendlines and numbers were pointing ineluctably in that direction. The Sanders people threw an earsplitting snit, largely because they had expected to run away with the Iowa caucuses and were pipped at the post by That Uppity Homosexual from South Bend. After all, how dare a “gay dude from Mike Pence’s Indiana” intrude on territory reserved by Divine Right for the bloviating blowhard Burlington Bolshevik?
Now, with the New Hampshire primary just three days away, we can expect the Sanders people to enable their candidate’s usual narcissistic, Trumpian behavior. We may expect more and nastier attacks on Buttigieg, on Warren, on Biden, and on just about every other Democratic candidate who doesn’t bend the knee and acknowledge the Divine Right of Bernard Sanders to the nomination.
Unfortunately for him, Bernard Sanders is not a Democrat. His disdain for the Democratic Party is a matter of public record. His numbers in Iowa were less than half of his numbers in 2016, and Buttigieg looks to be surging in New Hampshire. If Pete Buttigieg grabs the New Hampshire primary, perhaps Bernie Sanders’s head will explode, and/or the one or two relatively rational people in his campaign will prevail upon him to suspend his campaign rather than continue to act as some kind of fifth column for Donald Trump.
Sadly, that will probably not happen. As toxic as Sanders’s grassroots ground troops are, the inner circle of his campaign is just as bad, if not worse. They are “loyalists” in the worst, most Trumpian sense of that word. They don’t act as guardrails to keep the Independent Vermont senator within the bounds of rational discourse and defensible policy; instead, they enable all of his worst, neo-Leninist, most doctrinaire impulses. Just the thought of someone like Nina Turner occupying a senior post in a Sanders administration is enough to make a lot of Democrats break out in hives.
In short, Bernard Sanders and his neo-Bolshevik campaign are becoming shopworn, tiresome, and a positive danger to the United States.
The Democratic Party should have had enough of Bernard Sanders four years ago. We were damned fools to let this interloper run to be the candidate of a party of which he is not a member. Enough!
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Paul S. Marchand, Esq. Is a loyal, i.e. non-Sanders, Democrat and an attorney who lives in Cathedral City, where he served eight years on the city Council. Mr. Marchand also served for 10 years on the Riverside County Democratic Central committee, a hotbed of constipated ineffectuality. To avoid California’s unbelievably arcane and Byzantine conflict of interest laws, with their often conflicting compliance mandates, he practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. Knowing as he does the nastiness and vindictiveness of Bernard Sanders, which are equal in every measure to those of Donald Trump, he expects to be attacked, on digital media, by toxic, pugnacious, petulant, peevish Sanders supporters. Those supporters should be warned, if they descend to the death threats they used during the 2016 Nevada caucuses, Mr. Marchand is armed, cranky, and prepared to be dangerous. The views contained herein are his own, unless you like them, in which case they can be yours, too.
Saturday, February 8, 2020
Wednesday, February 5, 2020
CONSPIRACIES AND CLUSTERFUCKS
Summary: no one’s surprise, the carefully engineered impeachment “trial” of Donald Trump in the Senate ended in the acquittal that Mitch McConnell had intended all along. The “trial,” containing absolutely none of the structural accoutrements of a real trial, such as witnesses and documentary evidence, was a rigged sham, an obvious product of an obvious conspiracy. In the meantime, in Iowa, where, was 97% of precincts reporting, Pete Buttigieg and Bernard Sanders, with barely a tenth of a percentage point separating them, appear to be in a statistical tie after the debacle of the Iowa Democratic caucuses, an obvious clusterfuck of Mongolian proportions. Something is clearly wrong in Washington City, and clearly wrong with the Iowa Democratic Party and is ridiculous, anti-democratic, caucus mechanism.
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Cathedral City – February 6, 2020. The impeachment saga of Donald Trump ended not with a bang, but with the predictable whimper that all of us had expected. The impeachment “trial,” a trial bereft of any of the normal, structural accoutrements of an authentic legal proceeding, produced exactly the result that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had intended it to produce. The House managers were right to characterize the whole proceedings as a sham, lacking even the most passing resemblance to anything like a fair trial at common law.
No doubt Donald Trump and his organized crime family will take an over-the-top, repellent victory lap when Trump addresses the nation at noon tomorrow. Trump can be expected to demand criminal prosecution of one, some, or all of the House managers, to say nothing of calling full-throatedly for the prosecution of Joe and Hunter Biden.
Of course, the Trump White House is already claiming that Trump was fully exonerated in this sham “trial.” Given the partisan makeup of the Senate, acquittal was not surprising. Still, if Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans had wished to run a proceeding that might have had some appearance of legitimacy, they would have been better advised to allow for witnesses and evidence. But they did not. Because they did not allow for witnesses and evidence, they wound up foisting on the American people a spectacle, a piece of theater, “a tale told by an idiot,” as Shakespeare put it in the Scottish play, “full of sound and fury and signifying nothing.”
Democrats, who have a sorry reputation for being unwilling or unable to unwrap the gifts the Republicans keep presenting us, should pounce on the enormous gift the Republicans gave us with this ridiculous faux trial. Not only should the Democrats use this as a campaign issue against Republicans up and down every ticket, from president to local animal control officer, but Democrats should also make sure that every Republican lawyer in the Senate is the recipient of professional misconduct charges in their jurisdiction or jurisdictions of licensure for various disciplinary offenses including perjury, subordination, common Barratry, and obstruction of justice. Any ordinary lawyer engaged in the kind of trial-rigging that Mitch McConnell is guilty of having engaged in would merit disbarment. Mitch McConnell be no different; he should be disbarred.
Democrats cannot afford to let this matter lie. Democrats must make this a campaign issue. Mitch McConnell comes up for reelection this November, Democrats must use every instrumentality at their disposal to replace him with Amy McGrath. Moreover, Democrats need to stop worrying about being seen to descend to the Republicans level. We can’t be sucked in to the self-defeating counsels of “when they go low, we go high.”
Instead, we must be prepared to meet the Republicans in the basement with a switchblade. We must take instead the counsels of Sean Connery’s character in the 1987 remake of The Untouchables. They pull a knife, we pull a gun; they send one of hours the hospital, we send one of theirs to the morgue. Democrats can no longer afford the luxury of not fighting to the death, of not playing for keeps, of not using every instrumentality at our command, every arrow in our quiver, every round in our chamber.
Of course, while Democrats are meeting “Moscow Mitch” McConnell in the basement with a switchblade, we also need to be purging the senior ranks of the Iowa Democratic Party and stripping Iowa of its so-called first in the nation caucuses. If the impeachment “trial” of Donald Trump was hamstrung from the beginning by obvious conspiracy on the part of the Republicans in the Senate, the Iowa caucuses were a self-inflicted Democratic clusterfuck of Mongolian proportions. Iowa needs to scrap its caucus system in favor of a true, closed primary. It is difficult to see how the Iowa caucuses can pass even the barest of constitutional muster, representing as they do an across-the-board repudiation of the constitutionally mandated principle of one person one vote enunciated in Baker v. Carr (1962) 369 U.S. 186.
What’s even worse about the fiascos that were the Iowa caucuses this year was the twofold baleful influence of Bernard Sanders on the caucuses. The first malign effect of Bernard Sanders on the Iowa caucuses was to insist on the addition of new complications in the caucus mechanism in the interests of “transparency,” i.e., to make it easier for Sanders and his pugnacious, belligerent, redeless, college-age millennial followers to intimidate supporters of other candidates. The second baleful action of Bernard Sanders, who as this is being written, is virtually tied with former South Bend, Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg, was to unleash his vicious followers on Mayor Buttigieg and Mayor Buttigieg’s supporters, disseminating all manner of disinformation and hateful agitprop.
Indeed, the boorish behavior of the Independent Vermont senator and his supporters has been predictable, ineluctable, and typical. As they did in 2016, Sanders and his supporters have manifested a rather Divine Right attitude which essentially postulates that any Sanders victory is a victory for the ages, divinely preordained, and an outward and visible manifestation of Sanders’s entitlement to the Democratic nomination.
In short, Sanders and his followers have constructed an even more disturbing personality cult than that which surrounds Donald Trump. After all, cults of personality tend to be phenomena of the political right, with the possible exceptions of Iosif Visssarionovich Stalin and Mao Zedong. What makes the Bernard Sanders cult of personality so objectionable is its implicit insistence that anyone who does not subscribe to the Sanders cult is a suffering from some kind of profound moral failing.
Thus, the Sandernista agitprop and information warfare against Pete Buttigieg. Indeed, despite the insistence of Bernard Sanders and his cultists, it is more than a little bit clear that Sanders’s attacks against Pete Buttigieg contain a certain tincture of dog whistle homophobia. What is even more objectionable, particularly to those of us who happen to be gay, is how many of the Sanders attacks on Mayor Pete come from apparently self-loathing self identified homosexuals. Indeed, when one sees the social media attacks, ostensibly coming from queerfolk, but couched in the most primitive terms imaginable, one might be excused for saying to these Stockholm syndrome sisters “turn in your gay card, forthwith.”
If Bernard Sanders winds up eking out some infinitesimally narrow win in the Iowa caucuses, it is probably too much to expect him to accept that victory with any kind of grace, let alone any kind of apology to Mayor Pete. Instead, we can expect the usual finger-wagging hoarse-voiced, condescending, pugnacious lecture from Sen. Sanders concerning the awfulness of his opponent and the awfulness of his opponent’s supporters.
For in truth, Bernard Sanders has never learned the first thing about good manners or being gracious no matter whether in defeat or and victory. Bernard Sanders is, unfortunately, a left-wing version of Donald Trump.
And I think it is safe to predict that if Bernard Sanders is successful in a hostile takeover bid of Democratic Party, Donald Trump will eat him for lunch.
#neverbernie.
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Paul S. Marchand, Esq. is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. After having been zealously attacked for the last four-plus years by the Young Pioneers of the Sanders left, whose jaded jargon sounds like the entrance essays of aspirants for advancement to Komsomol, he is thoroughly tired of the absurdities and bullshit of the Sanders left.
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Cathedral City – February 6, 2020. The impeachment saga of Donald Trump ended not with a bang, but with the predictable whimper that all of us had expected. The impeachment “trial,” a trial bereft of any of the normal, structural accoutrements of an authentic legal proceeding, produced exactly the result that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had intended it to produce. The House managers were right to characterize the whole proceedings as a sham, lacking even the most passing resemblance to anything like a fair trial at common law.
No doubt Donald Trump and his organized crime family will take an over-the-top, repellent victory lap when Trump addresses the nation at noon tomorrow. Trump can be expected to demand criminal prosecution of one, some, or all of the House managers, to say nothing of calling full-throatedly for the prosecution of Joe and Hunter Biden.
Of course, the Trump White House is already claiming that Trump was fully exonerated in this sham “trial.” Given the partisan makeup of the Senate, acquittal was not surprising. Still, if Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans had wished to run a proceeding that might have had some appearance of legitimacy, they would have been better advised to allow for witnesses and evidence. But they did not. Because they did not allow for witnesses and evidence, they wound up foisting on the American people a spectacle, a piece of theater, “a tale told by an idiot,” as Shakespeare put it in the Scottish play, “full of sound and fury and signifying nothing.”
Democrats, who have a sorry reputation for being unwilling or unable to unwrap the gifts the Republicans keep presenting us, should pounce on the enormous gift the Republicans gave us with this ridiculous faux trial. Not only should the Democrats use this as a campaign issue against Republicans up and down every ticket, from president to local animal control officer, but Democrats should also make sure that every Republican lawyer in the Senate is the recipient of professional misconduct charges in their jurisdiction or jurisdictions of licensure for various disciplinary offenses including perjury, subordination, common Barratry, and obstruction of justice. Any ordinary lawyer engaged in the kind of trial-rigging that Mitch McConnell is guilty of having engaged in would merit disbarment. Mitch McConnell be no different; he should be disbarred.
Democrats cannot afford to let this matter lie. Democrats must make this a campaign issue. Mitch McConnell comes up for reelection this November, Democrats must use every instrumentality at their disposal to replace him with Amy McGrath. Moreover, Democrats need to stop worrying about being seen to descend to the Republicans level. We can’t be sucked in to the self-defeating counsels of “when they go low, we go high.”
Instead, we must be prepared to meet the Republicans in the basement with a switchblade. We must take instead the counsels of Sean Connery’s character in the 1987 remake of The Untouchables. They pull a knife, we pull a gun; they send one of hours the hospital, we send one of theirs to the morgue. Democrats can no longer afford the luxury of not fighting to the death, of not playing for keeps, of not using every instrumentality at our command, every arrow in our quiver, every round in our chamber.
Of course, while Democrats are meeting “Moscow Mitch” McConnell in the basement with a switchblade, we also need to be purging the senior ranks of the Iowa Democratic Party and stripping Iowa of its so-called first in the nation caucuses. If the impeachment “trial” of Donald Trump was hamstrung from the beginning by obvious conspiracy on the part of the Republicans in the Senate, the Iowa caucuses were a self-inflicted Democratic clusterfuck of Mongolian proportions. Iowa needs to scrap its caucus system in favor of a true, closed primary. It is difficult to see how the Iowa caucuses can pass even the barest of constitutional muster, representing as they do an across-the-board repudiation of the constitutionally mandated principle of one person one vote enunciated in Baker v. Carr (1962) 369 U.S. 186.
What’s even worse about the fiascos that were the Iowa caucuses this year was the twofold baleful influence of Bernard Sanders on the caucuses. The first malign effect of Bernard Sanders on the Iowa caucuses was to insist on the addition of new complications in the caucus mechanism in the interests of “transparency,” i.e., to make it easier for Sanders and his pugnacious, belligerent, redeless, college-age millennial followers to intimidate supporters of other candidates. The second baleful action of Bernard Sanders, who as this is being written, is virtually tied with former South Bend, Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg, was to unleash his vicious followers on Mayor Buttigieg and Mayor Buttigieg’s supporters, disseminating all manner of disinformation and hateful agitprop.
Indeed, the boorish behavior of the Independent Vermont senator and his supporters has been predictable, ineluctable, and typical. As they did in 2016, Sanders and his supporters have manifested a rather Divine Right attitude which essentially postulates that any Sanders victory is a victory for the ages, divinely preordained, and an outward and visible manifestation of Sanders’s entitlement to the Democratic nomination.
In short, Sanders and his followers have constructed an even more disturbing personality cult than that which surrounds Donald Trump. After all, cults of personality tend to be phenomena of the political right, with the possible exceptions of Iosif Visssarionovich Stalin and Mao Zedong. What makes the Bernard Sanders cult of personality so objectionable is its implicit insistence that anyone who does not subscribe to the Sanders cult is a suffering from some kind of profound moral failing.
Thus, the Sandernista agitprop and information warfare against Pete Buttigieg. Indeed, despite the insistence of Bernard Sanders and his cultists, it is more than a little bit clear that Sanders’s attacks against Pete Buttigieg contain a certain tincture of dog whistle homophobia. What is even more objectionable, particularly to those of us who happen to be gay, is how many of the Sanders attacks on Mayor Pete come from apparently self-loathing self identified homosexuals. Indeed, when one sees the social media attacks, ostensibly coming from queerfolk, but couched in the most primitive terms imaginable, one might be excused for saying to these Stockholm syndrome sisters “turn in your gay card, forthwith.”
If Bernard Sanders winds up eking out some infinitesimally narrow win in the Iowa caucuses, it is probably too much to expect him to accept that victory with any kind of grace, let alone any kind of apology to Mayor Pete. Instead, we can expect the usual finger-wagging hoarse-voiced, condescending, pugnacious lecture from Sen. Sanders concerning the awfulness of his opponent and the awfulness of his opponent’s supporters.
For in truth, Bernard Sanders has never learned the first thing about good manners or being gracious no matter whether in defeat or and victory. Bernard Sanders is, unfortunately, a left-wing version of Donald Trump.
And I think it is safe to predict that if Bernard Sanders is successful in a hostile takeover bid of Democratic Party, Donald Trump will eat him for lunch.
#neverbernie.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand, Esq. is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. After having been zealously attacked for the last four-plus years by the Young Pioneers of the Sanders left, whose jaded jargon sounds like the entrance essays of aspirants for advancement to Komsomol, he is thoroughly tired of the absurdities and bullshit of the Sanders left.
Tuesday, February 4, 2020
THE FIRST DEMOCRATIC FIASCO OF 2020: WHY IT'S TIME TO DETHRONE THE IOWA CAUCUSES AND THE NEW HAMPSHIRE PRIMARY
Summary: Last night’s Iowa caucuses were a fiasco for the Democratic Party. What should have been a simple, real-time exercise in tabulating caucus results turned into a cluster fuck of Mongolian proportions as vote totals were unaccountably and unacceptably delayed from numerous Iowa precincts. Already, conspiracy theories are swirling in every direction, and the chattering classes, together with some of the DNC, are beginning to wonder whether the vaunted first-in-the-Nation Iowa caucuses have outlived their usefulness.
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Cathedral City, February 4, 2020 — last night’s Democratic Iowa caucuses were an unmitigated fiasco. What should have been a simple, real-time exercise in counting and tabulating the results of the various caucuses around the State of Iowa became a clusterfuck of Mongolian proportions as vote totals were unaccountably and unacceptably delayed because of software glitches in various apps intended to speed up the transmission of results.
Nearly 24 hours after the hypertrophic, overly ballyhooed Iowa caucuses were supposed to come to an end, there is still no clear notion as to who the winner was.
Nonetheless, the results are available, the night appears to have gone far better than could have been expected for former South Bend, Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg, the gay dude from Indiana with the almost unpronounceable surname. Indeed, according to available results, Buttigieg appears to have commanded more so-called delegate equivalents than the vaunted front runner, Independent Vermont Sen. Bernard Sanders, who trails Buttigieg by a little bit less than two percentage points.
Given that the shtetl Stalinist has been campaigning in Iowa since he shivved Hillary Clinton in the 2016 campaign, Buttigieg’s surprisingly strong performance cannot be sitting well with Bernard Sanders or his campaign. Unconfirmed and sketchily sourced reporting has it that both the Independent Vermont Senator and his senior campaign staff are livid at the apparent trend in the numbers.
Of course, it must be remembered that Sanders and his senior staff, as well as most of his redeless followers have a rather divine right attitude of entitlement in any campaign in which Bernard Sanders is involved. Rather like Donald Trump, Bernard Sanders and his people tend to believe that victory is their birthright at anyone who does not “feel the bern” suffers from some kind of moral shortcoming that automatically deprives them of any right to have an opinion or a point of view.
As the results from the Iowa caucuses continue to trickle in, and it becomes ever more evident that a majority of Iowa Democratic caucus goers just don’t “feel the bern,” Sanders's redeless Twitter and Facebook followers have been fomenting all manner of conspiracy theories that Sanders himself, that sour, superannuated shtetl Stalinist, that loudmouth Leninist loser, that blowhard bloviating Burlington Bolshevik, was somehow “robbed” of victory in the Iowa caucuses because of some kind of nefarious conspiracy by and on behalf of Pete Buttigieg.
The Sanders conspiracy theory attacks targeting Mayor Pete are all the more reprehensible because they are so Trumpian in their tone and tenor. Though a lot of gay men are rather foolishly rallying behind Sanders, the tone on social media is full of dog whistle homophobia of which the queer nation ought to wake up and take notice. After all, Bernard Sanders is no great friend of the queer nation. Indeed, dig deep enough into Sanders’s past and it’s not hard to find traces of a traditional Marxist critique of queer sexualities and the tacit reinforcement of left-bourgeois heteronormativity, rather like that encountered in the upbringing of such monopolists as Mark Zuckerberg.
Given that Sanders has apparently come in a close second to Mayor Buttigieg in the Iowa caucuses, you would think he and his supporters might be grateful to have bamboozled so many Iowa caucus goers. Unfortunately, Sanders, like Trump, suffers from a very severe case of sore winner syndrome.
Predictably, we should have expected such ineluctably churlish behavior from Bernard Sanders. When the Nevada caucuses in 2016 devolved into violence and death threats from Sanders supporters, Sanders was slow to denounce their behavior and his belated, halfhearted denunciation, when it finally came, was so full of deflection, implementation, and Soviet-style whataboutism as to be a useless tissue of prevarications and lies.
Notwithstanding the insistence from both the Trump and Sanders campaigns on propagating disinformation and conspiracy theories, the fact remains that the Iowa Democratic Party conducted one of the most piss poor sets of caucuses since the ridiculous experiment in caucusing began in its present form after the 1972 campaign.
Of course, applying Hanlon’s Razor, we should be reluctant to ascribe to malice — or to malign conspiracies— what can be most easily, and most probably, laid at the door of stupidity on the part of the Iowa Democratic Party leadership. Indeed, the stupidity of the Democratic Party leadership in Iowa was so gross, so reckless, so over-the-top, as to be culpable.
Three steps should be taken without delay. First, the Iowa Democratic Party’s should purge its top leadership and replace them with people who have more of a sense of what the hell is going on. There simply is no excuse, particularly not in a state which prides itself on its first-in-the-nation caucuses, for conducting the caucuses so incompetently and so foolishly. If this had happened in the People’s Republic of China or the former Soviet Union, those responsible would been taken out to a stadium somewhere and pistolled publicly in the nape of the neck for their crimes.
Of course – and thankfully- we are not the Soviet Union or the PRC, Donald Trump and his efforts to destroy our democracy notwithstanding. However, what happened in Iowa last night has quite justly got a lot of people in the political class wondering if it is not time to do away with the Iowa caucuses and deprive Iowa, a small, unrepresentative, nondiverse, 90% white, farm state of its status as the “bellwether” in our national presidential campaigns. The states should give serious thought to rotating their primary contests among regions of the country, so that no single small, unrepresentative, nondiverse jurisdiction can have the kind of outsized influence on the presidential elections that Iowa and New Hampshire have managed to garner to themselves by virtue of having a first-in-the-nation presidential contest every four years.
The final step to be taken without delay is quite simply the abolition of the caucus process in every jurisdiction which selects or allocates delegates to the Democratic national convention by way of a caucus. Four years ago, I observed that caucuses are anti-democratic. Caucuses advantage the white, the well-off, and the well-connected. Caucuses require an investment of several hours of time, spent in personal attendance at an often rowdy and confrontational gathering of political activists. Because caucuses require attendance during the evening, they have the effect of excluding people who work night shifts, parents trying to take care of small children, elderly people who cannot drive at night, the poor who may lack transport to the caucus location, or the disabled who may not be able to access the caucus site. Thus, an examination of almost any caucus site, particularly in Iowa, will disclose an overwhelmingly white universe of caucus goers.
That is not what the Democratic Party is.
Moreover, caucuses do not permit secret ballots. One caucuses for one’s candidate by going physically to a particular piece of the geography of the caucus room; there is simply no provision for absentee ballots or other accommodation for those who are physically unable to attend the caucus. This facilitates intimidation tactics and belaboring by certain types of activists of a particular perfervid disposition – activists of the type who tend to gravitate toward the Sanders campaign in particular. In short, caucuses create political bedlam of the type beloved of many political activists, but not at all welcome to those who prefer to undertake their politics in a more civilized fashion.
Now contrast a typical candidate selection caucus to a closed Democratic primary election, held on election day, accessible to absentee voters as well, administered not by party apparatchiks but by public election officials, employed by their counties, and answerable to the public in the event or glitches, misfeasance, or malfeasance in the conduct of the election. In a closed Democratic primary, for example, every Democrat may vote in the primary, but only Democrats may vote, providing some degree of security from Republicans, third partisans, or no party preference voters from interfering with the Democratic Party’s own selection of its own candidates. Of course, the same observations apply pari passu to any other party, whether Republican, Green, American Independent, Peace and Freedom, or any of the other various third parties out there.
Primaries definitionally are about selecting the candidate whom the party considers should be a standardbearer. Open primaries, including California’s ridiculous “jungle primary,” should be abolished as well as candidate selection caucuses.
Moreover, in addition to getting rid of caucuses, the Democratic Party should impose requirements to put some teeth into the mandate that every state should have a closed primary. For the 2024 elections, the Democratic National Committee should mandate that every state select its Democratic standardbearers or delegates in a close primary in which, again, every Democrat may participate but only Democrats may participate.
The sanction for refusal to adopt the closed primary should be the exclusion of that state’s delegates from the Democratic national convention until the state in question unconditionally agrees to adopt a closed primary. Caucuses, that classist, racist, ableist, enterprise, ought to be relegated to the dustbin of history.
If nothing else, the egregious Mongolian cluster fuck that has been this year’s Iowa caucuses ought to provide the catalyst for dethroning Iowa and New Hampshire from their undeserved primacy, and a further catalyst for doing away with caucuses altogether.
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Paul S. Marchand, Esq., is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices (after all, the more you practice, the more you might get it right) in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. He spent eight years of his life as a city councilmember in Cathedral City, and 10 years of his life as a member of the Riverside County Democratic Central Committee. He leafleted and stuffed envelopes for George McGovern in 1972 at the age of eight. The views contained herein are his own.
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Cathedral City, February 4, 2020 — last night’s Democratic Iowa caucuses were an unmitigated fiasco. What should have been a simple, real-time exercise in counting and tabulating the results of the various caucuses around the State of Iowa became a clusterfuck of Mongolian proportions as vote totals were unaccountably and unacceptably delayed because of software glitches in various apps intended to speed up the transmission of results.
Nearly 24 hours after the hypertrophic, overly ballyhooed Iowa caucuses were supposed to come to an end, there is still no clear notion as to who the winner was.
Nonetheless, the results are available, the night appears to have gone far better than could have been expected for former South Bend, Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg, the gay dude from Indiana with the almost unpronounceable surname. Indeed, according to available results, Buttigieg appears to have commanded more so-called delegate equivalents than the vaunted front runner, Independent Vermont Sen. Bernard Sanders, who trails Buttigieg by a little bit less than two percentage points.
Given that the shtetl Stalinist has been campaigning in Iowa since he shivved Hillary Clinton in the 2016 campaign, Buttigieg’s surprisingly strong performance cannot be sitting well with Bernard Sanders or his campaign. Unconfirmed and sketchily sourced reporting has it that both the Independent Vermont Senator and his senior campaign staff are livid at the apparent trend in the numbers.
Of course, it must be remembered that Sanders and his senior staff, as well as most of his redeless followers have a rather divine right attitude of entitlement in any campaign in which Bernard Sanders is involved. Rather like Donald Trump, Bernard Sanders and his people tend to believe that victory is their birthright at anyone who does not “feel the bern” suffers from some kind of moral shortcoming that automatically deprives them of any right to have an opinion or a point of view.
As the results from the Iowa caucuses continue to trickle in, and it becomes ever more evident that a majority of Iowa Democratic caucus goers just don’t “feel the bern,” Sanders's redeless Twitter and Facebook followers have been fomenting all manner of conspiracy theories that Sanders himself, that sour, superannuated shtetl Stalinist, that loudmouth Leninist loser, that blowhard bloviating Burlington Bolshevik, was somehow “robbed” of victory in the Iowa caucuses because of some kind of nefarious conspiracy by and on behalf of Pete Buttigieg.
The Sanders conspiracy theory attacks targeting Mayor Pete are all the more reprehensible because they are so Trumpian in their tone and tenor. Though a lot of gay men are rather foolishly rallying behind Sanders, the tone on social media is full of dog whistle homophobia of which the queer nation ought to wake up and take notice. After all, Bernard Sanders is no great friend of the queer nation. Indeed, dig deep enough into Sanders’s past and it’s not hard to find traces of a traditional Marxist critique of queer sexualities and the tacit reinforcement of left-bourgeois heteronormativity, rather like that encountered in the upbringing of such monopolists as Mark Zuckerberg.
Given that Sanders has apparently come in a close second to Mayor Buttigieg in the Iowa caucuses, you would think he and his supporters might be grateful to have bamboozled so many Iowa caucus goers. Unfortunately, Sanders, like Trump, suffers from a very severe case of sore winner syndrome.
Predictably, we should have expected such ineluctably churlish behavior from Bernard Sanders. When the Nevada caucuses in 2016 devolved into violence and death threats from Sanders supporters, Sanders was slow to denounce their behavior and his belated, halfhearted denunciation, when it finally came, was so full of deflection, implementation, and Soviet-style whataboutism as to be a useless tissue of prevarications and lies.
Notwithstanding the insistence from both the Trump and Sanders campaigns on propagating disinformation and conspiracy theories, the fact remains that the Iowa Democratic Party conducted one of the most piss poor sets of caucuses since the ridiculous experiment in caucusing began in its present form after the 1972 campaign.
Of course, applying Hanlon’s Razor, we should be reluctant to ascribe to malice — or to malign conspiracies— what can be most easily, and most probably, laid at the door of stupidity on the part of the Iowa Democratic Party leadership. Indeed, the stupidity of the Democratic Party leadership in Iowa was so gross, so reckless, so over-the-top, as to be culpable.
Three steps should be taken without delay. First, the Iowa Democratic Party’s should purge its top leadership and replace them with people who have more of a sense of what the hell is going on. There simply is no excuse, particularly not in a state which prides itself on its first-in-the-nation caucuses, for conducting the caucuses so incompetently and so foolishly. If this had happened in the People’s Republic of China or the former Soviet Union, those responsible would been taken out to a stadium somewhere and pistolled publicly in the nape of the neck for their crimes.
Of course – and thankfully- we are not the Soviet Union or the PRC, Donald Trump and his efforts to destroy our democracy notwithstanding. However, what happened in Iowa last night has quite justly got a lot of people in the political class wondering if it is not time to do away with the Iowa caucuses and deprive Iowa, a small, unrepresentative, nondiverse, 90% white, farm state of its status as the “bellwether” in our national presidential campaigns. The states should give serious thought to rotating their primary contests among regions of the country, so that no single small, unrepresentative, nondiverse jurisdiction can have the kind of outsized influence on the presidential elections that Iowa and New Hampshire have managed to garner to themselves by virtue of having a first-in-the-nation presidential contest every four years.
The final step to be taken without delay is quite simply the abolition of the caucus process in every jurisdiction which selects or allocates delegates to the Democratic national convention by way of a caucus. Four years ago, I observed that caucuses are anti-democratic. Caucuses advantage the white, the well-off, and the well-connected. Caucuses require an investment of several hours of time, spent in personal attendance at an often rowdy and confrontational gathering of political activists. Because caucuses require attendance during the evening, they have the effect of excluding people who work night shifts, parents trying to take care of small children, elderly people who cannot drive at night, the poor who may lack transport to the caucus location, or the disabled who may not be able to access the caucus site. Thus, an examination of almost any caucus site, particularly in Iowa, will disclose an overwhelmingly white universe of caucus goers.
That is not what the Democratic Party is.
Moreover, caucuses do not permit secret ballots. One caucuses for one’s candidate by going physically to a particular piece of the geography of the caucus room; there is simply no provision for absentee ballots or other accommodation for those who are physically unable to attend the caucus. This facilitates intimidation tactics and belaboring by certain types of activists of a particular perfervid disposition – activists of the type who tend to gravitate toward the Sanders campaign in particular. In short, caucuses create political bedlam of the type beloved of many political activists, but not at all welcome to those who prefer to undertake their politics in a more civilized fashion.
Now contrast a typical candidate selection caucus to a closed Democratic primary election, held on election day, accessible to absentee voters as well, administered not by party apparatchiks but by public election officials, employed by their counties, and answerable to the public in the event or glitches, misfeasance, or malfeasance in the conduct of the election. In a closed Democratic primary, for example, every Democrat may vote in the primary, but only Democrats may vote, providing some degree of security from Republicans, third partisans, or no party preference voters from interfering with the Democratic Party’s own selection of its own candidates. Of course, the same observations apply pari passu to any other party, whether Republican, Green, American Independent, Peace and Freedom, or any of the other various third parties out there.
Primaries definitionally are about selecting the candidate whom the party considers should be a standardbearer. Open primaries, including California’s ridiculous “jungle primary,” should be abolished as well as candidate selection caucuses.
Moreover, in addition to getting rid of caucuses, the Democratic Party should impose requirements to put some teeth into the mandate that every state should have a closed primary. For the 2024 elections, the Democratic National Committee should mandate that every state select its Democratic standardbearers or delegates in a close primary in which, again, every Democrat may participate but only Democrats may participate.
The sanction for refusal to adopt the closed primary should be the exclusion of that state’s delegates from the Democratic national convention until the state in question unconditionally agrees to adopt a closed primary. Caucuses, that classist, racist, ableist, enterprise, ought to be relegated to the dustbin of history.
If nothing else, the egregious Mongolian cluster fuck that has been this year’s Iowa caucuses ought to provide the catalyst for dethroning Iowa and New Hampshire from their undeserved primacy, and a further catalyst for doing away with caucuses altogether.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand, Esq., is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices (after all, the more you practice, the more you might get it right) in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. He spent eight years of his life as a city councilmember in Cathedral City, and 10 years of his life as a member of the Riverside County Democratic Central Committee. He leafleted and stuffed envelopes for George McGovern in 1972 at the age of eight. The views contained herein are his own.
Wednesday, December 25, 2019
IN THE SMILE OF THE BEAUTIFUL CHILD WE OVERCOME KOYAANISQATSI
Summary: In the nearly 30 years since I was first admitted to the practice of law, I’ve established shibboleth of coming into my office on Christmas Day and meditating on the Incarnation of the Savior. In a time of koyaanisqatsi, of life out of balance, every fiber of my Christian being cries out against the evil thing in the White House, but every fiber of my Christian being also assures me that if the Christian Republic bears steady and staunch witness against him, the People of God will prevail. Strong in the power of powerlessness the Gandhiji and Martin Luther King taught us, we the people will prevail; We will overcome koyaanisqatsi. God wills it.
Cathedral City, December 25, 2019 –- In the nearly 30 years since I was admitted to the practice of law, I have maintained a more or less constant shibboleth of coming into the office on Christmas Day. In the silence of the office, with no phone calls, no interruptions, no unwanted human interaction, I actually find a place to get some work done, but perhaps more importantly, to find a quiet place for meditation in this Incarnation season, to deal with the quotidian crises of koyaanisqatsi, by which the Hopi described a “life out of balance.”
Every time I try to overcome koyaanisqatsi, this Advent and Christmas season, to banish that Thing in the White House from my contemplations of the season, Donald Trump goes and does something new to replenish the endless aquifers of outrage bubbling beneath the surface of American society. Just a few days ago, for example, The Donald delivered remarks to American troops in Afghanistan in which he unburdened himself off a lengthy litany of grievances against Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Party, and loyal Americans who believe that his conduct rises to the level of “treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors.” What made The Donald’s Festivus-like gripe and grumble session so objectionable was that he was delivering his remarks in his capacity as commander-in-chief of the armed forces in a context that should have been entirely apolitical.
The other occurrence that impinged upon this Advent and Incarnation season was an editorial in Christianity Today —the evangelical magazine founded by the late Billy Graham— calling for Donald Trump’s removal from office, and the ineluctable Nonconformist evangelical Protestant backlash against it. The editorial was not itself heretical, but the backlash against it manifested all the worst sorts of ethnonationalist Protestant heresy that has become so dangerously prevalent in this country.
As one who stands somewhat on the theological right, that is one who believes in the Incarnation, the Virgin Birth, the Grace of the Sacraments (all seven of them), the Latin Catholic Deposit of Faith, the Apostolic Succession, and the triad of Scripture, tradition, and reason, I have never had a great deal of patience for Christian denominations which stand on the theological left edge of the Reformation, but which seek political power by aligning themselves with the political right. It is always been curious to me how, in America, the theological right and the political left overlap, and the theological left and the political right overlap. In short, show me a Christian of the theological right, and I will almost inevitably be will to show you, in that same individual, a person on the political left.
Of course, if this year we have not seen The Donald trying to hold the government of the United States hostage for his ridiculous border wall, we still see The Donald systematically betraying this country and her interests to the Russian State. We see The Donald systematically disassembling the American security relationship with Japan and the Republic of [South] Korea; we see The Donald picking tariff battles with China but saying almost nothing about Beijing’s systematic repression of the Uighurs in East Turkestan (Xinjiang). We see The Donald failing to defend American values or promote American interests abroad. We still live in a time of koyaanisqatsi.
But worst of all, here in our own country, we see The Donald, guided by that unspeakable golem Stephen Miller (a Shonda for the goyim, worthy of being read forever out of the Congregation of Israel, declared herem, and forever uncountable toward a minyan), pursuing policies that, in 1945, would have brought any German before the war crimes trials at Nuremberg. How can we speak of modeling American values, how can we speak of modeling Christian values, how can we speak of living the truth of this Incarnation season when we remain silent in the face of evil policy that sanctions the breaking up of families, the caging of children, and turning a blind eye as infants and teenagers languish and die while in the custody of ICE, the Border Patrol, or other American bureaucracies?
Particularly at Christmas, when millions of Americans renew their yearly conversation with that Lucan infancy narrative which, across 2000 years, has become one of the most precious possessions of the Western mind in general and the Christian Republic in particular, how can we ignore what is going on in our own backyards? We have become conditioned and indifferent to daily outrages against the human person, human rights, and human dignity. We ignore the caged children; we look the other way when we see a homeless person, with all her worldly possessions crammed into a purloined shopping cart, making their way with a kind of sad, weary dignity from one side of the street to another.
For me, as a Christian, a Catholic, and Anglican, and Episcopalian, who professes and confesses a deep, absolute, and abiding faith in a God Who took human form in order to reconcile us simple humans to God, and who made for that holy purpose an icon in the form of Jesus Christ to draw all humankind to God, I find myself badly conflicted on this Christmas. Over against revolting expositions of far too many Americans declining God’s invitation in Christ to be, in the words of the late Rep. Elijah Cummings “better than that,” a great proportion of the American people instead prefer to gravitate toward the perverse blandishments of Antichrist, expressed in the hateful words of Donald Trump.
Yet, even as God Godself became incarnate from the Virgin Mary in human form in Jesus Christ, quietly rebuking the powers of koyaanisqatsi and of the powers that be with what we might now call Gandhiji’s paradox of the power of powerlessness, we can see even among us signs of God’s ineffable presence in a world that organizes itself rather without reference to first things and to eternal things. As happened last year about this time, God vouchsafed all of us who could see a small assurance that God’s ineffable presence as I looked out again into the Whitewater Wash and saw there a homeless man, sharing his meager foodstuff with a small flock of pigeons, in a kind of Franciscan feast of the impoverished.
It reminded me then and there that there is indeed something fundamentally out of balance in our lives, something koyaanisqatsi, as the Hopi hight say, in the way contemporary American society organizes itself. For there is something truly koyaanisqatsi about the heresies implicit in the so-called Prosperity Gospel beloved of so many evangelical Protestant Nonconformist. There is something koyaanisqatsi in the way we have appropriated the Christmas narrative and twisted it into something I cannot imagine that God ever intended the incarnation of our Savior ever to represent.
In a time when Gospodin Trump and his minions of Antichrist have sought to entice us to live down to all of the worst aspects of our originally sinful human nature, when our institutions are trying to push back by impeaching him in the hopes that he may be removed from office, we should answer with a resounding “no” to Trump and all that Trump stands for.
Instead, we should reacquaint ourselves with the eternal truths contained in our Christian Incarnation narrative. We should reacquaint ourselves with the inconvenient truth that our Savior, his mother Mary, and Joseph were situationally homeless. Not only that, we should also remember that Lucan infancy narrative reminds us that the Holy Family became refugees fleeing Herod’s slaughter of the Holy Innocents.
In short, the Holy Family represented precisely the kind of people against whom Gospodin Trump, the Shonda golem Stephen Miller, and their supporters have been accustomed to fulminate. However, their fulminations will prove unavailing. For we have the assurances of God Incarnate in Jesus Christ that Gospodin Trump and all his minions of Antichrist will not prevail.
For when the Savior comes, He brings with Him what Gandhiji called the power of powerlessness, the ability of nonviolence to rebuke and overcome all terrors. For we who have welcomed into our hearts this beautiful Child, we who have believed and preached Christ crucified, we who have borne witness to God conquering death by death, can be assured, as Paul writes in his Epistle to the Romans that
The baby in the manger or the mature man with His disciples supping for the last time in the upper room may not have been much to look upon, but the power of God is ineluctable; the power of God can turn every wall, it can reduce every fortification, and it can do so in the manner in which French playwright Edmund Rostand described a beautiful young girl gaining access to a grim fortress by convincing the sentries to grant her entry: “she smiled at them.”
On this Day when we commemorate the Incarnation of the Savior of the World in that manger in Bethlehem more than 2000 years ago, we acknowledge His conquest of our sinful hearts by acknowledging the smile of the Beautiful Child.
And as we know that the beautiful Savior is with us, we know that we, too, can rebuke, resist and overcome the evil that is this day in our midst.
The Savior of the World is at hand!
Oh! Come let us adore Him!
Merry Christmas!
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney. He lives in Cathedral City, where he served two terms on the city Council, and he practices law in Rancho Mirage. He is a religiously Conformist member of the Episcopal Church, that relentlessly nice denomination of Christians who like to eat little sandwiches with the crusts cut off and drink tea with their pinkies extended. The views contained in this post are his own, unless you like them, in which case, they can be yours, too.
Cathedral City, December 25, 2019 –- In the nearly 30 years since I was admitted to the practice of law, I have maintained a more or less constant shibboleth of coming into the office on Christmas Day. In the silence of the office, with no phone calls, no interruptions, no unwanted human interaction, I actually find a place to get some work done, but perhaps more importantly, to find a quiet place for meditation in this Incarnation season, to deal with the quotidian crises of koyaanisqatsi, by which the Hopi described a “life out of balance.”
Every time I try to overcome koyaanisqatsi, this Advent and Christmas season, to banish that Thing in the White House from my contemplations of the season, Donald Trump goes and does something new to replenish the endless aquifers of outrage bubbling beneath the surface of American society. Just a few days ago, for example, The Donald delivered remarks to American troops in Afghanistan in which he unburdened himself off a lengthy litany of grievances against Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Party, and loyal Americans who believe that his conduct rises to the level of “treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors.” What made The Donald’s Festivus-like gripe and grumble session so objectionable was that he was delivering his remarks in his capacity as commander-in-chief of the armed forces in a context that should have been entirely apolitical.
The other occurrence that impinged upon this Advent and Incarnation season was an editorial in Christianity Today —the evangelical magazine founded by the late Billy Graham— calling for Donald Trump’s removal from office, and the ineluctable Nonconformist evangelical Protestant backlash against it. The editorial was not itself heretical, but the backlash against it manifested all the worst sorts of ethnonationalist Protestant heresy that has become so dangerously prevalent in this country.
As one who stands somewhat on the theological right, that is one who believes in the Incarnation, the Virgin Birth, the Grace of the Sacraments (all seven of them), the Latin Catholic Deposit of Faith, the Apostolic Succession, and the triad of Scripture, tradition, and reason, I have never had a great deal of patience for Christian denominations which stand on the theological left edge of the Reformation, but which seek political power by aligning themselves with the political right. It is always been curious to me how, in America, the theological right and the political left overlap, and the theological left and the political right overlap. In short, show me a Christian of the theological right, and I will almost inevitably be will to show you, in that same individual, a person on the political left.
Of course, if this year we have not seen The Donald trying to hold the government of the United States hostage for his ridiculous border wall, we still see The Donald systematically betraying this country and her interests to the Russian State. We see The Donald systematically disassembling the American security relationship with Japan and the Republic of [South] Korea; we see The Donald picking tariff battles with China but saying almost nothing about Beijing’s systematic repression of the Uighurs in East Turkestan (Xinjiang). We see The Donald failing to defend American values or promote American interests abroad. We still live in a time of koyaanisqatsi.
But worst of all, here in our own country, we see The Donald, guided by that unspeakable golem Stephen Miller (a Shonda for the goyim, worthy of being read forever out of the Congregation of Israel, declared herem, and forever uncountable toward a minyan), pursuing policies that, in 1945, would have brought any German before the war crimes trials at Nuremberg. How can we speak of modeling American values, how can we speak of modeling Christian values, how can we speak of living the truth of this Incarnation season when we remain silent in the face of evil policy that sanctions the breaking up of families, the caging of children, and turning a blind eye as infants and teenagers languish and die while in the custody of ICE, the Border Patrol, or other American bureaucracies?
Particularly at Christmas, when millions of Americans renew their yearly conversation with that Lucan infancy narrative which, across 2000 years, has become one of the most precious possessions of the Western mind in general and the Christian Republic in particular, how can we ignore what is going on in our own backyards? We have become conditioned and indifferent to daily outrages against the human person, human rights, and human dignity. We ignore the caged children; we look the other way when we see a homeless person, with all her worldly possessions crammed into a purloined shopping cart, making their way with a kind of sad, weary dignity from one side of the street to another.
For me, as a Christian, a Catholic, and Anglican, and Episcopalian, who professes and confesses a deep, absolute, and abiding faith in a God Who took human form in order to reconcile us simple humans to God, and who made for that holy purpose an icon in the form of Jesus Christ to draw all humankind to God, I find myself badly conflicted on this Christmas. Over against revolting expositions of far too many Americans declining God’s invitation in Christ to be, in the words of the late Rep. Elijah Cummings “better than that,” a great proportion of the American people instead prefer to gravitate toward the perverse blandishments of Antichrist, expressed in the hateful words of Donald Trump.
Yet, even as God Godself became incarnate from the Virgin Mary in human form in Jesus Christ, quietly rebuking the powers of koyaanisqatsi and of the powers that be with what we might now call Gandhiji’s paradox of the power of powerlessness, we can see even among us signs of God’s ineffable presence in a world that organizes itself rather without reference to first things and to eternal things. As happened last year about this time, God vouchsafed all of us who could see a small assurance that God’s ineffable presence as I looked out again into the Whitewater Wash and saw there a homeless man, sharing his meager foodstuff with a small flock of pigeons, in a kind of Franciscan feast of the impoverished.
It reminded me then and there that there is indeed something fundamentally out of balance in our lives, something koyaanisqatsi, as the Hopi hight say, in the way contemporary American society organizes itself. For there is something truly koyaanisqatsi about the heresies implicit in the so-called Prosperity Gospel beloved of so many evangelical Protestant Nonconformist. There is something koyaanisqatsi in the way we have appropriated the Christmas narrative and twisted it into something I cannot imagine that God ever intended the incarnation of our Savior ever to represent.
In a time when Gospodin Trump and his minions of Antichrist have sought to entice us to live down to all of the worst aspects of our originally sinful human nature, when our institutions are trying to push back by impeaching him in the hopes that he may be removed from office, we should answer with a resounding “no” to Trump and all that Trump stands for.
Instead, we should reacquaint ourselves with the eternal truths contained in our Christian Incarnation narrative. We should reacquaint ourselves with the inconvenient truth that our Savior, his mother Mary, and Joseph were situationally homeless. Not only that, we should also remember that Lucan infancy narrative reminds us that the Holy Family became refugees fleeing Herod’s slaughter of the Holy Innocents.
In short, the Holy Family represented precisely the kind of people against whom Gospodin Trump, the Shonda golem Stephen Miller, and their supporters have been accustomed to fulminate. However, their fulminations will prove unavailing. For we have the assurances of God Incarnate in Jesus Christ that Gospodin Trump and all his minions of Antichrist will not prevail.
For when the Savior comes, He brings with Him what Gandhiji called the power of powerlessness, the ability of nonviolence to rebuke and overcome all terrors. For we who have welcomed into our hearts this beautiful Child, we who have believed and preached Christ crucified, we who have borne witness to God conquering death by death, can be assured, as Paul writes in his Epistle to the Romans that
Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us. For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Rom. 8:37-39)
The baby in the manger or the mature man with His disciples supping for the last time in the upper room may not have been much to look upon, but the power of God is ineluctable; the power of God can turn every wall, it can reduce every fortification, and it can do so in the manner in which French playwright Edmund Rostand described a beautiful young girl gaining access to a grim fortress by convincing the sentries to grant her entry: “she smiled at them.”
On this Day when we commemorate the Incarnation of the Savior of the World in that manger in Bethlehem more than 2000 years ago, we acknowledge His conquest of our sinful hearts by acknowledging the smile of the Beautiful Child.
And as we know that the beautiful Savior is with us, we know that we, too, can rebuke, resist and overcome the evil that is this day in our midst.
The Savior of the World is at hand!
Oh! Come let us adore Him!
Merry Christmas!
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney. He lives in Cathedral City, where he served two terms on the city Council, and he practices law in Rancho Mirage. He is a religiously Conformist member of the Episcopal Church, that relentlessly nice denomination of Christians who like to eat little sandwiches with the crusts cut off and drink tea with their pinkies extended. The views contained in this post are his own, unless you like them, in which case, they can be yours, too.
Friday, December 20, 2019
THE CURIOUS GAP BETWEEN THE PUNDITOCRACY AND THE UN-CONSULTED VOTER: THOUGHTS ON LAST NIGHT'S DEMOCRATIC DEBATE
Summary: Thursday night’s Democratic debate, the last in the hypertrophic Democratic primary campaign before the infamous Iowa caucuses, produced the usual gaggle of pundits and talking heads all trying to spin the results of last night’s debate in favor of which ever candidate any given pundit happened to support at that moment. Perhaps we, the unconsulted voters of the provinces, need to make our opinions known rather than assume that our opinions should be dictated by the chattering classes or the punditocracy, however well-meaning they may be.
If one thing was clear from last Thursday night’s Democratic debate, it was that Joe Biden has got his groove back. By contrast to the other six candidates on the stage, Uncle Joe came across as measured, experience, confident, and most of all, presidential. Given how the punditocracy has been so fond of assuming that the quondam Vice President would inevitably collapse, last night’s performance inevitably gave his supporters aid and comfort, boosting morale and improving his chances of victory in the unrepresentative, anti-democratic, racially problematic, Iowa caucuses.
Of course, we should also acknowledge a point made by Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar and South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, that there is very much a double standard in place in the heavily gendered enterprise of political campaigning. Men, in short, are allowed, even expected, to behave like assholes, to flaunt their male privilege and not be called upon it. Women, on the other hand, can’t be sharp elbowed or pointed in their critiques without being accused of being hoydens, harridans, or harpies.
Neither Elizabeth Warren nor Amy Klobuchar have yet to accumulate the sheer credibility and clout of House Speaker Nancy D’Allesandro Pelosi, who because she is who she is, and because of her sheer political skill, gets to be sharp elbowed, pointed, and deeply critical without anyone daring to call her a hoyden, a harridan, or a harpy. In short, Nancy Pelosi is a diva, and if there is one rule for coming at a diva, very simply it is: don’t.
Moreover, gay men, who, Lindsey Graham notwithstanding, are not divas like the divine Miss Nancy, are often subject to the same kind of disability; a gay man who deploys sharp elbows or pointed language does so at the acknowledge risk of being called a drama queen or worse.
Nonetheless, when Elizabeth Warren came out swinging at Pete Buttigieg, unsurprisingly given his ascent to near front runner status in Iowa, Senator Warren, without realizing how much she was standing into danger, was foolish enough to sail right into a trap of her own making. With flags flying, sails billowing, and guns blazing, Senator Warren attacked Mayor Buttigieg for the manner in which Mayor Pete engages in campaign fund-raising.
Not to put too fine a point on it, Mayor Pete eviscerated Senator Warren in front of a substantial debate audience at Los Angeles’s Loyola Marymount University. Where Senator Warren had attempted to play the Bernie Sanders purity card, Mayor Pete noted, somewhat acerbically, that not only was he the least well-off of the candidates on the debate stage that night but also that Senator Warren was herself a millionaire, and that Senator Warren had used exactly the same kind of fundraising strategies in her Senate campaign as those for which she was criticizing Mayor Pete. For Senator Warren, her attack on Mayor Pete’s fundraising, while it may play well among the Sanders/Warren activist faction on Twitter, was, for most watchers, an unforced error that was, in effect, a double whammy.
For not only had Senator Warren attempted a sharp elbowed attack that would have garnered criticism even had she been a male candidate, but the double standard identified, ironically enough, by Mayor Buttigieg and Senator Klobuchar herself, worked to her and Senator Klobuchar’s additional disadvantage in that it opened her up to some highly gendered criticism from both sides of the political divide.
Amy Klobuchar did not fare much better against Mayor Pete. Indeed, Senator Klobuchar’s response to Mayor Pete can be described as being akin to the umbrageous response of a terribly grand French noblewoman of the ancien régime trying to swat down a brash, but savvy, peasant from the provinces.
Buttigieg’s criticism of the culture in Washington DC, and its frequent out-of-touchness with the lives of the unconsulted voters in “flyover country,” struck a nerve with Senator Klobuchar, though the criticism itself, aimed squarely at a singularly dysfunctional “Inside the Beltway” culture, was by no means unfounded or out of line. Indeed, having lived just over the Maryland line in the relatively affluent suburb of Bethesda, I know how alien the world beyond the Capital Beltway can seem to denizens of the District of Columbia or to those of us who lived within a mile of Westmoreland Circle. Buttigieg’s barb hit Senator Klobuchar dead amidships below the waterline, and it stung. The unbrageousness of Senator Klobuchar’s response, resembling also that of the commander of the besieged fortress hurling maledictions down upon the besieging troops, was testament to the correctness of Mayor Buttigieg’s criticisms.
And, like her senatorial colleague, Senator Klobuchar comes across, judged by that double standard as she is, as hoydenish, harridan-like, and harpyesque. Like Senator Warren, she stood into danger, sailing in to the attack with her own flags flying, sails billowing, and guns blazing, only to rip her keel out on the hidden rocks of Buttigieg’s response. The South Bend mayor may have been flustered, but he kept his cool, his composure, and his control. The “gay dude from Mike Pence’s Indiana” demolished, hopefully once and for all, the stereotype of the mincing, lisping, ineffectual, homosexual. If nothing else, Pete Buttigieg’s performance last night should have put paid to the idea that a gay man, at least an openly gay man, pace James Buchanan, cannot be president.
Of course, the right despises Pete Buttigieg because his existence is a living, breathing rebuke to their Bible brandishing invocation of Leviticus 18:22, and the semi-Marxist Sanders/Warren left wing of the Democratic Party, while often concealing their views behind anodyne, politically acceptable jargon, tends to share the Leninist/Soviet critique of homosexuality — particularly male homosexuality — as a bourgeois affectation by which queer men are held to lack the necessary strength and temper of the will to make the revolution and accomplish the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Off on the fringes of the debate, where the revolution was neither won nor lost, wealthy candidates Andrew Yang and Tom Steyer did little to move the needle for their campaigns. Though Yang possesses the saving grace of the deft touch of humor that seems to have rather disappeared from the hypertrophic Democratic campaign, his remarks could not escape a certain problematic quality. How much has to be offered to the American people to bribe them to vote for a particular candidate? Similarly, Tom Steyer failed to impress, either.
Which leaves us Bernard Sanders and Joe Biden.
It was hard not to get a little annoyed with Gospodin Sanders last night. Early on in the debate, waving his bony finger and raising his voice, the Independent Vermont Senator pronounced the US Mexico Canada free-trade agreement (also known as Child of NAFTA) as an “outrage.” Certainly, Gospodin Sanders seems to have bought entirely into the traditional Ming and Qing Dynasty concepts of trade being a privilege rather than the Western concept of trade being a right. Clearly, to the doctrinaire bloviating blowhard Burlington Bolshevik, the concept of the free movement of goods or services is “an outrage.”
But perhaps worse for Bernie is that his entire debate performance consisted of the same stump speech in answer to every single question put to him. At a certain point, a grim, prim, finger wagging, voice raised, doctrinaire delivery of the same “eat the rich, down with the billionaire class” screed begins to lose traction with all but the most hardened “progressive” Democrats. His propensity for interrupting bought him a wonderfully deft put down from Joe Biden, which had the salutary effect of shutting Bernie up for most of the rest of the debate.
And indeed, in this debate, Uncle Joe, whom so many people had been inclined to write off as being in some kind of political death spiral, showed that he had his groove back. He came across as prepared, confident, commanding, and above all, presidential. The way in which he put down Senator Sanders and his propensity for interruption demonstrated a kind of command of the debate stage that had not existed in the earlier cattle call debates.
In short, the nautical analogy of Joe Biden sailing through these debates like a great British three-decker line of battleship of the great blood and thunder Royal Navy days of Horatio Nelson, Samuel Hood, Cuthbert Collingwood or John Jarvis, first Earl St. Vincent still applies. Even more than in previous debates, Biden sailed through this one and, mirabile dictu, sustained no damage at all. The candidates who could have damaged him, most notably Kamala Harris, are gone now.
Subsequent events may prove me quite wrong, but I believe that if any candidate solidified his position last night, it was Uncle Joe, followed by Mayor Pete. Print me to suggest that what we may be seeing is less a primary among several possible viable Democratic contenders for the nomination then it is at this point a free-for-all audition to see who gets to be Joe Biden’s Vice President and who fills out the cabinet roster of his Heads of Department. A man whom that thing Donald Trump fears so badly that Trump is willing to risk his own impeachment to try to pressure one or more foreign governments in Kyiv and in Beijing into sabotaging that man’s candidacy is more than qualified to replace the criminal Donald Trump as President of the United States.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand, Esq. Is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City, where he served as a member of the city Council for eight years. He practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. The views expressed herein are his own, and not necessarily those of the Biden campaign or of any other campaign. “Progressives” should get off their high horse.
Summary: Thursday night’s Democratic debate, the last in the hypertrophic Democratic primary campaign before the infamous Iowa caucuses, produced the usual gaggle of pundits and talking heads all trying to spin the results of last night’s debate in favor of which ever candidate any given pundit happened to support at that moment. Perhaps we, the unconsulted voters of the provinces, need to make our opinions known rather than assume that our opinions should be dictated by the chattering classes or the punditocracy, however well-meaning they may be.
If one thing was clear from last Thursday night’s Democratic debate, it was that Joe Biden has got his groove back. By contrast to the other six candidates on the stage, Uncle Joe came across as measured, experience, confident, and most of all, presidential. Given how the punditocracy has been so fond of assuming that the quondam Vice President would inevitably collapse, last night’s performance inevitably gave his supporters aid and comfort, boosting morale and improving his chances of victory in the unrepresentative, anti-democratic, racially problematic, Iowa caucuses.
Of course, we should also acknowledge a point made by Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar and South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, that there is very much a double standard in place in the heavily gendered enterprise of political campaigning. Men, in short, are allowed, even expected, to behave like assholes, to flaunt their male privilege and not be called upon it. Women, on the other hand, can’t be sharp elbowed or pointed in their critiques without being accused of being hoydens, harridans, or harpies.
Neither Elizabeth Warren nor Amy Klobuchar have yet to accumulate the sheer credibility and clout of House Speaker Nancy D’Allesandro Pelosi, who because she is who she is, and because of her sheer political skill, gets to be sharp elbowed, pointed, and deeply critical without anyone daring to call her a hoyden, a harridan, or a harpy. In short, Nancy Pelosi is a diva, and if there is one rule for coming at a diva, very simply it is: don’t.
Moreover, gay men, who, Lindsey Graham notwithstanding, are not divas like the divine Miss Nancy, are often subject to the same kind of disability; a gay man who deploys sharp elbows or pointed language does so at the acknowledge risk of being called a drama queen or worse.
Nonetheless, when Elizabeth Warren came out swinging at Pete Buttigieg, unsurprisingly given his ascent to near front runner status in Iowa, Senator Warren, without realizing how much she was standing into danger, was foolish enough to sail right into a trap of her own making. With flags flying, sails billowing, and guns blazing, Senator Warren attacked Mayor Buttigieg for the manner in which Mayor Pete engages in campaign fund-raising.
Not to put too fine a point on it, Mayor Pete eviscerated Senator Warren in front of a substantial debate audience at Los Angeles’s Loyola Marymount University. Where Senator Warren had attempted to play the Bernie Sanders purity card, Mayor Pete noted, somewhat acerbically, that not only was he the least well-off of the candidates on the debate stage that night but also that Senator Warren was herself a millionaire, and that Senator Warren had used exactly the same kind of fundraising strategies in her Senate campaign as those for which she was criticizing Mayor Pete. For Senator Warren, her attack on Mayor Pete’s fundraising, while it may play well among the Sanders/Warren activist faction on Twitter, was, for most watchers, an unforced error that was, in effect, a double whammy.
For not only had Senator Warren attempted a sharp elbowed attack that would have garnered criticism even had she been a male candidate, but the double standard identified, ironically enough, by Mayor Buttigieg and Senator Klobuchar herself, worked to her and Senator Klobuchar’s additional disadvantage in that it opened her up to some highly gendered criticism from both sides of the political divide.
Amy Klobuchar did not fare much better against Mayor Pete. Indeed, Senator Klobuchar’s response to Mayor Pete can be described as being akin to the umbrageous response of a terribly grand French noblewoman of the ancien régime trying to swat down a brash, but savvy, peasant from the provinces.
Buttigieg’s criticism of the culture in Washington DC, and its frequent out-of-touchness with the lives of the unconsulted voters in “flyover country,” struck a nerve with Senator Klobuchar, though the criticism itself, aimed squarely at a singularly dysfunctional “Inside the Beltway” culture, was by no means unfounded or out of line. Indeed, having lived just over the Maryland line in the relatively affluent suburb of Bethesda, I know how alien the world beyond the Capital Beltway can seem to denizens of the District of Columbia or to those of us who lived within a mile of Westmoreland Circle. Buttigieg’s barb hit Senator Klobuchar dead amidships below the waterline, and it stung. The unbrageousness of Senator Klobuchar’s response, resembling also that of the commander of the besieged fortress hurling maledictions down upon the besieging troops, was testament to the correctness of Mayor Buttigieg’s criticisms.
And, like her senatorial colleague, Senator Klobuchar comes across, judged by that double standard as she is, as hoydenish, harridan-like, and harpyesque. Like Senator Warren, she stood into danger, sailing in to the attack with her own flags flying, sails billowing, and guns blazing, only to rip her keel out on the hidden rocks of Buttigieg’s response. The South Bend mayor may have been flustered, but he kept his cool, his composure, and his control. The “gay dude from Mike Pence’s Indiana” demolished, hopefully once and for all, the stereotype of the mincing, lisping, ineffectual, homosexual. If nothing else, Pete Buttigieg’s performance last night should have put paid to the idea that a gay man, at least an openly gay man, pace James Buchanan, cannot be president.
Of course, the right despises Pete Buttigieg because his existence is a living, breathing rebuke to their Bible brandishing invocation of Leviticus 18:22, and the semi-Marxist Sanders/Warren left wing of the Democratic Party, while often concealing their views behind anodyne, politically acceptable jargon, tends to share the Leninist/Soviet critique of homosexuality — particularly male homosexuality — as a bourgeois affectation by which queer men are held to lack the necessary strength and temper of the will to make the revolution and accomplish the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Off on the fringes of the debate, where the revolution was neither won nor lost, wealthy candidates Andrew Yang and Tom Steyer did little to move the needle for their campaigns. Though Yang possesses the saving grace of the deft touch of humor that seems to have rather disappeared from the hypertrophic Democratic campaign, his remarks could not escape a certain problematic quality. How much has to be offered to the American people to bribe them to vote for a particular candidate? Similarly, Tom Steyer failed to impress, either.
Which leaves us Bernard Sanders and Joe Biden.
It was hard not to get a little annoyed with Gospodin Sanders last night. Early on in the debate, waving his bony finger and raising his voice, the Independent Vermont Senator pronounced the US Mexico Canada free-trade agreement (also known as Child of NAFTA) as an “outrage.” Certainly, Gospodin Sanders seems to have bought entirely into the traditional Ming and Qing Dynasty concepts of trade being a privilege rather than the Western concept of trade being a right. Clearly, to the doctrinaire bloviating blowhard Burlington Bolshevik, the concept of the free movement of goods or services is “an outrage.”
But perhaps worse for Bernie is that his entire debate performance consisted of the same stump speech in answer to every single question put to him. At a certain point, a grim, prim, finger wagging, voice raised, doctrinaire delivery of the same “eat the rich, down with the billionaire class” screed begins to lose traction with all but the most hardened “progressive” Democrats. His propensity for interrupting bought him a wonderfully deft put down from Joe Biden, which had the salutary effect of shutting Bernie up for most of the rest of the debate.
And indeed, in this debate, Uncle Joe, whom so many people had been inclined to write off as being in some kind of political death spiral, showed that he had his groove back. He came across as prepared, confident, commanding, and above all, presidential. The way in which he put down Senator Sanders and his propensity for interruption demonstrated a kind of command of the debate stage that had not existed in the earlier cattle call debates.
In short, the nautical analogy of Joe Biden sailing through these debates like a great British three-decker line of battleship of the great blood and thunder Royal Navy days of Horatio Nelson, Samuel Hood, Cuthbert Collingwood or John Jarvis, first Earl St. Vincent still applies. Even more than in previous debates, Biden sailed through this one and, mirabile dictu, sustained no damage at all. The candidates who could have damaged him, most notably Kamala Harris, are gone now.
Subsequent events may prove me quite wrong, but I believe that if any candidate solidified his position last night, it was Uncle Joe, followed by Mayor Pete. Print me to suggest that what we may be seeing is less a primary among several possible viable Democratic contenders for the nomination then it is at this point a free-for-all audition to see who gets to be Joe Biden’s Vice President and who fills out the cabinet roster of his Heads of Department. A man whom that thing Donald Trump fears so badly that Trump is willing to risk his own impeachment to try to pressure one or more foreign governments in Kyiv and in Beijing into sabotaging that man’s candidacy is more than qualified to replace the criminal Donald Trump as President of the United States.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand, Esq. Is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City, where he served as a member of the city Council for eight years. He practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. The views expressed herein are his own, and not necessarily those of the Biden campaign or of any other campaign. “Progressives” should get off their high horse.
Wednesday, December 18, 2019
HOW BERNARD SANDERS AND HIS REDELESS FOLLOWERS ARE POISONING THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY AND PAVING THE WAY FOR A SECOND TRUMP TERM
Summary: the doctrinaire cancer of purity testing and activist Leninism has begun to metastasize within the Democratic Party. The tone of the 2020 primary, like that of the 2016 primary, has been one of sneering, nastiness, pettiness, confrontation, condescension, and of sheer unwillingness on the part of a great many Democratic activists, particularly in the Sanders/Warren wing of the left side of the Party, to acknowledge that the sniping, the backbiting, and the propagandistic promulgation of a Sanders “we wuz robbed!” Dolchstoßlegende benefits no one except Donald Trump and his organized crime campaign.
-----------------------------
While I loathe the Russian/Republican Party, I can’t help but feel a certain measure of disdain and unease for my own Democratic Party. Activists on the Sanders/Warren wing of the left side of the Democratic Party, not satisfied with relentlessly attacking current front runner Joe Biden have begun to fear the possible advent of a newer, younger, queerer possible front runner in the form of South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, on whom the vials of wrath and vitriol appear to have been well and truly opened.
This outpouring of what the Los Angeles Times today referred to as a “sneering tone,” of barely concealed anger at Mayor Buttigieg certainly puts one in mind of the sneering, misogynistic tone that Bernard Sanders and his redeless followers adopted toward former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton during the 2016 primary. The tone of the Sanders faction’s critique of Secretary Clinton was, to put it mildly, hateful, misogynistic, and steeped in male, Trumpian, privilege. Worse, the insistent Sanders "we wuz robbed" Dolchstoßlegende in which Sanders and his foolish followers claimed that they were deprived of the 2016 nomination through sharp practice at the DNC, benefited, and benefits, no one but Donald Trump.
To put it bluntly, Bernard Sanders and his followers managed to inject a poison into the Democratic body politic in the 2016 primary cycle that has come back to haunt us in the 2020 cycle. That it is indeed a poisonous tone can be illustrated by the fact that the redelessly doctrinaire Sanders followers seemed to care not one whit that their confrontational, condescending, pugnacious, partisanship cost them friends within the Democratic Party and elsewhere.
Indeed, we saw, throughout the 2016 election cycle, how not only did at least 15% of Sanders primary voters cast general election ballots for the unspeakable, soon-to-be impeached, Donald Trump, the Kremlin’s chosen candidate, but how even more of them eagerly and uncritically adopted the Trump-WikiLeaks-Kremlin narrative and talking points to attack Hillary, even after Secretary Clinton had clinched the nomination of her Party to be it standardbearer for the presidency of the United States. What we saw, in short, was a nasty case of sore-loserism, misogyny, and spite emanating from the Independent Vermont Senator and his hyperventilating followers.
Now, with Pete Buttigieg rising in the polls and presumably siphoning off support from the sour, superannuated, shtetl Stalinist, the loudmouth Leninist loser, the blowhard bloviating Burlington Bolshevik Bernard Sanders, it is perhaps ineluctable that the vials of wrath and vitriol would again be opened. As much as the Sanders campaign in 2016 could justly be taxed with setting a bitter, divisive, misogynistic tone, in 2020 it can with equal justice be taxed with setting a bitter, divisive, Sanders- against-the-world tone that traffics in left bourgeois homophobia, left bourgeois misogyny, and (snortgiggle!) charges of ageism against Joe Biden, who is two years Bernard Sanders’s junior.
And certainly, the Sanders campaign has managed to enlist the support of the default group of publications of the radical left. The Nation, once mordantly — and accurately — characterized by a Republican humorist P.J. O’Rourke as “that compendium of the snits and quarrels of the Old Left,” very publicly announced an “anti-endorsement” of the quondam Vice President.
Further into the realms of Marxist dialectic, the Intercept, Glenn Greenwald’s house organ for the traitor Edward Snowden, and the Marxist periodical Jacobin have both been banging the drums for Bernard Sanders quite loudly and insistently. Moreover, as Buttigieg has improved his standing in the polls, the Marxist magazines and “that compendium of the snits and quarrels of the Old Left” have fallen into lockstep to excoriate Mayor Pete for being, among others, insufficiently queer, too queer, too white, too privileged, too corporate, and just too much of everything that the doctrinaire left in this country despises. Even his relative poverty compared to the other Democratic candidates has been held against him. In all this, it’s not hard for a queer person to sense a kind of dog whistle homophobia.
Of course, queerfolk are despised by both the hard right and the hard left. The hard right, waving their copies of the King James Bible, excoriates queerfolk on the strength of certain verses in Leviticus, on whose authority they seek to compass our vanishing. The hard left, for their part, tend to adopt the Marxist-Soviet critique of queerfolk as not having the strength of will necessary to help accomplish the dictatorship of the proletariat. (This, notwithstanding the fact that the first foreign affairs, commissar of the Soviet Union, Gyorgy Chicherin, was an openly queer man who accomplished a great deal in advancing the dictatorship of the proletariat.)
Either way, the right-bourgeois will treat queer folk as unspeakable and not to be received in a social setting. But at least with the right bourgeois, queerfolk know where they stand. It is with the left bourgeois that queer folk are perpetually uncertain; from the left bourgeois, such as Bernard Sanders or even Mark Zuckerberg, one can expect lip service to the idea of tolerance for queerfolk, but privately, when they think no one is listening, left bourgeois personages such as Gospodin Sanders or Gospodin Zuckerberg will privately assure their intimates that we are really not their kind, dear.
What this means, in short, is the Democratic Party has allowed itself to imbibe, in full measure, the same poison that has so badly damaged its counterpart, the Republican Party. Bernard Sanders, for example, has much to account for with respect to the poisoning with Vermont’s nuclear waste of poor, politically powerless communities of color in Barnwell, South Carolina and Sierra Blanca, Texas. In neither case did Gospodin Sanders apparently bother to acquaint himself with the fact that the communities to be poisoned with Vermont’s toxic atomic detritus were in fact communities of color. When Gospodin Sanders took a shellacking in the 2016 primary elections in Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama, largely because he had not connected with African-American voters in those states, he pooh-poohed the poll results in primitive, racially insensitive terms. Of course, we all know how Sanders and his redeless followers, together with WikiLeaks, that asset of the Russian state, travestied both Hillary and Chelsea Clinton in the most offensive, misogynistic terms imaginable.
And it is happening all over again.
An Internet meme of some vintage suggests:
“Dear Liberals and Independents,
In 2020 there will be a candidate competing against Donald Trump for President.
It is very likely this candidate:
-Isn’t your first choice
-Isn’t 100% ideologically pure
-Has made mistakes in their life
-Might not really excite you that much
-Has ideas you may be uncomfortable with
Please start the process of getting over that shit now instead of waiting till 2020.”
Democrats need, indeed, to start getting over that shit now, rather than getting into an endless conniption over who is their first choice, who is 100% ideologically pure, who has a totally clean record, who excites one, and who is free from any discomforting ideas.
Our candidate will not be a Messiah. Our candidate may well be prone to gaffes, or have some blots on his or her legislative escutcheon. Shit, some of them may even have said "no" to a Girl Scout cookies salesgirl in 1983. As Democrats, we need to remember that even our heroes have feet of clay. We can’t afford the vain and frivolous luxury of purity tests or looking into a candidate’s distant past to find that one indiscretion which the Marxist left defines as disqualifying.
We are in the fight of our political lives against an incipient dictator. We can’t afford to fight from a crouch or allow ourselves to be washed away on waves of fear pee every time the Republicans and the Kremlin say “boo.”
Instead, we must be guided by the advice that Sean Connery’s character tendered to Kevin Costner’s character in the 1987 remake of The Untouchables:
“They pull a knife, you pull a gun;
they send one of yours to the hospital, you send one of theirs the morgue!”
The vanity and frivolous luxury of ideological purity testing, heresy hunting, or being terrified of making a gaffe cannot be allowed to metastasize. We can’t afford the equally vain and frivolous luxury of Michelle Obama’s well-meaning but unacceptable counsel of going high when they go low.
Instead, we must be prepared to meet them in the basement with a switchblade.
The future of the Republic demands from us a kind of steely, Bolshevik resolve, a willingness to be Stakhanovite, and the readiness (hopefully in a merely metaphorical sense) to kill or die in the service of vision of America that must not be allowed to waste away or be sacrificed on the altar of the Republican Party’s insensate desire for power.
Citoyens, la patrie est en danger!
-----------------------------
While I loathe the Russian/Republican Party, I can’t help but feel a certain measure of disdain and unease for my own Democratic Party. Activists on the Sanders/Warren wing of the left side of the Democratic Party, not satisfied with relentlessly attacking current front runner Joe Biden have begun to fear the possible advent of a newer, younger, queerer possible front runner in the form of South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, on whom the vials of wrath and vitriol appear to have been well and truly opened.
This outpouring of what the Los Angeles Times today referred to as a “sneering tone,” of barely concealed anger at Mayor Buttigieg certainly puts one in mind of the sneering, misogynistic tone that Bernard Sanders and his redeless followers adopted toward former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton during the 2016 primary. The tone of the Sanders faction’s critique of Secretary Clinton was, to put it mildly, hateful, misogynistic, and steeped in male, Trumpian, privilege. Worse, the insistent Sanders "we wuz robbed" Dolchstoßlegende in which Sanders and his foolish followers claimed that they were deprived of the 2016 nomination through sharp practice at the DNC, benefited, and benefits, no one but Donald Trump.
To put it bluntly, Bernard Sanders and his followers managed to inject a poison into the Democratic body politic in the 2016 primary cycle that has come back to haunt us in the 2020 cycle. That it is indeed a poisonous tone can be illustrated by the fact that the redelessly doctrinaire Sanders followers seemed to care not one whit that their confrontational, condescending, pugnacious, partisanship cost them friends within the Democratic Party and elsewhere.
Indeed, we saw, throughout the 2016 election cycle, how not only did at least 15% of Sanders primary voters cast general election ballots for the unspeakable, soon-to-be impeached, Donald Trump, the Kremlin’s chosen candidate, but how even more of them eagerly and uncritically adopted the Trump-WikiLeaks-Kremlin narrative and talking points to attack Hillary, even after Secretary Clinton had clinched the nomination of her Party to be it standardbearer for the presidency of the United States. What we saw, in short, was a nasty case of sore-loserism, misogyny, and spite emanating from the Independent Vermont Senator and his hyperventilating followers.
Now, with Pete Buttigieg rising in the polls and presumably siphoning off support from the sour, superannuated, shtetl Stalinist, the loudmouth Leninist loser, the blowhard bloviating Burlington Bolshevik Bernard Sanders, it is perhaps ineluctable that the vials of wrath and vitriol would again be opened. As much as the Sanders campaign in 2016 could justly be taxed with setting a bitter, divisive, misogynistic tone, in 2020 it can with equal justice be taxed with setting a bitter, divisive, Sanders- against-the-world tone that traffics in left bourgeois homophobia, left bourgeois misogyny, and (snortgiggle!) charges of ageism against Joe Biden, who is two years Bernard Sanders’s junior.
And certainly, the Sanders campaign has managed to enlist the support of the default group of publications of the radical left. The Nation, once mordantly — and accurately — characterized by a Republican humorist P.J. O’Rourke as “that compendium of the snits and quarrels of the Old Left,” very publicly announced an “anti-endorsement” of the quondam Vice President.
Further into the realms of Marxist dialectic, the Intercept, Glenn Greenwald’s house organ for the traitor Edward Snowden, and the Marxist periodical Jacobin have both been banging the drums for Bernard Sanders quite loudly and insistently. Moreover, as Buttigieg has improved his standing in the polls, the Marxist magazines and “that compendium of the snits and quarrels of the Old Left” have fallen into lockstep to excoriate Mayor Pete for being, among others, insufficiently queer, too queer, too white, too privileged, too corporate, and just too much of everything that the doctrinaire left in this country despises. Even his relative poverty compared to the other Democratic candidates has been held against him. In all this, it’s not hard for a queer person to sense a kind of dog whistle homophobia.
Of course, queerfolk are despised by both the hard right and the hard left. The hard right, waving their copies of the King James Bible, excoriates queerfolk on the strength of certain verses in Leviticus, on whose authority they seek to compass our vanishing. The hard left, for their part, tend to adopt the Marxist-Soviet critique of queerfolk as not having the strength of will necessary to help accomplish the dictatorship of the proletariat. (This, notwithstanding the fact that the first foreign affairs, commissar of the Soviet Union, Gyorgy Chicherin, was an openly queer man who accomplished a great deal in advancing the dictatorship of the proletariat.)
Either way, the right-bourgeois will treat queer folk as unspeakable and not to be received in a social setting. But at least with the right bourgeois, queerfolk know where they stand. It is with the left bourgeois that queer folk are perpetually uncertain; from the left bourgeois, such as Bernard Sanders or even Mark Zuckerberg, one can expect lip service to the idea of tolerance for queerfolk, but privately, when they think no one is listening, left bourgeois personages such as Gospodin Sanders or Gospodin Zuckerberg will privately assure their intimates that we are really not their kind, dear.
What this means, in short, is the Democratic Party has allowed itself to imbibe, in full measure, the same poison that has so badly damaged its counterpart, the Republican Party. Bernard Sanders, for example, has much to account for with respect to the poisoning with Vermont’s nuclear waste of poor, politically powerless communities of color in Barnwell, South Carolina and Sierra Blanca, Texas. In neither case did Gospodin Sanders apparently bother to acquaint himself with the fact that the communities to be poisoned with Vermont’s toxic atomic detritus were in fact communities of color. When Gospodin Sanders took a shellacking in the 2016 primary elections in Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama, largely because he had not connected with African-American voters in those states, he pooh-poohed the poll results in primitive, racially insensitive terms. Of course, we all know how Sanders and his redeless followers, together with WikiLeaks, that asset of the Russian state, travestied both Hillary and Chelsea Clinton in the most offensive, misogynistic terms imaginable.
And it is happening all over again.
An Internet meme of some vintage suggests:
“Dear Liberals and Independents,
In 2020 there will be a candidate competing against Donald Trump for President.
It is very likely this candidate:
-Isn’t your first choice
-Isn’t 100% ideologically pure
-Has made mistakes in their life
-Might not really excite you that much
-Has ideas you may be uncomfortable with
Please start the process of getting over that shit now instead of waiting till 2020.”
Democrats need, indeed, to start getting over that shit now, rather than getting into an endless conniption over who is their first choice, who is 100% ideologically pure, who has a totally clean record, who excites one, and who is free from any discomforting ideas.
Our candidate will not be a Messiah. Our candidate may well be prone to gaffes, or have some blots on his or her legislative escutcheon. Shit, some of them may even have said "no" to a Girl Scout cookies salesgirl in 1983. As Democrats, we need to remember that even our heroes have feet of clay. We can’t afford the vain and frivolous luxury of purity tests or looking into a candidate’s distant past to find that one indiscretion which the Marxist left defines as disqualifying.
We are in the fight of our political lives against an incipient dictator. We can’t afford to fight from a crouch or allow ourselves to be washed away on waves of fear pee every time the Republicans and the Kremlin say “boo.”
Instead, we must be guided by the advice that Sean Connery’s character tendered to Kevin Costner’s character in the 1987 remake of The Untouchables:
“They pull a knife, you pull a gun;
they send one of yours to the hospital, you send one of theirs the morgue!”
The vanity and frivolous luxury of ideological purity testing, heresy hunting, or being terrified of making a gaffe cannot be allowed to metastasize. We can’t afford the equally vain and frivolous luxury of Michelle Obama’s well-meaning but unacceptable counsel of going high when they go low.
Instead, we must be prepared to meet them in the basement with a switchblade.
The future of the Republic demands from us a kind of steely, Bolshevik resolve, a willingness to be Stakhanovite, and the readiness (hopefully in a merely metaphorical sense) to kill or die in the service of vision of America that must not be allowed to waste away or be sacrificed on the altar of the Republican Party’s insensate desire for power.
Citoyens, la patrie est en danger!
Thursday, November 28, 2019
PUTTING ASIDE THE CULTURE WARS AND TRULY GIVING THANKS THIS THANKSGIVING
Summary: Thanksgiving, once a relatively unexceptionable holiday characterized by a very large cheat meal and the sedentary contemplation of football, has become the latest casualty in America’s ongoing culture wars. On one hand, there is Donald Trump, trying, utterly without evidentiary foundation, to advance some kind of “war on Thanksgiving” narrative. On the other, there are the so-called Social Justice Warriors of the Sanders/Warren left, who have been enthusiastically taking Trump’s bait and, like the woke scolds they are, attacking the current Thanksgiving holiday with every bit of politically correct scorn they can muster.
While Thanksgiving merits careful, introspective examination, it decidedly does not merit either Donald Trump’s efforts to politicize it with a phony “war on Thanksgiving” or the Sanders/Warren left’s attempts to delegitimize and whitewash the holiday as some sort of racist enterprise.
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Cathedral City, November 28 – Today is Thanksgiving. Outside the rain is coming down slowly, steadily, heavily. If 19th centuryJapanese printmaker Ando Hiroshige were depicting the rain, he would use black lines to depict heavy precipitation, rather than the white lines he customarily used to betoken a lighter rain. A little bit west of here, in the San Gorgonio Pass communities of Banning and Beaumont, the snow is falling and sticking. Roads are closing at low-water crossings; withal, the weather this Thanksgiving day is simply miserable. It’s the kind of weather for crawling into bed with a boyfriend and beguiling the hours in languid lovemaking.
But still, it is Thanksgiving Day. And in Donald Trump’s America, that means a new front in America’s ongoing culture wars. At a rally in Sunrise, Florida the other night, Donald Trump, without any facts or evidence whatsoever, implied that the “radical left” was out to force a change of the name of Thanksgiving. Ever trafficking in divisive culture war political tropes, Gospodin Trump apparently wants to expand the so-called War on Christmas into a so-called War on Thanksgiving. Not surprisingly, Trump State Media (AKA Fox News), Trump’s Russian trolls on social media (particularly on Facebook), and Trump’s addlepated base eagerly embraced Gospodin Trump’s bullshit War on Thanksgiving narrative.
Of course, Trump and his handlers knew that they were baiting the Social Justice Warriors of the Sanders/Warren left, who, for their part, enthusiastically rose to debate by producing a whole raft of opinion pieces damning Thanksgiving as an awful, racist, white supremacist glorification of “genocide.”
Wow. Just wow.
As a man of the left myself, I had not thought it possible that others of the left, even those further to the left than me, could have been so foolish as to take Donald Trump’s bait. It is disappointing, but not surprising, that the Sanders/Warren left should have allowed itself to be bereft of its higher mental faculties, its capacity for cogent, careful thinking, and its intellectual rigor so completely by the malignant narcissist in the White House. It is disappointing, but not surprising, that the dialogue and dialectic of the American left should have been reduced to such a pitiably reactionary state that taking Donald Trump’s bait and engaging him in exactly the culture war battles he is spoiling to fight constitutes Social Justice Warriors’ misplaced idea of disciplined thinking.
Some years ago, when the last of my unjustly maligned Boomer generation was in college, certain leftist academics ---who had considerably more intellectual rigor and intellectual chops than their current successors in the Academy can ever hope to possess— argued, with not inconsiderable justification, that Thanksgiving should be held up to careful, considerate, intellectually rigorous examination for the lessons that George Washington’s and Abraham Lincoln’s Thanksgiving day proclamations, as well as the original Thanksgiving celebrations themselves, had for the United States and for the American people.
On October 3, 1789, Pres. George Washington issued a proclamation designating Thursday, November 26, 1789 as a national day of Thanksgiving. The sentiments of Washington’s proclamation were unexceptionably Anglican. No surprise there; Washington himself was an unexceptionably Anglican Virginia Tidewater planter, a man with impeccable Anglican credentials, including a stint on the vestry of his Anglican parish church. Washington’s Thanksgiving proclamation made absolutely no reference to any of the various antecedents of our modern Thanksgiving that we now celebrate.
Seventy-four years to the day after Washington had issued his Thanksgiving proclamation, Abraham Lincoln issued a like proclamation, not quite so Anglican in sentiments, which has become the basis for our modern American Thanksgiving Day holiday.
In neither case did either proclamation make any mention whatsoever of the 1621 “Thanksgiving” celebrated by the Pilgrims of the Plimouth colony in Massachusetts. Yet, somehow, this nonconformist Massachusetts Bay “Thanksgiving” feast has become the model for our current Thanksgiving Day celebrations and, in many ways, the source material for America’s foundation myth.
Who of us, at least those of us who attended elementary school somewhere in this country, cannot recall Thanksgiving Day pageants in which students, and sometimes teachers, got togged up in, for lack of a better phrase, Pilgrim drag and acted out the mythological narrative of Myles Standish, Priscilla Mullins, John Winthrop, and all the other Pilgrim Separatist Nonconformists who had come to Plimouth aboard the Mayflower, ostensibly seeking religious freedom.
Growing up in the public schools in Los Angeles, I too participated in this rather outré exercise in pageantry. It seemed somewhat odd to me to witness, for example, one of my classmates, an Ethiopian girl from an ancient, Christian, African civilization dressed up like a comely Wampanoag Indian maiden, or a Mexican-American kid named Cuauhtemoc, and his brother, with the equally Méxica/Aztec/Chicano name of Ahuizotl, portraying Myles Standish and John Winthrop respectively, while their sister Xochitl inhabited, with great aplomb, the role of Priscilla Mullins.
In all this cross-cultural cross-dressing and appropriation, it seems to have occurred to no one that the first Thanksgivings in what are now the United States occurred long before the Pilgrims arrived at Plimouth. On September 8, 1565, for example 800 Spaniards, under the leadership of Pedro Menéndez de Avilés came ashore to found the city of San Augustín, now St. Augustine, Florida. Almost immediately they came ashore, Menéndez and his company gave a feast for themselves and the local native tribe, accompanied by a Mass of Thanksgiving.
On April 30, 1598, a Spanish settlement party under Don Juan de Oñate held a feast of Thanksgiving in what is now the town of San Elizario, down valley from what is now the city of El Paso, Texas. A Mass of Thanksgiving was celebrated, a feast was had, and another pre-Plimouth Thanksgiving joined the historical record.
On December 4, 1619, English settlers at Berkeley Hundred in Virginia were celebrating what may very well have been the first English-speaking Thanksgiving in the Americas. Unlike the Massachusetts event, two-plus years later, the Berkeley Hundred Thanksgiving was also Anglican in its theology and its liturgics.
The conclusion that ineluctably forces itself upon the observer, particularly upon an observer who is Conformist, i.e. Anglican, in religion, is that the Massachusetts Bay-centric creation narrative foisted off upon the schoolchildren of such diverse communities as Los Angeles, El Paso, St. Augustine, or even Berkeley Hundred itself, has a number of serious flaws.
First and foremost, is the fact that the entire Plimouth Rock narrative sets up the Separatist, Nonconformist Pilgrims, as heroes of the piece akin to something out of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, with the Anglican Church of England in an unspeakably villainous role. Now we may assume that part of that narrative stems from the American penchant for equating religious freedom with the freedom of Nonconformity to have its own way. For in truth, freedom of religion in the United States has historically implied the freedom of Protestant Nonconformist religion.
For years, for example, the military only recognized two kinds of Christianity: Roman Catholic and a generic “Protestant.” It did not recognize as equally valid, equally separate branches all the Church the Eastern Orthodox churches, the ancient Eastern churches, including the Coptic and Ethiopian churches, the Lutheran churches or the Anglican/Episcopal churches. Indeed, in the “heroic Pilgrims at Plimouth Rock” narrative promulgated to schoolchildren around the country, the Anglican/Episcopal church comes in for particular condemnation.
Add to this Nonconformist bias the inescapable fact that Berkeley Hundred lies in the Commonwealth of Virginia, an undeniably Confederate state during the Late Unpleasantness, and it becomes fairly easy to determine why the Berkeley Hundred Thanksgiving of December, 1619, should have been swept under the metaphorical rug in favor of the 1621 events at Plimouth. Moreover, the Nonconformist bias in much of American historiography also accounts for the almost entire “whitewashing” of the San Augustín and San Elizario thanksgivings under Menéndez and Oñate.
Yet, despite the attempted scrubbing of these earlier Thanksgiving celebrations from American history, the idea of setting aside a day to give thanks is itself theologically unexceptionable. To those of us who are Conformist in our religion, the scriptural command that comes down to us from 1 Thessalonians 5:18, “[i]n every thing give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you,” comes close to being a Kantian categorical imperative.
Occasions of Thanksgiving, therefore, whether on the officially proclaimed day at the end of November, or any other time, ought to be times when we eschew culture war disputations, when we turn aside from the Trumpian temptation to “own the libs,” when we avoid the equally tempting Bolshevik enterprise of demonstrating how woke we are, and when we avoid endless arguments over the propriety of the Oxford comma.
Thanksgiving, whether today or on any other day, should be a time for contemplating first things, eternal things, hopeful things, and holy things. From the standpoint of Conformist religion, Thanksgiving, in these final days of the liturgical season after Pentecost, as we gear up for Advent and Christmas, New Year’s and Epiphanytide, ought to be a time for stock taking, introspection, and getting in touch with what it means to be a part of a community in which, as former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams reminds us, “[w]e have to learn to be human alongside all sorts of others, the ones whose company we don't greatly like, whom we didn't choose....”
Perhaps, above all else, we ought to declare, even if fleetingly, an armistice in the culture wars and get in touch today with what it means to be thankful to live in a community where we have the opportunity to learn to be human alongside all sorts of others. It may be, in the end, what saves us.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City, where he served eight years on the city Council, and practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. He makes no bones about being gay and about being Conformist in his religion.
While Thanksgiving merits careful, introspective examination, it decidedly does not merit either Donald Trump’s efforts to politicize it with a phony “war on Thanksgiving” or the Sanders/Warren left’s attempts to delegitimize and whitewash the holiday as some sort of racist enterprise.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Cathedral City, November 28 – Today is Thanksgiving. Outside the rain is coming down slowly, steadily, heavily. If 19th centuryJapanese printmaker Ando Hiroshige were depicting the rain, he would use black lines to depict heavy precipitation, rather than the white lines he customarily used to betoken a lighter rain. A little bit west of here, in the San Gorgonio Pass communities of Banning and Beaumont, the snow is falling and sticking. Roads are closing at low-water crossings; withal, the weather this Thanksgiving day is simply miserable. It’s the kind of weather for crawling into bed with a boyfriend and beguiling the hours in languid lovemaking.
But still, it is Thanksgiving Day. And in Donald Trump’s America, that means a new front in America’s ongoing culture wars. At a rally in Sunrise, Florida the other night, Donald Trump, without any facts or evidence whatsoever, implied that the “radical left” was out to force a change of the name of Thanksgiving. Ever trafficking in divisive culture war political tropes, Gospodin Trump apparently wants to expand the so-called War on Christmas into a so-called War on Thanksgiving. Not surprisingly, Trump State Media (AKA Fox News), Trump’s Russian trolls on social media (particularly on Facebook), and Trump’s addlepated base eagerly embraced Gospodin Trump’s bullshit War on Thanksgiving narrative.
Of course, Trump and his handlers knew that they were baiting the Social Justice Warriors of the Sanders/Warren left, who, for their part, enthusiastically rose to debate by producing a whole raft of opinion pieces damning Thanksgiving as an awful, racist, white supremacist glorification of “genocide.”
Wow. Just wow.
As a man of the left myself, I had not thought it possible that others of the left, even those further to the left than me, could have been so foolish as to take Donald Trump’s bait. It is disappointing, but not surprising, that the Sanders/Warren left should have allowed itself to be bereft of its higher mental faculties, its capacity for cogent, careful thinking, and its intellectual rigor so completely by the malignant narcissist in the White House. It is disappointing, but not surprising, that the dialogue and dialectic of the American left should have been reduced to such a pitiably reactionary state that taking Donald Trump’s bait and engaging him in exactly the culture war battles he is spoiling to fight constitutes Social Justice Warriors’ misplaced idea of disciplined thinking.
Some years ago, when the last of my unjustly maligned Boomer generation was in college, certain leftist academics ---who had considerably more intellectual rigor and intellectual chops than their current successors in the Academy can ever hope to possess— argued, with not inconsiderable justification, that Thanksgiving should be held up to careful, considerate, intellectually rigorous examination for the lessons that George Washington’s and Abraham Lincoln’s Thanksgiving day proclamations, as well as the original Thanksgiving celebrations themselves, had for the United States and for the American people.
On October 3, 1789, Pres. George Washington issued a proclamation designating Thursday, November 26, 1789 as a national day of Thanksgiving. The sentiments of Washington’s proclamation were unexceptionably Anglican. No surprise there; Washington himself was an unexceptionably Anglican Virginia Tidewater planter, a man with impeccable Anglican credentials, including a stint on the vestry of his Anglican parish church. Washington’s Thanksgiving proclamation made absolutely no reference to any of the various antecedents of our modern Thanksgiving that we now celebrate.
Seventy-four years to the day after Washington had issued his Thanksgiving proclamation, Abraham Lincoln issued a like proclamation, not quite so Anglican in sentiments, which has become the basis for our modern American Thanksgiving Day holiday.
In neither case did either proclamation make any mention whatsoever of the 1621 “Thanksgiving” celebrated by the Pilgrims of the Plimouth colony in Massachusetts. Yet, somehow, this nonconformist Massachusetts Bay “Thanksgiving” feast has become the model for our current Thanksgiving Day celebrations and, in many ways, the source material for America’s foundation myth.
Who of us, at least those of us who attended elementary school somewhere in this country, cannot recall Thanksgiving Day pageants in which students, and sometimes teachers, got togged up in, for lack of a better phrase, Pilgrim drag and acted out the mythological narrative of Myles Standish, Priscilla Mullins, John Winthrop, and all the other Pilgrim Separatist Nonconformists who had come to Plimouth aboard the Mayflower, ostensibly seeking religious freedom.
Growing up in the public schools in Los Angeles, I too participated in this rather outré exercise in pageantry. It seemed somewhat odd to me to witness, for example, one of my classmates, an Ethiopian girl from an ancient, Christian, African civilization dressed up like a comely Wampanoag Indian maiden, or a Mexican-American kid named Cuauhtemoc, and his brother, with the equally Méxica/Aztec/Chicano name of Ahuizotl, portraying Myles Standish and John Winthrop respectively, while their sister Xochitl inhabited, with great aplomb, the role of Priscilla Mullins.
In all this cross-cultural cross-dressing and appropriation, it seems to have occurred to no one that the first Thanksgivings in what are now the United States occurred long before the Pilgrims arrived at Plimouth. On September 8, 1565, for example 800 Spaniards, under the leadership of Pedro Menéndez de Avilés came ashore to found the city of San Augustín, now St. Augustine, Florida. Almost immediately they came ashore, Menéndez and his company gave a feast for themselves and the local native tribe, accompanied by a Mass of Thanksgiving.
On April 30, 1598, a Spanish settlement party under Don Juan de Oñate held a feast of Thanksgiving in what is now the town of San Elizario, down valley from what is now the city of El Paso, Texas. A Mass of Thanksgiving was celebrated, a feast was had, and another pre-Plimouth Thanksgiving joined the historical record.
On December 4, 1619, English settlers at Berkeley Hundred in Virginia were celebrating what may very well have been the first English-speaking Thanksgiving in the Americas. Unlike the Massachusetts event, two-plus years later, the Berkeley Hundred Thanksgiving was also Anglican in its theology and its liturgics.
The conclusion that ineluctably forces itself upon the observer, particularly upon an observer who is Conformist, i.e. Anglican, in religion, is that the Massachusetts Bay-centric creation narrative foisted off upon the schoolchildren of such diverse communities as Los Angeles, El Paso, St. Augustine, or even Berkeley Hundred itself, has a number of serious flaws.
First and foremost, is the fact that the entire Plimouth Rock narrative sets up the Separatist, Nonconformist Pilgrims, as heroes of the piece akin to something out of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, with the Anglican Church of England in an unspeakably villainous role. Now we may assume that part of that narrative stems from the American penchant for equating religious freedom with the freedom of Nonconformity to have its own way. For in truth, freedom of religion in the United States has historically implied the freedom of Protestant Nonconformist religion.
For years, for example, the military only recognized two kinds of Christianity: Roman Catholic and a generic “Protestant.” It did not recognize as equally valid, equally separate branches all the Church the Eastern Orthodox churches, the ancient Eastern churches, including the Coptic and Ethiopian churches, the Lutheran churches or the Anglican/Episcopal churches. Indeed, in the “heroic Pilgrims at Plimouth Rock” narrative promulgated to schoolchildren around the country, the Anglican/Episcopal church comes in for particular condemnation.
Add to this Nonconformist bias the inescapable fact that Berkeley Hundred lies in the Commonwealth of Virginia, an undeniably Confederate state during the Late Unpleasantness, and it becomes fairly easy to determine why the Berkeley Hundred Thanksgiving of December, 1619, should have been swept under the metaphorical rug in favor of the 1621 events at Plimouth. Moreover, the Nonconformist bias in much of American historiography also accounts for the almost entire “whitewashing” of the San Augustín and San Elizario thanksgivings under Menéndez and Oñate.
Yet, despite the attempted scrubbing of these earlier Thanksgiving celebrations from American history, the idea of setting aside a day to give thanks is itself theologically unexceptionable. To those of us who are Conformist in our religion, the scriptural command that comes down to us from 1 Thessalonians 5:18, “[i]n every thing give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you,” comes close to being a Kantian categorical imperative.
Occasions of Thanksgiving, therefore, whether on the officially proclaimed day at the end of November, or any other time, ought to be times when we eschew culture war disputations, when we turn aside from the Trumpian temptation to “own the libs,” when we avoid the equally tempting Bolshevik enterprise of demonstrating how woke we are, and when we avoid endless arguments over the propriety of the Oxford comma.
Thanksgiving, whether today or on any other day, should be a time for contemplating first things, eternal things, hopeful things, and holy things. From the standpoint of Conformist religion, Thanksgiving, in these final days of the liturgical season after Pentecost, as we gear up for Advent and Christmas, New Year’s and Epiphanytide, ought to be a time for stock taking, introspection, and getting in touch with what it means to be a part of a community in which, as former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams reminds us, “[w]e have to learn to be human alongside all sorts of others, the ones whose company we don't greatly like, whom we didn't choose....”
Perhaps, above all else, we ought to declare, even if fleetingly, an armistice in the culture wars and get in touch today with what it means to be thankful to live in a community where we have the opportunity to learn to be human alongside all sorts of others. It may be, in the end, what saves us.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City, where he served eight years on the city Council, and practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. He makes no bones about being gay and about being Conformist in his religion.
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